Is woke really dead?

Surely, woke is dead? The social justice warriors brandishing pitchforks, threatening the police on those that refuse to accept that “trans women are women” or that fail to take the knee when in the vicinity of a Black Lives Matter protest, are yesterdays news? Not quite, but, according to one author and comedian Andrew Doyle, of our best known critics of this nonsense, its demise can’t come soon enough.

His latest book, The End of Woke is more of an acknowledgement that this phenomenon is on its way out than an obituary. Some may consider even this to be overly optimistic, but no matter. Indeed, in my view, this is the best work yet by the creator of genius parody Titania McGrath, and author of works such as Free Speech And Why It Matters (2021) and The New Puritans (2022).

What does he mean by “woke”? Many, such as the actor Kathy Burke, thinks it simply being kind. “I love being ‘woke’. It’s much nicer than being an ignorant fucking twat.” Burke interprets the word as meaning anti-racist, sexist and all the other nasty things decent people should instinctively be against. 

But for Doyle, one of the key aspects of the woke movement, “is that its adherents treat all challenges as a form of heresy that must be quashed.”

If you are against Critical Race Theory then you are racist. Believe that gender ideology is harmful? Transphobic bigot. Question the origins and meaning of the “river to the sea” slogan? Zionist scum.

This book kicks off with the momentous occasion on 5 February 2025 when the newly elected president Trump signed an executive order banning men from participating in women’s sports. Trump, brandishing his pen and surrounded by women and girls grinning triumphantly? One might be forgiven for instantly dismissing the rest of the book as pro-Trump propaganda and writing Doyle off as a right-wing protagonist. But this is the entire point. Many instinctively opposed it — simply because of who this definitive turning of the tide was coming from. And in so doing, those people have wound up defending the inclusion of men (otherwise known as trans women) in women’s sports. Now that Trump has said there are only two sexes, and put a stop to the chemical castration and surgical interventions on children in the name of “trans healthcare”, does it follow that “good folx” should be in favour of it?

Nothing but an authentic liberal society will prevent this from happening again

Identitarian progressives seem comfortable enough supporting Iran (as a means of tactically supporting the Palestinians, with whom they appear to be obsessed), but anything Trump does can only be the “wrong thing” — even though this particular act benefits women and offers children protection.

Welcome to the world of woke.

How does Doyle know it’s crumbling? He cites the UK Supreme Court ruling that men don’t become women because they have a certificate that says so; the Cass Report; Stonewall steadily losing its grip on institutions, including the NHS, and universities being called to task over free speech issues. Each of these events have sounded the death knell for this authoritarian, deeply illiberal capture. 

Doyle devotes just a single chapter to the gender madness — and rightly so, because it is only one manifestation of a problem that has become widespread, and he has a lot to get through. For him, the woke right is as problematic and as prevalent as the woke left; it’s about authoritarianism and liberal tendencies to bully people into pretending to believe what they are being told they must, such as when Trump argued that those who burn the national flag ought to be imprisoned for a year, or when, in 2016, he threatened to “open up the libel laws” to make it easier to sue his critics.

In the UK, we have “two-tier” policing, which results in the arrest of individuals for “wrong think” and “non-crime hate incidents”. 

Heretics are burned metaphorically at the stake by those that masquerade as the most principled people on the planet. They are authoritarian, and bully those that resist cult-like thinking. The woke love Black Lives Matter-type politics, spouting “intersectionality” whilst at the same time applauding race segregation in the shape of separate schooling for black students. 

The people Doyle refers to as “woke” claim to be liberal. Yet they are, as he clearly illustrates in this well-written and intelligently argued tome, the very opposite. Liberals don’t believe in censorship, or the suppression of alternative viewpoints but in the marketplace of ideas. 

Wokeists use words in ways that are almost the opposite of what they really mean. 

For example, when they claim to be promoting equality, they tend to mean that everyone ought to be thinking in the same way as them. And take “diversity”, by which they mean homogeneity. And when wokeists bleat about inclusion, they mean the exclusion of anyone daring enough to disagree with them.

The woke movement is about forcing people to accept certain principles, constantly pushing boundaries by means of setting expectations that everyone should sign up to beliefs that are the opposite of those that have been set in stone for generations. No-one has ever believed that any human being could change sex, yet “trans women are women” became a hysterical mantra repeated not only by those either in the cult, but also by everyone terrified of being ostracized.

Those that spoke out against the grooming gang scandal were also subject to a witch hunt. Trevor Phillips, for example, was suspended from the Labour Party accused of “Islamophobia” because he called into question the shibboleth of multiculturalism, which, Doyle argues, resulted in some Pakistani Muslim perpetrators slipping through the net.

Are we seeing the end of woke? Unfortunately, the conditions that led to this authoritarianism still remain. And worryingly, some of the same tactics used by those on the progressive left to silence dissent, is increasingly being hailed as an effective model to curtail authoritarianism and quell the wokeists. But that will never work, as Doyle points out, keen to look at ways that would ensure we never get into this mess again. Nothing but an authentic liberal society will prevent this from happening again, despite the fact that many, particularly those on the political right, blamed liberalism for allowing woke to flourish. I have no idea whether universal liberal values could possibly address the problems caused by woke, but I’m damned if I can think of an alternative.