Wake Up

Politics is now so horribly toxic and divisive, it doesn’t leave room for anyone not on the extremities, and least of all old-fashioned liberals who believe in free speech. And it’s not just Vladimir Putin who thinks this marks the death of liberalism. Stephen Fry, speaking at the Festival for Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, said the same. ‘A grand canyon has opened up in our world,’ he said, ‘and the cracks grow wider every day. As it widens, the armies on each side shriek more and more incontinently at their perceived enemies across the divide, their gestures and insults ever huger, cruder and louder. Classic liberalism and its postwar ideology of social democracy are dead. It’s over, it’s had its day. We’ve woken up to find ourselves uprooted and displaced. We are the ones cowering down in the ravine while the armies clash above. No one cares what we think.’

Fry was at pains to stress that although his own sympathies leaned more left than right, both sides in this ferocious culture war were to blame. ‘Is that what is meant by the fine art of disagreement?’ he asked. ‘A plague on both their houses.’ And he concluded with this advice: ‘If someone is behaving like an arsehole, it isn’t cancelled out by you behaving like an arsehole. Be better. Not better than they are. But better than you are. The shouting, the kicking, the name calling, spitting hatred, the dogmatic distrust, all have to stop.’

Of course, he’s right. And I’ve been as guilty of this as anyone, frequently losing my rag on Twitter about everything from my beloved football team Arsenal to America’s inexplicable love affair with guns. But one thing I’ve learned, the hard way, is the more you scream down those with whom you disagree, the less chance you have of winning an argument. This is not a lesson most people even want to hear, let alone heed.

Since Fry made his speech, things have got immeasurably worse. People are more entrenched, more hysterical, more abusive than ever before – and the worst offenders, by far, are the wokies and their intransigent illiberal liberalism. They scream and shout about the intolerance of others, the infringing of their rights, the excruciating difficulties of their day-to-day existence. They are constantly ‘triggered’ by things that offend and upset them. But the irony is that there are many reasons to believe this remains the best time ever to inhabit Planet Earth.

New York Times columnist Nick Kristof declared at the end of the last decade, ‘If you’re depressed by the state of the world, let me toss out an idea: In the long arc of human history, 2019 has been the best year ever.’ As evidence, he cited record low levels of child deaths (whereas in 1950, 27 per cent of kids died by the age of 15, now that percentage is just 4 per cent) and record highs for adult literacy (90 per cent of adults are now literate). He also stated, ‘Every single day in recent years, another 350,000 people got their first access to electricity, 200,000 more got piped water for the first time, and 650,000 went online for the first time.’ Kristof concluded, ‘When I was born in 1959, a majority of the world’s population had always been illiterate and lived in extreme poverty. By the time I die, illiteracy and extreme poverty may be almost eliminated – and it’s difficult to imagine a greater triumph for humanity on our watch.’

The good news doesn’t stop there. People are living longer than ever before, thanks in part to more diseases being eradicated than at any time in history. Life expectancy worldwide is now 71 years, and in developed countries it’s 80 years. That compares to an average of 30 for most of the 200,000 years of human existence, and that figure remained unchanged as we entered the twentieth century. Fewer wars are happening, and fewer people are dying from violent deaths.

Steven Pinker, the Canadian-American cognitive psychologist who has written a lot about why this is the greatest time to be alive, estimated that in prehistoric times, around 500 people out of every 100,000 were killed by other humans every year. Today, he estimates that annual figure to have fallen to just 6–8 people per 100,000, and even lower in developed countries. It’s way safer in other ways too – with far smaller rates of accidental deaths from fire, water or falling off buildings thanks to better regulation and warning systems.

There’s less poverty than ever – global extreme poverty has fallen to under 10 per cent of the world’s population, when 200 years ago it was 90 per cent. We’re better educated; over 90 per cent of the world aged between 15 and 23 can read and write, compared to 15 per cent for most of previous recorded history. And the percentage of girls who can do both has rocketed. Young people today have far higher IQs than their grandparents, and the global average score is rising at a rate of three points every new decade. Democracy has exploded. In 1850, only 7 per cent of countries were ‘democratic’, with their people living in freedom. Today, it’s 70 per cent. We do fewer chores than ever (while in 1920, American families spent 11.5 hours per week on laundry, today it’s just 90 minutes), and the amount of food available to people has soared.

