Liberalism the Morning After
By J. Simpson
Nellie Bowles was a darling of the liberal media…until she wasn’t. Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History details her fall from grace, acting as a cautionary tale about the worst excesses of the modern Left.
Nellie Bowles
Nellie Bowles was a model Liberal. For years, she was a celebrated journalist with legacy media outlets like The New York Times. She was hanging out drinking “I’m With Her-icanes” at a drag bar in 2016 when she was certain Hillary Clinton would become the first female American president. She was raised in San Francisco. She’s a devoted feminist. She was the first out lesbian in her high school, “sticking rainbows all around campus,” as she puts it. She’s even married to a woman, the controversial “conservative” journalist Bari Weiss, who Bowles now works with at The Free Press. How does such a celebrated voice for justice and progress become a persona non grata among liberals and progressives?
Bowles’ story is only a small part of a much, much larger story, although she’s the one narrating. Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History tells how a cultural revolution went off the rails by detailing some of the more intense moments of the last decade that legacy media would rather forget if they ever acknowledged them in the first place.
Spread out over four sections, Morning After the Revolution follows some of the most sensationalist stories and social movements that have come up in the wake of “Occupy Wall Street.” Each section touches on a hot-button topic that most media outlets, journalists, and academics won’t touch with a 10-foot pole. This intro might make you think that Bowles’ book is just another conservative anti-woke screed. On the contrary, Morning After the Revolution spends much of its time talking about how this polarization and radicalization are hurting the people that progressives claim to want to help most, especially People of Color.
BLM
Section I, Three Zones, focuses on how three different cities responded to the death of George Floyd and the rise of the #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) movement. Bowles begins by talking about Seattle and the rise of the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). CHAZ arose in the summer of 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns, CHAZ was a police-free autonomous zone in Seattle’s historic gay neighborhood, Capital Hill. It was somewhere between Occupy Wall Street 2.0, a permanent Antifa Black Bloc, and a block party. It didn’t take very long at all for CHAZ to devolve from community dodgeball games to gangs of armed guards demanding fealty to the party while trying to route out wrongthink from the surrounding community. The rate at which CHAZ disintegrated from a would-be utopia to mob rule is eye-opening, setting the tone for the protests and autonomous zones to follow. It also details the alliance between BLM and Antifa, despite continual assertions they’re different things, as Bowles points out in the next chapter on the BLM protests in Portland. It’s here she starts to lay out some of the common rebuttals and rhetorical mental pretzels liberals, leftists, and Progressives started tying themselves in at this point.
Maybe destroying small business was good. Small businesses aren’t unionized. Small businesses aren’t accountable. All those little burned-out shops were part of the structural problem.
Creating false equivalencies comparing the police to literal Hitler and Antifa to the children’s musician Raffi does little to make the Left seem like they’re arguing in good faith. Neither do calls for violence and praises for looting while rioting. She also talks of the carnival-like atmosphere in Portland, even while would-be activists were standing around discussing the merits of the AK-47.
Section I concludes with a wide-angle look at protests all over the country and the tolls they were taking on the communities they were supposedly protecting. Chapter 3 focuses on the most egregious misuse of the Black Lives Matter movement, beginning with Minneapolis. Bowles begins by talking about the millions upon millions of dollars raised by non-profits ostensibly to support the movement and the families of the victims. She also talks about the damage that the Abolish the Police movement did to activists working on police reform. It’s a picture-perfect example of how the idealism and inflexibility of many Progressives prevent actual change and progress from being made. Hearing the parents of both Tamir Rice and Michael Brown – two other high-profile victims of racial violence from Ferguson, Missouri – explicitly call out non-profit organizations soliciting funds in the name of their loved ones, should make everyone take pause.
We don’t want or need y’all parading in the streets accumulating donations, platforms, movie deals, etc. off the death of our loved ones, while the families and communities are left clueless and broken,
wrote Samaria Rice along with the mother of another victim. “Don’t say our loved ones’ names period! That’s our truth!” Michael Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., shared a similar skepticism. “Who are they giving the money to, and what are they doing with it? Why hasn’t my family’s foundation received any assistance from the movement? How could you leave the families who are helping the community without any funding?”
