Wake Up

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

FIRST EDITION

© Piers Morgan 2020

Cover layout design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008392598

Ebook Edition © October 2020 ISBN: 9780008392628

Version: 2020-09-19

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Dedication

To John Ferriter.

‘Be the person your dog thinks you are.’

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Note to Readers

5  Dedication

6  Contents

7  INTRODUCTION: The World’s Gone Nuts

8 JANUARY: ‘Wuhan’s as big as London’

9  FEBRUARY: Pantomime Villain

10  MARCH: Womxn? Bullshixt

11  APRIL: PM in ICU. No PPE for NHS

12  MAY: ‘What about you, Fatso?’

13  JUNE: ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts.’

14  JULY: It’s Not Black or White

15  CONCLUSION: Time to Wake Up

16  Acknowledgements

17  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Introduction

The World’s Gone Nuts

I don’t know when it first hit me that the world had gone nuts.

It might have been when an American white woman named Rachel Dolezal self-identified as black on national television despite both her parents being white. That was nuts.

Or perhaps it was when Altrincham Grammar School for Girls in Manchester, England asked staff to refrain from calling female students ‘girls’ because it might offend transgender students – yet didn’t change the gender-specific name of the school. That was nuts.

Maybe it was when there were strident calls from radical feminists – who, like all radicals, destroy support for their cause by taking everything to absurd extremes – for James Bond to be female. That was nuts.

Or was it when Google removed the egg from its salad emoji to make it ‘more inclusive’ to vegans? That was nuts.

It might have been when CeCe Telfer, a tall, powerfully built transgender woman, was named Female Athlete of the Year for 2019 by a sports news website after smashing women’s college and state sprinting records – one year after competing far less successfully as a man. That was nuts.

Possibly, it was when students at the University of California, Berkeley demanded they be excused from exams because they ‘didn’t have enough privilege’ to be able to handle them emotionally. That was nuts.

Or was it when other students at Oxford University in England banned clapping at student union events in case it triggered anxiety? That was nuts.

I pondered if it was when Marks & Spencer started selling gay sandwiches – the LGBT (lettuce, guacamole, bacon and tomato) to ‘celebrate’ Gay Pride season. Even my gay friends thought that was nuts.

Ultimately, I think the final straw for me came when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for the word ‘mankind’ to be outlawed because it was sexist. There, right there, was the purest, maddest example of the world going completely stark raving bonkers, and it came from one of the most powerful men, sorry ‘persons’, on Planet Earth. (Wait until Trudeau finds out the word ‘man’ appears in the word ‘woman’ …)

So yes, the world had gone nuts. It had become a place where common sense was ignored, weakness celebrated, strength denigrated, failure replaced by ‘participation prizes’, accountability abandoned in the rush to blame others, dissenting views instantly crushed by a howling self-righteous mob and signalling one’s dubious virtue was absolutely paramount. Why had the world gone this way? Who was causing this nonsense?

The answer is even more shocking than our inexorable descent into the abysmal PC-crazed abyss. For it’s us liberals who are responsible. By ‘us’, I mean that I consider myself a liberal and it’s my fellow liberals who have been driving this frantically illiberal assault on the very things we’re supposed to stand for: freedom and tolerance.

This extraordinary state of affairs prompts the question, ‘What is a liberal?’ To which the answer is … it’s very hard to say anymore. Technically, the word ‘liberal’ is derived from the Latin words liber (meaning ‘free’, and also the root of ‘liberty’, meaning ‘the quality or state of being free’) and liberalis (meaning ‘courteous, generous, gentlemanly’).

The definitions of a liberal include ‘one who is open-minded or not strict in the observance of orthodox, traditional or established forms or ways’, a person who is ‘willing to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one’s own’, ‘favourable to or respectful of individual rights and freedoms’, and ‘concerned with broadening general knowledge and experience’.

Liberals believe that ‘society should change gradually so that money, property and power are shared more equally’. Above all, liberals are supposed to be ‘tolerant’. Yet here they are, screaming, shrieking, hollering and hectoring us all into a world of staggering intolerance and attempting to inhibit or silence our freedom of speech, particularly on our most pertinent societal issues.

