The Daily Signal - Nellie Bowles Saw the 2020 Revolution, Firsthand

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

Nellie Bowles is an old-fashioned journalist, the type who wants to actually experience for herself the events she reports on. In her new book, "Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History," Bowles chronicles going to Seattle's Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, where anarchy reigned during the summer of 2020. She attends anti-racism trainings. She writes about what it was like to be a reporter for the New York Times who was trying to be a good journalist, and how she was forced to consult a "disinformation expert" to change her reporting. Bowles, a lesbian and a former Hillary Clinton booster, also chronicles her own evolution as she reports. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, June 10th. I'm Virginia Allen. On today's show, my colleague and Daily Signal editor-in-chief Kate Trinko is sitting down with Nellie Bowles. She's the author of Morning After the Revolution, Dispatches from the wrong side of history. Bulls discusses what it was really like trying to be a fair reporter during her time at the New York Times. She also describes attending anti-racism seminars and seeing a fair reporter during her time at the New York Times. She also describes attending anti-racism seminars and seeing a fair reporter. for herself Seattle's anarchist neighborhood in 2020. Once a Hillary Clinton supporter, Bulls changed her mind about a lot of things during the pandemic and she shares why with us on today's show. Stay tuned for Kate Trinko's interview with Nellie after this. The Heritage Foundation is the most effective conservative policy organization in the country. Every semester, our interns are a vital part of that mission. We pay competitively.

We develop talent. and we give our interns access to some of the sharpest minds in the country. We're going on offense, so join us. To learn more about the Young Leaders Program here at the Heritage Foundation, please go to heritage.org slash intern. Joining me today is Nellie Bowles, author of the new book, Morning After the Revolution, Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History. Nellie was formerly a reporter for the New York Times,

and now is with the free press. Nellie, thanks for coming on the show. It is a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on. So you write that you owe a lot of your life to political progressivism and you bristle at the alternative. You supported Hillary Clinton in 2016. You're a lesbian who's out and proud.

What has happened to your political and philosophical outlook in these years that you've been doing the reporting? What was it like before 2020 and what was it like after? Yeah. So as you just listed, I fit. all the right demographics of a good progressive. It's all those attributes and I'm from San Francisco to top it all off. I was a happy young reporter at the New York Times for years and it was all going very well.

And then as 2020 and 2021 came and started to close off so many avenues of what we could report on, I mean, the sort of like closing of the journalist mind that happened really of journalists' own choice. We collectively decided as a tribe that we just weren't going to report on any number of interesting topics. And those interesting topics were things that might not specifically help Joe Biden's election or might not specifically help progressive goals. And so it was I couldn't report on Chaz, the Antifa encampment in Seattle that I became obsessed. with I couldn't report on this. I couldn't report on that. It became very limiting. And I think we saw that in all of mainstream media at NPR, at Washington Post, kind of this proud limiting. And so it's not that I had like a political transformation or now I'm woken up and I'm suddenly a conservative. It's just that

I became very aware of how censorious the new progressive movement was becoming. And the movement that I'd been swimming in my whole life and that I hadn't questioned until it really came and told me that I couldn't follow my own curiosity as a writer. So on that, and you mentioned not being able to cover the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone is one of those examples. Was there internal dissent among your colleagues of the New York Times? Was there attention? I mean, we've seen some reporting that, you know, there's people in the Times being like, no, we want to be a traditional news outlet. We want to report in the news. And then there's younger leftist activists? Or was it everyone more aligned?

No. The bosses and the leadership of all the old institutions want the old values. They still sort of think that the old values can be saved. It's the young cohort that has come in that I was a mom that believes in a different vision of journalism. It's journalism as moral clarity. It's journalism as kind of a beautiful justice project. rather than journalism driven by curiosity or, in my case, kind of innate suspicion of authority figures. Like, that's why it clicked for me to become a reporter in the first place. And I think that what you're seeing is a ground-up movement.

