Rick McGinnis:
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements
It’s been a rough four years. Everybody knows that. And though their struggles don’t register much with the public, journalists have arguably been having a rough 20 years, probably more. They’d ask for your sympathy but know they’re not likely to get it, though they can write books like Nellie Bowles’ Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History. Bowles begins the book by recalling her heyday as a reporter at the New York Times, reporting on the tech sector, and she describes herself as a “New Progressive doing the only job she had ever wanted.” And then 2020 hit, and things began changing with accelerating, even frightening speed.
Bowles made the mistake of presuming that curiosity was required to be a reporter at a major journalistic institution and describes how her work caught the attention of the people at the paper tasked with overseeing the tone of its articles, and rooting out what they considered disinformation. She heard about the takeover of part of Portland, Oregon in the aftermath of the George Floyd riots and the establishment of the putatively utopian but practically lawless Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). She was curious and wanted to investigate what was going on there.
A newsroom colleague said he was worried about her. “He was worried about what these story ideas said about me and if I was thinking about my career. He was worried I was into all this cancel culture stuff. I said, I’m just so curious about what’s going on up there, what else am I supposed to do? He said, ‘That’s a question for a therapist, not an editor’.”
If you know anything about authoritarian governments and how they control societies, you’ll pick up on Bowles’ colleague pathologizing her curiosity – casting it as more a mental health issue than part of a job description. But this is far from the most disturbing thing you’ll read in her book.
In the end Bowles would leave the Times alongside another colleague, Bari Weiss, with whom she had fallen in love and married in 2021 after converting to Judaism. The two would found what’s now called The Free Press, the Substack magazine that’s become a refuge of sorts for disaffected journalists who once considered themselves fully in step with their newsroom colleagues.
Morning After the Revolution is a travelogue through the last four years, from the perspective of someone who found herself moving day by day – as that worried Times colleague put it – to what collective quality broadsheet opinion considered the wrong side of history. It’s a story Bowles tells not from the dismissive or outraged or mocking perspective of a Ben Shapiro or Douglas Murray, but from one that, as Bowles describes it, is “not a caricature.”
“Even as I reported on the issues,” she writes, “I was constantly struck by the movement’s beauty. There is pleasure and community in cancellation. There’s poetry in police abolition.”
And she wants you to share in what she saw as the humour of it all: “The ideology that came shrieking in would go on to reshape America in some ways that are interesting and even good, and in other ways that are appalling, but mostly in ways that are – I hate to say it – funny.”
Each chapter of Bowles’ book explores some major event or theme of the Lockdown Era – CHAZ, Black Lives Matter, police defunding or abolition, the homeless crisis and the attendant housing shortage crisis, the explosion of opiate addiction, and the ascendancy of the transgender movement. They’re peppered with deadpan descriptions of desperate coping and cognitive dissonance.
Writing about how police abolition and the escalation in crime in Los Angeles created a demand for alarm systems and private security, Bowles observes: “In our neighbourhood, a rich swath in the middle of the city, next to the ADT lawn signs there are Black Lives Matter and In This House We Believe. And then, more often than not, there’s a fourth sign: Armed Response.”
Describing plans by enlightened municipalities to replace police officers with crisis negotiators: “So the trendiest progressive solution to violence was to disband police forces and then, instead, we would send groups of unarmed black men to defuse violent situations in our dangerous neighbourhoods. They wouldn’t have a union. They wouldn’t have pensions. They wouldn’t have guns.”
She recalls the story of a woman walking with her dog who was attacked by a homeless man with a stick in a park in Brooklyn in 2022. The dog died but the man remained free, even after the woman saw him again and called the police while she pursued him. “The only acceptable thing for that woman with that golden retriever to do would have been to also have a stick and to fight right back then and there. She should have been training for the moment. The attacker was also a victim, a local elected official explained. The homeless man with the stick is a victim too, the elected kept saying. The woman, allowing her dog to be attacked, victimizing the man.”
