Is speech freer now, five years into the ‘vibe shift’?
A virtual roundtable on wokeism, AI, Israel, and much more, featuring Parker Molloy, Sean Monahan, Katherine Dee, and six other outspoken voices in media.
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It has been five years since Sean Monahan wrote about the “vibe shift” that was said to mark the end of the woke era, and about a year and a half since a “top banker” hailed Donald Trump’s second term by telling the Financial Times, “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”
Almost from the start, the term “vibe shift” signified everything and nothing. In his useful recent New York Times column, “The Vibe Has Shifted Back,” David Wallace-Wells addresses the substantive changes wrought by Donald Trump’s return to office and subsequent hemorrhaging of support. My goal in convening this virtual roundtable was narrower, or maybe shallower: Assess whether speech is freer—or more circumscribed—than it was in the summer of 2021.
Five years ago, we were still seeing the fallout from the pandemic—the natural experiments in social isolation and school shutdowns, as well as the culture warring that vaccinations prompted—and the reverberations from the previous summer’s Black Live Matters protests. Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, crystallizing the backlash against hashtag activism and “liberal media bias,” and signaling the sharp turn of the tech elite against liberalism itself. One year later, in response to October 7, Israel began its genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza.
This was a turning point, at least for the American left. The identity politics that had so galled right wingers and others began to give way to anti-war activism and a renewed focus on class, as economic pressure increased on all but the wealthiest Americans, and AI founders promised a new underclass and thirsty data centers across the country—trends that only intensified, when the outcry over the dismantling of DEI programs died down and abortion access held steady after Roe vs. Wade was overturned. “As long as you’re ‘pro-Palestine’ and economically progressive,” Shadi Hamid wrote in a January column about Zohran Mamdani, “you can probably find a place for yourself in today’s Democratic Party.”
“Our definition of a controversial idea has changed radically.” —Scaachi Koul
But if wokeism is inextricably tied to identity politics, so too is anti-wokeism, which demonizes immigrants, sows panic about trans people, and celebrates whiteness and cartoonish gender stereotypes. If the vibe shift was in part a reaction against people of privilege being asked to sit their asses down and listen, where does that leave media and the online discourse now, when the right dominates the closest thing to a “town square,” X, and many liberals have sectioned themselves off on Bluesky? What about when you factor in the rise of TikTok and independent media on Substack, the unraveling of The Washington Post, Bari Weiss’ wrenching redirection of CBS News, or the stirrings of life in legacy magazines, like The Painted Protest, Dean Kissick’s 2024 Harper’s cover story on “how politics destroyed contemporary art”?
These questions are not abstract for the writers and thinkers who are prominent in the scrum of social media and publishing. I asked nine of them to share their thoughts in a written survey.
Do you feel freer now than you did five years ago to speak your mind, whether publicly or privately?
Sean Monahan, founder, K-Hole: Absolutely. 2020 was a year of mass hysteria. The novelty of COVID-19 created a pathway for digital censorship. That censorship apparatus doesn’t exist anymore.
Katherine Dee, writer of default.blog: On some issues, definitely. But I think the “woke muscle” has shifted to other topics—thinking here of technology as the latest frontier for the culture war. Personally, I’ve always felt out of place, though.
Josh Lora, aka Tell the Bees, writer and content creator: I do not, but I also think this is due to platform choice—since TikTok is my primary platform, I find myself in a sort of double bind where I can’t criticize certain people or have certain convos without it turning into a Thing. This could also simply be that TikTok is the new Tumblr, and very young people congregate there to express their outrage, but also the tenor of many conversations has shifted and everything is a morality play or a referendum on a great social issue.
“I self-censor a fair amount now. Sometimes it’s the harassment I'm worried about. Just as often it’s a feed ranking.” —Parker Molloy
Kat Tenbarge, writer of Spitfire News: Yes, but only because I’m independent! The biggest barrier to speaking my mind was definitely working for corporations with social media policies.
scaachi Koul, Slate culture writer and author of Sucker Punch: I guess the question is what “free” means here? I have less personal fear, I care far less about professional reprisals or grudges than I did in my 20s. But I have more fear of institutions and governments and police than I ever have. I don’t know if that speaks to a worsening state (probably) or if it’s just a matter of getting older and paying more attention. All I can do is try to keep my mind free, and hope my body can follow.
Kelly Chapman, aka Audrey Horne: Absolutely. But I think it’s a combination of the changing society and my own personal growth and in confidence in my voice. The latter was certainly buoyed by a shift in the general culture.
Maxwell Tani, media editor, Semafor: A bit, but maybe that’s just what it feels like to get older.