In other words, this is a pretty damn good time to be a human being – safer, healthier, more prosperous, better fed and more peaceful than ever. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, many young people appear convinced this is the worst, scariest and most offensive time to ever exist, as their ludicrously over-the-top online antics prove. Staggeringly, they even make right-wingers look relatively tolerant.

So, I began 2020 sitting at my office desk, constructing a book based around a burning desire to try to persuade my fellow liberals to stop behaving like arseholes, even if they think everyone else is, and start behaving like liberals again. To go back to being liberal. To re-learn the importance of freedom, particularly in relation to free speech. To regain a proper perspective on life. And to do so not as the devil so many wokies perceive me to be, but as potentially their saviour.

Then came coronavirus – and everything changed. The world got something it didn’t want but perhaps, in a strange, perverse way, it needed – a global crisis of such magnitude that it made every one of us rethink the way we think about life. A tempest so torrid that it swept away so much that was dividing us and gave us that new, sharp perspective about what really matters that I felt was so lacking in much of society. Or it did for a while, anyway.

Locked down in our homes and unable to enjoy our normal freedoms, we re-established connections with family, friends, local communities and nature. Celebrity culture was shunned for a new appreciation of more deserving, non-famous stars – health and care workers. And wokery was temporarily banished because honestly nobody had the energy for it when really serious shit was going down.

Then, to my horror, it slowly came creeping back and eventually exploded in a summer of madness after the despicable killing of George Floyd in America, at the knee of a cop. The world took all leave of its senses, and illiberal liberalism rose up with even greater zealousness and ferocity than before the pandemic, tearing down – literally, in the case of statues – the very culture and history of great nations. It was like we’d learned absolutely nothing from such a life-changing event. I was reminded of the movie Awakenings, in which a group of zombie-like patients are brought back to their old, vibrant lives by a brilliant doctor and a wonder drug, only for the drug to then wear off and all the patients slump back to semi-comatose states again.

As the virus wreaked its havoc, I abandoned the original idea for this book, a thematic series of extended essays examining how woke culture had sent the world nuts. I’ve changed during this crisis, as I think we all have – for good and bad. It’s made me re-evaluate a lot of things I thought, how I view the issues that had been sending everyone nuts, and how my own behaviour may have contributed to the problem. And, ironically, the same people who had spent the past few years lambasting me began to laud me, and those who had cheered me from the Twitter rooftops began to castigate me.

This was a weird evolution for me, but one that said a lot about how coronavirus has awakened the entire planet in what has been one of the most extraordinary, dramatic, scary and riveting episodes in modern history. As someone who has been a diarist for 25 years, I concluded that the best way to explain that change was in real time, as it happened.

This, then, is an account of how, thanks to a devastating pandemic, we’ve been given the wake-up moment of our lives, and why we cannot, must not, go back to sleep.

January

‘Wuhan’s as big as London …’

WEDNESDAY 1 JANUARY 2020

The world seems relatively quiet this morning, though there’s a disconcerting story coming out of China, where health authorities say they’re investigating 27 cases of a new strain of viral pneumonia in the city of Wuhan in Central China which has left many of the people infected seriously ill.

There are rumours on Twitter that it may be another outbreak of SARS but Chinese officials are playing them down. ‘The cause of the disease is not clear,’ the official People’s Daily newspaper said, citing unnamed hospital officials, continuing, ‘We cannot confirm it is what’s being spread online, that it is SARS virus. Other severe pneumonia is more likely.’

China doesn’t have a good record for transparency in this area – it lied for weeks when SARS first erupted in 2003. And suggestions of something far nastier than just ‘severe pneumonia’ this time have been fuelled by the fact that Wuhan’s massive Huanan Seafood Market – one of the country’s many infamous ‘wet markets’ full of live animals – has today been shut down as a ‘precaution’.

