As a Hillary voter, a New York Times reporter, and frequent attendee at her local gay bars, Nellie Bowles fit right in with her San Francisco neighbors and friends—until she started questioning whether the progressive movement she knew and loved was actually helping people. When her colleagues suggested that asking such questions meant she was “on the wrong side of history,” Bowles did what any reporter worth her salt would do: she started investigating for herself. The answers she found were stranger—and funnier—than she expected.
In Morning After the Revolution, Bowles gives readers a front-row seat to the absurd drama of a political movement gone mad. With irreverent accounts of attending a multiday course on “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness,” following the social justice activists who run “Abolitionist Entertainment LLC,” and trying to please the New York Times’s “disinformation czar,” she deftly exposes the more comic excesses of a movement that went from a sideshow to the very center of American life.
Deliciously funny and painfully insightful, Morning After the Revolution is a moment of collective psychosis preserved in amber. This is an unmissable debut by one of America’s sharpest journalists.
Nellie Bowles is a writer living in Los Angeles. Previously, she was a correspondent at The New York Times where, as part of a team, she won the Gerald Loeb Award in Investigations and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Journalism Award. Now she is working with her wife, Bari Weiss, to build The Free Press, a new media company, where she also writes the weekly TGIF column which is released every Friday, thank God…or whoever.
Shermer and Bowles discuss:
- what it’s like to work at The New York Times
- what it’s like to found a new media company
- same-sex marriage
- Liberalism vs. Progressivism: The New Progressives
- Black Lives Matter movement
- Patrisse Khan-Cullors, co-founder, “trained Marxist” bought four homes
- Whiteness, White privilege, Robin DiAngelo
- Black bodies, White bodies, somatic abolitionism, bodies of culture
- #metoo movement
- LGBTQ
- IDAHOBIT: International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia, Transphobia
- BBIPOC: Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color
- Trans movement as the next rights revolution after gay rights?
- Wi Spa
- born in the wrong body?
- CHAZ: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, Seattle
- Homelessness
- Anti-Racism led by middle-aged White women
- cancel culture
- defund/abolish the police
- protesting
- Latino, Latina, Latinx.
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This episode was released on May 14, 2024.
