2025: the year of consolidation
news 18 January 2026 2025, the year of consolidation. 1. Introduction The year 2025 has just come to an end, and I will try to explain what happened.To better understand things, let’s go back a little. In December 2023, after ten years of work and seven years away from social media, I published my two books: Guide to Veganism and Guide to Vegan Activism. I quickly realized that the enthusiasm driving me was not necessarily shared by other vegans. My books remained largely invisible. Around sixty copies of the first circulated, and about thirty of the second. This first disappointment taught me that the quality of a project is not necessarily linked to the enthusiasm it generates. There is often even a negative correlation between these two phenomena. The importance of being known, and the weight of marketing in a book’s success, then appear as decisive factors. One of the harsh realities of human psychology is the following: most people seem to care about things only when they feel they have something to gain from them. On Facebook, in 2024, it was flat calm. Posts had little reach. I felt like I was speaking into the void. At the end of the year, I said to Catherine: we’re leaving. So we left. Destination… Instagram. 2. Instagram and the Dogmatic Vegan Group Instagram was a new world. It is early 2025. Engagement is stronger there, reactions more numerous. We feel like we’re coming back to life. And that feels good. However, this vitality comes with a parallel intensification of hostility. Comments are shorter, harsher, more aggressive. It was in this context that one of the year’s major discoveries appeared: the Dogmatic Vegan Group. Until then, I was only aware of one major force holding back the advent of a vegan world from within the so-called “vegan” movement: supposedly vegan but fundamentally anti-vegan organizations. By entering Instagram, we discovered that this was not the only obstacle. The DVG, in a few words? The opposite of those organizations. It promotes veganism, but without pedagogy. Pedagogy is replaced by raw hostility. I learned to get to know this group, which displays all the characteristics of a closed identity group: single-track thinking, an implicit leader, and followers who repeat. The DVG operates by controlling the language of other vegans and by interpreting their words in the most unfavorable way possible. Their originally laudable objective of defending the vision of Leslie J. Cross turns into an ideological prison. The method is simple: if one talks about subjects other than those found in Cross’s theoretical texts, the co-founder of veganism (for example speciesism, suffering, food, sport, etc.), then one loses vegan status and dishonors it. No matter the context in which words are used: they are intrinsically bad. The result is clear for many activists: fear of speaking, fear of acting, fear of undertaking, and sometimes even fear of thinking. 3. The consolidation of my books Paradoxically, the discovery of the DVG marked a positive turning point in the writing of my books. Thanks to the many conflicts I was confronted with, the book on vegan activism became clearer, denser, and richer. Already expanded to nearly three hundred pages by the end of 2024, notably thanks to the discovery of Paul Bashir’s street vegan education philosophy, the project grew by around three hundred additional pages. This led me to make an important decision: to divide the work into several books. One part to lay the foundations of the vegan movement, another to act concretely, and then a final, more advanced volume. We thus end up with a series entitled Freeing the Animals – A Possible Dream, whose objective is to provide all the necessary tools to create a vegan world: Guide to Veganism – Understanding Everything Guide to Vegan Activism – Building the Vegan Movement Guide to Vegan Activism – Creating a Vegan World Guide to Vegan Activism – Becoming a Complete Vegan Educator 4. Gary Yourofsky and the foreword The other major event of the year is the return of Gary Yourofsky after ten years of absence. I was able to interview him in October. It was a powerful moment. And above all, Gary agreed to write the foreword to the first book. This act is powerful in two ways. First, because I consider Gary to be the vegan educator par excellence. He has devoted almost his entire life to tirelessly educating about veganism in order to free animals. Second, because of the intimate symbolism that connects us: Gary saw the nightmare with his own eyes. I felt it very deeply during a real vision. With a bit of luck, Gary Francione will agree to write the foreword to the second book, and Paul Bashir the third. That would be an ideal triad. 5. YouTube projects The year 2025 also marked the promising beginnings of YouTube projects, with the creation of several channels. The Jérémie Végane channel is intended for French-speaking vegans who want to become strong vegan educators. The Jérémie Vegan Talks channel pursues the same objective internationally. The french Youtube channel for Vegan The english Youtube channel for vegans We also began, with Sébastien, the first videos of the central channel on which our attention will focus in 2026. This channel, simply named after my first and last name, Jérémie Lopez, will feature street interviews about veganism and aims to reach hundreds of thousands of people. 6. Social media review At the end of the year, the assessment of a full year of content creation on Instagram proved to be very instructive but mixed, despite intense work. I went from around 400 followers to 800 on my English account dedicated to non-vegans. I also started a new English account linked to my English YouTube channel Jeremie Vegan Talks, aimed at vegans, as well as a French Instagram account: The english Instagram for non-vegans The english instagram for vegans The french instagram for non-vegans …
