Humiliation, the ultimate defeat
Nothing about the current political situation we are currently experiencing in the West will ever make sense to you until you first understand that you live under foreign occupation and are thus subject to the rules of the occupiers. If you do not start from there, you will search for multiple explanations and rationalizations for your society's misery and shortcomings that will ultimately lead you nowhere.
The thing is, your enemy has no interest in a so-called "victory" over you, because they already won long ago, before most of you were even born. Now the entirety of their actions is aimed at a single goal:
Humiliation
Humiliation robs you of your humanity, your will, your reason to fight on. Humiliation takes everything from you, and it even robs you of being worthy of empathy. It has been used by every occupier in history and it's our natural primal understanding of defeat. The Ottoman practice of Kocek is a prime example. Koceks were a combination of dancers and clowns: they were young non-Muslim boys taken from their parents and trained to be entertainers for the Ottoman Turks. The goal was to have the Occupied think "If we allow that to be done to our boys, what else can they do?" to which the answer is "anything". It is full-spectrum domination of the minds of the conquered.
Your government doesn't allow your city to be plagued by rampant violent crime, your parents to be addicted to opioids, pollution to give you cancer, or your food to be filled with chemicals, all while your media laughs at you because they think it's for anyone's benefit. They want it because they KNOW YOU DON'T WANT IT BUT CAN'T STOP THEM. They want to humiliate you. There isn't any other reason. And that's exactly what they're doing.