Now, in Donald Trump's second administration, that parallel economy is just the economy. Trumpist culture wars have made almost everything more expensive, effectively forcing all Americans to pay an anti-woke tax. Although conservatives usually use woke to describe some form of egalitarianism they oppose, it's proved such an effective epithet that they're now applying the label to anything they need their constituents to dislike.
On Monday morning, the Wall Street Journal confirmed that the Paramount-Skydance behemoth, headed by tech scion David Ellison, had acquired Weiss' Substack-based publication the Free Press for a $150 million valuation, about 10 times the revenue the platform brought in last year. The "anti-woke" newsletter will now join the suite of brand-name properties under the merged-media umbrella, including BET and MTV, while Weiss herself will become editor in chief of CBS News-which is about to lay off 10 percent of its very worried staff.