I don't think the leadership at NPR wants NPR to be deranged, although now with the new CEO who notes, but it's a ground-up movement. And so that makes it all the harder. to fix. And I think that it doesn't, to say it's ground up doesn't mean it's not powerful. Like internally when you're within that scrum and the scrum decides to turn on you, which eventually happened to me and I write about in the book,

it is very real. And even if it's just coming from colleagues and it's not specifically coming from bosses, although there were a few editors who were doing some of the stuff. But even if it's just coming from colleagues, it can be the end of a career. It can be the end of once it decides, once the sort of group decides that you're on the outs, you're out.

And it's a surreal experience. And I write about it in the book, having been on the other side of that too, where I had been part of canceling a friend. Like I had been part of this before. I had been a happy soldier in the movement. And then when I came onto the other side of that and found myself its target, I was shocked and naive. Obviously, it's super naive.

And in the book, I don't come off as like a heroic figure at all by any means. Mostly as a naive person. But anyways, then I quit the paper eventually and I go out and start reporting the stories that I would have done for the times. And I go around the country, I go to San Francisco, my hometown, and do a deep dive into kind of how it collapsed, how the city with so much money and so many PhDs could collapse. Right. And I just went around looking at what was going on with the movement that called itself progressive, yet the results were not turning out to reflect the rhetoric at all. And really, it's a book. And I think the last four years, so much of this has been a movement between, a battle between progressives and liberals.

And that fissure between them. And so the book kind of like traces that a little bit, I would say. So I want to get into some of the specific places or experiences you had reporting on. But first, one more question about your time at the New York Times. Yeah. You mentioned working with a disinformation expert and he affected your reporting. Could you share that story with our listeners? Of course.

So there's a movement that's been happening in basically every mainstream liberal American newsroom, so NBC, CNN, The Times, NPR, liberal to now, you could say left wing in some of these cases. And the movement is to bring in the idea. you have disinformation, often through reporters, sometimes through editors, sometimes through outside consultants. And what is disinformation? Disinformation is anything that is politically inconvenient in the moment. And that sounds like I'm maybe exaggerating or not giving it credit, but genuinely, the COVID lab leak was called not just disinformation, but a conspiracy theory. That's the most famous one. We all kind of know that one now. And that was done by the disinformation reporters and the disinformation consultants within these companies.

They're very closely affiliated with the government. The Biden administration created a disinformation office that was run out of the Department of Homeland Security. So they see it as almost, it's a security situation to control our speech. And I mean, anything interesting was disinfo, right? Like the Hunter Biden laptop was disinfo. thing that this group decided wasn't helpful. The word was disinfo. And so at the times, there was a consultant who specialized in disinfo. And I wanted to do a story about Prager You, the conservative viral video maker. I was a business reporter covering things like that would be a really logical story. And I did a story that wasn't like super flattering to Prager You,

It wasn't crazy critical. It was just like, here's this funny conservative viral video maker that's trolling college campuses. And it's fair and balanced. Yeah, trying my best. And to sort of poke fun at it, but also just explain what it is and, you know, find a balance of entertainment and news and all that. It's a good feature. And I filed it. And suddenly I heard from higher-ups that it needed a, you need to be.

disinformation angle. And I was like, what do you mean a disinformation angle? And they were like, well, you need to explore Prager You as a disinformation node. And I was like, I don't, I still don't understand. This is what was going on for a week or so. I don't get what you mean. If someone's pro life and you're pro-choice, pro-life is not disinformation. It's a different, if it's a different belief, but it's not disinformation. I'm not going to say that Prager-you, is lying just because they're arguing something that you at the New York Times might not agree with. They're not lying. It's not fake. And so eventually I got paired up with the disinformation consultant who was kind of running the movement within the New York Times. And he ran like a influential Slack

channel where reporters would post like, is this disinformation? Oh my gosh. basically anything right wing was, yes, disinformation. Anything making fun of lockdowns was, what do you think? Disinformation. Anyway, so with Prigger U, he basically said you need to add in the Southern Poverty Law Center's assessment of Prigar U. And I went and looked at it, and the Southern Poverty Law Center had a special hate expert.

