Morning After the Revolution, Years Before an Apology

Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, by Nellie Bowles (Thesis, 272 pp., $30)

O ver a weekend, I began and finished reading Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, by Nellie Bowles, a former progressive journalist at the New York Times who went from “drinking with I’m With Her-icanes at a drag bar” to being a self-described “hemming-and-hawing moderate” who writes for the Free Press, which was founded by her spouse, Bari Weiss. The book essentially fights against the Left’s efforts to memory-hole the absurdity that peaked in 2020. It was an easy read because Bowles’s prose is direct and accessible; the casual tone almost makes you think she dictated the book rather than typed it. But it was also a heavy read, given its striking details about death in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), disturbing crime in San Francisco, and tent cities erected by the homeless. Today, you may find yourself wondering, “Was 2020 really that bad?” Bowles’s book answers convincingly: No, it was worse.

The book can be considered a collection of reported articles with some personal commentary, any of which would have summoned an angry mob of left-wingers had they been published in 2020, especially if they had appeared in the New York Times. The reporting in these essays is death to progressivism by a thousand cuts: The details about anarchy, hypocrisy, and social authoritarianism in social-justice spheres amount to a devastating profile of the activists who insist they are morally and politically superior. But Bowles’s commentary feels reserved, as if she hasn’t thoroughly undergone the introspection necessary to reflect on her own conduct — maybe a product of shame. She recalls crying in an anti-racist training session but doesn’t tell us why. Was she shocked, horrified, or genuinely experiencing guilt? We’re left wondering. Ultimately, Bowles is a skilled investigator — of events, not of her previous ideological commitments. (In fact, it isn’t obvious that she has abandoned many of her progressive stances. She writes in the introduction that “there are reparations that should be paid,” while her chapter “The Best Feminists Always Have Had Balls” uses the preferred feminine pronouns for males who identify as women.)

Rather than confront personal faults, Bowles attempts to justify her actions by blaming peer pressure. The chapter “Abolitionist Entertainment LLC,” on Black Lives Matter and racial-justice activism, opens with the following: “Everyone had wanted to do something to join in as the protest movement grew into 2021. Everyone wanted to help. Everyone wanted to give.” But this is inaccurate. Not everyone pledged allegiance to the “anti-racist” regime. There were vocal critics — sometimes called “conservatives” — and they were quickly demonized as raging fascists; any attempt to do a both-sides criticism of 2020 fails spectacularly because it was only one side. It seems more accurate, I think, to say that by “everyone” Bowles means within her social circles. Excommunicated progressives can evade accountability by consoling themselves with the lamentable logic that their actions aren’t so bad because lots of other people did the same things — but the record shows that not everyone lacked the moral courage to reject the social-justice bullies.

And from Bowles’s lack of self-examination and personal responsibility emerges the book’s aggravating flaw. The 242 pages convey the following: Progressives wrongly supported devastatingly bad policies. But nowhere does this appear: Conservatives were correct — despite her independent reporting that confirms what those on the right — public figures, media commentators, politicians — said in the throes of the revolution. “All the media I was getting was either extremely right-wing (look at this woke hellhole) or very left-wing (10 reasons why local vigilante violence is actually better than police),” Bowles writes in the introduction. In her chapter “A Utopia, If You Can Keep It,” she recalls seeing troubling videos from CHAZ, but “the only places that posted them were right-wing websites that pumped them out with blaring all-caps headlines” such as “SEATTLE DESTROYED BY LIBERALS.” While covering CHAZ, Bowles learned that two teenagers died, other people were shot, and local businesses were destroyed, all while emergency responders avoided the area. You might reasonably expect this to culminate in some sort of admission along the lines of, “Hey, it turns out the conservative publications covered this chaos pretty accurately.” But it doesn’t.

Apparently, when remembering how bad 2020 was, conservatives are supposed to forget all the bad things that progressives did to them. The book’s introduction briefly summarizes how the Left’s agenda is advanced by New York Times journalists with the help of “Disinformation Experts,” one of whom instructed Bowles to incorporate more criticism in her coverage of the right-wing media outfit PragerU. “I needed to chide PragerU for the sin of getting people questioning and for the fact that when you search for Republicans on YouTube, you can also eventually find yourself being recommended videos from people further to the right,” Bowles states. And so her published article floats the idea that PragerU is bad because it is algorithmically connected to what the New York Times deems even worse. The point of this anecdote, I think, is to take a stab at the Times, which it accomplishes. But Bowles doesn’t say that she’s ashamed of such dubious journalism. She doesn’t suggest that she has requested a retraction. She doesn’t modify her uncharitable characterization by offering a more clear-eyed appraisal of PragerU. Maybe the soldiers of 2020 want a truce, but perhaps some restorative justice must come first.

Morning After the Revolution is worth buying and reading, for it provides further evidence of the extent to which “progressivism” is another word for “insanity.” Bowles’s reporting reminds us of the political iniquities that we might prefer to forget. But it’s missing even a modest compliment for the conservatives who were treated as pariahs simply for objecting to the ridiculous claims, demands, and policies defended by progressives in 2020. Even worse, there is no apology to the right-wingers who endured character assassination for supporting what moderates and sane people on the left now endorse.

Of course, the people who refuse to apologize for the radical failures of 2020 are the same people who, in that year, began every meeting with an apology for “colonization” and “white supremacy.” The activists from 2020 are fully capable of saying “I’m sorry,” except to a conservative.