Nellie Bowles: ‘The antiracist movement argues for quite racist things’
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We’re 20 minutes into our interview when Nellie Bowles distils her argument down to a single sentence. “The American Left would like it to be that unless you believe in every single tenet of the philosophy of the day, you’re a fascist.” In her book-lined LA study, the award-winning former New York Times reporter and one-time Left-wing media darling leans back in her chair, momentarily mute with outrage. “And I reject that! I’m not going to accept their bizarre labelling system. It’s absurd!”
Bowles takes a breath. When she starts talking again her tone is back to being even and lightly amused. “One thing that I think is funny about our modern discourse,” she goes on, “and this is on the Left and Right: you’re not allowed to change your mind about things.” She cites drug legalisation as one example: “I was so pro-legalisation, but then you start to see things in the world, you learn things and you think: ‘I might have been wrong about this or that.’ And it’s not like I need to disavow me at 25. It’s just that now that I’m 36, I’m seeing that certain things aren’t a good idea.”
I’m pretty sure there’s a term for that: life experience? Although in a recent review of Bowles’ new book, Morning After The Revolution: Dispatches From The Wrong Side of History – a book in which she chronicles that arc – The Washington Post preferred to liken the author’s political awakening to geriatric decline: “If Leftism is a hazard of adolescence, conservatism is all too often an unfortunate symptom of ageing, not unlike senility.”
“Not that I’d even identify as a conservative,” Bowles protests, once we’ve both stopped laughing at the quote – one of a few zingers her collection of biographical essays has predictably received from the Left-leaning media. “I’m just…” she searches for the word. “Maybe softer.”
On Zoom, the San Francisco-born writer certainly looks softer than the severe portraits of her in heavy-rimmed spectacles I found online. Luminous-skinned and full-mouthed, dressed in denim dungarees and a white T-shirt, she seems too wholesome to be a political provocateur. “But progressives want to say that anyone who is not the furthest to the Left isn’t with them,” she goes on. “They can’t allow there to be a moderate, middle, messy faction.”
Back in 2019, Bowles was still “on the right side of history”. As a self-described “card-carrying lesbian” and “Hillary voter” she had the dream job, writing the “right” kind of stories for The New York Times. One big hit was a scathing 2018 interview with Jordan Peterson, and in 2020 she was one of a group of journalists awarded the prestigious Robert F Kennedy Journalism Award for an investigation into online child abuse.
But when, that same year, in the shadow of the pandemic and the killing of George Floyd, “American politics went berserk”, Bowles watched the liberal intelligentsia, in particular, “become wild”, as she writes in the book, “wild with rage and optimism”. That’s when she started to question the increasingly zealous aims and methods of her clan – and whether this “revolution” was actually helping.
Ask the writer to pinpoint the exact moment her once beloved liberals lost their way, jumped the shark, veered off into a collective psychosis, and she “finds it hard”, she admits. And it’s not just that it’s 8am in the morning in LA, where Bowles lives with her wife of three-years, Bari Weiss (a writer and co-founder of the LA-based multimedia company Free Press). And it’s not brain fog (she tips the camera down to show me that she’s seven-months pregnant with her second child). No, it’s because for Bowles, there was more of a slow dawning over two years – 2020 and 2021 – than an epiphany. A dawning she documents in hilarious detail in Morning After The Revolution.
First, there were the acronyms, she writes. The ones that “dropped and then had to be understood quickly or else”. The ones that started simple enough – by adding the letter X “to gender-neutral words to indicate extra gender-neutralness, extra pro-trans” – but then “homophobia, biphobia, interphobia and transphobia” became “IDAHOBIT”, and a still more baffling newcomer arrived on the scene: “2SLGBTQQIA+”.
At various points over that same period, she recounts how “fellow reporters at major news organisations told me roads and birds are racist. Voting is racist. Exercise is super racist. Worrying about plastics in the water is transphobic.” Because no consumer brand worth its progressive salt felt it could stay out of this particular “revolution”, “the Muppet Show got a warning label and the sexy M&M was butched up a bit. Some Dr Seuss books were banned and the Jane Austen House Museum added details about her family’s role in the slave trade.”
It’s hard to ignore this frenzied pile-up of wrong-righting, particularly when you’re a journalist charting sociological change. And impossible to ignore the traction of movements like #defundthepolice and Antifa – a decentralized network of far-Left militants – who had started occupying “autonomous zones” across the country. Yet this, Bowles writes in the book, is precisely what her New York Times colleagues told her to do.
