Nellie Bowles Knows Why So Many Progressives Lost Their Minds—She Almost Did, Too

75 snips

May 14, 2024

Nellie Bowles, author and former New York Times reporter, shares her compelling journey from progressive darling to a critical observer of her former beliefs. She discusses the disconnect between media narratives and real-world experiences during protests, and her challenges as an independent journalist tackling sensitive topics. Bowles reflects on the moral dilemmas of cancel culture, the consequences of progressive policies in San Francisco, and the evolving dynamics of political identity. Her new book chronicles this transformation amidst societal upheaval.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

ANECDOTE

Nellie's Early Controversies

Nellie Bowles, initially a rising star at the New York Times, faced criticism for her reporting on topics like MeToo and anti-Semitism.
An editor even called Bari Weiss, Nellie's future wife, a "Nazi" in front of colleagues.

INSIGHT

Media's Shift to Partisanship

Coverage at mainstream liberal publications shifted to explicitly support Joe Biden's reelection.
This became a clear directive, impacting story selection and publication timelines.

ANECDOTE

Antifa's Presence in Protests

Bowles witnessed Antifa's presence in Chaz, Seattle's autonomous zone, and other protests.
This contradicted mainstream media's narrative that downplayed or denied Antifa's involvement.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Nellie Bowles wasn’t always the TGIF queen you know and love at The Free Press.

In fact, Nellie was, for a very long time, deeply embedded in the progressive left.

Before Bari and Nellie met—and fell in love, blah blah blah—in 2019, Nellie was nothing short of a media darling. She had the right ideas, she wrote the right stories, and NYT readers ate it up.

But Nellie is a reporter. And being a reporter—a great one—forced her to confront the gap between what an increasingly zealous left claimed were its aims. . . and the actual realities of their policies.

People don’t usually change their minds. At least not on big-stakes political issues, and not when their jobs are at risk, or their social acceptance is on the line. And people certainly don’t change their minds publicly.

Nellie did. And she chronicles that change in her new book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History.

The book is a collection of stories from her reporting during the years she started to question the narrative. These were stories people told her not to write. People said, Don’t go to Seattle’s autonomous zone; there’s nothing to see there. They said, Don’t report on the consequences of hormone therapy for kids; it’s not important.

But as Nellie writes, “I became a reporter because I didn't trust authority figures. . . . As a reporter, I spent over a decade working to follow that curiosity. It was hard to suddenly turn that off. It was hard to constantly censor what I was seeing, to close one eye and try very hard not to notice anything inconvenient, especially when there was so much to see.”

That curiosity is what got Nellie kicked out of the club. But it gave her a place in a new club, the one that we at The Free Press think that the majority of Americans are actually in.

On today’s episode: What does it mean to walk away from a movement that was once central to your identity? How does it feel to be accused of being “red-pilled” by the people you once called friends? How did the left become so radical and dogmatic? Why do people join mobs? And how did Nellie come back from the brink?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices