Second, the ‘threat’ of wokeness was a media fiction. Conservative and centrist publications spent years promoting ‘free speech on campus’ and ‘cancel culture’ as threats equivalent to the right’s assaults on democracy and minority rights.

First, the activist ‘overreach’ mostly consisted of low-stakes, cherry-picked anecdotes. The police were not defunded. Words were not banned. White men were not barred from college.

The backlash is responding to the *possibility* of social change, not actual change.

What we’re seeing is not the pendulum swinging back toward the right after the left went too far. We’re seeing a moral panic, a society-wide assault on a phantom leftist who wants to ban Dr. Seuss and arrest you for using the wrong pronouns and put kitty litter boxes in classrooms.