The money in politics is a cash cow for the media.
My proposal happens to be very mainstream.
Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.
I don't entirely agree with the slogan "speaking truth to power."
That intellectuals, including academics, would become a "new class" of technocrats, claiming the name of science while cooperating with the powerful, was predicted by [Mikhail] Bakunin in the early days of the formation of the modern intelligentsia in the 19th century.
When geologists announced the beginning of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, humans destroying the environment, one of the main things they pointed to is the use of plastics in the earth.