Faced with the woke onslaught, the Left needs to wake up to the importance of free speech A new campaign to combat indoctrination led by a Left-leaning activist shows how we can turn the tide on woke 26 January 2021 • 3:57pm Woke ideologies have infested every element of our day-to-day lives, swamping institutions from universities and charities to businesses and sports teams. Those who dissent from the orthodoxy have been sacked, cancelled and ostracised, punished for daring to critique ideas that most people regard as being somewhere between absurd and sinister. The range of woke themes today is broad, stretching from Critical Race Theory – the absurd and offensive idea that relative levels of “privilege” can be decided solely by skin colour – to radical understandings of gender identity. Recognising there’s no universal umbrella term for these various causes, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsey of the New Discourses project coined the term “Critical Social Justice”, which could indeed become useful terminology if it enters the public lexicon.