Have we reached peak woke?

Like a dying religion, it's certainly in retreat, but some disciples are still clinging on...

- TOBY YOUNG

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.

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.