When Piers Morgan insists that ‘woke is dead,’ he proves only that he’s part of a new kind of woke, one that preaches freedom while policing it and transforming freedom into coercion.
This week, Piers Morgan launched his new book, ‘Woke Is Dead: How Common Sense Prevailed.’ True to form, he takes aim at familiar targets – the gender divide, the perceived erosion of free speech, and, naturally, anyone who prefers not to eat meat. The veteran broadcaster even claims he can pinpoint the exact day ‘woke died,’ during last year’s US presidential election, when one Trump campaign ad, in his view, outshone all others.
“‘Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you’ was the single most powerful and effective advert in modern American political history,” he argues.
It’s quite a turnaround. Back in 2020, Morgan published ‘Wake Up,’ warning the ‘liberal war on free speech’ was even more dangerous than Covid-19. Its blurb thundered: “If, like me, you’re sick and tired of being told how to think, speak, eat and behave, then this book is for you.”
So, what’s changed in five years? Something has, but not what Morgan thinks. ‘Woke’ hasn’t died, it’s migrated. It’s the right now telling us how to think, speak, and behave but inevitably as is always the way with the right, in a thoroughly repressive form.
Piers Morgan hasn’t killed woke. He’s joined it.
Many of us have long known the right never truly believed in ‘free speech.’ Now we have proof, and plenty of it – on both sides of the Atlantic.
The woke right in the US
The clearest example came after the killing of Charlie Kirk, when Trump and the MAGA movement embraced the very ‘cancel culture’ and suppression of speech they once claimed to oppose.
Jimmy Kimmel, one of America’s leading late-night hosts, was pulled off the air ‘indefinitely,’ after suggesting conservatives were exploiting Kirk’s death for political gain. The right’s outrage over his remarks sparked a counter-backlash, as hundreds of celebrities, including Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep, rallied to defend “our constitutionally protected rights.”
The push to punish those who’ve criticised Kirk, even when they cite his own slurs against Black, gay, and Muslim people, is, for some observers, a textbook case of the ‘woke right’ at work.
Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution argues that these crackdowns reflect a growing effort by conservatives to control public discourse. “What they’ve learned from the left,” he says, “is that if you can control what people say, if you can make them afraid of being cancelled, you can make the minority view look like the majority view.” I’m not sure that I would accept Rauch’s view that the left’s sensitivity to the social nature of words was ever about ‘control’, but the point about minority views presenting themselves as that of the majority, is well made.
Conservatives deny culture cancelling, of course. Texas Republican Dan Crenshaw insists, “I don’t think cancel culture applies here.” Defending the right’s support for Kirk, he insisted, “That’s a little bit different than ‘cancelling’ someone for glorifying the assassination of a family man.”
The instinct to silence dissent didn’t stop with the Kirk affair. It took an even more repressive form, in the battle over the American flag itself.
Flag flying
In August, Trump signed an executive order directing prosecutors to pursue charges against anyone who burns the US flag during protests. It effectively sought to bypass the Supreme Court’s 1989 Texas v. Johnson ruling, which affirmed flag burning as protected political expression under the First Amendment.
“They [the court] called it freedom of speech,” Trump complained as he signed the order. “You burn a flag, you get one year in jail.”
The order contained no such penalty, but the message was unmistakable, the self-proclaimed defenders of free expression were now enforcing the exact opposite.
Flag flying in Britain
Since the summer, Union Jacks and St. George’s flags have been everywhere, draped from lampposts, hung from windows, fluttering over pubs and village greens.
What seems forgotten is that ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ began in the suburbs of Birmingham, after a handful of flags were removed by the city council during the installation of new LED streetlights. But for hard-right online provocateurs, it was enough to ignite a culture war. Within hours, social media was ablaze with claims that ‘woke local bureaucrats’ were erasing national pride and denying people their British identity.
That narrative quickly snowballed. Reform’s Lee Anderson declared that any elected official who supports removing a flag “should be removed from office for betraying the very country they serve.”
Pure woke right, it could be argued, is a movement that wraps itself in patriotism while policing who is insufficiently patriotic.
While supporters insist the campaign is about pride, not prejudice, its Facebook page tells a different story, littered with posts glorifying Donald Trump’s crusade against ‘illegal immigrants,’ protests outside asylum hotels, and endorsements of Tommy Robinson’s ‘free speech’ rally.
