In today’s episode of The Road to Year Zero we pick up right where we left off in our conversation with Jonathan Chait.

At the time of our interview, Chait was working on a piece exploring the current state of the culture, since, as he put it “a wave of illiberal norms around the discussion of race and gender began to hit an expanding array of progressive institutions” seven or eight years ago, and arguing that we had hit yet another inflection point in the year 2022.

In the prior episode, The Road to Year Zero #3: Chait v. The Internet, we published excerpts of the interview that focused on his 2015 piece, and the sudden and spontaneous responses generated against him at the time, and have been waiting to post the second part of the interview until his new piece was published.

Now that his article is out, we're going to continue the interview right where we left off in the last episode. We'll discuss whether rumors of a vibe shift are real, the weakness of wokeness, why you see so many editorials in the New York Times lamenting cancel culture, and why Chait believes this is going to be a self-ending phenomenon.

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