Woke never really died, it’s coming back with a vengeance — and we should be terrified

When corporations axed their DEI departments at breakneck speed and pronouns quietly disappeared from bios, Republicans were quick to declare victory: Woke is dead.

But don’t be fooled. Woke is alive and well — and ready to roar back with a vengeance. The backlash to the supposed Republican renaissance and sweeping cultural conservative agendas is here.

It’s taking over the New York City mayor’s office and spilling into the streets of Minneapolis. And it never left college campuses.

A Post report this week revealed that psychology students at Brooklyn College are required to take a class that includes “collective racial healing activities” as well as “trauma-informed interventions” to combat injustice.

“I don’t see color” and “the only race is the human race” are microaggressions, according to the course material.

There’s a “Weaponizing Whiteness” video module and students even take a Buzzfeed quiz to find out just how deep their privilege runs.

It sounds so retro, but it’s actually very 2026.

While corporations have been able to somewhat easily swing with the pendulum — they introduced DEI and other woke programs after the 2020 protests, then scrubbed them when Trump was re-elected and public sentiment shifted — universities are a different story.

Wokeness is too baked in to academia to simply vanish just because a Republican is in the White House.

It’s been intrinsic on campuses for generations. These schools invented the vocabulary of wokeness. Most people now teaching critical race theory were probably students during the first wave of CRT courses. They are creatures of the ecosystem.

So is Mayor Mamdani, the Bowdoin-educated son of a Columbia professor. Academia courses through his veins.

It was on full display in his inaugural address, which had the tone and tenor of a wide-eyed college student’s senior thesis. “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” he declared. It’s a far cry from Eric Adam’s unpolished, working class relatability.

His picks for cabinet positions are precisely the educated elites who parrot the language of the institutions that churned them out.

Take, for instance, Cea Weaver, his pick for tenant advocate, who went to both NYU and Bryn Mawr —  two progressive bastions — and whose parents are professors.

At 37, she holds the sort of utopian Millennial ideas that once died at the threshold of campus gates. Now they’re making it to the mayor’s office.

Weaver has declared that implementing rent control is “a strategic and critical first step in the fight for full social housing,” and bragged that activists could “strike a blow to the entire real estate industry.”

She’s also disparaged homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy.”

When confronted about these comments, she could have simply said, “I don’t believe that anymore.” Instead, she broke down crying. And Mamdani stood by her — a resounding affirmation that he does, indeed, back this woke gobbledygook.

Meanwhile Mamdani’s pick for chief equity officer, Afua Atta-Mensah, was allowed off the hook for vitriolic woke tweets posted from 2020 through 2024, which she quietly deleted.

She once said she wanted to tax white people “to the white meat” and disparaged “white women at nonprofit organizations” as police-like. Still, earlier this month, Mamdani proudly declared, “There is no one I trust more to advance racial equity across our work in City Hall.”

These woke caricatures are being plucked from obscurity to ring in the revival of the ideology here in the Big Apple. Mamdani is making woke great again.

Across the country, the jargon of wokeness invented on campuses is spilling back out into the broader culture again, much like it did in 2020.

One protester in Minneapolis encapsulated the phenomenon perfectly, when she told an interviewer earlier this month that she felt wrong being at an anti-ICE protest because of her white privilege.

“It feels kind of wrong being here in some way,” the woman said. “Part of it is being a white woman, that I’m privileged and I have a lot of privilege, so I feel like white tears are not something that are helpful or necessary when black and brown people have been experiencing this for a long time.”

What a throwback. This sort of language might have briefly gone out of fashion, but it’s clearly back.

The truth is, the right declared victory too early. Wokeness never died.

It has infiltrated Gracie Mansion. It’s filling the streets of Minneapolis. It’s bubbling back up on social media and continues to simmer on college campuses. 

It’s the weed that grows back stronger. We ignore it at our own peril.