Manny Fidel, co-host of No Such Thing and author of Colored People Time: Not in any measurable way. I feel more conviction about what I believe than I did five years ago, which may make me more confident to speak my mind about things. I am slightly more willing share an assessment of a politician or public figure without considering whether someone will think it’s inappropriate for whatever reason, and have leaned towards just letting things rip. But I can’t say my behavior in general has changed all that much.
Parker Molloy, writer of The Present Age: No. Not at all. Part of it is the fear that if you say the wrong thing, the right-wing media machine (Fox, Libs of TikTok, all of them) puts a target on your back, and the government seems more and more happy to help. I’m trans, so that’s not necessarily a hypothetical for me. But the thing that gets me more often is dumber than that. It’s the algorithm. If I post something a platform doesn’t like, it just doesn’t get shown to anyone, so I catch myself weighing whether a point is worth making if the cost is that my reach craters for a week. I self-censor a fair amount now. Sometimes it’s the harassment I’m worried about. Just as often it’s a feed ranking.
Do you perceive a wider variety of viewpoints represented in the media today than you did five years ago? Do you believe there is a greater tolerance now for potentially controversial ideas or coverage among decision-makers in media? How about among readers and viewers?
Max Tani: Yes. I think there’s definitely a greater tolerance for people who have made controversial statements in the past that has gone against whatever the “general consensus” is, particularly if they’re a man with somewhat heterodox opinions.
Manny Fidel: Maybe due to X’s ideologically lopsided algorithm, I have seen a lot more conservative/center-right viewpoints, from places like The Free Press, The Washington Beacon, etc.
Parker Molloy: It’s more that the whole thing shifted right and we’re all pretending it didn’t. There are more conservative voices in mainstream media now than there have ever been, and I don’t just mean “conservatives,” I mean the entire menu. Full-on fascists? MAGA? Neocons? Alt-right? New Right? Never Trumpers? Anti-Trump Republicans who can’t stand the Never Trumpers? They’re all there, they all get segments, they all get op-eds. That really is a wide spread of opinion.
And then to represent the left, the media wheels out Maureen Dowd or whoever. Anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan gets called a liberal or a progressive or a leftist or a socialist like those are all the same word, while actual leftists making actual arguments for left-wing policy basically don’t appear in the big outlets anymore. A lot of that comes back to who owns everything now. Musk bought Twitter. The Ellisons bought Paramount and put Bari Weiss on top of CBS News. The people who control what we read and watch and where we post are almost all pulling in the same direction, and it really shows. It’s a genuinely bad time to be on the left and trying to do this for a living.
Scaachi Koul: I think our definition of a controversial idea has changed radically, and it also depends on who your audience is. What I know for sure is that there are fewer places to get published or to report the news. That alone will cut down on the volume and variety of viewpoints you get.
“The anti-woke bent to a lot of media coverage seems gratuitous to me at this point.” —Kelly Chapman
Kat Tenbarge: There has definitely been a crackdown on diversity and opining at the mainstream media level. They’re terrified of getting sued and facing retribution from the Trump administration. But among readers and viewers, it’s the opposite. They’re angrier than ever, and they’re in pursuit of more opinionated, colorful speech.
Sean Monahan: Yes, though mostly as a result of the collapse of mainstream media. I wouldn’t say traditional press outlets have expanded their viewpoint diversity, but audiences have migrated away from them.
Katherine Dee: I think in the past, certain criticisms would make it into big, mainstream publications, but almost accidentally. Now, I think many editors are seeking out contributions from folks who made a name for themselves in the alternative media ecosystem. But like I said, the impulse is still there. You might be able to criticize something like medical transition, but what about an article that unabashedly celebrated Big Tech? (I say this purely descriptively/hypothetically.)
Josh Lora: I think the Overton Window has shifted slightly, but there is still outrage when a major publication publishes something that’s not correct or necessarily accepted on either side. People have issues with The Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, WaPo (obviously). I think some things might get published, but the backlash exists—they just choose to ignore it.
Kelly Chapman: Yes, definitely. Though I believe a lot of it is at best an overcorrection or a morbid curiosity about the other side, divorced from any nuance. Every major outlet covering Curtis Yarvin last year, for example—that felt like a convenient tokenization, a shallow attempt to correct for the excesses of woke. Even the critical stuff, like the tradwife fixation we’ve seen in the last year or two, feels untethered from reality, driven more by reaction than by curiosity. The anti-woke bent to a lot of media coverage seems gratuitous to me at this point, though maybe that’s a symptom of me being too online for too long, or a symptom of Trump being our current president, and anti-woke feeling boring. I’m waiting for Vibe Shift 3.0.
Looking back, was “cancel culture” a genuine problem? Is it less of a problem now?
Kelly Chapman: Absolutely. I felt it acutely, as a very religious, very conservative 20-something, but I don’t think you had to be very religious or conservative to feel it. It’s the reason for the broader anti-woke swing we’re seeing now.
