#Resistance put good leftist Nellie Bowles out in the scold

Nellie Bowles was a good leftist: she ran the gay-straight alliance at her high school, read The Nation, reported for the New York Times and even proudly joined the cancellation of a white author friend, ahem, ex-friend, caught up in a literary race row.

Now she’s holding up a mirror to the ultra-progressive elite and their excesses, starting with the 2020 summer of “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests.

Her new book, “Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History” dives into her personal and professional awakening, taking a wild ride through the CHAZ autonomous zone in Seattle, Antifa protests, race-reckoning sessions for guilt-stricken white women, and the radical trans movement.

All stuff that was verboten inside the halls of the vaunted Times, where her beat was “tech, culture and power” but where reporting was strictly policed by a scoldy “#Disinformation” Slack channel.

“Some of the #Resistance started to get strange but our job was to ignore all that,” she writes.

But then she fell in love with “dissident” journalist Bari Weiss, a refugee from The Times and the founder of The Free Press, who is now her wife.

“I think [the awakening] would have taken a little longer, if I hadn’t met Bar. But eventually, I think my personality wouldn’t have been able to withstand the constrictions [of my job].”

Now she’s, to quote Vice President Harris, “unburdened by what had been.”

Bowles admits that she still believes in a lot of the causes, but the idealism of “abolish the police” push, for one, “had nothing to do with reality,” she said.

In May 2021, she partook in a four-day course for white women looking to atone for their original sin of not much melanin.

It was called “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness,” and facilitated by white lady Carlin Quinn, featuring a talk from white lady Robin DiAngelo, whose book “White Fragility” became the gospel for anti-racists.

In it, women cried. One with a biracial child worried that “her whiteness will harm her child.”

Much of the antiracism movement became “therapeutic,” Bowles said. “Instead of looking to do something tangible to change lives, everything became an internalized thing you could do in your living room.”

And the revolution, she noted, was also brought to you by your friendly gas behemoth.

“An ‘Emancipation Conversation’ I was invited to was sponsored by Shell,” she wrote.

Much of the book explores how these movements tried to reinvent language, as a means of control.

“There was an obsession with banning words. And you would see lists put out by universities. The phrase trigger warning was added to the list because it had gun implications.”

A Johns Hopkins guide reframed a lesbian as “a non-man attracted to non-men.”

“Basket case” was no bueno at Stanford.

“People who truly believed that if we could just speak with more kindness and care, if we just rework our lexicon a little, maybe the world will be softer,” she said.

Her searing observations don’t exactly jive with the self-serious ethos of the rank and file pronoun police or “folx” who use the word “Latinx.”

“The progressive movement is not self-reflective and it’s not self-aware so it can’t make fun of itself,” Bowles tells me.

Plus, “Everything must be taken seriously. Greta Thunberg must be taken seriously … No really committed social movement likes humor.

“That always sets you outside of it. But the revolution of the last four years doesn’t even like observation. It doesn’t even want to be seen.”

For example, this year’s college campus protesters are wearing masks to keep their faces obscured. Antifa deployed umbrellas and held up skateboards to block cameras in CHAZ.

Unfortunately for those woke soldiers, Bowles was there, watching, in Seattle and in Portland, not to mention the Wi Spa protests in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, asking questions and finding the farce in the fevered execution of their causes.

Bowles, who now writes a Friday column for The Free Press, is simply far too funny to part of the progressive scolds.

“It was a new era,” she writes. “Liberals—those weak, wishy-washy compromisers, the hemmers and hawers—were out. Washing them away was the New Progressive.

“They came with politics built on the idea that people are profoundly good, denatured only by capitalism, by colonialism and whiteness and heteronormativity. It was a heady, beautiful philosophy.”

Instead it created, “a new class system. It’s a new set of manners.”

But one that was out of touch for say, working class Americans or Americans who didn’t run in elite circles.

“It takes a lot of money to talk ‘woke,’ [it takes] resources and time to keep up with proper progressive parlance,” said Bowles.

Yes, it’s absurd, but it is also sinister. “They manage to make it so if you don’t agree with it, or you want to talk about police reform or a bigger topic, you are shamed for it.

“The goal is very tight control of elite American institutions.”

Now, Bowles considers herself “less strident and more open to being wrong.” She doesn’t identify with either party.

“There’s silliness on both sides. Being open-minded and seeing absurdity around you should be legal.”