And the hate expert had said about, Prager You, that the danger of it was that if you watch a lot of Prager You videos on YouTube, you might then later be directed via the YouTube algorithm to content that is more right-wing. And that eventually you'll get to content that's more right-wing and then more right-wing, and then it'll get really bad. That was the argument. And so it puts you on an algorithmic pathway. And so I was like, guys, I tried to push back.

Well, yeah, eventually I give up, right? I'm not, this was like 2019. I wasn't there to get in major fights, and I loved my job. I loved being a features reporter at the New York Times. And I eventually just came. I put it in. I call up a professor at UC Berkeley in like the Center for Hate Studies or whatever, extremism studies.

So I know it's going to give me the quote I need, something basically like, Prager, you might not be exactly disinformation falsehoods, but it's on the road to there. And it just, I did it. I got on the front page like hunky dory. But it felt dirty to me doing that. And it felt dirty to be part of a machine that was smearing in such a sort of bizarre way. Because disinformation and calling something disinformation, the information, the reason why that word and that movement became so important is because the next step is to say it should be deplatformed. Because after something is disinformation, if it's a lie, if it's spreading a lie in a sort of almost virus, like illness way, then it shouldn't be on YouTube. It shouldn't be Googled.

It shouldn't be on Twitter. And so this movement, this thing that I thought was sort of, Yeah, it just really shook me after doing that. And I didn't quit from it. I just noted how weird it was and then continued on with my life. And as the years went by and it was more and more of these kind of strange demands, I just realized this isn't going to work. I can't be part of doing a thing that I feel is dishonest.

As much as I'm a careerist, as much as I want prestige, as much as I want to get on the front page. And I think there is a movement now within the Times to push back against this, right? To say enough and we need to rebalance. Well, that is good to hear. Yeah, and it's great. And I'm, like, rooting for that. Like, the Times is a big place.

The faction that took over and that took over so many newsrooms is a small faction. So most reporters of these places, like even at NPR, most of the. reporters are great reporters who just want to do a good job and tell stories. And they're not whack-a-doodle ideologs. These places, it's, I mean, similar at universities. These places have just been like cowed by a really sophisticated, very funny faction. So you did eventually get to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. And I have to admit, I was not there myself. I followed it on Twitter, on, you know, the news like many other people. But you got to experience it. And, you got to experience it. in person. And of course, for those who have mercifully blacked out, 2020, that is when a group of

activists took over a neighborhood in Seattle in the summer of 2020 and got the police kicked out of their station. So what did you see there? What I saw there, and I ended up going to a bunch of cities where there had been or were currently sort of Antifa strongholds or there'd been riots. And what I saw was, first of all, all the media we were getting at the time was either left-room media. So you had NPR being like, it's a beautiful potluck energy. It's a summer festival. And then you had right-wing media that was like Seattle has fallen. The city is dead. It's the collapse. And it was also hyperbolic on both sides. And so I went on And it was absolutely fascinating.

All of these sort of destroyed areas or taken over areas were fascinating and actually really undercover in a lot of ways during that, during the height of those riots. In Chas, it had been taken over by this Antifa group, which at the time it was very important to deny that Antifa was real. So that alone was like really a naughty thing to. acknowledge as a force and as something that was happening, that it wasn't just like social justice warriors and like people with PhDs, that it was also Antifa, which is a group that says violence should be on the table and it's okay if I'm carrying around guns and you should be a little nervous.

Antifa is, it says that violence is a very useful part of the social movement. And so what they've done is basically closed off the streets, taken over a neighborhood, a gay neighborhood, in fact. And the city of Seattle, the mayor went all in on it. She helped support it, materially. She helped put in barriers for the new borders of the new city, Chaz. She helped put in portopotties. Needless to say, months later, when the lawsuit started coming from the locals, all of her text messages from that era had mysteriously been deleted. Just a crazy mistake. And what I found up there was what you'd expect that this group had declared it, a police-free utopia.

