05-24-24 Interview - Nellie Bowles from The Free Press on Her New Book and More

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
My guest today is someone that Ifan girl over every single Friday when her
column TGIF comes out in the FreePress. It is wildly entertaining, super
sarcastic, but also extremely informative ina very you just heard it at a
cocktail party kind of way. Butit's even better now because she's got a
book out called Morning After the RevolutionDispatches from the Wrong Side of History.

(00:23):
Nelly Bowls, Welcome to the show. It is such a pleasure to be
here. And I love that descriptionof TGIF. It is a fill party
level knowledge because often that's my levelof knowledge of the various news topics of
the day. Is like it's likebasically a couple lines of from a cocktail
party. Well, but you knowwhat, really, that's what most people
want, isn't it. Nobody wants. Nobody wants a nine thousand word column

(00:44):
anymore. Okay, nobody wants like, oh, let me turn to page
a forty seven to continue reading.Nobody wants to do that anymore. So
I want to ask you a littlebit to give us my audience, a
little bit of background about you,because I think that the book almost kind
of gets to the end first ina weird way of your story. And
I don't want to put words inyour mouth, but how would you describe
your career? First of all,because you've been in journalism for a long

(01:06):
time, And then we'll kind oftouch on how you've sort of it evolved
over the last few years into whereyou are now at the Free Press,
where I really think you guys arekind of undefinable in a really cool way.
Yeah, I started. I startedthe San Francisco Chronicle as a local
reporter and then made my way upeventually to the Times. And I was

(01:27):
a successful young reporter at the NewYork Times. I was doing really well.
I was getting on the front pageregularly. I was doing investigations and
big features. And as twenty twentyand twenty twenty one came, my role
became harder because my curiosity had alwaysbeen rewarded and mostly I was curious about

(01:52):
the rise of Trump in the variousfactions and tech world silliness. But as
twenty twenty and twenty from one came, there were a lot of news stories
that were happening that weren't maybe necessarilygood for the Democratic Party, but they
were really interesting anyway, and Iwanted to cover them, and that became
a real challenge within the paper,and it became a real challenge within basically

(02:14):
all mainstream American institutions. And soI went very quickly from being a happy,
young progressive going along with the flowto feeling really outside the movement and
being told I was outside the movementfor my curiosity because I wanted to cover,
let's say, what was going onin Seattle with Antifa BLM group taking

(02:38):
over a neighborhood, or or Iwanted to cover some of the silliness in
the modern anti racism movement. OrI wanted all of these things. So
eventually I left The Times. Iwrote this book, which is more or
less the reporting and features that Iwould have done as a reporter at the
Times but couldn't. And my wifeand I started this new media company,

(03:01):
the Free Press, which I sortof claimed that we both started together,
but she really started. She's verywise, she's amazing. And then once
I saw that it was taking offand it wasn't just a little newsletter,
then I joined in and then Okay, let's do it. This thing we're
doing together. Then I was like, then we started it together, and

(03:21):
I was doing like business managing fora little while, I set up our
first year accounting completely wrong, likeI screwed up so much basic stuff.
But I set up our website whatever. It was a mess. But now
it's turned into a little media companyand we publish a lot of different stories
and we try to have the freedomof the new world, the freedom of

(03:44):
this sort of sub stack chaos ofnew blogs and and and chaos of new
curious media companies with the values andthe standards of the old world. Basically
the fact check. What you're doingis called and it is. It is
an industry that has been in declinebecause of ideological capture. And as a

(04:06):
right wing talk show host, Italk about this stuff all the time.
And that's going to get me toyour book, which, by the way,
I picked up and could not putdown. I read the first three
quarters of it in like two hoursbecause it was so good. But there
have been many times in my talkradio career when I've said, damn,
I would have liked to have beena fly on the wall for that conversation.