Katherine Dee: Yes and no on both counts. In media, of course markets always create counter-markets, and that is the benefit of being canceled as a journalist during the 2010s and early 2020s. I understand people who didn’t want to move to alt or RW media and feel resentful and like their careers were upended. On the other hand, some people were “canceled” for legitimate reasons. I can’t say how many were justified—I don’t know, and I mean that honestly. I think we all agree that someone like Harvey Weinstein was a monster, and what happened to Aziz Ansari was humiliation for its own sake.
It’s easier to talk about this from the vantage point of media than more everyday situations, though. It did feel like for a long stretch there you weren’t allowed to have dissenting opinions, to be wrong, in some cases to defend yourself. This happened in the workplace, I saw it happen in spiritual and hobby communities too. Is it less of a problem now? No, but the texture is different. And I think people are less afraid to ignore the mob.
Sean Monahan: The problem with cancel culture was not that office politics and speech codes derailed careers. That’s always happened. The issue was the volume of cancellations and mediagenic nature of them. The end result was the delegitimization of institutions, which still plagues us today. Just look at the sentiment polls on academia. Higher education, at least in the United States, has lost the trust of the public.
Max Tani: I think there were some news articles and posts that probably overdramatized relatively run-of-the-mill annoying/disrespectful workplace behavior.
Parker Molly: Yeah, it was real. But people remember it wrong. The late-2010s version was basically what you get when you run boycott politics through social media, which nobody had really done at that scale before. And the problem was the reaction to it. Companies and executives had no clue how to handle a pile of angry posts, so they’d panic and do something stupid. Remember when Disney fired James Gunn off Guardians of the Galaxy because Mike Cernovich dug up a bunch of gross jokes he’d tweeted years before? They just … did it, right away, because a few accounts were mad. Insane. And that never went away. If anything the right got a lot better at it, because they can get elected officials and Fox to amplify whatever the outrage of the week is.
Nobody ever brings up Dylan Mulvaney in these conversations, and she might be the clearest actual “cancellation” there is. She didn’t do anything except be trans and take a one-off sponsorship. Bud Light sent her a personalized can, she posted about it once, and the right melted down for a year over it. Ron DeSantis had the state of Florida look into whether Anheuser-Busch breached its fiduciary duty to shareholders just by working with her. An actual governor, aiming an actual pension fund at a beer ad! And not one of the “free speech” people said a word. They’ve only ever cared about this issue in the sense that they want to be the ones who decide who gets “canceled” and what the culture looks like more broadly. And they’re very good at using this stuff when it points the direction they like.
“Nothing matters, in a way.” —Josh Lora
Kat Tenbarge: All the “canceled” people are settling into their comebacks nicely. “Cancellation” is a choice. If you disappear, no one cares. If you come back, people will acclimate to it. Louis C.K. is on billboards, Kevin Spacey is doing podcasts, and even Harvey Weinstein is getting the sympathetic treatment from massive creators like Candace Owens. “Cancel culture” is a much bigger problem for women making allegations versus men on the receiving end. Amber Heard was dragged through court and certainly won’t be getting the warm welcome that Andrew Tate regularly receives. Abuse and sexual violence was the real problem, not cancel culture, and the former has only gotten worse.
Scaachi Koul: I implore people to think about what these words mean. The word “culture” suggests a broadly accepted modus of beliefs and ideology, and “cancel” suggests these people have stopped being able to work or thrive or live in a society because of their past acts. Do we have an ecosystem of holding people SO accountable that they’re barred from participating in society as normal? No, because the people complaining about it are doing so in published books (Dave Portnoy) or on Netflix (Louis C.K.). Not being able to get traction on your podcast isn’t cancel culture; cancel culture would be, in theory, a kind of jail. Instead, it’s just the removal of a few inches of entitlement.
There is no culture of cancellation, but there is a push and pull between two groups: those who want the freedom to say and do whatever the fuck they want without repercussions depending on who they hurt or offend, and those who don’t want to watch a Brad Pitt movie anymore. These are not equal measures. I feel dumber for having to write this down.
Josh Lora: I think we overcorrected a tad, but the heart of the matter wasn’t wrong? People obviously shouldn’t say slurs or be allowed to hold positions of power if they’ve been egregiously racist or transphobic or misogynistic. I think the only thing that’s shifted is that with the second Trump election and the economic malaise, canceling has become a sort of passe conversation, where the left cares a lot and the right doesn’t care at all, and we’re not meeting in the middle—everything is moot. Dave Chappelle and Louis C.K. are on tour. Chris Brown is on tour. Kid Rock is openly offending people. Nothing matters, in a way.