And what was happening instead was little militias building up. I mean, it's hilarious because you're in Seattle, in this gay neighborhood. And you've got like armed militias wandering around door to door. asking basically for payments and saying, all protect your shop. You don't want to get your window smashed? All protect it. You pay me.

And then another group comes by. I mean, really, well, I was there. I watched one of these guys come up and sort of present himself as a pay-to-play armed guard. And it was what you'd imagine from an anarchist-controlled enclave in the middle of Seattle. the thing that I now think about a lot is with the protests on campus and the way that there's very much a comfort with talking about violence and talking about like when you hear there's only one solution intifada revolution and the need to escalate these are calls for violence right these are calls

for maybe even war and it the line between those early, much denied Antifa protesters and the rhetoric of them that said violence is acceptable to what we see now on campuses. It's a direct line. I mean, it's the same, it's the same movement in kind of new outfits. So what do you think happened? Why do you think some leftists are now seemingly open to violence? I think that summer and over the years, that followed, there's been a slow moving of the Overton window, slow, it became less important to deny that Antifa was real. It became okay to say violence is on the table as part of our political project. Yeah, I think there's just been a moving of the Overton window over the last

four years. I mean, and now it's not even so, obviously the campus stuff and the rhetoric now is being covered, but it's also sort of being covered as, yeah, this is happening. It's not shocking in the same way that I think it was a little shocking a few years ago. We've gotten sort of a neared to it. But anyway, so the book covers this, and I'm making it sound quite serious now, but it's, a lot of it is ridiculous and very funny and very absurd. And there's just been a lot of low-hanging fruit in some of the excess and silliness over the last few years because very few people want to write about it. I mean, you have the conservative press who wants to write about it and just call it bad. And then you have the liberal press that just wants to call it

good. So what were some of the things that struck you as silliest in the course of reporting for this book? Oh, God. My favorites. The anti-racist movement. The anti-racist movement had for years been very serious movement. I mean, the modern anti-racist movement, let's say in the last 20 years, 30 years, it had been about changing laws and organizing people to make tangible changes in people's lives. And more recently, there was a shift in that movement towards a therapeutic movement. model of anti-racism, where it's actually not about changing laws or making people's lives

necessarily better. It's about working on your internal whiteness and the problems of your internal whiteness. And what that looks like is a bunch of white women over the last four years getting together and trying to sort of therapy out their whiteness. And so I went to a couple of these sessions. I went to six days of these sessions and tried to therapy out my whiteness. It's so psychological. I mean, you end up feeling crazy. Like I couldn't help. How do you therapy out your whiteness? It's really hard. It involves a lot of tapping your skin and humming and rocking, rocking yourself. And doing a thing that it turns out white women love doing, which is talking about our perfectionism, our sense of urgency, how we need to let go of these things. And now we just call it

whiteness. Right, because urgency is racist, right? Yes. Well, there's, I have a chapter in the book about the list of white supremacy traits, which I find still just to be the most, to go back and look at it is really shocking. So this is a list of traits that a, of course, white female, anti- anti-racist educator came out with, and these are the traits of whiteness, and they are objectivity, sense of urgency, individualism, worship of the written word. And it was, they were the tools of white supremacy, and applying those to other people, expecting other people to be objective or worship the written word was racist in her telling. I mean, it sounds so racist to even repeat this. This is crazy, right? But in her telling, that was racist. And

As absurd as this sounds, this took off. This became the dominant mode of modern anti-racist thought. You had the Smithsonian Museum make a beautiful illustrated poster of these white supremacy characteristics, objectivity, perfectionism, sense of urgency. And they undergird a lot of what we see the anti-racist movement do now. So you see the anti-racist movement say that the SAT is racist, and we can't have that. And like a timed test, sense of urgency. That's a white trade. Like these are crazy ideas, but this is genuinely the mainstream anti-racist thinking. So that was really fun to write about it and fun to take the class.