(04:26):
That's what this book is. Thisis like the Keys to the Kingdom.
This tells people on the right wholook at some of the stuff that
happens on the left and go Ican't even follow that logic, like this,
this is it, this is thebook, this is what you gotta
read. It tells you it's nuts. I wanted to write about the movement,
first of all, from within themovement, in part because I was

(04:47):
within the movement. And so whenI write about cancel culture, I write
about canceling a friend. And Iwanted to write about it without flattening it.
I'm just letting my dog out nowshould be a problem. I wanted
to write about the movement without flatteningit, and to show the complexity and

(05:08):
to not just say, oh,look at this silly thing, and now
I'm on the other side because Ifeel complicated about it, and so throughout
I try to both describe it asnow a little bit of an outspider,
and describe it and describe the humorand let it breathe as a kind of

(05:29):
funny movement at times, like it'sfunny that San Francisco banned eighth grade algebra
and what came out of that,Like that, that's kind of funny.
So I try to describe that andtry to offer what it feels like to
be within it, and why whyit won in many ways, why progressivism

(05:49):
has beaten liberalism in so many situations, why why it struck such a chord.
Because I think it's easy to justsay this is bad or this is
dumb, but you have I haveto wrestle with why it was successful.
Well for me, one of thethings that came across in this book is
that far more than I have experienced, and I'm not saying it doesn't happen

(06:10):
on the right, but far morethan I've experienced, that the politics of
progressivism it almost becomes like and Ishudder to use this because it's going to
be inflammatory, but it seems likethe same place in a person's life that
Islam has in a country that isrun by Muslims. Because it's not just
politics, it's your lifestyle, yoursocial circle, the things that you believe

(06:33):
are in lockstep with everyone else thatyou know. So if you've come off
that way of thinking, you risklosing everything. It's not just oh,
I've changed my mind on this issue, it's I'm now going to be ostracized
from the people that I care about. It's very powerful. I think you're
right that there is a little bitof a religious impulse within it, and

(06:55):
it's not it makes sense that thiswould rise at a time when organized religion
has fallen. So there's definitely that, and there's a desire for purity within
it. Like if we talk aboutlet's say, cancel culture, Cancel culture
was a movement within progressivism. Itwas never about canceling a trumper. There

(07:15):
were no trumpers in those spaces.It was never about canceling someone from the
outside because there wasn't like some areal, actual person with different beliefs nearby.
If you're talking about academia journalism,it was about purifying the movement and
saying any dissident voice within journalism,within academia, any voice that's not with
the movement one hundred and ten percent, we need to find them and we

(07:40):
need to out them. They're dangerous. And it's a movement obsessed with purity.
And that's what makes it ultimately,I think, in part successful,
because it's it's very there's a lotof message discipline, and in part then
antithetic to a lot of American liberalvalues, which are quite different. American

(08:07):
liberalism is based in the idea ofdifferent people getting together and talking and debating
and compromising. Well, and itwas going to ask who are the deciders
because it seems the standard is alwaysshifting, right, it's always on shifting
sands. But my question is iswho gets to be the one that says,
oh, no, no, thisis good, this is bad.
You were oppressed, you are notlike, who's the decider in that situation.

(08:31):
There's not like a grand boss behindthe curtains. There's not a booba.
It's more of a communal decision.I think over the years it's been
hammered out who are the like there'sa concept called the progressive stack. Oh,
and the progressive stack is the ideathat the most privileged person who wants

(08:54):
to contribute to the conversation should contributelast, the least privileged person should contribute
first. And you kind of haveto figure out in the middle who's where.
You know, does the gay persongo before the Asian person who's more
privileged, Well, if he's disabledthen or you know or gay. Yeah,
not all disabilities are visible. Soit's a very it's a very delicate

(09:18):
dance, I would say, Butbut people do try to do the dance
and figure out who's in front andwho's behind. But no, there's not
like a Grand Pooba who's deciding allthis. It's a movement. It's a
grassroots movement. Nelly, I,for years as a right leading person on
the radio, have called the progressiveyou know stack that you were just talking
about the victim ideology pyramid, andit's everybody's trying to race to the top

(09:43):
or bottom, depending on your perspectiveof that pyramid by having one or more
afflictions. Right, if you're ifyou're male, you better be gay at
a minimum, okay, And youneed to be disabled, but not from
military service. So there's like allthese caveats that have to be And I've
made fun of this for years,and to hear you talk about it as
something that actually exists as a pointof seriousness where people are really genuinely so

(10:09):
concerned about hurting someone else's feelings thatthis is how they live, it sounds
exhausting. It is. Part ofit comes from a place of reality.
So there is a reality that whenyou're in a room around a table,
men often will talk over women,and so acknowledging that and working around that

(10:31):
is something that doesn't to me strikeme as crazy. And I think a
lot of this comes from kernels oftruth right right colonels where you're like,
yeah, men do sometimes talk overwomen in a boardroom, and that isn't
right, And then it's taken toa place of silliness and absurdity. But
there is there's a kernel there thatmakes sense. It's like there's a kernel

