If you’ve been stranded incommunicado on a desert island for ten years and want to catch up on the last decade, Piers Morgan’s latest book “Woke Is Dead: How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness” is the ticket. In fact, it might go a long way toward straightening out an “age of total madness” for all of us.Across 15 lively, journalistically eloquent, comprehensive chapters, Morgan — the controversial British media personality — sets forth example after example of woke madness, making one wonder how supposedly sane adults could espouse such tenets. He writes:We can now look back on the period 2015-2025 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.Children were no longer born as baby girls or boys but as blank canvasses for “gender-creative parenting,” which Time Magazine said would “eliminate oppression.” Persistent flirting and chivalry were held in the same contempt as sexual violence and prosecuted not by judges but by self-appointed jurors on Twitter. Video games were no longer to blame for the perennial crisis of violence, laziness, and moral decay. Now it was “cisgender white males.”True believers were always a noisy minority, but they ruled like a theocratic dictatorship with an iron grip on the flow of information. Media, movies, politicians, advertising, celebrities, and universities were in lockstep with the new commandments..So, is woke really dead? Morgan cites COVID-19 as the beginning of the end: “After years of creeping illiberalism, cancel culture, identity politics, and woke media bias, the pandemic created optimal conditions for the worst excesses of wokeness to flourish in a meteoric blaze of virtue-signalling. But it also became a decisive tipping point, beyond which a silenced majority decided enough was enough. President Trump’s improbable comeback is the totem of this mass repudiation, but he is not the only beneficiary.” There are some signs of woke’s demise. Church attendance is on the massive increase, particularly in the UK and US; the Mark Carney-founded, anti-economy “net zero banking alliance” is dead; Ford Motor Company is writing off electrical vehicles; the International Olympic Committee looks set to ban biological males from women’s sports; and so on.But at the same time, Skate Canada has ghosted Alberta following the province’s new gender laws. Canadian university research funding remains tied to advancing woke ideology. And the federal government, which employs some 600 DEI managers, has spent more than $1 billion on DEI policies and programs since 2016..Morgan himself amasses scores of other, almost unbelievable examples of wokeism:The University of Southern California banned the word field, on the basis that slaves once worked in fields. On Mother’s Day, 2022, Calvin Klein featured a pregnant trans-man in a new ad campaign.A cricket board in the UK commissioned an investigation into itself and concluded that cricket is institutionally racist.A debate erupted on Twitter in 2022 as to whether Anne Frank benefited from “white privilege” because her family was able to hide her in a loft for two years before the Nazis abducted her.California’s Democrats have effectively legalized shoplifting below $950.As a mark of respect to trans-people who identify as women, Michelle Obama coined the word womxn..And let’s not forget the pronouns, on which the very fate of the Western Hemisphere has apparently come to depend. As Morgan puts it in his chapter “Word Police”: Pronouns briefly took over the world. It became virtually impossible to read an email, glance at a name badge, or look at a social media bio without seeing ‘he/him,’ ‘she/her,’ or ‘they/them.’ At first, it was an act of politeness, made contagious by the desire to show moral superiority. Then came the mandates…The University of Greenwich suggested boyfriend or girlfriend become ‘partner.’ Manchester University’s language guide replaced mother or father with ‘guardian’ and Leeds went with the dismal ‘carer.’ The British NHS has faced endless negative headlines about ludicrous directives to replace words like breastfeeding and mother with ‘chest feeding’ and ‘birthing parent.’ That’s why my preferred pronouns are Hot/Hotter/Hottest. You might not like it or understand it, but it’s my truth.Morgan’s book is eminently fair and balanced — even to antagonists who have verbally and publicly blasted him. Take J.K. Rowling, who Morgan writes has “whacked me repeatedly in a furious public spat sparked by my friendship with Donald Trump, calling me a ‘fact-free, amoral, bigotry-apologizing celebrity toady.’” Despite that, Morgan defends Rowling for her views on women’s rights in the face of hysterical abuse from “pro-transers.”Morgan also recounts some hot exchanges between him and longtime friend Donald Trump. Their to-and-fro reflects Morgan’s key differentiation between the classic wokester and the classic non-wokester. The two men have been able to excoriate each other in the passion of the moment — then remember their friendship. Wokesters, by contrast, shame and cancel anyone or anything that dares to cross their contorted, joyless worldview.In his chapter, “Calling Out the Bullshitters,” Morgan says, “It should be possible to criticize or even loathe President Trump without declaring him the new Hitler, just as it was possible to pretend that Joe Biden was a Mensa-leading intellect and a prize fighter.” .In that spirit, Morgan brings up the controversial British activist Tommy Robinson. “He has a string of criminal convictions for violence, fraud, contempt of court, and a long record of brazen race-baiting. But that doesn’t mean that he’s wrong about literally everything, and whatever his motives, he has been raising the grooming scandal in lurid terms for a long time.” (This scandal refers to the thousands of vulnerable, mainly white girls, who were systematically sexually exploited by men over several decades. Many of the perpetrators were of British-Pakistani heritage, and authorities have been accused of ignoring victims’ reports for fear of being branded racist.) Someone Morgan gives no latitude to is Justin Trudeau. He labels him “the wokest world leader in history” and slags him for “unleashing hell” on truckers for their 2022 Freedom Convoy protest against the vaccine mandate, invoking the federal Emergencies Act, and ordering banks to freeze protestors’ accounts. Morgan lambasts him “as the most PC-crazed leader in the history of peoplekind, as he once insisted we rename it.” The last chapter of "Woke Is Dead" is an excellent conclusion to the book, in which Morgan sets down 13 “Life Lessons For Making Your Own Luck.” That prescriptive title may sound like just one more prosaic self-help piece, but the 47 pages that follow comprise a refreshing, engaging counter to the Newspeak and madness of wokedom. For example: “Being relentlessly grateful is the absolute antithesis of being woke. It’s so full of vengeful hatred. Hate your opponents, hate your country, hate your history, hate the rich, hate the police, hate men, hate fun, hate steak.”As for global wokedom, even the author suggests it isn’t really dead (“we must keep pounding”, “the end is nigh for the language police”, “woke is dead, but we’re not totally in the clear,” etc.). Still, there’s a satisfying finality about the title — one which any good writer would choose, while seeking a world where “debate triumphs over censorship and common sense is king.”Bronwyn Eyre is a senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy
