20 January

Something happened overnight that shows the hijacking of America by social media. In one of his last acts as President, Joe Biden pardoned Anthony Fauci, the leading public health figure in America. Fauci has done nothing wrong, it’s a ‘pre-emptive’ pardon, to prevent the Trumpians coming after him. Fauci has spent a lifetime trying to protect Americans from infectious disease. When that protection, simple things like masks, threatened fat profits by wealthy high status Americans, they went to war on Fauci, mostly through social media. Trump is the social media President. Twitter got him there, and when he was booted from Twitter, what was the first thing he did? He set up his own social media network, Truth Social. Social media is society eating itself, populist fools like Trump use its sugar hit to gain power. But populism always ends one way, a society splintered into rival gangs, with would-be leaders the first casualties. Like much of South America already.