In my own village in the High Peak, Derbyshire, a cultural battleground is raging. A small bakery flies the Union Jack flag to celebrate British heritage.’ Many locals cheer the café on, buoyed, no doubt, by sympathetic coverage from the local press. “Derbyshire café defiantly declares ‘the flag will be staying’ as it refuses to take down Union Jack,” ran a headline in the Manchester Evening News this week.
Yet few seem willing to see how this flag-flying frenzy, like much of the woke right itself, has become less about love of country, and more about deciding who belongs in it.
From flags to governance
This mindset now stretches beyond village greens and Facebook groups, reaching deep into public institutions.
In Derbyshire, where the county council is run by Reform, the party’s ideology is being tested in governance. In September, council leader Alan Graves claimed the authority “20% overstaffed,” promising to make it “lean and mean” by axing around 2,000 jobs.
The unions were unimpressed. Dave Ratchford of Unison dismissed the claims as “flat Earth theory” without evidence.
Typical Reform, austerity disguised as efficiency, and public-sector resentment repackaged as common sense.
This week, Reform MP Danny Kruger unveiled plans to slash the civil service and close government offices if the party wins the next election. He vowed to treat the “whole DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) woke agenda that has infected so much of Whitehall” as a breach of the civil service code, banning ‘socially controversial, political positions.’ In other words, the woke right now condemns ‘ideological conformity’ by enforcing its own.
The irony of the ‘woke right’
The irony is astounding. As Reform poses as a party of moral integrity, five councillors from its ‘flagship’ Kent council were expelled for ‘dishonest and deceptive behaviour’ after a leaked, expletive-laden video meeting. Proof, perhaps, that while moral panic is easy to preach, consistently ethical behaviour in public office can be challenging.
That same irony runs through the broader woke right, a movement that claims to defend freedom while quietly dismantling it.
Take, for instance, the slow but deliberate erosion of the right to protest, a cornerstone of any democratic society.
Under successive Tory governments, protest has been steadily criminalised. First came the Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Act 2022, followed by the Public Order Act 2023. These laws were introduced in direct response to the civil disobedience of Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter.
The punishment for participating in such protests has also intensified, making peaceful civil disobedience an increasingly risky act.
What makes this all the more disquieting is Labour’s complicity. The anti-protest legislation that the party once opposed, with David Lammy as shadow justice secretary, condemning it as an attack on “the fundamental freedoms of protest that the British public hold dear,” has not been rolled back. Instead, with Labour in government, those restrictions have been further tightened.
The recent proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, which has led to hundreds of arrests of peaceful demonstrators, has been condemned by civil liberties groups and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who called it “at odds with the UK’s obligations under international human rights law.”
And the tightening continues. Just last month, the government announced plans to grant police new powers to curb ‘repeat protests,’ including the authority to ban them outright. Home secretary Shabana Mahmood argued that officers should be able to consider the ‘cumulative impact’ of protest activity when restricting when and where demonstrations can occur.
Critics argue that such restrictions mark a dangerous turn away from democratic accountability. Dr David J. Bailey, associate professor of politics at the University of Birmingham, warned that the government’s position on repeat protests poses a grave threat to democratic rights. “Sustained campaigns are widely considered necessary for democracies to function. Successful attempts by the public to influence politicians are often the direct result of repeated actions seeking to hold the powerful to account through protest,” he wrote in the Conversation.
Once again, the woke right’s obsession with moral order and national unity exposes its true purpose: not to protect freedom, but to police it. Behind the guise of patriotism and public safety lies hostility to dissent, or at least the wrong kind of dissent, and a willingness to sacrifice the very liberties they claim to defend.
But the crucial difference between the woke right and the woke left is that the right isn’t truly woke at all. The term woke originated in African American communities, first emerging in 1938, when blues musician Lead Belly used the phrase ‘stay woke’ as a warning to stay alert to racial injustice. In its true sense, being woke means caring about the wellbeing and dignity of all people, regardless of race, religion, sexuality, or background. The so-called woke right, however, wants the censorship without the compassion, the control without the conscience.
So, when Piers Morgan insists that ‘woke is dead,’ he proves only that he’s part of a new kind of woke, one that preaches freedom while policing it and transforming freedom into coercion.
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch
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