The Woke Revolution and the Populist Backlash

WSJ Opinion: Free Expression

Gerard Baker, Editor at Large, The Wall Street Journal

Society & Culture, News

4.6 • 591 Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the summer of rage that followed was a seminal event in U.S. politics. It was seized on by progressive ideologues who controlled most of the cultural and political discourse in America to assert an identity-based ideology and to marginalize dissent. But their efforts to cement a woke revolution and cancel opposition has come back to haunt them. The re-election of Donald Trump last year represented in part a counter-revolution. And now he and his MAGA majority seem to be using some of the same tactics to squeeze their opponents from the public square. How did we get here and how can we restore civility in an age of increasingly polarized intolerance? On this episode of Free Expression, Gerry Baker speaks with Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of a new book ‘Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse.’ They discuss how illiberalism turned university campuses into hotbeds of intolerance, why there is now a backlash against ‘identity politics,’ and how Donald Trump’s base is more multi-cultural than is portrayed by his critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.
0:08.7	Hello and welcome to Free Expression from the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I'm Jerry Baker. I'm
0:13.2	editor at large of the journal. Thanks for joining us. If you're not already subscribing,
0:16.2	please do make sure you subscribe on Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you do you're listening.
0:20.3	And remember to leave us a nice review. This week, the topic of freedom of speech, free expression.
0:25.7	The name of this podcast has been very much in the news. We saw the cancellation and then the
0:30.0	uncancellation of Jimmy Kimmel after his rather regrettable remarks about the murder of Charlie Kirk.
0:36.2	I'm recording this on Wednesday. Jimmy Kimmel was back on the
0:38.7	air last night on Tuesday night. Of course, there's been a much wider conversation that has
0:43.5	involved about the extent to which this country is moving away from its ideals and values of
0:49.9	freedom, in particular of free speech. We saw the rather unhelpful, I think, intervention of
0:55.5	Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, which seemed to, at least some
0:59.9	people's eyes, seem to lead to the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel last week. That, again,
1:03.6	seems to reflect an authoritarianism that many people perceive on the right. Donald Trump himself
1:08.8	has said some pretty harsh things about canceling his opponents
1:12.2	in the wake of some of the really awful things that have been said in the wake of the Charlie
1:16.3	Kirk assassination. But even some, frankly, less outrageous things. Donald Trump does seem to have
1:22.9	something of an authoritarian instinct when it comes to people expressing opinions that he doesn't like
1:27.9	on platforms. And it has led to this, as I say, this sort of wider debate about whether or not
1:33.0	illiberalism on the right is now a characterization of the way this country is going. But of course,
1:38.2	I think it is very important to understand, also, as many people have pointed out, the wider
1:42.4	context and indeed one of the justifications for some of the things that Donald Trump and his administration doing comes from the fact that we have lived in this country for the last 10 or 15 years or so under a kind of progressive left-wing hegemony in many of our cultural institutions in which dissenting opinion, conservative opinion,
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