“Hence like most people who have substituted the habit of delusion for reality, they became hysterical whenever the root of their delusion was touched, and reacted with a violence that completely belied the openness of mind which they prescribed for others.”

　　— Whittaker Chambers, Witness, 1952

　　Nellie Bowles could easily have used Chambers’ observation as the epigraph for Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History. Much like with Chambers’ account of leaving the Communist Party, there are two stories here. First, there is the book itself, and then there is the reaction to the book by Bowles’ former comrades-in-arms.

　　For many years, Bowles was entrenched with the New Progressives, her preferred term for what is more commonly called the Woke. From 2017–2021, she was an award-winning reporter for The New York Times, gaining widespread acclaim for investigating the growing world of online child abuse. She also endeared herself to progressives with tendentious hit pieces on Jordan Peterson and PragerU. She was a young reporter on the rise.

　　Morning After the Revolution is Bowles’ break-up letter, chronicling her realization that something had gone horribly amiss in the crowd with which she was running. She begins the story in 2020 with Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Bowles wanted to write about it; her colleagues were concerned that she was “trying to cover things that shouldn’t be covered.” Everyone around her knew that if the story of what was happening was reported, it would play into the hands of white supremacists. Going to Seattle to be a journalist was clear evidence that Bowles had been “red-pilled.”

　　While talking to people in Seattle, Bowles noticed the strange partnership of Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM). As Bowles began to report on Antifa rallies, she picked up the free pamphlets like “I Want to Kill Cops Until I’m Dead,” and tamer things like “In Defense of Smashing Cameras,” and “Why We Break Windows.” Meanwhile, BLM and other similar organizations raised $50 billion in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Yet, when Bowles traveled to Minneapolis to talk with locals about how the money was being spent, she found angry activists. As one said about the fundraising groups, “You never see them. You never hear from them. The Soros money and stuff like that, they don’t do protests and talk to people in the community. They’re spending it on very high salaries to do—we’re not quite sure. We can’t really figure out what they’re doing with the money.”

　　By this point in the book, it is obvious that Bowles has broken with the New Progressives who know that reporting such things is at best bad form and at worst aiding and abetting fascists. Bowles keeps going though, with stories about omnipresent accusations of racism, online self-flagellation therapy groups, a homeless encampment in LA, the movement to abolish the police, the transgender movement, the collapse of San Francisco, and the rise of struggle sessions and canceling.

　　The final break came when Bowles fell in love with fellow NYT writer Bari Weiss. Because Weiss had committed the great sin of supporting Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden but not Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she was a “Nazi,” in the words of one of Bowles’ colleagues. Eventually, Bowles and Weiss married, left the paper, and created The Free Press.

　　Taken together, the stories in this book are a devastating portrait of the New Progressives. As the chapters roll by, it becomes obvious that in order for this movement to rise and achieve such omnipresence in society, it was necessary that reporters from places like The New York Times refuse to cover these stories. Sunlight is a disinfectant; all it would have taken to refute the narrative that Antifa was a small, harmless group was for a reporter with genuine Leftist bona fides to report on the rallies. Maybe we have all been reading The Washington Post’s motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness” the wrong way. Maybe creating darkness was the paper’s goal.

　　The Reaction

　　In one sense, Morning After the Revolution is simply another entry in the genre of explaining the Woke virus. Within this genre, it is one of the best. Bowles has a keen ear for a telling anecdote and a seemingly bottomless supply of snark. Reading this book is akin to sitting in a bar and listening to a reporter with a great sense of humor tell you horror stories about what is going on in America.

　　But, the real importance of the book is demonstrated in the reaction to it. The New York Times had two reviews. The subheadline of Laura Kipnis’ review declares, “Nellie Bowles relies more on sarcasm than argument or ideas.” The other by Michelle Goldberg laments, “Wokeness is Dying. We Might Miss It.” Molly Fischer’s review in The New Yorker headline: “Nellie Bowles’s Failed Provocations.” Kate Knibbs in Wired: “There’s Nothing Revolutionary about Morning After the Revolution,” adding the subheading that the book is “lukewarm dogma.” Charles Kaiser’s review in The Guardian: “A Bad Faith Attack on the Woke.” Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post: “Nellie Bowles thinks you should outgrow progressivism” in a book that “takes aim at the supposed excesses of today’s left.” Note the adjective “supposed.”

　　What about the content of the reviews? First off, nearly everyone mentions Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion. Bowles invites these comparisons; the title of this book is a riff on a famous Didion essay. Moreover, Bari Weiss once described Bowles as “the love child of Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion.” The consensus of the reviews: Bowles is not as good as Wolfe or Didion. (This is the sole focus of Fischer’s review in The New Yorker.) It is a curious complaint. Wolfe and Didion were as good as it gets at what they did. Nobody else even comes close.

　　The typical review of a novel does not spend so much time explaining that Tolstoy and Austen were better. Let us grant the point that Bowles is no Wolfe or Didion and ask why it was so crucial for these reviewers to say this. It is an important part of the underlying message of these reviews, all of which aim at the tone of the policeman saying, “Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.” You might have heard that Bowles is funny, but these reviewers are here to tell you that she isn’t.