FRIDAY 3 JANUARY

It hasn’t taken long for 2020 to live down to 2019’s often bafflingly insane standards of ‘woke’ absurdity.

An employment tribunal judge today ruled that ‘ethical veganism’ qualifies as a philosophical belief protected under UK law. The successful claimant, a self-proclaimed ‘ethical vegan’ named Jordi Casamitjana, asserted he was fired by his own employer, animal welfare charity the League Against Cruel Sports, in April 2018 because he told colleagues their employer’s pension fund was being invested in companies that experiment on animals.

The charity rejected the allegation, but the case really centred on whether ‘ethical vegans’, who follow strict vegan diets and oppose the use of animals for any purpose including laboratory testing, are entitled to the same legal rights and protections surrounding their ‘belief’ as, say, a person has for their religion, or other protected characteristics like their race, sex, pregnancy, maternity and sexuality. The answer, apparently, is yes. Judge Robin Postle said he was ‘satisfied overwhelmingly’ that ethical veganism meets the criteria of the Equality Act as a philosophical belief and not just an opinion. ‘It is cogent, serious and important,’ he concluded, ‘and worthy of respect in democratic society.’

Of course, the news was greeted with raucous celebration by the more radical and preachy members of the vegan community, which has spent the past two days haranguing people like me into giving up meat for the dreaded ‘Veganuary’. Finally, they’ve got what they want: legal validation for their war on carnivores. Kale-munching is no longer a lifestyle choice, it’s a right. And as with all rights in the modern world, that brings with it an instant onslaught of self-righteousness and virtue-signalling. The latter, for the uninitiated, is ‘the action or practice of expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one’s good character or the moral correctness of one’s position on a particular issue’. In other words, doing or saying something to make oneself look virtuous. Since the advent of social media, this affliction has become a scourge of biblical proportions. Now, there’s nothing wrong with virtue, it’s just behaviour showing high moral standards. Nor is there anything wrong with signalling, that’s just conveying information or instructions by means of a gesture, action or sound. The problem comes when you combine the two and start to signal your virtue; especially if you’re signalling an entirely different virtue to the one that actually exists inside your soul.

I began to notice this curious phenomenon several years ago when a few famous friends of mine began tweeting (aka ‘signalling’) extraordinarily virtuous thoughts to their millions of followers that, let me be kind here, bore little relation to what they would spout to me over dinner. They do it to be liked – literally. They want to rack up ‘likes’ on social media, believing it to be a measure of their apparent popularity. To be most effective, the virtue-signalling needs to be expressed with extreme outrage, and preferably punctuated with profanity to show the world you REALLY F*CKING CARE!!!!

Veganism attracts the very worst kind of virtue-signallers.

I’ll be honest, I find vegans annoying. Not the quiet ones who get on with their meat-free lives without bothering the rest of us, but the noisy, angry ones who demand we all do the same as them or automatically expose ourselves as disgusting monsters. And from my experience, most vegans are very, very noisy. As the joke goes, ‘How do you know if someone’s a vegan? Don’t worry, they’ll soon tell you.’ Like all the best jokes, it carries with it a truism.

I like to eat meat. In fact, I like to gorge on beef, lamb, chicken, pork and, yes, even veal. I know exactly how it’s all produced – vegans delight in constantly detailing the precise gory details lest we forget – and I still like eating meat. Just as many animals like eating other animals. I don’t think there’s anything a vegan can possibly say to me that will ever change my mind, although I am open, as with everything, to a reasonable discussion about it. The problem is that radical vegans, like all radical activists, don’t want to be reasonable let alone have a discussion.

I honestly don’t care if people want to be vegans. If they truly want to spend their life forgoing the joys of meat to dine on tasteless plants, that’s their problem not mine. Or, rather, it’s their life, not mine. But I do care when they decide to lecture me on how repulsive I am and try to push their eating habits onto me. Particularly when they try to play the holier-than-thou card, as they do so often.

As with all ‘woke’ activists, there is a woeful lack of tolerance from radical vegans. They want to shame, vilify, silence and convert meat-eaters, berating us into subservient compliance to their way of life. It’s not enough that I respect their right to eat what they like; unless I follow their path then I am the enemy.

