It’s not just ignorance, it’s denial as well. They don’t want to admit that most atrocities committed around the world are done to benefit them.

As a certified Americ*n, I can give you a crash course on this logic.

• USA: freedom
• Freedom: good
• Not USA: not freedom
• Not freedom: dictator (bad)

Hence anybody who opposes the US is a dictator, and any politician I don’t like within the USA is also a dictator. Dictators are the source of all evil. My mom is a dictator.

It’s a symptom of the current conflict within the American ruling class – the sort of thing Marx described in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. First you have a revolution in the forces of production: since the 1970s, the development and widespread adoption of sophisticated computer technology. This revolution leads to a prolonged economic crisis: the western world since 2008. The bourgeoisie, which normally has a certain level of class solidarity, splits into factions; each faction has its own ideas on how the economy can be restarted, but they want the other capitalists to foot the bill. If the process is pushed to its logical conclusion, one faction eventually builds a mass movement and uses it to take control of the state machinery, in order to suppress other factions and enact its own economic policy. This was the fascists in Germany; it was also Franklin Roosevelt in the US.

Today you have on one side finance capital, the big oil companies like Exon Mobile, and “legacy” capitalists, all of whom sit in the highest halls of power. They are allied with the Democrats and the intelligence agencies. On the other you have low-level capitalists like Trump and Betsy DeVos, and the world of tech startups in Silicon valley. They are allied with the MAGA wing of the Republican Party, and what drives them is a kind of resentment about being controlled, regulated, and generally shut out from the upper echelons of political power. The Trumps and DeVoses of the world have obviously long been at the beck and call of upper-level capital in the US, but the tech companies are shut out as well: Silicon Valley was set up as a tech monopoly by the US government, and the newcomers on the scene have to play by rules which favor Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Trump and the tech startups are right now trying to throw off the yoke of finance capital and the oil companies. I do not expect them to succeed, and if they do it will likely destroy the petrodollar; which event, insofar as it would effectively end US global dominance, would end up destroying them as well. The good news is that a conflict within the ruling class is very often the prelude to the working-class itself taking power. “All is in chaos on heaven and earth; the situation is excellent.”