Greetings, American humans! Hello, advanced mammalian friends! Welcome to the Week of Hillary!

“Wait, wait, wait,” you might be thinking if you’re a normal American human. “It’s not the Week of Hillary. Last I checked, it was the Week The Government Steals All Of My Money, Then Somehow Manages to Act Like It’s The Victim. Also, isn’t ISIS about to take over Ramadi? Also, didn’t Russian warships just enter the English Channel? And what about—”

Pffftt. Pipe down. You haven’t been paying attention, friend. It is, at least in the cloistered world of the American media, The Week of Hillary. On Sunday, the former secretary of state announced her intention to enact her final, sweet, glorious revenge on the old ball and chain, Bill “Mr. Fun” Clinton — ahem, I mean “run for president” — and the coverage has been wall-to-wall since.

So far, the Hillary Show has been consistently hilarious, complete with a bizarre Robocop-style, bulletproof, Secret Service-driven “casual” road trip van — a van named, oddly, “Scooby,” which is the cartoon dog, and not “The Mystery Machine,” which is the actual cartoon van — and what may have been the weirdest Ohio Chipotle visit ever. (In short, Hillary wore sunglasses inside like a Vegas mobster, she didn’t talk to anyone, and then the New York Times ran a full scientific microanalysis of the nutrition content of her order.)

However, there’s also bad news: Behind the scenes, the Clinton campaign is even creepier than you might think. “Americans have fought their way back from tough economic times, but the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top,” Hillary declared in her announcement video, which looked suspiciously like a 1990s Mentos commercial. “Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion.”

There are several things wrong with this, so we’ll start with the obvious: Who in America older than the age of 12 wants a politician to be their “champion”? Moreover, if you do want a politician to be your champion — we can talk about your troubling experience-based cynicism deficit later — would you honestly choose one who has “Creature of the D.C. Foreign Donor/Big Banking/Conflict-of-Interest/Question-Dodging/General Corruption Borg” written all over her? (As an aside, I’m guessing that Elizabeth Warren is wondering this too.)

There’s a deeper question to consider: What does it really mean to be someone’s “champion” — and what do left-leaning politicians think it means? Interestingly, after a few random screenshots of a cheerfully crazed middle-aged woman yelling about her garden — “My tomatoes are legendary here in my own neighborhood!” — Hillary’s announcement video opens with a testimony from a young, single mother. “My daughter is about to start kindergarten next year,” the woman says, packing boxes and flexing Popeye muscles next to her little girl, “and so we’re moving, just so she can belong to a better school.”

Honest question: Is this meant to be uplifting? Why should someone have to pack up and move in order to go to a better school? What about the people who don’t have the resources to leave? In fact, wouldn’t it be great if the people who ran our education system would offer parents a choice, giving them access to multiple good schools, rather than walling them off in sub-par districts based on wealth or lack thereof?

Sadly, that’s not likely to happen soon: The people who run our schools are “at the top,” as Ms. Clinton would say, “and the deck is stacked in their favor.” But wait. Jeepers, zoinks, and jinkies, gang! Something doesn’t fit! Our schools are run by … they’re run by … the government! They’re run by politicians and entrenched bureaucrats! Aren’t they supposed to be our “champions”? Aren’t they supposed to free us through their growing control?

This, at its root, is the Progressive paradox, and it applies to a whole slew of other issues, including health care, small business regulations, economic policy and free speech. There’s also no one who embodies it better than Hillary Clinton, who, for the past two decades, has “championed” herself right through the highest annals of power and straight on to the bank.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Sunday was also the biennial meeting of George Soros’s Democracy Alliance, which, as the Washington Free Beacon’s Lachlan Markay reports, “steers tens of millions of dollars each year” to a grab bag of left-wing causes. It’s a meeting without a hint of irony, where “flashy sports cars ferry climate crusaders to a luxury hotel, a private security company shields prying eyes from speeches on political accountability, and billionaire Democratic donors denounce money in politics.”

What they don’t denounce, of course, is growing government control, paired with creeping bureaucratic influence into an ever-expanding segment of the “everyday American’s” life. It’s control by a few, slickly packaged as the “championing” of the many. Who knows? Some progressives may honestly believe it, even though they shouldn’t. It’s like the oldest Scooby Doo episode in the book — flimsy mask and all.

Heather Wilhelm is a writer based in Austin, Texas. This article originally appeared at RealClearPolitics.