Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

We have long read America exhibits the most brutal form of capitalism in the world. Peter Turchin's work
is not fun to read, still if for little else it is important enough do. For awareness. So, thanks. More of yours:

The Scholar Who Predicted America's Breakdown Says It's Just Beginning
[...]
A 'Knowledge Class'

Critics have sometimes questioned the deterministic tone of Turchin's models. But he emphasizes that he does not predict exact events—only the risk factors and phases of systemic stress.

While many political analysts and historians point to Donald Trump's 2016 election as the inflection point for the modern era of American political turmoil, Turchin had charted the warning signs years earlier — when Trump was known, above all, as the host of a popular NBC reality show.

"As you know, in 2010, based on historical patterns and quantitative indicators, I predicted a period of political instability in the United States beginning in the 2020s," Turchin said to Newsweek. "The structural drivers behind this prediction were threefold: popular immiseration [ Insert: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/immiseration ], elite overproduction, and a weakening state capacity."

According to his model, Trump's rise was not the cause of America's political crisis but a symptom—emerging from a society already strained by widening inequality and elite saturation. In Turchin's view, such figures often arise when a growing class of counter-elites—ambitious, credentialed individuals locked out of power—begin to challenge the status quo.

[ It Didn’t Start with Trump: The Decades-Long Saga of How the GOP Went Crazy
The modern Republican Party has always exploited and encouraged extremism.
David CornSeptember+October 2022 Issue
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/09/it-didnt-start-with-trump-the-decades-long-saga-of-how-the-gop-went-crazy/ ]

"Intraelite competition has increased even more, driven now mostly by the shrinking supply of positions for them," he said. In 2025, he pointed to the impact of AI in the legal profession and recent government downsizing, such as the DOGE eliminating thousands of positions at USAID, as accelerants in this trend.

This theory was echoed by Wayne State University sociologist Jukka Savolainen, who argued in a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that the U.S. is risking the creation of a radicalized "knowledge class"—overeducated, underemployed, and institutionally excluded.

"When societies generate more elite aspirants than there are roles to fill, competition for status intensifies," Savolainen wrote. "Ambitious but frustrated people grow disillusioned and radicalized. Rather than integrate into institutions, they seek to undermine them."

Savolainen warned that Trump-era policies—such as the dismantling of D.E.I. and academic research programs and cuts to public institutions—have the potential to accelerate the pattern, echoing the unrest of the 1970s. "President Trump's policies could intensify this dynamic," he noted.

https://www.newsweek.com/peter-turchin-political-violence-donald-trump-barack-obama-riots-2083007

In that last, would or will feel more appropriate than could. Then there is the media:

jbsliverer, Thank you for the welcome nudge. On misinformation, yes, i had grown weary of repeating the three of misinformation, disinformation and lies and virtually in the last week or so (mainly since the goddamn election, i think) had sloppily settled into the wrong one. You're right, it is definitely disinformation by those who are telling lies to the U.S. and the world.
[...]
Elon Musk was just forced to reveal who really owns X. Here’s the list
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/replies.aspx?msg=175397642

Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?
"[...]It doesn't matter what the policies are or what the facts, numbers, and graphs say or show. It all just boils down to the perceptions gained from the traitors planned and orchestrated DISINFORMATION and Russian style Propaganda War. With their suppression of votes, billions$ of corruption, using lawfare against democracy, draining $$'s, resources, and time (using our citizens paid for court systems against us), and continuing culture wars of hate to divide and conquer are some of the forces we need to deal with." [my emphasis]
It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive
those things, which points to one overpowering answer.
[...]
The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backward to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.
[...]
This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.

And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.
[...]
And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him. I discussed all this Thursday with Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America, who watches lots of Fox News so the rest of us don’t have to. He made the crucial point—and you must understand this—that nearly all the crazy memes that percolated into the news stream during this election came not from Trump or JD Vance originally, but from somewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem.

The fake story about Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs, for example, started with a Facebook post citing second- and third-hand sources, Gertz told me; it then "circulated on X and was picked up by all the major right-wing influencers." Only then did Vance, a very online dude, notice it and decide to run with it. And then Trump said it himself at the debate. But it started in the right-wing media.

Likewise with the postdebate ABC "whistleblower" claims, which Gertz wrote about .. https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-business/maga-runs-wild-random-posters-abc-whistleblower-claims .. at the time. This was the story that ABC, which hosted the only presidential debate this election, fed Team Harris the questions in advance. This started, Gertz wrote, as a "wildly flimsy internet rumor launched by a random pro-Trump X poster." Soon enough, the right-wing media was all over it.

Maybe that one didn’t make a huge difference (although who knows?), but this one, I believe, absolutely did: the idea that Harris and Joe Biden swiped emergency aid away from the victims of Hurricane Helene (in mostly Southern, red states) and gave it all to undocumented migrants. It did not start with Trump or his campaign or Vance or the Republican National Committee or Lindsey Graham. It started on Fox. Only then did the others pick it up. And it was key, since this was a moment when Harris’s momentum in the polling averages began to flag.
[...]
I think a lot of people who don’t watch Fox or listen to Sinclair radio don’t understand this crucial chicken-and-egg point. They assume that Trump says something and the right-wing media amplify it. That happens sometimes. But more often, it’s the other way around. These memes start in the media sphere, then they become part of the Trump agenda.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175406309