Everyone’s bored to death with it. Not just the silly pronouns and bullying sanctimony, the institutional groupthink and endless propaganda. Not even the corporations playing pretend with rainbow flags on one account while flogging cars to regimes that stone homosexuals on another. No, I mean the word itself. The soul-emptying clichés on the left and tired banalities on the right. “Diversity is strength”, says one side in a transparent lie. “Go woke, go broke”, says the backlash, ignoring that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is a multibillion-dollar industry.
This boredom fuels declarations of victory. Piers Morgan’s new book, Woke is Dead, claims that common sense has triumphed “in an age of total madness”.
Don’t be silly. Far from being defeated, woke is adapting. This virulent ideology has learned something crucial: when explicit commitments attract backlash, you make them implicit. When the branding becomes toxic, you rebrand. And when diversity quotas spark lawsuits, you rename them “holistic assessments”. In short, when ideology becomes indefensible, you embed it deeper into the small print where it’s harder to see and impossible to challenge.
The signs are still there, of course. Walk into any NHS hospital and you’ll still see leaflets about “chest-feeding” and “pregnant people”. Check university admissions and you’ll notice that Oxford accepts black applicants at three times the rate of grade failure compared to white British students. But it’s a little less obvious than before, because the public is more aware of what’s going on and less willing to let it pass unnoticed.
The result is that institutions, far from abandoning woke, have started to camouflage it. They’ve given it witness protection.
