"But these weren't the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late."—Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

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.