Reece Peck, an associate professor from the City University of New York, arrived in Cluj-Napoca this spring not as a tourist drawn by Dracula or gymnastics—the two associations Americans typically make with Romania—but as a scholar tracing the mutations of populism across continents. Speaking at the Jean Monnet Module conference hosted by Babeș-Bolyai University, Peck offered a framework for understanding how populist movements have shifted their infrastructure from cable television to social media, and what that migration means for countries like Romania, where figures such as Călin Georgescu command the devotion of millions. Peck's presence at UBB was not incidental.

His collaboration with Mihnea Stoica, a lecturer and researcher at the university, began years earlier at a conference on populism in Jyväskylä, Finland. Since then, the two have exchanged experiences across institutions—Stoica has lectured multiple times to Peck's students in New York, while Peck has returned the favor in Cluj, including a visit to the Faculty of Political, Administrative and Communication Sciences four years ago. Their ongoing dialogue reflects a shared interest in how political rhetoric adapts to the media environments that carry it.

In the United States, Peck explained, right-wing populism was incubated within the environment of cable news, particularly Fox News. His book, "Fox Populism: Corporate Media and the Myth of the Working Class," examines how economic anxieties during the Great Recession were channeled into cultural grievances by networks that claimed to speak for ordinary Americans. Cable television provided a controlled, broadcast model—a few dominant voices reaching millions of passive viewers.

But that model has been superseded. Trump's 2024 campaign, Peck noted, relied less on traditional outlets like The New York Times or CNN than on alternative online media: podcasts, YouTube personalities, platforms like 4chan and Breitbart News, figures like Alex Jones. The "podcast elections" of 2024 marked a threshold, a moment when the influence of legacy media visibly waned.

This digital pivot, Peck argued, is not unique to the United States. In Romania, populism has bypassed cable news entirely, finding its primary stage on social media. The platforms differ—TikTok and Facebook rather than Fox—but the underlying dynamics are recognizable: the mobilization of economic anxiety, the appeal to cultural identity, the construction of an "us" against a "them."

Geopolitical tensions and inflation provide the raw material; digital networks provide the distribution. Yet the transformation is not confined to the right. In the United States, politicians like Zohra Mamdani and Graham Platner represent a populist left, using confrontational rhetoric to energize bases that feel abandoned by centrist liberalism.

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John Ossoff in Georgia exemplifies a hybrid approach, blending traditional political strategies with the tactics of modern media. What unites these figures, across the ideological spectrum, is their recognition that the media field has changed—and that political survival depends on adapting to it. Peck traced the roots of American political polarization back to Richard Nixon, an era when an asymmetry first emerged between a populist right and a centrist, institutionalist liberal left.

That asymmetry persisted through Ronald Reagan's presidency, setting the terms for the political field we inhabit today. The Vietnam War, Peck suggested, played a catalytic role, transforming the cultural and political dynamics that enabled Nixon's rise. But Trump and the MAGA movement introduced something new: a willingness to violate norms, embrace authoritarian gestures, deploy a style and tone that radicalized the Democratic base in response.

Trump's actions—his corruption, his language, his tolerance for violence—changed not only the right but also the left, forcing a recalibration of what political engagement means. The Jean Monnet Module conference, organized by UBB's Faculty of History and Philosophy, was designed to probe the intricacies of information manipulation and populist discourse within the European Union. Peck's contribution situated these questions within a broader pattern: the global migration of populism from broadcast to networked media, from centralized gatekeepers to distributed platforms.

The parallels between American and Romanian populism are instructive, he suggested, not because the contexts are identical but because the structural shifts are comparable. Both societies face economic precarity, geopolitical uncertainty, and a media environment that rewards emotional intensity over institutional deliberation. What remains constant, Peck argued, are the core appeals of populism—the invocation of economic grievance, the defense of cultural identity, the promise of restoration.

What changes are the channels through which those appeals are amplified. Cable news offered a unidirectional flow, a few voices speaking to many. Social media offers a networked flow, where influence is distributed, where audiences are also producers, where the boundary between politician and citizen blurs.

This shift does not make populism more or less dangerous; it makes it more adaptive, harder to contain, more responsive to the rhythms of online attention. As Peck concluded his lecture, the question he left with his audience was not whether populist movements will continue to evolve—that much is certain—but how scholars, journalists, and citizens will track that evolution as the media field continues to fragment. The challenge, as he sees it, is to understand the pattern without mistaking the platform for the phenomenon.

Social networks may eclipse traditional media, but the anxieties they channel, the identities they mobilize, the divisions they deepen—these are older than any technology. What changes is the velocity, the reach, the difficulty of response. And that, Peck suggested, is what demands our vigilance.