Whenever I publicly express my love of eating meat I am immediately greeted with a barrage of abuse on social media and demands for me to be ‘cancelled’. This nasty uncompromising attitude was best typified by an incident in 2018 when a group of 20 vegans from a group called Direct Action Everywhere stormed the Brazilian-themed Touro Steakhouse in Brighton on the south coast of England (11 miles from the village of Newick where I grew up and still have a home), screaming and shouting, waving signs and placards, and playing loud sounds of cows being slaughtered. ‘It’s not meat, it’s violence!’ they hollered.

Unfortunately for the protestors, there was a large stag party of young men in the restaurant who retaliated by leaping to their feet and chanting, ‘Stand up if you love red meat!’ The activists didn’t know what to do, so they just screamed their abuse even louder, as if somehow that would persuade a bunch of boozed-up carnivores to instantly renounce meat. Of course, that was never going to happen. In fact, all their antics achieved was to encourage the meat-eaters to want to eat even more meat. We see the same thing unfolding relentlessly online – abuse and shouting, with no intent to discuss, listen or learn.

This is why I suspect Mr Casamitjana’s ‘win’ will turn out to be a loss for vegans in the long run, because people just don’t like being told what to do, or think, or say, or eat – especially by angry activists shouting in their face. ‘Woke’ campaigners like this never understand that by adopting this kind of rigid, non-compromising approach to absolutely everything, they may win a battle or two but they won’t win the war. They genuinely believe the more they harangue and hector, the more they will persuade, yet usually the complete opposite is true. And at the heart of all this enraged intransigence lies an absurd hypocrisy: it’s not liberal, or even close to it. The whole principle of liberalism is predicated on a willingness to be tolerant of other people’s views, not violently opposed to even considering them.

Yet even the most powerful companies in the world are rolling over to radical illiberal activism. Tech giant Google used to have a salad emoji on its search engine platform that contained the basics of most salads, including lettuce, tomato and a boiled egg. But this was deemed ‘offensive’ because the egg was not inclusive for vegans. So, the egg was removed. Jennifer Daniel, Google’s ‘user experience manager’, proudly announced the change with this tweet: ‘There’s big talk about inclusion and diversity at Google so if you need any evidence of Google is making this priority, may I direct your attention to the [salad] emoji – we’ve removed the egg … making this a more inclusive vegan salad.’

I was curious why Google felt the need to do this. Ms Daniel, when confronted with widespread scorn, said it was to fall in line with something called the Unicode Consortium which chooses and creates new emojis.

‘Hello carnivores, vegans and everyone in between!’ she tweeted again. ‘Just want to clarify that the goal of the salad emoji redesign was to create an image more faithful to Unicode’s description: “A bowl of healthy salad, containing lettuce, tomato and other salad items such as cucumber.” Bon appetite [sic]!’

Aside from her poor French spelling, I noticed there was also no sign of cucumber in either the old or new salad emoji which seems very exclusionary to cucumbers and offensive to those who like eating them. Twitter was merciless on Google’s vegan virtue-signalling.

‘Excuse me,’ said a Twitter user named Kuraha, ‘I don’t have legs, could you cut yours off, so I feel included? That’s how it works, right?’

Others were concerned about people with allergies to tomatoes or lettuce: why didn’t Google care about their feelings? For my part, I was bemused why my preferences were now deemed offensive. I like eating eggs. I’ve always liked eating eggs. Many scientists cite eggs as being very nutritious as part of a well-balanced diet, which is why billions of people have eaten eggs quite happily for centuries. Yet Google will no longer let me see eggs in a salad emoji because they’re now ‘offensive’? This is surely just as exclusionary as removing the eggs just to please vegans. Why are vegan rights more important than my carnivore rights? Who decided that? Do I have to go to court like Mr Casamitjana to fight for my right not to have my belief in eggs discriminated against in this way?

