Have we developed a vaccine to the woke mind virus? I thought this ideological pandemic had peaked in 2020 when I set up the Free Speech Union (FSU), a non-partisan organisation that stands up for the speech rights of its members and campaigns for free speech more widely.
At the launch party, I confidently announced that the radical progressive ideology that had spread like wildfire in the second decade of the 21st century — sometimes referred to as Wokus Dei — was in retreat and the days when people were cancelled for daring to question it were coming to an end.
Then, in May of that year, George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, transforming what had been a fringe political movement into a global crusade. I remember being shocked to see protesters in the Isle of Man confronting a bewildered group of bobbies with a chant of “Hands up, don’t shoot!” Black Lives Matter became so fashionable that the presenters on Sky Sports wore little badges proclaiming their allegiance to the cause.
But it couldn’t last, could it? BLM was an organisation with self-proclaimed Marxists devoted to the overthrow of capitalism. This felt like a strange aberration due to the fact that people were spending far too much time online during the lockdowns.
At the FSU’s third anniversary party in 2023, I made another speech in which I confessed to getting it wrong before, but predicted that now, at last, this quasi-religious cult was beginning to subside.
Wokus Dei had had its day
After all, Nicola Sturgeon had been forced from office by a scandal in which a male sex offender had transferred to a women’s prison, Elon Musk had just bought Twitter and Top Gun: Maverick was smashing box office records.
There was also growing evidence that the public was fed up with virtue-signalling corporations shoving their progressive values down customers’ throats. After Bud Light hired trans activist Dylan Mulvaney as a brand ambassador, sales of America’s best-selling beer went into freefall, declining by between 11 and 26 per cent.
The message from consumers was clear: Wokus Dei had had its day.
Then, a year later, Labour won a thunderous majority at the general election, reducing the Conservatives to a rump. Among other things, its manifesto promised to bring in a full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion therapy and turbocharge the Equality Act.
So, you can understand my reluctance to proclaim that we’ve finally reached peak woke. I feel a bit like a man falling through a burning building: every time my feet touch what I think is the bottom, the floor gives way and I carry on plunging downwards.
Nevertheless, there are reasons to think the religious fire may have gone out. Exhibit A is the Republican Party’s comprehensive victory last November, winning not just the presidency, but also the House and the Senate. Part of the explanation for that rout is that the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, was perceived as being too ideologically extreme. The Democrats had got woke and gone broke.
Trump’s election in 2016 didn’t do anything to stop the momentum of the Great Awokening
True, Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016 didn’t do anything to stop the momentum of the Great Awokening. On the contrary, it gave it a boost, enabling members of the cult to point to the nasty orange man in The White House and say, “Look! I told you America was a cishet, patriarchal, white supremacist, fascist state.”
But it feels different this time. Taking their cue from the success of the Maga movement, major American companies like McDonald’s, Google, Boeing, Amazon and IBM have scaled back their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes and Deloitte, one of the big four accounting firms, has instructed its employees to stop putting pronouns in their bios.
The great liberal citadels of the American media have struggled to retain their audiences since November, with CNN and MSNBC seeing a decline in viewing numbers of 27 per cent and 38 per cent respectively. Fox News, by contrast, saw its viewers jump by 40 per cent in the weeks following the election.
Mark Zuckerberg, too, is scrambling to adapt to the new political climate
After the 2016 election result, The Washington Post doubled down on its opposition to Trump, adopting the strapline: “Democracy dies in darkness.” Two weeks ago, by contrast, the Post’s owner Jeff Bezos announced that the paper would be taking a sharp, rightward turn.
“We are going to be writing every day in support and defence of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” he said, prompting the resignation of David Shipley, the opinion page editor.
Mark Zuckerberg, too, is scrambling to adapt to the new political climate. Nick Clegg has been given his marching orders as president of global affairs at Meta, replaced by Joel Kaplan, a Republican who was once deputy chief of staff to President George W Bush. At the same time, Zuckerberg said he would be dismantling Facebook’s fact checking programme.
“Fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” he said.
Instead, Facebook will now be adopting a version of X’s community notes system, with factual errors being flagged by the platform’s users rather than a fact checker with a degree in “whiteness studies”.
Elon Musk, meanwhile, has been having a field day as head of Doge, a new government department created to cut waste in America’s vast state bureaucracies. His boldest move to date has been to freeze the country’s overseas aid programmes, which, among other things, had given $1.5 million to “advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities”, $70,000 for a production of a “DEI musical in Ireland” and $32,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru.
Of course, not everyone in America has accepted that the radical progressive cause is lost. At this year’s Academy Awards, a pro-Palestinian film won the Oscar for best documentary feature, Zoe Saldaña won best supporting actress for her turn in a trans musical, and host Conan O’Brien couldn’t resist having a jab at Trump later in the evening.
“Anora is having a good night,” O’Brien said. “Two wins already. I guess Americans are excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian.”
But it would be hard to argue that America’s army of pink-haired, social justice warriors isn’t in retreat. Even that ultimate bellwether of the zeitgeist, Goldman Sachs, has scrapped its 2020 policy requiring that at least one board member from a designated minority be on the board of the companies it’s working with.
Big US corporates may have abandoned woke policies, but the memo hasn’t yet reached the UK
What about the UK? On the face of it, wokery pokery shows no signs of abating in Starmer’s Britain. Scarcely a day passes without a public body issuing a new “inclusive language guide”, the latest being Wokingham Council in Berkshire which has banned its staff from using the term “hard-working families” lest it offend the unemployed. Other words on the forbidden list include “blacklist” and “whitewash” — they’re “racist”, obviously — while staff have also been told that “sustained eye contact could be considered aggressive” in some cultures.
Big American corporates may have abandoned woke policies, but the memo hasn’t yet reached their colonial outposts in the UK. Last month we learned that McDonald’s is pushing ahead with various DEI polices in Britain, including wanting 40 per cent of senior leadership roles being held by people from under-represented groups by 2030.
Deloitte, too, is experiencing the same US-UK divergence. Richard Houston, Deloitte’s UK boss, told staff in a letter in January that the company remains “committed to diversity goals” and “will continue to report annually on our progress on inclusion”.
As for the Free Speech Union, we’ve seen no let-up in the number of people asking for our help in the past three months. On the contrary, we’ve taken on 200 new cases since the beginning of the year, bringing the total number we’ve fought since 2020 to above 3,500. But there are some signs that the anti-woke backlash is beginning to cross the Atlantic.
Kemi Badenoch, the new leader of the Conservative Party, is taking a firmer line on culture war issues than her predecessors, and for all its squabbles, Reform UK is still leading in the polls. Even the Government seems to be making an effort to distance itself from the policies that did for Kamala Harris, with Wes Streeting criticising DEI practices at the NHS.
In the biggest sign yet that Starmer has seen which way the wind is blowing, he has announced a 40 per cent cut in the overseas aid budget, pledging to spend the money on defence instead. Who needs Musk when Morgan — “Blue Labour” — McSweeney is your chief of staff?
If the Westminster rumour mill is to be believed, that trans-inclusive ban on conversion therapy has been shelved and the Equality Act — clause 18 of the troubled Employment Rights Bill — may be next. I’ve even heard some of my colleagues on the Tory benches in the Lords hail Starmer as the first proper Conservative prime minister we’ve had since Margaret Thatcher. Peak woke? I’m still not ready to commit, having been proved wrong so many times before. But for free speech champions like me, things are certainly looking up.
