Woke is Dead? Not Yet
Two recent books by authors of varying credibility – Piers Morgan and Andrew Doyle – suggest that woke is over.
Doyle’s book argues:
It is no secret that we are in the midst of a cultural revolution. Activists in the ‘woke’ movement have claimed to be on the right side of history, and yet their approach has been intolerant, intemperate and, above all, illiberal. Having dominated the western world for the past fifteen years, there are clear signs the woke are now losing their power. The re-election of Donald Trump, the scaling back of DEI initiatives, and a growing awareness of the threats to women’s sex-based rights has stirred a counter-revolution. But is this truly the end of woke? Or have the culture wars merely evolved?
In The End of Woke, Doyle skilfully examines the mechanisms underlying the zealous extremes on both the left and the right. He shows that, in a desperate power struggle to re-assert liberal values, some leaders of the anti-woke movement have found themselves adopting a different kind of authoritarian approach - one which also promotes censorship and erodes our freedoms.
Doyle argues that although authoritarianism is common to all political tribes, we must resist its pernicious influence wherever it emerges. After all, replacing one form of tyranny with another will not end the culture wars. But liberalism - true liberalism - might just see the end of woke for good.
https://www.amazon.com.au/END-WOKE-Culture-Expect-Counter-Revolution/dp/1408723972
Morgan’s book argues:
They claimed it was a movement that would change society forever. Instead, it’s been buried six feet under by common sense.
For a decade, “woke” infected every corner of our lives. Cancel culture ran riot. Men became toxic. Virtue signalling was everywhere. And if you dared disagree? You’d be terminated on the spot.
But then something extraordinary happened. All over the world, people woke up.
In this explosive and uproarious takedown, Piers Morgan charts the spectacular collapse of the most ridiculous ideology in human history. With his trademark wit and fearless honesty, he exposes the hypocrites, destroys the myths, and celebrates the heroes who refused to surrender to the woke brigade.
Inside, Morgan takes aim at the madness wherever it’s hiding and calls out the absurdity with humour, logic, and outrage. He pulls no punches as he tackles:
· Hollywood hypocrisy – when celebrity virtue-signaling became it’s own performance
· Environ-mentalists – how saving the planet turned into shouting about plastic straws
· Go Woke, Go Broke – from brand deals to the price of moral posturing
· Word Police – the battle over language and what you can and can’t say
· And much more
But this isn’t just about pointing and laughing at the wreckage. With his unique blend of savage humour and surprising wisdom, Morgan offers a roadmap for navigating our post-woke world and a less divided, more sensible society.
Woke is Dead is the provocative, hilarious and essential read for anyone who wants to understand how an entire civilisation briefly lost its mind.
https://www.amazon.com.au/Woke-Dead-common-triumphed-madness-ebook/dp/B0DWC3QZL7
So, the books are a little more nuanced than their titles suggest. But their core claims are clear. The question is – is their optimism warranted?
On its face, no. We are still deep in the trenches. Just look around. The evidence is overwhelming. But there are two preliminary points to be made.
First, the problem is that woke is culturally embedded in all but a couple of Western countries. Hungary is the standout exception. The current US Administration is working on the problem at federal level. But America has (deliberately and constitutionally) such a distributed system of power, embracing the fifty states, the judiciary and the problematic Congress, that nothing is ever “over”. The rest are lost.
Second, we need to establish what the end of woke would look like. This, in turn requires an outline of the woke regime, admittedly defining woke broadly. Some of the key elements are as follows:
· The fetishism of having more than half an institution’s workforce female, as pointed out by Helen Andrews;
· The matching fetishism of almost compulsory female leadership of government agencies and corporations, and the triumph of HR world;
· Endless kowtowing to indigenous hegemony;
· Forcing people to tolerating (accepting?) and “affirming” public displays of homosexuality culture;
· Filling female prisons with transformed blokes and thinking this is okay;
· The continuation of mass immigration and the provision of instant citizen rights to new arrivals, including illegals;
· Allowing an unelected (inevitably female) eKaren to determine who can access social media and on what terms they might be identified, in order (ostensibly) to address the moral panic of teenaged online bullying;
Phil Shannon’s Woke Watch at Quadrant and John O’Sullivan’s book, Sleepwalking into Wokeness, are also useful primers.