(10:56):
in the idea that, Okay,the SAT shouldn't be the only thing we
judge college admissions by. Okay,yeah, sure of course not. There's
other things about a person that mightmake them academically successful. But then the
movement takes that and says, okay, we need to abolish the SAT.
It's a racist. The whole thingis race. We got scrapping, and

(11:16):
let's say what abolish the police.The liberal response to police being to police
using violence too easily, to policebeing inappropriate, acting racist, doing different
bad things that cops do do.The liberal response is to say, we
should pay cops more, we shouldtrain them more, we should make it

(11:39):
a more appealing job actually to geta higher quality candidate to be a cop.
The progressive response is abolish the police, get rid of the cops altogether,
and that that's it's it's it endsup in an irrational place, but
it starts from a kernel of trueof truth. There feels to be And

(12:03):
I'm not asking you to speak forthe progressive movement. I think you've done
a great job in a rather dispassionateway in this book Nelly spoke Morning after
the Revolution Dispatches from the Wrong Sideof History. I think you do a
great job of really dispassionately kind ofdescribing the scene like you're the fly on
the wall. That's why I usethat analogy, even though you're a player
in this stuff. But for thoseof us on the right, the thing

(12:24):
that we don't understand, and thisis something that I try to understand.
There's so much to your point.It's not about saying, look, we've
got the US Constitution, which hasbeen a pretty dang good document. We
should try to make sure that thiscountry is living up to all of those
ideals. Right. It seems likesome many on the progressive lefter like tear

(12:45):
it down, burn it all down, start over. This has been pretty
dang good, even though we failedin those areas. I think more people
realistically sit in the center somewhere wherethey're like, yeah, we really haven't
done the best job making sure thateverybody has that same standard. But it's
been pretty good. You know,I think that's where most people live,

(13:05):
don't you. Most Americans are Yeah, of course completely. Most Americans are
reasonable, moderate, or have amix of political beliefs from both sides and
kind of belong to whatever the moshimessy middle is. And most Americans are
exhausted more than doctrinaire at this point. Yeah, I completely believe that,

(13:31):
and I think that in a lotof ways. I mean, we can
talk about it on the right too, but on the left, a very
small faction have managed to take overthe conversation. But these ideas are not
wildly popular. They're just very successfullydominated in a lot of these elite spaces.
But it's not mainstream. It's noteven popular within these spaces. If

(13:52):
you ask the average New York Timesreporter, they don't want to be scared
to report on something that's not helpfulto democrats. They don't want to be
having to censor what they see andthink about. That's not your average Times
reporter even it's that a movement withinplaces like The Times, like NPR,
like all of these liberal spaces thatused to be sort of normal liberal and

(14:13):
now are a little crazy liberal.The movement has very successfully scared the majority
into cohesion, into adhering to therules. And they've done that in part
thanks to social media. I thinkTwitter played a huge role in creating this
false sense of discipline, this falseI mean a real sense of discipline,

(14:35):
but a false sense of consensus.Well, we're letting the loudmouths win exactly.
Yeah, and a few activists whobully people into thinking that only the
most left wing position is the appropriateposition. I think it happens on the
right too, where it's like anyonemore and more. Yeah, And it's
like it's like most conservatives don't believein every single play, think of every

(15:00):
Republican. It's absurd. We're humans, we have complicated politics. Well,
Nelly Bowls. You can read hercolumn TGIF the Outstage. Really I heard
that the Free Press was founded asa platform just for TGIF. Like,
that's what. I don't know whoyou're hanging out with, but you know,
hang out with my people. Theytell different stories. And now she's
written a fantastic book. I puta link on the blog to both of

(15:22):
these things, her column and tobuy the book. The book is such
a great read. It is aperfect summer read. It's like political but
light at the same time, soyou don't have to be overwhelmed. But
it's just fantastic, Nelly. Iremain a huge fan and I'm a subscriber,
and you know, I hope youguys continue to just crush it and
continue doing what you're doing at theFree Press. I love it. I

(15:43):
love what the writers that you're bringingin, the coverage that you're doing it
is. It speaks to me andI am definitely to the right of you,
and I appreciate that so much.So thanks for making time for us
today. Andy. I'm so gladyou're a reader and it's so good to
meet you.