　　Is Bowles a closet conservative? That conclusion can only make sense if one holds the Manichean view that everyone is either a New Progressive or an evil conservative.

　　Moreover, the reviews tell us, she also isn’t accurate. Sure, many of the reviews concede, that leftists can be “goofy.” Who isn’t goofy sometimes? But when Bowles attempts to be substantive, Kipnis assures us, she wields a “dull blade.” Consider Bowless account of the deaths, gunshot wounds, rampant drug use, and sexual assaults in a homeless encampment that the city of LA allowed to grow. In a drive-by character assassination, Kipnis omits the details, and summarizes the problem this way: “But it’s activists for the homeless who really gall Bowles, especially after she buys a house in a gentrifying Los Angeles neighborhood of multimillion-dollar properties. A 200-person homeless encampment had recently sprung up in a nearby park; private security costs her nearly $4000 a year.” The reader can now safely conclude that Bowles is not only no Tom Wolfe, she is also just an elitist worrying about her multimillion-dollar home.

　　Similarly, Kaiser assures the reader that claims in the book are not substantiated; Bowles is merely a rogue writing a book with a publisher that doesn’t bother with fact-checking. Kaiser’s example: in discussing the transgender movement, Bowles notes that when a child wants to transition, “If a parent resists, they can and do lose custody of their child.” Kaiser says, “Is that true? I have no idea.” The reader can now conclude it probably isn’t true. Of course, Kaiser could have spent 30 seconds on Google, but that would have been inconvenient for his narrative.

　　So, according to the reviews, the book isn’t amusing and it isn’t accurate. So, why is it being reviewed in these high-profile places? Why are all these high-minded defenders of the New Progressives spending their time trying to convince people not to read the book? The reviewers clearly think the book is dangerous. Bowles, the reviewers assure us, is a secret conservative, and thus this book is just a bit of right-wing propaganda. Kipnis concludes by telling the readers, “But the book’s central fallacy is that idiocy on the left requires moving to the right. It doesn’t.” Goldberg explains that Bowles’ book is part of the move to reinstate Trumpian policies. Rothfeld compares Bowles to William F. Buckley Jr. and then chides her for echoing the “conspiratorial approach” of nineteenth-century opponents of women’s suffrage, the John Birch Society, and opponents of civil rights.

　　It’s not amusing; it’s not accurate; it’s just another entry in conservative attempts to destroy civil rights. By the end of reading these reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and so on, the reader is equipped to dismiss anyone who has a kind word to say about the book as a fascist who either openly or secretly endorses Donald Trump.

　　The Old Progressives

　　Is Bowles a closet conservative? That conclusion can only make sense if one holds the Manichean view that everyone is either a New Progressive or an evil conservative. It does not require reading between the lines to detect that Bowles is not a conservative. She says so. Repeatedly. For example, she is still enamored with Hillary Clinton, wants universal healthcare, maintains her fondness for drag queens who sing well, is passionately committed to the gay rights agenda, and notes, “It is not exactly hard to hate the cops.” Bowles clearly isn’t a New Progressive; she is, however, an Old Progressive.

　　It is Bowles’ progressivism that makes her such a threat to the New Progressives. She is not a conservative whose fundamental political tenets are antithetical to progressive beliefs. Instead, she is a progressive who is alarmed, and at times deeply alarmed, about how the New Progressives in cult-like fashion have become untethered both to reality and to their own basic principles. Bowles makes it abundantly clear that she really wants to be part of the progressive crowd, that she enjoyed the emotional highs that came with being surrounded by people who all thought alike. But, as Whittaker Chambers noted, when Bowles touched the roots of the delusions of the New Progressives, she faced a fierce backlash.

　　The most poignant moment in the book comes when Bowles discusses the new craze for encouraging transgenderism in children. The current fashion is to insist that children who are “gender nonconforming” should be offered medical interventions. When Bowles was a kid, she liked playing with trucks and hated wearing dresses.

　　When I hear parents talk about their trans children, almost all of them describe kids who just knew, but then obviously trans traits are just little girls vaguely drawn to boys’ toys or clothes. If only my parents were more aware and more accepting, I could have been warmly counseled into pausing that unfortunate puberty. If they’d known a little better they would have offered to pay for me to be confirmed in my right gender, to get on testosterone and have my chest reconstructed nicely, flatly. I would have loved it.

　　The New Progressives have declared war on people like Bowles. She feels “betrayed.” The Old Progressive movement focused on “basic practical issues for gays and lesbians,” issues like gay marriage and increasing acceptance of a lesbian couple raising children. Instead of encouraging young girls like Bowles to grow up to be women like Bowles, the movement has become obsessed with turning them into men.

　　Bowles’ use of the term “New Progressives” is exactly right. There is something quite different about this new group. A decade ago, I suspect that Bowles and I would have had very few points of agreement in the political landscape. Even still, there might be real disagreement on whether New Progressivism is the natural evolution of Old Progressivism. Regardless of why the New Progressives have achieved such power, now old-style conservatives and old-style progressives are finding much common ground in our concern about what is happening. Politics makes strange bedfellows.