https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/qed/woke-watch-australia/
Here is a summary of O’Sullivan’s book:
America and the West are now in the penultimate stage of a revolution defined by “wokeness.” What we call “partisanship” is essentially the effect of the late but growing realization of the revolution’s opponents that they face a major threat to their interests, convictions, and ways of life. It is not the “wokerati,” but their likely victims who are waking up. What they see is how a large number of social trends that may have posed little danger separately - mass migration made more divisive by multiculturalism; the rise of identity politics; the imposition of bureaucratic “diversity;” the collapse of Christianity and traditional religious restraints; the sexual revolution; the weakening of the family; radical gender theory and the rising hostility between the sexes; terrorism and its gradual accommodation by democratic governments and institutions; the smothering of national sovereignty by “global governance;” the rise of anti-national elites in Western societies; the post-communist crises of conservatism; the extraordinary recent resurrection of “socialism” as a social panacea among the young; the economic consequences of environmentalism - all have coalesced into a brewing social revolution that leaves most ordinary people feeling dispossessed in their countries and losing the future. In this series of essays written over the course of a storied career, John O’Sullivan, a former adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and editor of National Review shows how this revolution has emerged and how this revolution can be resisted.
https://www.amazon.com.au/Sleepwalking-Into-Wokeness-How-Here/dp/1680533290
O’Sullivan’s theme is redolent of the image of the slowly boiling frog, waking up only when it too late. It provides great context, and perhaps some hope. Often conservatives demonstrate more optimism than I do.
Back to the core theme. Here are some potential indicators that woke might be in the rear view mirror, informed by the examination herein of woke’s key features:
· Institutional workforces’ female presence trending down, perhaps occasioned by positive discrimination laws in favour of males;
· Institutional female leadership scaled back;
· The end of all welcomes to country (in Australia);
· The withdrawal by Australia from all international woke institutions like the UN and the WHO;
· The banning of acknowledgements of country on government and corporate websites;
· British football matches no longer featuring speaking spots for homosexuals before games;
· Ending the practice of displaying one’s pronouns on email block signatures in workplaces;
· Non-trivial cuts in immigration and proper English tests for new arrivals;
· Defunding the ABC;
· Forcing universities to cut administrative staff to (say) ten percent of total staff (from the current fifty-plus per cent;
· Ending all public funding of rainbow events;
· Forbidding government agencies from marching in rainbow marches;
· Ending the student visa scam.
These are the things that would really signify the end of woke. They are, as the overpaid management consultants would say, “stretch targets”. Real action on core, woke-generated problems. They are, of course, merely scratching the surface.
And the current evidence of “progress”? A review of a few, random recent happenings will suffice as a summary of actions and progress.
Allison Pearson’s exposure of the UK immigration processing system itself demolishes any claims of the end of woke in that part of the world. It is a useful starting point and compulsory viewing.
The UK elites prioritise the non-offence of alleged asylum seekers over the safety of teenaged white girls. Online safety for this cohort is a crisis to be solved by authoritarianism. Real, actual physical safety and safety from well-grounded fear? Err, not so much.
Then we move, effortlessly, to the election of yet another new leader of the Victorian Liberal Party. The third leader in eleven months. We already know that the Libs south of the Murray are a busted flush. Modern parties love parliaments to be full of people called “Jess” or “Kate”. Well, with the new leader, we have both in one! And a teenager to boot. And one who prefers Labor’s new voice to parliament rather than the recent majority no vote of Victorians. Yes, even Victorians said nope by a handy margin. Jess Kate’s last job was at the ultra-woke Business Council of Australia, which didn’t see a woke cause it didn’t love.
Oh, and the new leader of the Brokeback NSW Nats is … Gurmesh Singh. Their fellow NSW “conservatives” are themselves considering a leadership change. No doubt, from one failed, woke leader to the next. The NSW Liberals are maintaining their support for net zero, the ultimate indicator of a woke sensibility. Rock solid.
Optics rule, whatever the respective merits or (more likely) demerits of these new leaders.
What of the current trajectory of free speech? Both the NSW Premier and our uber-woke Foreign Minister – female, lesbian, Asian – have weighed in on the side of suppression in the name of non-offence. Here is Wong:
Foreign Minister Penny Wong says “there’s no place in Australia for the hateful views” of the NSN [the neo-Nazis], and insists that freedom of speech “only goes so far” and doesn’t cover divisive or hateful opinions about others in the community.
Followed by Minns:
NSW Premier Chris Minns says that while Australia has free speech, once it moves towards hate speech then the public should expect government intervention.
