Jamie Paul, a former managing editor of Queer Majority and a contributing editor at Bi.org, is the founding editor of the American Dreaming on Substack, where (among his other writings) he has set out to provide a comprehensive catalog of the authoritarian excesses of the woke era of progressive cultural ascendency. At 11 extensively researched and sharply written installments (so far), Paul’s “Memory-Hole Archive” seeks to preserve for posterity the almost hallucinatory lunacy of what came to be the cultural currency and conventional wisdom in cosmopolitan America in the years between 2014 and 2023.

Paul argues that now that the woke era is behind us, the progressive left is collectively working to deny or deflect its overreach rather than learn from it, and he seeks to force a reckoning on the left of what went so wrong in the period when it monopolized cultural power. “If the innumerable left-wing overreaches of the past decade are not remembered, acknowledged, and learned from, we risk going down that same road again and perpetuating this cycle in which the political culture violently swings between the far left and far right,” he writes.

We are hugely impressed by the scope and scale of Jamie's accounting, and by his insightful and unsparing commentary on the left’s errors, and we agree with his contention that coming to terms with the failings of woke is necessary for the Democratic Party and liberal institutions to regain public trust, so we invited him to join us on this episode of BCB. In our conversation, we discuss how progressive institutions became increasingly intolerant of dissent during the late 2010s, and how the resulting backlash helped strengthen the populist right. And we also discuss how the right, now in the ascendency, exhibits its own dangerously authoritarian tendencies, backed by the power of the state.

Over the course of the discussion with Jamie. we dig into trigger warnings, safetyism, the privileging of lived experience, cancel culture, speech policing, the fixation on trauma and the power of therapy culture, identity politics, and progressives’ turn towards racial essentialism.

“There was a period during the 2010s where a lot of people on the left thought that they didn't need to play by the old rules, which were you convince people, you change hearts and minds, you build the foundation, and then you build atop that,” Paul explains. “They thought they could build a third story where there was no first or second story, and it just came crashing down, because you know this isn't Looney Tunes, so now we're in this position where we have to win back trust.”

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Jamie Paul, American Dreaming, Substack.

Jamie Paul, "How Trans Activism became So Radical," Persuasion, March 13, 2026.

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