HOW has this happened?

WHY has this happened?

WHAT will stop it?

When I first began writing this book in late 2019, I assumed it would lead to me being publicly ‘cancelled’ the moment it was published. I’d be shamed, vilified, mocked, abused, bullied and no-platformed. My book signings would be met with protests, possibly even threats of violence, and my media appearances to promote the book would be weirdly contentious. In fact, even the announcement I was writing a book on liberalism would be the catalyst for an immediate outpouring of ‘liberal’ rage on social media and accusations that I was just another middle-aged white conservative bad guy – many would refuse to believe I could possibly be a fellow liberal – trying to stop good people (like them) calling me out for my nasty, bigoted (in their eyes) opinions.

This, after all, had been happening to anyone who dared to challenge the woke world view. ‘Woke’ is a word that modern liberals proudly use to justify their illiberalism – only they are awake enough to see how the world should be, while the rest of us imbeciles are too sleepily stupid to understand.

As with so many things hijacked and abused by modern illiberal society, the term was first used with the very best of intentions in political ads supporting Abraham Lincoln during the 1860 presidential election. The ‘Wide Awakes’ movement was spawned by young Republicans to oppose the spread of slavery.

Being ‘woke’ burst into modern popular culture in a 1962 New York Times essay written by William Melvin Kelley entitled ‘If You’re Woke You Dig It’, and in Erykah Badu’s 2008 song ‘Master Teacher’ in which the soul singer repeats the phrase, ‘I stay woke.’

It was supposed to indicate someone having a sharp political awareness of systemic social and racial injustices, which is an entirely admirable trait. But in recent years, being ‘woke’ has come to mean having an intransigent intolerance of myriad, often very trivial and pointless things, and the broadness of the ‘woke’ charge sheet is growingly absurdly long and often utterly ridiculous.

In the process, it’s become a label attracting derision and mockery, gleefully used by right-wingers as a taunting tagline stick to beat liberals, and the essence of what being ‘woke’ originally stood for has been completely lost.

Rather than understand this, and re-calibrate what being ‘woke’ means, many liberals have instead become the very people their opponents mock them for – a bunch of constantly outraged illiberal lunatics who refuse to tolerate anyone or anything that doesn’t fit their savagely prohibitive ‘progressive’ agenda.

None of the faux outrage I anticipated over the publication of this book would bother me because I’ve spent years in the eye of the illiberal liberal storm. The woke crowd particularly loathed me because the informed ones know I’m actually a liberal. So, on paper, I’m one of them. I’m therefore the enemy within. For example, I consider myself to be a feminist, but whenever I say this, people – especially radical feminists – laugh with snorting, indignant derision. They think this must be a preposterous notion given how often and loudly I rail against absurd gender issues and the even more ridiculous antics of men-haters falsely claiming to be feminists. But I’ve loudly supported women’s rights, as well as civil rights, gay rights and transgender rights (apart from the absurd new trend of limitless gender self-identification), and don’t have a prejudiced bone in my body. Yet that hasn’t stopped them regularly and furiously branding me racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic.

There’s no room for logic or reason in the world of illiberal liberalism. It’s not what you believe that matters so much as how you express your beliefs, the precise language you use and a total unquestioning compliance with what they say is the way to behave. Of course, this is not just a problem for liberals. Extreme right-wingers can be just as self-righteous, obnoxious, intolerant, shaming and nasty.

Thanks to the explosion of social media fuelling echo chambers where people only expose themselves to singular thought processes that they already agree with, we have regressed as a world back thousands of years to the days when we existed in tribes that rarely met other tribes. In your own tribe, you dressed the same, spoke the same, behaved the same and had the same attitudes. Then slowly, you ventured outside of your tribe and encountered other tribes that dressed differently, spoke differently, behaved differently and had different attitudes. And both tribes responded to this startling discovery by deducing that the only way to handle it was to attack and kill the other tribe.

Twitter is the virtual version of that tribal warfare, especially when it comes to politics. You are pro-Trump or anti-Trump, but you can’t be nuanced about Trump. In the same way that Britons can be passionately pro-Brexit or anti-Brexit, but they can’t be neutral or fair-minded about it. The intolerant woke brigade are staunchly unwilling to hear opposing points of view, despite proudly proclaiming to be liberals.

