If you have ever run into a reel or short where a gullible “podcaster” is engaged in an “interview” with an astrologer and wondered who these people are and why you have never heard of them despite their apparent authority and popularity, join the club.

Of course the simple answer is that this is a mix of familiar old marketing practices being put to use to poison our feeds and, by extension, our culture.

Much has been said about how the Liberal media of America inadvertently fed Trump’s popularity, but we don’t apply it to our political condition and how the same dynamics sustain demagoguery closer to home. Add to that the fact that there are numerous smaller demagogues in the making at any given point of time, building their tiny toxic empires on social media platforms.

Some amount of media literacy might put us on a path that leads out of this morass but it seems a distant dream in a country where people bathe in excrement in order to get rid of diseases.