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.
Lulled by propaganda and partisan loyalty, the people become what Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, feared most: a zombie-fied mob, mindless to the very monster that feeds on them.
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. Serling showed how quickly panic corrodes a community in The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, where neighbors, convinced that danger lurks next door, transform into a violent mob and turn on each other. Our headlines change—drug wars and ICE raids, “domestic extremists” and pandemics, foreign hit lists and necessary military strikes—but the script remains the same: politicians play savior, and a browbeaten populace surrenders their rights for the illusion of safety.
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. In He’s Alive, Serling’s young fanatic learns the oldest trick in the book: “The people will follow you if you give them something to hate.” The American Police State has perfected that art—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. In Serling’s The Obsolete Man, a religious librarian in an atheist society where books are destroyed is condemned to death for obsolescence. The real crime was individuality. Today, bureaucracies demand the same submission—teachers disciplined for dissent, journalists axed for challenging the prevailing order, citizens detained under executive orders for speech deemed “dangerous.” Resistance is drained until only compliance remains.
Obedience, however, is never enough. Tyranny requires endless sustenance—material, financial, and human.
The Rise of the Thielverse & the Surveillance State (w/ Whitney Webb)
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