My feeling is there are two distinct realities here at play that are however woven together. One is the materialist/political, the other is religious/spiritual.
The pill that is hard to swallow is how connected these two are. Normies might be able to swallow the political/materialist explanations and misdeeds, because you have all kinds of media that portrays corruption in the political sense. But they're probably not ready to make the connection to the spiritual.
To get a sense for what's really going on you have to look at the political/material within the spiritual context. To expose the whos and whats you can use material tools (follow the money), when you run into the issue of why you start knocking against the spiritual though.
The final realization is that this isn't about political power, it's not about money, it's not about satisfying carnal needs. The showdown really is about good versus evil. And those materialist tools are used to seduce mankind into spiritual error. What is the price of your soul? And the great deception lies in the fact that most people don't realize that their spiritual essence, the soul, the eternal is at stake. And they don't realize just how the current world system is eroding them in that regard and working against them.
Nobody can buy or sell without the Mark of the Beast on one's hand or forehead. I don't know if there will be a physical mark at some point, but isn't it something similar when we shut off our little internal voice that is telling us something isn't right in order to satisfy our own carnal desires and material benefit ? And indeed when ideologies triumph that deride "the good" as weak, deluded and pathetic, that there is no right or wrong, only strong and the weak, then it is safe to say that we have completely driven away God's spirit from the Earth and replaced it with our own exultation as gods. We're basically just repeating Satan's rebellion and self-exultation. And while atheism is the current diet for the masses, the "illuminated" ones probably do think themselves as gods and in possession of "enlightened" knowledge, probably glorifying the moment of biting the apple which resulted in expulsion form paradise not as something bad but as something good. Of course since they act like their spiritual father (the devil) does, the complete erosion of God's law, the worship of the self, the murderous rage against the good and humble, the transhumanism and the wish to live forever, the occult, and all other manifestations are really manifestations of their spiritual state. A good tree doesn't bear bad fruit. Of course their deception is real too, there will be no victory for them, only gnashing of the teeth in utter darkness. The irony is the devil knows that, and he has nothing outside of hate, perdition, and eternal damnation, yet they still mimic him.