Reports of Woke’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated
Woke is Dead: How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness
By Piers Morgan
Harper Collins, 310 pages, $22
The estimable Piers Morgan’s new book, Woke is Dead, generously repays the reading time, containing as it does wit, wisdom, and humor. (Perhaps I should say humour in respect to Britain’s best controversialist.)
A year and change ago, sensible Americanos who had had enough of the insanity demanded, in the immortal words of Roberto Duran, “No mas, no mas.”
I extend this praise even though I believe woke is anything but dead. Wounded perhaps by our recent spasm of common sense — a virtue that is anything but common — but not dead by a long shot. It will take more than a new president and a handful of well-aimed executive orders to root woke out of its littorals in academe (where the rubber meets the sky), the legacy media, the entertainment industry, and a dismaying chunk of corporate America. These cultural transmission belts, all dominated by the madcap left, will not give up easily. Promising trends are afoot now, but it’s still too soon to sing, “Ding-dong the wicked witch is dead.”
Especially dismaying is that the woke tragedy has not been a bottom-up but a top-down phenomena. The more years one has sat directly on one’s backside at university, the more strings of degrees behind one’s name, the more likely one is to believe that a six-foot tall person with an X and Y chromosome, a five-o’clock shadow at three-o’clock, and an Adam’s apple the size of a real apple, can become a she just by declaring himself to be one. More confirmation, if more were needed, that George Orwell was spot on when he said: “Some ideas are so stupid only intellectuals believe them.” No fool like an “educated” fool.
Woke is Dead is a tour-de-insanity of our recent political and cultural history, most of which informed TAS readers are already familiar with. But as Morgan unspools them in all their daffy details, we’re reminded of how far down the rabbit-hole we had fallen before the much-needed pushback began a year or so ago.
Consider. In Woke World, we were joylessly hectored, from high atop Mount Virtue, to believe, or at least to pretend to believe, that:
- The U.S. is a racist hell-hole where white Americans oppress black Americans and should be engaged full-time in mea culpas. Donald Trump is the head racist and Al Sharpton (dial 1-800-HUSTLE) is a civil rights leader;
- Criminals, even those with rap sheets longer than a Fidel Castro speech, are victims who should be helped rather than hindered in any way, and police officers are criminals;
- There are many sexes and even more pronouns. People can move freely from one to another at their whim. And it’s right and proper that men should be allowed to compete in women’s sports and lurk in women’s intimate spaces, displaying their male tool-kits and enjoying the view;
- Earth will fry unless we turn the planet over to the tender mercies of Al Gore, AOC, and the delusions of various enviro-nutters like Gerda Thundermug;
- The world would be better off if cleansed of all traces of religion (except Islam, of course) and of traditional masculinity, re-defined as toxic masculinity;
- Enforceable borders are so 20th Century;
Alice, call your office. Wonderland was a lot like this.
The outrageous brain infarcts and others were, and in some precincts still are, enforced with a rigid cancellation system that would have made the Stasi proud. At the height of woke cancel culture, anyone bold enough to state the bloody obvious, that Dr. Rachel Levine is an ugly guy in a dress, risked a visit from a grim-faced delegation of red-guards from the HR department. (To this day many HR departments function as political officers, enforcers of the orthodoxies of the left progressive enterprise.)
A year and change ago, sensible Americanos who had had enough of the insanity demanded, in the immortal words of Roberto Duran, “No mas, no mas.” Morgan calls Donald Trump’s election in 2024 both a cause and an effect of this return to common sense. “In a world where the scourge of wokeism rendered so many people weak-willed, work-shy, lacking in the resilience, resolve, and perseverance required to navigate life’s travails, and totally devoid of basic common sense, Trump has all those qualities in abundance.” (The desirable qualities, not the weak-willed etc.)
In short order Trump closed our borders and started shipping out the worst of the millions of gate-crashers that the previous administration invited in, made it official government policy that there are only two sexes, put pressure on cities and states to treat criminals like criminals, backed away from the Democrats’ suicidal energy policies, and began the battle to end DEI, which is little more than discrimination against whites and Asians. (The only way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. DEI is not a cure for discrimination. It’s just another form of it.) As Morgan phrases it: “It took a right-wing and white president to restore Martin Luther King’s aspiration of character over color.”
Common sense once again has a fighting chance in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Fewer Americans, in the face of cosmic stupidity by the woke scolds, are going along with the gag. They’ve begun to say out loud what they’ve kept in for fear of the woke cancelling squads. There are many battles to come in the culture war. But at least, as Morgan lays it out in just 310 pages of straight-forward prose, the battle has been joined.
Woke is Dead is a fine primer on the dreary period we’ve endured, the re-awakening, and an encouraging take on the road ahead. In the last decade we’ve undergone a cultural lobotomy. But, happily, this one is reversible. It will take time, courage, and persistence. Stay tuned. In due course we’ll see if we’re up to the mark.
A word on Piers Morgan and the difficulty of assigning ideological labels to individuals these days. Morgan has always described himself as a liberal, even though he is always tearing forensic strips off of people, policies, and ideas that fly under the liberal label. He explains: “I’ve always considered myself to be a liberal because liberalism meant free speech, free markets, small government, a color-blind society, and a general but pragmatic aversion to war. Yes to all of that. But the woke-branded liberalism is the polar opposite.” If this sounds a lot like conservatism to you, it does to me as well. Few people who describe themselves as liberals today would subscribe to any one or all of these.
For those who have common sense friends or relations on their gift list, Woke is Dead would be a fine stocking stuffer.
READ MORE from Larry Thornberry:
Democrat Policies Are Crazy, but Crazy Still Sells (See NYC)
RIP Mike Greenwell — a Good Ball Player and a Good Man
Octogenarians Can Solve Murders Too
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