The Dimes Square scene, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, and Trump’s election to a second term have been credited with changing the scope and tenor of our discourse. How influential or enduring have those changes proven to be?
Kat Tenbarge: Dimes Square was a total cultural mirage. No one outside the NYC media scene even knows what it is, and most people inside the NYC media scene don’t know what it is either.
Scaachi Koul: I still don’t really know what Dimes Square is and I don’t care to learn.
Parker Molloy: Dimes Square barely registered. It got a mountain of coverage because writers wanted a “vibe shift” to point at, but its real effect on how people talk was close to nothing.
Musk taking over Twitter, though, that’s enormous. He’s the richest man in the world, a pretty obvious white supremacist, fascist, and bigot, and he just bought the town square. And now he decides what gets shown to people. Which shapes what they believe. Which shapes how they vote. Which shapes what governments do.
Kat Tenbarge: Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover has unfortunately proven to have long-lasting impact. Most people have largely abandoned the platform, but the ones who stayed behind are more radicalized by misogyny, racism, antisemitism, and a whole host of other bigotries. Unfortunately, that includes a ton of the news industry, both new and traditional.
“The way the left hollowed out words like ‘empathy’ cleared the path for the extreme vice-signaling we’re seeing on the right today.” —Chapman
Katherine Dee: I think the key to thinking about all of these questions is differentiating between ordinary people and the media ecosystem. If we’re talking media—all of these things made a big impact. Sometimes these attitudes trickle down.
Max Tani: I think [Musk’s takeover of Twitter] pushed some liberal voices to alternative platforms, where they get less attention from the mainstream media, which still takes its cues from X.
Trump’s reelection shifted the media discourse by showing people that there was a significant slice of the electorate that was either tuning out liberals and the mainstream media, or did not share its values.
Parker Molloy: Right now, the thing I’d point at is billionaires buying the newsrooms themselves, not just the platforms. CBS is the obvious case. Ellison’s Paramount put Weiss in charge and they’ve been tearing the place apart since, pushing out senior people, firing Scott Pelley, gutting 60 Minutes. When the owners get picked for their politics, nobody has to censor anything.
Kelly Chapman: They were very influential, and very cathartic in the face of “cancel culture,” but they also accelerated the hollowing out of the discourse and of moral language. I’ve written about this with respect to gender polarization, but the way the left hollowed out words like “empathy” cleared the path for the extreme vice-signaling we’re seeing on the right today. It’s hard now for either side to talk about right and wrong in a believable way, but unfortunately that’s exactly what we need to be able to talk about to respond to the rise of AI.
I really think AI is going to completely reorient the discourse because it’s forcing us to face fundamental questions about humanity that we thought were closed. I think we’re moving from a traditional right/left dichotomy to something much weirder: the conversation will settle around what it means to be human. This is a moral question that the secular left cares about, but really does not have a robust answer to. The religious world does, so I think we’re going to see a new humanist alliance between liberals, leftists and the religious right. The technocrats—many of whom seem to be moving in a transhumanist direction—will push optimization as a moral good unless the rest of us are able to articulate and stand up a robust defense for the imperfect, the weak, and the human.
Katherine Dee: Right now, the biggest Culture War issue is AI.
Max Tani: There’s pretty much no issue or subject that engenders more fury and passion when I write about it than Israel/Gaza.
Manny Fidel: The tenor of our discourse is definitely more abrasive. I think it has to do with the feeling people on the left have about “fighting back.” If there’s an ongoing cultural tug-of-war, we won’t gain any more ground by being chillers.
Kat Tenbarge: Anti-Israel sentiment is a huge driver of this next phase of politics and culture, and rightfully so, but legitimate Nazis like Nick Fuentes are having a field day with it. People need to be careful not to let actual bigots into the fold. Anti-AI sentiment is slowly getting captured by the right, too. But not the Trump right. The new right. Which is somehow even worse.
Scaachi Koul: You know, I don’t think any of this shit happens if you make sure people are paid a livable wage, that they have access to clean drinking water and health care, that they can marry who they want without fear of being murdered, that their children go to schools without cops and metal detectors as apparent necessities. The discourse is being shaped by what we’re afraid of, and we’re afraid of so much because it’s just so hard to have anything in this country. There are several bad actors making sure it stays hard, and using that fear to their advantage.
Sean Monahan: I don’t know that anything has changed. It seems like the two sides of the culture war remain exactly where they were when “wokeness” began during the second Obama administration. I suppose “AI” has become the new proxy for the broad dissatisfaction with the economy that has more or less been the subtext for “discourse” since the financial crisis in 2008.
“Many of us won’t like to hear it, but ‘libbing out’ seems to hold more cultural space than ‘dark woke’ at the moment.” —Manny Fidel