Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History by Nellie BowlesMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
An interesting look back at when the world went bat-shit crazy for a few years. Bowles has an interesting perspective as a former reporter at the NYT and self-described San Francisco progressive. She was an insider of sorts and as a journalist is able to approach her our journey through this craziness as a reporter would. It makes it a personal story without being overly so: she's covering herself and her journey.
There isn't any thing too deep here: Bowles is not digging into the philosophic or psychological ideas or motivations: she is reporting on them. She is reminding us of what the cadre of media and academic elites said and did at the time. This is important as people forget or smooth out what happened to seem less scary or crazy. Bowles reminds us that people really did say and mean defund the police. There really were people on the progressive left that pushed (and still do push ) racist "antiracist" ideas. And so on through gender, education, COVID polices, housing and homeless, prosecution.
Bowles started out in those camps, but slowly over time, reality pushed back and made her question a lot of what was being said and done. Some might say she's red-pilled or whatever, but she still seems to hold many of the same traditionally progressive views points but in more moderate and centrist ways. It's telling that a move to middle is regarded as something radical.
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