A historian weighs in The chief executive of Ish Entertainment uses the work of a historian to comment on the similarity between the U.S. today and France just before the Revolution.

An excerpt from "The Billionaires Have Gone Full Louis XV" by Michael Hirschorn in the NYT. 

The historian Robert Darnton described an uncannily similar moment in “The Revolutionary Temper: Paris 1748-1789,” his brilliant 2023 account of the decades leading up to the French Revolution. The preconditions were all there: suffocating top-down control of the media, rapid technological change, let-them-eat-cake behavior among the courtier class, weaponized religious bigotry, mansions with hideously de trop ballrooms. OK, Marjorie Taylor Greene is not quite Voltaire. But there was a pedophilia scandal involving Louis XV: Public obsession with the king’s many mistresses helped give rise to so-called libelles, cheaply printed, semi-factual pamphlets that speculated on, among other matters, the king’s supposed never-ending supply of teenage girls. It would have fit right in on TikTok. Reverence turned to mockery; mockery begot contempt; and then. …

Libelles ≈ social media. 

REVISION: The original headline was "A historian weighs in on the similarity between the U.S. today and France just before the Revolution," but the historian didn't comment on the similarity. The author of the article Michael Hirschorn, identified at the link as "the chief executive of Ish Entertainment," is the one who picked things out of the history and made the comparison. Thanks to commenter Narr for drawing attention to this.