Is Piers Morgan right to declare woke dead?

Donald Trump’s issuing of over 200 executive orders back in January 2025, which banished DEI policies and recognised officially that there are only two genders, prompted an avalanche of assertions that woke is finally over. This auspicious start to Trump’s second term set the mood for much of the conversation on both sides of the Atlantic, with British writer Andrew Doyle publishing his book, The End of Woke, in May.

While Doyle’s work didn’t actually argue that woke had been defeated (he says there is an implied question mark in the title), it did argue persuasively that the doctrines of hyper-liberalism, which arrived in earnest 10 years or so ago, were facing unprecedented challenges. An ideology that placed undue emphasis on identities, and one which had become unmistakably authoritarian, was facing pushback like never before. In Britain, events seemed to bear out the thesis that woke, if not dead, was at least on life support. The UK Supreme Court ruling in April – that ‘woman’, as per the Equality Act 2010, means biological female – seemed to herald that the end was in sight.

Veteran newspaper editor, television presenter and now YouTuber Piers Morgan has never been one to hold back on his opinions. And it’s with characteristic bluster that in his new book, Woke is Dead: How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness, he pronounces the madness definitively over.

Like many, Morgan regards the re-election of President Trump to be significant, setting the counter-revolutionary spirit for the year. He agrees that, in 2025, there was a marked revolt against trans ideology – with ‘transwomen’ now banished from a growing number of women’s spaces – and a retreat from the histrionic ‘anti-racist’ rhetoric that reached its climax in 2020. Indeed, many corporations this year quietly discontinued their DEI schemes and sermonising ad campaigns. In contrast with the events of the early part of this decade, 2025 was the year American Eagle not only used a blonde, shapely white female to advertise its jeans, but also refused to say sorry for having done so.

As many readers will know, Piers Morgan is not one for nuance, doubt or understatement. In both form and content, Woke is Dead conveys its message with unquestionable clarity. There is little equivocation, with woke largely spoken of in the past tense, the issue considered resolved. ‘A sudden flood of common sense is now washing over us with spectacular force and speed’, he decides. ‘We can now look back on the period 2015 to 2025 as The Wokies. A crazed decade in which initially well-meaning worries about sexism and racism morphed into tyrannical purity purges and a campaign to remake every aspect of society, language and culture.’

Morgan’s delivery is certainly spirited, crammed with breathless tabloid overstatement, at times even lurching into Alan Partridge territory: metaphorical ‘bombshells’ abound; some people went ‘bonkers’, while others went ‘stark raving mad’ and companies ‘found themselves hitched to a wagon that rolled off down a steep slope and sped off the edge of a cliff’. Either Morgan has no comprehension of his own pompous and oafish public image, or else he is making an unwise attempt at self-deprecatory irony, when he writes of Trump: ‘He has a bombastic, confrontational rhetorical style that can be aggressive, rude and sometimes downright offensive.’

Yet for all Morgan’s verbal tics, for all his unvarnished egotism, clichés, petty asides and tendency to repeat himself and laugh at his own jokes, he gets a lot right when dissecting the woke movement. Much of what’s now called woke was indeed well-meaning at the start, only for a sharp illiberal turn to transform it into a vehicle for ‘aggressive lobbying by lunatics who weaponised the empathy or cowardice of everybody else’. Adherents of hyper-liberalism may think they are being ‘kind’, but this is nevertheless a movement that Morgan aptly describes as ‘moral despotism’. As he reminds us, being armed with a sense of righteousness and mission will inevitably entail a drift towards tyranny: ‘If you’re so laser-focussed on the certainty of your own virtue, it becomes morally justifiable to do almost anything to get your way.’ Woke pushed itself into the public sphere through threat and intimidation. ‘Anybody who questioned the consensus was to be hunted down and flogged by the permanently offended’, as Morgan puts it.

Despite his unsparing and perceptive dissection of wokery and the crafty tactics employed by its high priests, the author is far less successful in convincing the reader that woke is actually dead. He has almost nothing to say about the still pitiful state of free speech in universities, the place where hyper-liberalism was born and where it refuses to die. Academics and students continue to be tormented and ostracised simply for believing, for instance, in biological sex.

While Morgan describes the trans lobby’s retreat at length, he is less inclined to dive into the topic of race. This is probably because, in Britain at least, academic establishments are still implementing DEI policies and ‘decolonising’ their courses. Meanwhile, the latest woke delusion, ‘neurodiversity’, is still in its infancy. The associated ‘mental-health crisis’ – one dependent to a large degree on self-diagnosis and unfalsifiable claims – represents the persistence of subjectivism in place of reason and objectivity.

All the same, Woke is Dead is an admirable and welcome addition to the canon. Morgan’s recommendations for the future are sound, with his self-help-style appendix on how to avoid herd-thinking being surprisingly astute and sympathetic. He advises younger readers that ‘nothing good can come of censoring yourself… The recovery starts with staying true to your personal belief and not blindly following the pack.’

Still, there is no escaping that woke isn’t dead. There is a world of difference between something being true and earnestly wishing it was. And woke is sadly still with us.

Woke is Dead: How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness, by Piers Morgan, is published by HarperCollins.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.