Yet the baffling thing about these illiberal liberals is they are now behaving exactly like the people they profess to hate most. They’ve become the modern-day fascists, demanding we all lead our lives in a way that conforms strictly to their narrow world view. They’re not interested in being tolerant or supporting freedom, and their inherent wokeness, paradoxically, causes societal division.

I have strong opinions about almost everything. And I actively dislike a lot of things that many might think are trivial and inconsequential, from papooses to vegan sausage rolls. But I don’t want them banned, or to stop people being free to eat them or like them. I just want to exercise my freedom of speech to say I think they are abhorrent stains on society. And yes, I know that getting all worked up about a papoose or vegan sausage roll is in itself vaguely ridiculous, but I genuinely don’t like either of them – and I should be allowed to say so without the entire world collapsing in a fit of collective hysterical pique. As a perfect illustration of my ‘The World’s Gone Nuts’ mantra, my diatribe against papooses ended up as a two-minute segment on NBC Nightly News, America’s most prestigious daily news broadcast.

That’s where modern illiberal liberalism has dragged the world: everyone is free to have an opinion, right to the point where that opinion differs from the agreed ‘acceptable’ opinion dictated by self-righteous modern liberals who don’t just think their opinion is right, they know it is. And woe betide anyone who dares to contradict them.

At this point, it’s useful to go back in time to a more genuinely liberal world, and analyse why liberalism has been so badly traduced. John Locke, an English philosopher whose major works were written in the late seventeenth century, was dubbed the ‘Father of Liberalism’. He is credited with developing the modern conceptions of identity and self through a continuity of consciousness. In simple terms, he believed we all start at birth with blank minds and develop knowledge by experience derived from sense perception. This is now known as ‘empiricism’.

As Locke explained, ‘Whatever I write, as soon as I discover it not to be true, my hand shall be the forwardest to throw it into the fire.’ This shouldn’t be a contentious statement, right? I mean, that is the very basis of education: we learn, we evolve.

Yet today, largely fuelled by the social media echo chambers, this rarely happens. Instead, we are driven to adopt increasingly strident opinions, often based on little scientific fact, and rather than being persuaded to change them when contradictory facts emerge, we double down on our own ill-informed opinion and we feel it even more strongly. This, surely, is the very antithesis of liberalism, is it not?

It is certainly the very antithesis of what Locke believed. His ideology was based on the premise that every opinion formed must be tested and challenged repeatedly, and that nothing is exempt from being disproven. He was also big on introspection, considering it vitally important to observe and carefully reflect on one’s own emotions and behaviours, particularly when forming opinions.

Locke’s overarching philosophy was that in a natural state, all people were equal and independent, and everyone had a basic right to defend ‘life, health, liberty and possessions’. (Many scholars trace the phrase ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’, in the American Declaration of Independence, to Locke’s theory of rights.) But Locke didn’t frame his liberalism in any political sense. That didn’t start until long after he died in 1704. In fact, we know precisely when it did start.

There are many negative aspects to our new internet-powered world, but one of the great benefits is its ability to process historical data. Google has scanned millions of books published over centuries, and as a result the history of the word ‘liberal’, and the way it has been used, is clear to see. For many centuries, it held a strictly non-political tone and interpretation and was used to indicate generosity and tolerance. But from 1769, according to Google’s Ngram Viewer – the online search engine that charts the historical frequency of phrase usage – everything changed. Suddenly, phrases like ‘liberal plan’, ‘liberal views’ and ‘liberal principles’ began appearing. The Atlantic, a leading American magazine, discovered this was largely down to two Scottish men, historian William Robertson and philosopher-economist Adam Smith, who both began repeatedly using the word ‘liberal’ in a political sense around that time.

Smith articulated what he perceived liberal principles to be: ‘All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.’

In other words, liberalism is predicated on people being free to lead their lives how they wish, within the confines of the law. This seems a pretty good yardstick for my own understanding of what being a ‘liberal’ is all about.

