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.

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At the journal's editorial page, we believe strongly in free expression. And each week on this

podcast, we explore in-depth and candor issues of topical and broader interest. We speak

in-depth to people who are leading figures in their field, practitioners, experts, commentators,

to give us all a better understanding of the major issues of our times.

This week, I'm pleased to say my guest is Wesley Yang, author, essayist, and commentator.

Wesley was born to Korean American parents, who were refugees from the Korean War.

He's written extensively about modern American politics and culture, and he's emerged as one of the

most articulate and thoughtful critics of the prevailing progressive

orthodoxy that dominates much of America's public discourse in universities, the media, culture, and elsewhere.

In 2019, he came up with the term successor ideology described this orthodoxy, and it's a phrase

that's caught on widely. It neatly captures, I think, how the emphasis on the ideals and values

of identity, politics, social justice,

anti-racism, and all the other progressive causes have been widely adopted by thought leaders

in our society in such a way that they've steadily replaced much of what we knew of as

liberalism, classical or modern liberalism, as the dominant political ideology.

Wesdie's also written at length about the experience of Asian Americans in the United States, including a very influential essay about the young man responsible for the mass shooting at Virginia Tech University in 2007 that killed 32 people. This and other essays were included in his book, The Souls of Yellow Folk, which was published in 2018. He writes regularly for the tablet and other publications. Of course, he has a podcast like all of us, And he joins me now. Where's the Yang? Thanks very much for joining me. Thanks for having me. So I want to talk about many things with you. But let's start, because we've all been trying to grapple with the political and cultural changes, the broad, wider, top level political and cultural changes that we've been seeing in this country and indeed in some extent in much of the West in the last decade or so. And I do think your term successor ideology captures it

extraordinarily well, again, these ideals of social justice, anti-racism, identity politics

around gender and sexuality and all of this, the way in which these have become the dominant

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