He’s also proud to lead the push to tighten laws nationwide, even if it means navigating constitutional protections.
Sources: Australian v The Agenda Telegram Channel, 18 and 19 November 2025.
That is all pretty clear. We are banning free speech. Of course, this means that the state decides what is acceptable. One of the woke state’s key strategies is to silence dissent. Ironically, this time, first they came for the neo-Nazis. Menzies in the 1950s tried to ban the Communist Party. That wasn’t allowed by the voters, and it wouldn’t have worked even if passed.
Then we have news from the mother (parent?) country, still on free speech in the face of the woke state. As per Paul Joseph Watson:
Britain’s Speech Gulag Exposed: 10,000 Arrested Last Year For Social Media Posts
Source: Paul Joseph Watson’s Telegram Channel, 18 November 2025.
This is the hate speech industrial complex, whereby the unidentified and offended – presumably from one or more self-identifying victim groups – can cause innocent-of-crime social media posters to be confronted by multiple policemen on their doorsteps. Versions of it abound across the “democratic” West.
Next, we come to Brendan Doggett. Brendan who? Well, he is a cricketer likely to be involved – due to an injury to other players including Captain Climate, Pat Cummins – in Australia’s Test match this week. His apparently primary claim to fame, despite his not inconsiderable skill set and the pale colour of his skin? He is indigenous! Now we have two in the team. The Guardian is in raptures, and not just The Guardian.
The Australian team now includes the indigenous times two, the climate activist-in-chief and Muslim Khawaja. Woke? Covered!
Could anti-Semitism and its milder, more acceptable version, anti-Zionism, be regarded as an example of woke, defined broadly as signing up for the culturally acceptable views of the elitist hegemons? I would think so, judging by the identities of those who have displayed either version of anti-Israel sentiment. The free Palestine mob. The old, Jew-hating left. The hijab wearers so celebrated out Lakemba way. The oft-described “woke right”. (The hint is in the use of the adjective here).
For Lakemba Nights, which, ironically, just about coincide with Sydney’s gay mardi gras, see:
https://www.cbcity.nsw.gov.au/Lakemba-nights-during-ramadan
Allahu Akba! To include anti-Semitism as a core element of the woke to-do list is quod erat demonstrandum.
These ease of finding these recent examples of wokeness suggests an embedded culture.
Now, these might be regarded by some random events, not part of any long march, and will be welcome events in the eyes of many, perhaps a majority. Probably a very soft majority, though. And detested by others. That isn’t really the point. The point is that woke still rules, because it is so embedded as to be not only accepted – at least publicly – by nearly all people, but also probably not even noticed by most. Certainly not noticed by the anywhere who inhabit our elitist global cities. An acceptance of woke by an assumed working majority of voters is a powerful enabler of all these disparate developments. None of these things ever happen in (say) Viktor Orban’s Hungary. They are in very modest retreat in Trumpland, and in outlier, conservative states like De Santis’s Florida.
Every anti-woke measure enacted by the likes of Trump or De Santis will be resisted with all of the might of the establishment. And the establishment is very, very good at this.
The USA experience indicates the size of the task.
So no, we ain’t there yet, Messrs Doyle and Morgan. These examples above are not straws in the wind, but markers of victory for the cultural Marxists of the sixties and beyond, and their useful, compassionate idiots. Woke isn’t even mildly ill, let alone dead. Have we even reached peak woke? I doubt it, despite the many (often hilarious) attacks on it. Its embedddeness is such that even oft-repeated cutting humour doesn’t dent it. What about “go woke, go broke”? Not even close, given the rampant fiscal incontinence extant in both the public and corporate sectors.
And the official approach of most mainstream, centre-right parties to issues of woke is halfwayism, and halfwayism is a close friend of woke. The Liberal Party is now turning its attention to mass immigration. No doubt, after a six-month process of navel gazing, they will come up with something like a modest (say, 100,000) cut in annual immigration. This does not address woke. Addressing woke would involve something like a five year pause on all immigration, acknowledging all the while that the damage – embedding woke philosophy and woke practice – is already done. It is a little late to be insisting (for example) that all public signage in all suburbs and regions be in English. It won’t happen, and it is too late.
Woke is not dead.
Meantime, happy International Men’s Day! (Even though it is, itself, woke tokenism). Enjoy it for twenty-four hours. Then let normal transmission resume.
Paul Collits
19 November 2025