The word ‘liberal’ took off towards the end of the century, spreading across Europe and then to the newly formed United States of America, and Google records the additional word ‘liberalism’ being used from around the 1820s. For a long time, Adam Smith’s interpretation of it remained the accepted one. But today, liberalism has developed into almost the complete opposite of what he intended. It’s come to represent a lack of freedom to pursue one’s lawful life as one sees fit.

John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, published in 1859, has been cited as the closest thing to a founding tract for liberalism. In it, he explained why it is in the interest of society to give individuals the greatest possible right to speak and act as they wish, and to do so knowing we’re all imperfect. Mill, like John Locke, believed that only by listening to those with whom we vehemently disagree, and testing our own strongly held ideas against equally strong counter-arguments, can we ever hope to reach the truth.

And if you consult Wikipedia today, it still defines ‘liberalism’ as, ‘A political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support free market, free trade, limited government, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), capitalism, democracy, secularism, gender equality, racial equality, internationalism, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion.’

In essence, liberalism can therefore be broadly defined in three ways: economic liberalism, meaning free competition and minimal government intervention in the economy; political liberalism, meaning the autonomy of the individual and standing up for the protection of political and civil liberties; and social liberalism, which promotes equality and protection for all minority groups. The combined power of these various facets of liberalism led the Financial Times to describe liberalism as ‘the dominant Western ideology since the Second World War’.

Yet the rise of unabashed populists like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, and events like Brexit, have led people to now conclude that liberalism is dying out. Indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin went so far as to say liberalism has ‘become obsolete’. He was supported by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who said he wanted to create an ‘illiberal state’ because he believed authoritarian regimes like Russia and China worked better than liberal democracies.

One reason for the rise of populism as an ‘antidote’ to liberalism was the global financial crash of 2008. Michael Cox, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, told the BBC, ‘Clearly, the liberal order we had until 2008 is in trouble.’ He said that globalisation and the fact ‘markets were allowed to determine everything’ had brought about ‘larger questions of identity and culture, with people feeling that their country is no longer their own’.

I would add the explosion of illiberal political correctness into the mix. If there’s one thing guaranteed to drive people into the arms of a populist, it’s the shrieking woke brigade telling them all day long what to think, say, eat, drink and laugh at. Yet those doing all the shrieking are actually a small minority. Twenty per cent of adults in the UK and USA use Twitter, and a recent survey in America found that, of those, 10 per cent post 80 per cent of the tweets. They tend to be the loudest and most aggressive, and therefore make the most noise and grab the most attention. They also tend to be very politically aware, and skew liberal.

This has created a weird two-worlds planet – those who are on Twitter and those who aren’t. The former, especially the woke element of the 10 per cent doing 80 per cent of the tweeting, work themselves and like-minded tweeters into a relentless frenzy of self-righteousness that seeks to tell everyone how to live their lives, and shame, abuse and cancel them if they don’t follow the exact rules laid down by the PC police. The latter, those not on Twitter, have no idea this is going on, and care even less, but when they’re told, usually by mainstream media, that a bunch of mad-eyed PC cops wants to ban them from laughing at inappropriate jokes, they feel angry. Very, very angry. And that anger manifests itself in a vote for Trump or Brexit. The perverse irony of all this modern hysterical illiberalism is that it propels people who might otherwise consider themselves liberal into the arms of nationalists and authoritarians, who themselves like to exercise illiberal control over people.

Now as a liberal, I completely understand feeling angry at being told how to behave, particularly by people whose own behaviour and lifestyle appear so joyless and unappealing. I just want to get on with my life, enjoying what I enjoy doing within the parameters of the law, and exercising my right to free speech without some howling mob of purple-haired, ring-nosed, Trump-loathing, meat-hating, men-detesting lunatics ordering me to be like them instead or risk my life being ruined.

I wouldn’t mind the woke crowd so much if they were prepared to engage me in proper civilised debate – but they’re not. They don’t see any need to debate anything because they’re so utterly convinced that they are 100 per cent right about everything and hypocritically refuse to acknowledge the importance of discourse in a liberal society. If we all follow this path, democracy will surely die.