Nellie Bowles Knows Why So Many Progressives Lost Their Minds
She Almost Did, Too
Bari Weiss interviews her wife Nellie Bowles about her book “Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History”. In a clear and stirring way, Nellie describes her involvement in and movement away from the progressive community which gave her a “sense of immense camaraderie”, a purpose of “doing justice” and contributing to “the most important thing in the world”. This is a powerful apostasy story, which includes her admission about the sense of glee she felt in cancelling people who were “stepping out of line” from the orthodoxies of progressivism.
She discusses how her career as a reporter for the New York Times took her on a journey into the uncomfortable reality of what was happening in America from 2020 onwards, and which she saw was being incorrectly reported in the media. This eye-opening journey led her away from being “a very good soldier” of the progressive movement, to seeing that the inverted reality that progressives are fighting for, in frequently violent ways, is not contributing to improving the lives of disadvantaged people in any tangible way. Using people’s real stories, she articulates how it’s making things worse and is impacting the silent majority in our society in profound ways.
Losing friends because she could no longer toe the progressive line, showed her that she was “done” with the movement. Faced with demands that she ignore the love she feels for family members whose political views are extremely different from hers, as well as her experience of the denigration and cancellation of the woman she loves, became the final incentives for her to leave the progressive movement. Doing so provided her with a great sense of release. This freedom from the simplistic, binary explanations about the complexities of work, love and politics enabled her and Bari to set up The Free Press, “a new media company built on the ideals that once were the bedrock of great journalism: honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence.”