By this point, Bowles’ bosses had already clocked her “as a problem”. And it didn’t help that she had just started dating Weiss, a well-known “dissident” who was once a star opinion writer at The New York Times, but claimed she’d been bullied out by colleagues who disagreed with her (Right of woke) views. The paper sent in their “in-house Narrative Enforcers” (officially called “Disinformation Experts”) to deal with Bowles and explain how to “incorporate disinformation analysis” into a piece she was writing – in other words: toe the party line.
I tell her how astonished I was by this part of the book and Bowles laughs. “I know! It’s so crazy. At the time, I honestly didn’t know what to say. I was baffled. Obviously, there is disinformation in the world. Obviously, there’s fake news in the world, and I get why the arrival of Trump on the scene with his rhetoric would make people worried and why the disinformation topic became a major concern, but…” But this was about them setting their wayward employee back on track? Bowles shrugs. “Like a lot of things, once that group had power, they went a little crazy with it. They couldn’t stop themselves with the tools they had.”
Despite all this, when Bowles effected a sort of pre-emptive self-cancellation and quit in 2021, she hadn’t expected to get such a strong reaction from her former colleagues. “I was really shocked by it,” she tells me, eyes wide. “Shocked by the purity tests. Shocked by how doctrinaire everyone expected me to be. People I had thought were my friends, normal seeming people, were suddenly posting very cruel things about me online. And that had been my whole world – I didn’t have another one.”
Three years on, she’s grateful this happened for two reasons. First, it meant she didn’t have to feel so nervous about the publication of Morning After The Revolution. “Because all the people who are going to yell at me have mostly already yelled at me.” (And it’s interesting, we note, that The New York Times has not yet reviewed the book.) Second, because “leaving the prestige world of The New York Times really freed me in terms of mental space, and how much I cared about what those people thought.”
It helps, she adds with a chuckle, “that most of them live in about three-square miles of Brooklyn, so it’s not like I’m going to run into them at my local farmer’s market in LA. Also, it’s such a tiny, actually irrelevant group.” She pauses, backtracks. “I mean, they’re relevant in so far as their politics are the politics of mainstream American media. But they don’t align with broader American culture – with a lot of folks’ thinking. That’s why there’s enormous interest in something like The Free Press,” she says, referencing the company she and Weiss co-founded in 2022. Born out of a small blog called Common Sense, it has gone from strength to strength and is now a news site with over 680,000 subscribers, at least 97,000 of which are paying. Last year The Free Press signed a two-year deal with Netflix to create non-fiction works from its content. “People want free-thinking, nuance-driven writing that’s not Left-wing or Right-wing. Because so many people are in between.”
There really is a correction happening, she agrees. “Actually, there are probably two types of correction happening in the US. One – let’s call it a moderate reformation – where sensible liberals got together and said ‘enough’, ‘we’re done.’ And the other among the youth. I’m sensing that it’s becoming a little bit cool to push back against some of the more doctrinaire points of this movement, so I think there is a rebel faction of young people who are pushing back too.” The writer wants to be clear about one thing, however: “The revolution has won. Because what they did has been woven into American mainstream institutions.”
She’ll admit too that: “It’s not that that group of jerks [at the NYT] don’t have power. Of course they have power. But they’re not the be all and end all.”
Bowles grew up in San Francisco, where her family has been based for six generations. Her Greek Orthodox mother worked as a stockbroker (but is now a garden writer); her episcopalian father is an entrepreneur (who recently sold an alertness testing company), and because they split up when she was young, she has lots of siblings, “steps and halves – seven of us altogether”. She describes herself as “a prestige-minded American kid who was always going to do good” and align herself with groups and institutions like the NYT. “In fact, it didn’t even occur to me that there were other possibilities outside of it.”
Today, her outlook is very different. She’s converted to Judaism – a decision her family were “super supportive” about – in part because “I was living a Jewish life alongside Bari and living in a Jewish community,” partly because “raising our daughter within the Jewish world and sending her to a Jewish preschool” is something she loves. But also, because – I suggest and she acknowledges – that kind of moral scaffold may have helped to ground her after the mad period described in the book.
As a writer – and the author of the weekly Free Press column, TGIF –“limiting yourself to so few topics and constantly censoring parts of your mind” seems so “self-defeating”, she says, circling back to our earlier conversation. “Although I will say that The New York Times is obviously a huge institution, and there are a lot of amazing reporters, so it’s not like all of them are soldiers of this movement. But somehow these small factions, not just there but in a lot of places, manage to have an outsized impact.”
What’s happening in schools, where the “toxic trends of whiteness” are being taught to young children, is one example, and in the book Bowles writes about a four-day “toxic whiteness” workshop she attended in 2021, where she listens to various white people self-flagellate about how their very existence “perpetuates whiteness” and how shameful that is.
