From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression with me, Jerry Baker, from the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Thanks very much for joining us. If you're not already, please be sure to subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you'll get your podcasts.

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Free expression, we all know, is essential to a healthy democracy, and so each week on this

podcast we aim to contribute by having a wide-ranging and candid conversation with leading

practitioners and commentators in the world of politics, business, technology, academia,

the arts and culture, etc., exploring in depth the themes, people and topics that shape our world.

I'm glad to say that my guest this week is Noah Rothman, conservative commentator, author and associate

editor of Commentary Magazine.

And that was a distinguished anatomist of our modern political and cultural conditions.

His first book, Unjust, Social Justice and the Unmaking of America, was a very well-timed exploration of the modern ideology of social justice that's tearing up the threads of the American fabric.

His new book, The Rise of the New Puritans, fighting back against Progressive's War on Fun, is just out.

It's a terrific read that examines the lunatic extremism of the modern progressive cultural creed, and places it in

historical context, was a kind of warped latter-day successor to the Puritanism that animated

many of the earliest Americans. It is an ideology, he says, and I quote from the book,

that emphasizes political utility over personal pleasure. From the comedy you enjoy to the sports

you watch, to the sex you have,

or increasingly don't, a particular sort of left-wing activist insists that these and many

other private activities have a public dimension. They must contribute to the promotion of a wholesome

society. We're going to explore what these particular pathologies are and how we got here and what we can do about them now with Noah Rothman. Noah, thanks very much for joining me. Thank you for having me, Jerry. I appreciate that generous introduction. And congratulations on the book, which is a terrific read. I want to get into some of the you do dissect in very telling ways. Some of these, one of a better word, are kind of woke obsessions, telling us how we should be living our lives. But I want to start with the point you make right at the beginning, which is that it's another example, I think,

and you capture it very well of the inversion of so much of our sort of political and cultural

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