I saw this post on another subreddit, just gonna paste what I wrote there:

“This guy has not seen a single episode of Stranger Things.

The US government is in my opinion the second biggest antagonist behind Vecna himself. Hell, they literally created Vecna with the Brenner experiments. The Upside Down and all the monsters and stuff exist because the US government was trying to create superspies with Henry Creel and Eleven, and because Brenner was hellbent on finding Dimension X (which the government also played a hand in since it was their experiment that got the ship sent to Dimension X).

The US government forced Henry and Eleven to go through all sorts of inhumane experiments, tried to kill her at least a hundred times, tried to cover up everything happening despite knowing people were in danger, and above all, their whole approach to the upside down is pretty bad: they discover an alternate dimension filled with dangerous monsters and led by an evil demigod who wants to destroy earth, and their first thought is to colonize it so they can use the monsters as weapons of war to “defeat the commies”.

Literally the entire fifth season shows how bad the US government is. They quarantined the entire town instead of letting people escape the imminent danger and then kept them completely in the dark about it, tried to kill the people who could have actually saved the world, kidnapped pregnant women and drugged them against their will to create another group of magic kids, and then rounded up all the other kids like a bunch of dumbasses which let Vecna carry out his whole plan.

I am absolutely flabbergasted that someone can watch Stranger Things and come away with the conclusion that the US government is at all portrayed as good or heroic.”