And I think reading it is like, is alarming because. It's really psychological, the whole experience. Yeah, I admire your ability to endure six days of a class like that for reporting. So last question, you mentioned earlier in the interview that you are originally from San Francisco, which full disclosure, I grew up in a suburb of San Francisco for a month. Yeah. Oh, cool. Yeah, love the area.

But as you mentioned, it's gone downhill. Things have changed. And you mentioned that you're one out of, I think you said one out of, every 20 residents left San Francisco County during the pandemic. So what's going on in this poor city? San Francisco is the perfect city to write about when you're talking about progressives versus liberals because that's ground zero. There's no one else to blame.

You can't point to the conservative and say, oh my gosh, it's this mega, it's this mega conservative who's ruining the city. All the failures of San Francisco can only be blamed on policies that progressives endorse because they're the only people running the city. It's a unified front. And I basically, over my life, came to see that many of the policies weren't making sense in real life there. So the drug legalization, I mean, although drugs aren't technically legal in San Francisco, they are legal in San Francisco. And you're just walking over people dying on the sidewalk.

And that's a normal part of living there. And you're the schools. Like San Francisco found out, they discovered that for eighth grade algebra, it wasn't the racial mix they wanted were testing into the advanced algebra class. It was too many Asians, not enough black kids. And so they decided that the solution,

instead of saying let's improve math education for fifth graders and sixth graders, try to get more kids able to test into advanced algebra, the solution was to ban eighth grade algebra across the board. So you just had these really absurd things happening, the corruption in the homeless funding. I mean, the amount of money spent on homelessness services versus what you see, which is just homelessness rising,

just more tense cities. I mean, it doesn't make sense. And so what I write about is, first of all, those absurdities and what happened and how there's no one else to blame. And then about the reform movement that happened. So you had a kind of uprising of the moderate liberals in San Francisco, which it's hard to believe, but there's a big group of normal people who just want good public schools and basic public safety. And it was started by the Asian parents who the school board, when the Asian parents were saying, we want eighth grade algebra back, we want the schools reopened, the school board was caught on hot mic, various members of it, talking about how the Asian parents were white supremacists.

And there's this long idea about how Asians are like white adjacent and the... Totally makes sense. Not weird at all. Not weird at all, right? Totally makes sense. Well, the Asian parents of San Francisco got really mad about this. And they basically galvanized the city, organized. I mean, you would go to, you would go to the farmer's market and they'd be there with clipboards, collecting signatures. And this group of parents galvanized the city got the city to recall half the school board. Then also got the city paring up, I mean, grouping up with a larger movement then to recall the district attorney. this is a place that San Francisco hadn't had like recalls really before, at least not in

40 years or something. It's a monoculture politically. And yet all of a sudden it wasn't. And yeah, the district attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled. And Chesa for background had said that we shouldn't arrest drug dealers because, let alone drug users or petty thieves or whatever, but drug dealers shouldn't even be arrested because because they're also victims and they have families to support. And like, this was the level of criminal justice in the city.

So the moderates really stood up and said, we're taking it back. And that was a very fun thing to write about. And yeah, I think the story of San Francisco is a kind of perfect encapsulation of the progressive versus the liberal fight. Well, nice to end on a note of hope. Yeah, I felt hope after, I felt sort of, I mean, it was to see a district attorney who doesn't talk like that is, maybe there can be reform within some of these spaces and some of the silliness. As a writer, I want more of the silliness, but as a citizen of California, I am rooting for less silliness, maybe.

Exactly. Well, thank you so much for joining me. Again, if you want to hear more of these stories, check out Nellie's book, a morning after the revolution dispatches from the wrong side of history. Nellie, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me on. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode.

Thanks so much for joining us on this Monday. If you haven't had the chance, make sure that you check out our evening show. It's right here in this same podcast feed where we bring you the top news of today. And be sure to hit that subscribe buttons you never miss out on new shows from the Daily Signal podcast. Thanks again for being with us today.

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