Why wasn’t this bigger news? Why weren’t the activists – who are usually so quick to point out transgressions – so oddly silent about the accusations the Black Lives Matter Global Network made off with millions of dollars? BLM Global Network raised $100 million in 2020 alone. It should have especially raised eyebrows when it was discovered that BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors had purchased a $1.4 million home in Topanga Canyon, California. Instead, Khan-Cullors called the publication that broke the news “a despicable abuse of a platform.”
From the first three chapters, the tone and precedent are set. When pushed or confronted with wrong-doing, rather than taking accountability Progressives tend to double down and then rationalize their actions. It certainly doesn’t do much to bolster faith in their social movements.
The remaining three sections touch on three of the other main movements of the Progressive Left of the last four years. Section II touches on the anti-racist movement that grew out of the BLM movement, with its assertion that all white people are racist as popularized by speakers like Robin DiAngelo, a white woman who charged thousands of dollars for speaking appearances. If you had a problem admitting you were racist, it just meant that you needed DiAngelo’s course that much more.
Gender Identity
Section III, Men and Non-Men, talks about one of our era’s most explosive and divisive topics, the rapid and unprecedented rise of people identifying as transgender since 2010. Bowles illustrates the complete unwillingness to discuss nuance on this topic by focusing on the Wi Spa case from 2021, where a transgender woman was confronted when a woman complained to the front desk that there was “an erect penis in the women’s locker room.” Ironically, the woman – who was later identified as Darren Merager – isn’t entirely comfortable with the term transgender. When she showed up at the protest happening in her honor, protestors didn’t believe it was her, calling her a Proud Boy instead.
Bowles then proceeds to point out similar confusions and contradictions in the emerging asexual movement. She then concludes the section by looking at the most controversial topic of all – how to treat transgender children. Bowles points out how much modern transgender rhetoric is rooted in outdated sexist stereotypes. She talks about her childhood as a young, tomboy-ish lesbian, where she had a common aversion to all things girly, frilly, and pink. Bowles concludes that section with the observation that had she been born a little later, she was fairly certain she’d be read as trans.
It’s a concern shared by many queer and gender non-conforming people. Talking about these concerns is completely forbidden in liberal/leftist/Progressive circles. Anything other than complete, 100% agreement with anyone who’s saying they’re transgender is immediately labeled as transphobic, with the offending party being accused of wishing genocide on trans children.
Maoism and Ideological Purity
Although it is incredibly interesting, informative, and even entertaining, Morning After the Revolution is alarming. It should set off some warning bells for anyone who’s not been paying close attention to the ongoing culture wars. Bowles points out the inflexibility and absolutist thinking of too many modern-day Progressives. The final section concludes with a discussion of the struggle sessions of the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China and the obsession with ideological purity.
In today’s Progressive Left, either you’re all in or you’re 100% out. We’ve been seeing some of the after-effects of this extremist thinking in this last year when the Israel-Hamas conflict was added to the stack of causes to support. The Democrats’ unwillingness to call out Israel and implicitly side with Palestine, has resulted in many Progressives refusing to vote for Joe Biden in the upcoming election. This demand for ideological purity could result in a second Trump presidency as just one more example of Horseshoe Theory in action.
Nellie Bowles became a reporter because she asked too many questions. Her split with the modern Left movement began when she started asking the wrong questions, beginning with her coverage of CHAZ. The phrase “the wrong questions” should set off warning bells in everybody’s mind, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum. Having one foregone conclusion that all evidence must support is an ideology. It’s how fundamentalist cults operate, not scientists or political parties. Questions and open dialogue keep ideas and philosophies strong, healthy, and accountable. Many of the political attitudes discussed in Morning After the Revolution are shockingly racist and sexist, like the idea that punctuality and math are symptoms of white supremacy. Perhaps we could have conversations about the soft bigotry of low expectations if we could talk about it at all. Maybe we could talk about how assuming that only boys like sports and only girls cry further reinforces conservative gender stereotypes. One day, these discussions will need to be had. People like Bowles, who aren’t afraid to ask uncomfortable questions at great personal expense, are opening the conversation and leading the way.