Discussing the rise of asexuality and demisexuality amidst a cornucopia of sexual identities in the wake of the transgender movement, which describes Bowles not as a lesbian but as a “non-man attracted to non-men:” “Queerness is an aesthetic and a politics. It’s a culture, a rebellion. The only thing queerness has little to do with is sex. To base gayness in something like physical arousal is appalling to the new movement. The body has very little to do with all of this. And that’s good, the movement tells us. The body and sex are suspect. It’s fitting that asexual would become one of the more popular new labels.”
Talking about how trans women ideologues have been able to position themselves as the ultimate feminists despite being born biologically male: “To each of them, though in slightly different ways, to be female is to desire a certain place in society. It’s an approach to life more than anything biological. As they’re defining it, they’re outlining a femaleness that’s jarring but also very familiar. It’s cozy and even comfortable for me to hear, like I’ve heard it before somewhere. Their conclusion is that to be a woman is, in general, disgusting.”
She describes life in San Francisco, her former hometown: “Once, when I was walking and a guy tore my jacket off my back and sprinted away with it, I didn’t even shout for help. I was embarrassed – what was I, a tourist? Living in a failing city does weird things to you. The normal thing to do then was to yell, to try to get some help – even, dare I say it, from a police officer but this felt somehow weak and maybe racist.” She continues: “A couple of years ago, one of my friends saw a man staggering down the street, bleeding. She recognized him as someone who regularly slept outside in the neighbourhood, and called 911. Paramedics and police arrived and began treating him, but members of a homeless advocacy group noticed and intervened. They told the man that he didn’t have to get into the ambulance, that he had the right to refuse treatment. So that’s what he did. The paramedics left, the activists left. The man sat on the sidewalk alone, still bleeding. A few months later, he died about a block away.”
By this point I’m over two-thirds through Bowles’ book, but I haven’t laughed once. Perhaps I’m not the intended audience.
Bowles’ final chapter is about “The Joy of Canceling” and begins with her recollection that “the first time I was consciously part of canceling someone, it felt incredible. I do remember the pleasure.”
Finding herself somewhere in the middle of a dispute between a black friend and an author acquaintance (“a white woman, also well known, less hilarious but equally lovely”) she decides to take her friend’s side and join in the “drumbeat of rage.” She pulls out of an event where she was to interview the author onstage. “The goal was to slice her carefully out, and I was thrilled to do my part. To let someone stay like that is to allow rot. By showing where I stood, I felt closer to my friends. But also, in some ways, doing what I did is the price of admission. To ignore the drumbeat was to suggest that I didn’t care. I definitely did care.”
The event is cancelled, the author’s book and book tour fail, and she was excised from Bowles’ social circle. “A cancelation isn’t about finding a conservative and yelling at them,” she writes. “It’s about finding the betrayer in your midst. It’s about sniffing them out at your coffee shop or your office. They look and talk like you. They blend in perfectly. But they’re not like you.”
Eventually, as these things go, Bowles is cut loose by the friend for whom she had taken part in the author’s cancelling, for holding back amidst the frenzy of another cancellation by her friends and peers. “She said very nicely that it was suspicious how quiet I was that day,” Bowles recalls. “She very politely told me that I was a racist. Then she said goodbye.”
What chilled me was the book’s final paragraph, where Bowles writes that “I never heard from my friend again after she said goodbye. I get it. She’s drawing the line. Part of me admires her for it.” I don’t know why but I was reminded of Winston Smith at the end of George Orwell’s 1984, broken by torture, resigned that “it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
Maybe it’s because I’m of a different generation from the millennial Bowles, or maybe it’s because I was never emotionally suited to journalism, but as much as I can appreciate her honesty, I am shocked by this acceptance that sniping at peers and friends from the safety of the mob is acceptable, and that once targeted, you must accept it with graceful resignation. But it’s behaviour that the last four years somehow normalized, both inside and outside the media. And with this in mind, it’s no surprise that the suffering of journalists and the decline of their industry is considered with such indifference.