The British Egg Industry Council was similarly puzzled. ‘We completely understand that vegans choose not to eat eggs, but in the UK egg sales are up by almost 5 per cent,’ a spokesman said. ‘Many people love them, so it seems a shame for the majority to be missing out due to concern for offending one group. Eggs are the perfect salad accompaniment – full of protein, vitamins and minerals.’

Inevitably, crafty commercial minds have realised that there is money to be made from all this nonsense. A year ago this week, Greggs, the British high street bakery chain, announced on Twitter, ‘The wait is over … #vegansausageroll.’ I was incredulous. Who the hell had been waiting for a vegan sausage roll? And how can a sausage be vegan anyway? The very notion of a ‘vegan sausage roll’ makes no sense. Sausages are meat products. From the time they were first invented in 3100 BCE by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia – modern-day Iraq – they have always been made of meat. And anyway, why would vegans want to eat something named after a meat product if they hate meat so much?

As a meat-eater, I take exception to the use of meat labels in this way. The whole thing is a total sham, a con on the public designed to make people feel vegan-virtuous. The companies behind it are just virtue-signalling their spurious vegan credentials to make money from a small but noisy minority of their consumer base. I tweeted back at Greggs, ‘Nobody was waiting for a vegan bloody sausage roll, you PC-ravaged clowns.’

‘Oh, hello Piers, we’ve been expecting you,’ they instantly replied, with a rapidity that suggested they had indeed been expecting me. Of course, all hell broke loose as the world’s vegans rushed to abuse and shame me, playing right into Greggs’ greedy little hands.

To sum up just how ridiculous this corporate virtue-signalling is, Wagamama has just announced its new dish: vegan tuna. ‘Welcome to the bench our new vegan suika tuna,’ the firm tweeted. ‘Yep, you read that right. Vegan tuna. Now, that’s next wave. But catch it while you can. Available exclusively for #veganuary only.’

Of course, there is no tuna in it. It’s actually grilled watermelon.

SATURDAY 4 JANUARY

President Trump has taken out the second most powerful man in Iran, its military leader General Qasem Soleimani, who was blown up by a US drone strike on a convoy taking him to a meeting with the Iraqi prime minister in Baghdad.

This stunning move follows a series of recent Iran-inspired rocket attacks on US bases in Iraq, culminating in one a few days ago that killed an American contractor and injured US and Iraqi soldiers. Trump responded by ordering US strikes on Kataeb Hezbollah, the Iran proxy militia that carried out the rocket attacks, which prompted the group’s furious supporters to break into the US embassy in Baghdad and set fire to the reception area.

For Trump and his military advisors, this situation was disturbingly reminiscent of the terrorist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya in 2012 when US Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed. The president, who’d been heavily critical of his predecessor Barack Obama’s inaction over that fiasco, knew that failure to act decisively now when confronted with a similar situation was not an option.

‘Iran will be held fully responsible for lives lost, or damage incurred, at any of our facilities,’ Trump tweeted. To which Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei responded on Twitter by taunting back at the US president, ‘You can’t do anything.’

There is something very surreal and unnerving about World War III being possibly started through the prism of a tweet exchange.

At the same time, the US reportedly received credible intelligence that Soleimani was actively plotting to kill more American military and diplomatic personnel in the Middle East. This represented a direct and immediate challenge to the security of the United States, but one that Iran arrogantly presumed America would do nothing about. They were wrong.

President Trump considered various military options presented to him and chose the killing of Soleimani to send Iran a firm message that yes, actually, the United States could and would do something to defend itself. Will Iran up the ante, or back down? Either way, this is the biggest test of Donald Trump’s presidency and it will be fascinating to see how he handles a real crisis.

I’ve been friends with Trump for 13 years, since I competed in, and won, his inaugural season of Celebrity Apprentice USA. During the next few years, we exchanged frequent email correspondence, and he would call from time to time for a chat about life and the universe. I also acted as his boardroom advisor on numerous subsequent episodes of The Apprentice and interviewed him many times when I joined CNN. I’ve always liked Trump personally; the man I knew before he ran for president was funny, street-smart, flamboyant, gossipy and outrageously opinionated. He’s also ferociously loyal – if you’re loyal to him.