Nellie Bowles’ Morning After the Revolution is a grand tour through the craziness that followed the killing of George Floyd and continues to this day, despite the majority of Americans shaking their heads in bewilderment. Bowles, a former Timesreporter, started out as a progressive seeker, curious and hopeful about the new thinking, and she is still seeking solutions to racism, income inequality, and attacks on women’s rights. But she also sees the absurdity of much of what passed for progressivism, yet was actually narcissistic, neo-racialist, and aggressively inhumane.
At the Times, Bowles was hounded by an anti-disinformation editor, who was there to remind writers that the lab leak hypothesis was a conspiracy theory and also that conservatives were very bad people. The real danger was Trump, she was told, and anything questionable that the left did had to be passed over in silence, lest the enemy gain succor. When she said she wanted to go to Seattle to check out the new anarchist collective that had abolished the police, she was asked, she says, “Why do you care? No, but seriously why do you care?”
Bowles wrote several significant stories for the Times, including one on antifa in 2020, before leaving the paper along with her wife, Bari Weiss, who founded the now-indispensable Free Press. (Bowles was told by a Times editor that her new romantic partner, Weiss, was “a Nazi,” as their colleagues nodded in agreement.) Bowles wrote a mordantly funny weekly column, TGIF, for the Free Press, where she has covered many stories not fit to print in the Times and The Washington Post.