Monsters don’t always come wrapped in the trappings of horror or myth.
Most often, monsters in the real world look like ordinary people. They walk among us. They smile for the cameras. They promise protection and prosperity even as they feed on fear and obedience.
All is not as it seems.
We are living in two worlds.
There’s the world we’re shown—the bright, propaganda-driven illusion manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors—and the world we actually inhabit, where economic inequality widens, real agendas are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak, and “freedom” is rationed out in controlled, legalistic doses by militarized police and federal agents.
We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.
Tune out the distractions and diversions, and you run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: monsters with human faces walk among us.
Many of them work for the U.S. government.
Through its power grabs, brutality, greed, corruption, and tyranny, the government has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to fight—terrorism, torture, disease, drug trafficking, trafficking of persons, violence, theft, even scientific experimentations that treat humans as test subjects.
With every passing day, it becomes painfully evident that the American Police State has developed its own monstrous alter ego: the Vampire State.
Like its legendary namesake, it survives by draining the lifeblood of the nation—the sweat, money, labor, privacy, and freedoms of “We the People.”
One tax, one law, one war, one surveillance program at a time, it takes what it needs and bleeds us dry.
As in every great horror story, the most terrifying monsters are the ones that look familiar. Of all the gothic figures, Bram Stoker’s vampire—a cold, calculating predator bent on conquest—may be the closest to the waking nightmare unfolding before us.
Like its mythic counterpart, the Vampire State seduces its victims with promises of safety, comfort, and national greatness. Once trust is secured and access granted, it feeds slowly and methodically—just enough to keep the populace docile, but never enough to rouse them from their trance.
Once it latches on, the Vampire State’s tyrannical hunger only grows.
The Vampire State feeds on fear. Fear is the oxygen of tyranny. Every crisis—real or manufactured—fuels the quest for more power. Fear, however, is only the beginning. Once fear takes hold, the next step is to turn people against one another. Demagogues know well how to do this.
The Vampire State feeds on division. The American Police State has perfected the art of pitting citizen against immigrant, left against right, protester against police, rich against poor—because a divided nation is far easier to control. Division, in turn, breeds submission. Once a society is at war with itself, obedience becomes the only refuge.
The Vampire State feeds on obedience. Obedience, however, is never enough. Tyranny requires endless sustenance—material, financial, and human.
The Vampire State feeds on wealth. No predator survives without a steady source of sustenance, and the state’s preferred meal is the taxpayer. Endless wars, bloated budgets, emergency powers and corporate concessions keep the machine humming. Yet even that cannot satisfy a regime that wants total control. To control completely, it must know everything about those in its power.
The Vampire State feeds on privacy. A true predator must know its prey. The predatory state now drinks deeply from the digital lifeblood of the nation—every call logged, every movement tracked, every purchase recorded. And when fear, division, obedience, wealth, and privacy have been mined to exhaustion, the Vampire State turns to its most precious prey—the human spirit.
The Vampire State feeds on hope. The final hunger is spiritual. It drains its victims of hope until despair is all that’s left. A hopeless populace is a controlled one.
Every horror story reaches a moment when the victims realize what they’re up against. Ours has come. The question is how to break the spell.
If the Vampire State thrives on fear, feeds on hate, is empowered by violence, and demands obedience, then our weapon must be courage, our antidote love, our defense nonviolence, and our answer disciplined, creative civil disobedience.
Every generation must relearn these truths.
Almost 250 years after America’s founders pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to unseat a tyrant, we find ourselves under the tyrant’s thumb again, saddled with a government that feeds on the fears of the public to expand its power; a bureaucracy that grows fat on the labor of the governed; a surveillance apparatus that gorges on data, privacy, and dissent; and a war machine that sustains itself on endless conflict.
These are the symptoms of a nation that has forgotten its own cure.
The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were meant to serve as stakes through the heart of authoritarian power, but they are not magic incantations.
With every act of blind obedience, every surrendered liberty, every law that elevates the government over the citizenry, our protections diminish.
Our task is to see the truth and to act on it.
As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, monsters walk among us—because we have failed to see them for what they truly are.
The Vampire State is real. But so is the power of the human spirit to resist it.
Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.