“Because I really don’t think it’s healthy to tell young kids that they are white, and that their whiteness has enormous [negative] meaning,” she says, citing the “white traits” that controversial critical race theorists such as Robin DiAngelo insist exist. “It’s also just so reductive, this reification of race, and I think a lot of it is very counterproductive.” Neither is it helpful “for people to be constantly reminded of their supposed ancestors’ crimes,” she points out.
Another example of small factions having an outsized impact is what is happening at her alma mater, Columbia University, right now, and campuses across the US. “It’s the soldiers of a movement who are extremely effective at public shaming and dominating the conversation,” she says. “But it’s not the majority of people at these places.”
There were always protests when Bowles was at Columbia, she says. “And I think it’s great when college kids protest. It’s awesome – in general. But these protests? They’ve obviously got out of control. You’ve had the kids trapping janitors in the buildings and it has clearly escalated beyond a simple college demonstration.” So, at this point, what should be happening? “At this point you say, ‘this crosses the line and we’re going to call the police in on this situation.’ I honestly don’t think that’s crazy! And it’s especially clear cut at public universities, like, say, UCLA. Because when you have students taking over swathes of campus and saying: ‘Jewish students can’t walk down this path anymore’ – well, that’s illegal. So you have to call the cops.”
I tell her how Rishi Sunak called the leaders of Britain’s top universities to Downing Street earlier this month and insisted a “zero tolerance” approach to anti-Semitism be taken on campus. Has Biden been clear enough on this? Bowles pulls a face. “No. I don’t think so. And it’s beyond what we’re seeing at the universities. We’re in a dark moment in that particular story.”
When she asks me whether I’ve seen more anti-Semitism in the US or the UK, I have to be honest and say that although there has obviously been a clear escalation here since Oct 7, I personally noticed a marked rise in America from the start of the pandemic.
“It’s very worrisome watching the rhetoric,” she murmurs. And it didn’t come out of nowhere. Bowles is sure of this because she didn’t ignore Antifa, even when her NYT colleagues told her it was “a nothing burger”, “a non-story”. And when she flew to Seattle where the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone group had occupied six blocks of the city, she found young men with guns on their laps guarding their “autonomous zone”; she saw looting and anarchy.
“What Antifa brought in those years was the idea that violence could be part of the conversation. That a little bit of tension in the air and the possibility of violence was a good thing for protests. Now, we’re seeing that attitude, which was so fringe, normalised in a way that is so dangerous. In these protests on college campuses, we’re seeing the threat of violence woven in proudly. Now, I think it’s fine to call for war if you want to call for war, but let’s be clear: if you’re doing this, you’re not anti-war, you’re pro-war.”
Weiss has made similar points. They also agree on gun control. “And the Left/Right dynamics are particularly worrying right now,” she tells me, “with both sides forming an alliance.” Because it would necessitate enormous amounts of policing, “the American Left has now become anti-gun-control in much the same way as the American Right. So we’ve got different American political figures saying ‘we’re actually stepping away from gun control’.” Yet she and Weiss don’t agree on everything, she says. “We argue. We argue! But it’s not necessarily that she’s to my Left and I’m to her Right – it’s more about how important this or that is.”
She tries to think about what their last argument was about, then splutters with laughter. “Honestly, most of our conversations are now about our kid.” So no arguments about Biden and Trump? “No,” she scoffs, although she does find it unfathomable, she adds in an aside, that “they’re both so old! Can’t we have someone young and strapping, like Macron?”
This jogs her memory about one “disagreement” rather than an argument she and her wife had over Robert F Kennedy. “For a while I was really RFK curious,” she admits. “I loved his environmentalism and his focus on health. I even bought a bunch of books about paediatric vaccines and emailed our paediatrician saying: ‘I think we might want to stagger our vaccine schedule.’ Then Bari said: ‘that’s not a thing that’s happening in our home.’ And I realised that I needed to take a de-RFK pill,” she adds through a burst of laughter. “Obviously we’re getting all the vaccines.”
Bowles needs to join another Zoom call, but before she goes the writer seems to want to stress that she really isn’t the fascist turncoat some Left-leaning reviewers would like to depict her as. “I honestly constantly think about how many people worked so hard so that we can have freedom,” she tells me. “As a gay person, that’s only been in the last 30, 20, or even 10 years. And as a woman I never take my rights for granted.”
Three days after our interview The New York Times finally reviews the book – and it’s a humdinger. Maybe one for Bowles and Weiss’s loo wall?
Morning After The Revolution: Dispatches From The Wrong Side of History by Nellie Bowles, is published on May 23 by Swift Press.
