Piers Morgan has been wrong many times before, but rarely with the kind of misplaced confidence he’s showing now. His new book, Woke Is Dead: How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness, is doing the media rounds with the energy of a man convinced he’s finally slain the dragon. Yet he’s simultaneously hosting debates with 20 self-described woke liberals, which is like declaring victory in a war while still dodging bullets. If the ideology were truly dead, he wouldn’t have to share a studio with half a platoon of its loudest disciples. His own publicity tour undermines the premise.
Morgan’s track record of premature declarations, misreads, and smug predictions is well-documented. But he’s never been more wrong than at this moment. Not because his frustrations with woke excess are baseless—they aren’t—but because the notion that the ideology is “dead” is laughable. If anything, it has never been more alive, more adaptable, more skilled at self-preservation. What Morgan mistakes for a corpse is breeding and building new bureaucracies faster than the old ones can be dismantled.
If woke has vanished, it’s odd timing for Zohran Mamdani, essentially Bernie Sanders spliced with Brooklyn idealism, to end up as New York City’s mayor. His entire campaign ran on the familiar vocabulary of systemic oppression, intersectional uplift, and redistributive justice. One doesn’t win City Hall by championing a movement that’s expired. Mamdani’s victory is a reminder that America’s cultural pendulum isn’t swinging back to common sense. It’s marching deeper into ideological territory that Morgan insists is fading.
And then there are the polls showing that young Americans are now more inclined toward socialism than at any point in living memory. This is a generational shift. A majority of Gen Z expresses more trust in “collective solutions” than in markets, merit or even free speech. The kids Morgan thinks are rejecting woke thinking are reshaping institutions and vocabulary to reflect their worldview. He may want to steer them back to reality, but they’re far more interested in moral symbolism.
DEI, meanwhile, hasn’t died so much as changed its wardrobe. After a year of corporate panic and performative “restructuring,” many offices simply rebranded it—swapping “DEI” for “Belonging Initiatives,” “Workplace Culture Teams,” or the always-vague “Inclusive Excellence Units.” Universities have done the same: new acronyms, same ideology, same soft-authoritarian grip. You don’t kill an empire by renaming it. You give it plausible deniability, and DEI is thriving under its new aliases.
Even Morgan’s homeland offers no comfort. Britain, the country he insists has finally shaken off the madness, continues to produce stories that could’ve been written by the Babylon Bee, back when it was funny. The University of Sheffield recently slapped a trigger warning on the Bible for “sexual content.” This is the country Morgan grew up in—a place now so skittish that one of the foundational texts of Western civilization must come with the same caution label as an edgy HBO series. If that’s what victory over woke looks like, one wonders what defeat would entail. Content warnings for Shakespeare’s metaphors? We’re already there. Sensitivity edits for the Magna Carta? Not yet, though, give it time.
The darker twist is that peak-woke 2016 wasn’t the high point. Today is worse, mainly because the right has gone woke, too, even if the term barely captures it anymore. They don’t call it woke, it’s “defending American values” or “protecting the faith tradition.” But the tactics are the same. Moral absolutism, language policing, and quick-trigger cancellation. Look at how quickly some conservatives try to exile anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the vague, nonsensical “Judeo-Christian” slogan. Disagree with its theological incoherence, and you’re labeled an antisemite by dinner. Question its use as a cultural bludgeon, and you’re treated like a heretic. These are the same tools progressives perfected—shame, accusation, ideological purity tests—now wielded by the people who promised to oppose them.
Tucker Carlson is the clearest example. A growing faction on the right wants to cancel him, silence him for straying from their approved script on Israel and the meaning of American identity. They insist they’re defending truth, yet the tone is whiny. It’s the same righteous fury that animated woke mobs on campus, only painted red instead of blue. The ideological software is identical; only the décor has changed.
This is the point Morgan misses. Woke isn’t dead because it never depended on job titles, hashtags, or corporate platitudes. It’s a way of life. It adapts because it’s built on a universal instinct—humans love policing each other. They love sorting the world into saints and sinners, allies and enemies. Woke refined that instinct into an entire operating system, and now its code is running on every side of the political aisle. The left uses it. The right imitates it. And Morgan keeps preaching from his pedestal, insisting the beast has been neutered, unaware it’s now wearing new masks and filling out HR paperwork.