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After sweeping the swing states and winning the popular vote in 2024, President Donald Trump took office with a sense that he occupied the center and had dealt the cultural left a grave blow. Non-aligned or heterodox voices in the podcasting world and media had gravitated toward him, alienated by the illiberalism and exotic concerns of contemporary Democrats.Significant elements of Silicon Valley swung his way. Trump won the debate over trans policy, and he made mass deportation — once considered outlandish — a mainstream issue.Sensing which way the wind was blowing, corporations begin ditching their DEI programs. There wasn’t the immediate backlash against Trump’s election the way there had been the first time around, and he enjoyed some cultural cachet — NFL players, for instance, did on-field versions of his YMCA dance. All of this was referred to as a “vibe shift,” and it seemed a punctuation mark on what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now calls Woke 1.0.Today, though, the vibe is bad again, and bears resemblance to the environment prior to Trump’s return to the White House. Once again, the elite culture is in the grips of a mass hysteria, this time about an alleged gang rape at a college campus rather than a fatal police interaction with a black suspect, whether Michael Brown or George Floyd.But the triumph of narrative over fact, and the abiding belief in the systemic repression of a victim group, are the same. Once again, a comedian saying supposedly offensive things has led to widespread condemnations — of the same Shane Gillis who was dumped as a “Saturday Night Live” cast member during Woke 1.0.Once again, people are being hunted down and cancelled for dumb things they said long ago: The Portland Trail Blazers fired their new TV announcer immediately upon learning that he posted a couple of offensive things on social media as a 15-year-old.The culture is unlikely to reach the same level of insanity it did after the death of George ...