Dispatches From the Culture Wars

As the new year kicks in, the assaults on freedom, reason, and decency continue—from both sides

What’s the first big culture-war skirmish of 2022? Maybe that distinction goes to the latest Amy Wax brouhaha, which is a reminder that racism—in the old-fashioned and explicit sense, not the infinitely flexible kind articulated by modern “antiracism”—is a very real and disturbingly vocal presence in some quarters of “conservatism” right now.

In August 2…