Review of Nellie Bowles' book "Morning After the Revolution"
I’ve said that this book is like watching a car wreck – no matter how shocking and surprising, you can’t look away.
My understanding is that each chapter is a story that Nellie investigated and wrote in 2020 for The New York Times that they didn’t print.
I’m glad she published the stories because without this accounting, we will forget. It’s amazing how fast we forget and move on. I remember how fast we forgot the shocking and surprising four years that started with the shooting of Kent State students by the National Guard (1970) and the resignation of President Nixon (1974). The music and dancing changed immediately, from free style dancing in Woodstock mosh pits to choreographed moves under Disco mirror balls.
Here are some of the unkown stories Nellie memorializes:
Who knew you could identify Antifa members at a 2021 protest because they carried automatic weapons?
Who knew the families and communities whose children represented the Black lives that mattered, never benefitted from the money raised by BLM?
Who knew the attendees of white supremacy workshops were mainly white women, who didn’t remember they didn’t get the vote until after black men?
Who knew the “A” in LGBTQA+ are people who abstain from sex until they find someone they love and that makes them queer?
The last three chapters are the hardest to read, probably because we still haven’t moved passed the consequences of transgender treatments for children, the reversal of women’s “liberation”, the dysfunction San Francisco portends for cities adopting similar policies around the country, and the joy of canceling people on social media (behavior which sounds remarkably similar to high school maturity, at scale, as adults.)
Nellie’s stories don’t try to make sense of the chaos. They are a reporter’s journal of “the rest of the story” – the part not told by “mainstream” media news. It would be complemented by a follow up from Bari Weiss that is the Opinion piece, an analysis that makes sense of all this information by answering the question “why did it happen?” I look forward to that.