Transcript: Nellie Bowles

My interview with the author and Free Press founder

2020 was a turbulent year in American politics, and in the America media. The editor of The New York Times recently conceded that the paper went “too far” during that time and said that it is now working to pull itself back from such “excesses.” My guest on this week’s program was at the paper during that period — and left to report critically on what she calls “the revolution,” both for her new media company and for her new book, which is out this week. 

Nellie Bowles is an American journalist and co-founder of The Free Press. Her new book is Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History. 

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

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TH: You have had a big couple of years. You got married. You gave birth to your daughter. You have another child on the way. You left The New York Times, and went from being a progressive journalist in good standing with the Brooklyn left to something of a heretic. You started a successful media company, The Free Press, with your partner. And now you have published this book. At the same time as all of this was happening, as you put it in Morning After the Revolution, American politics went berserk. So there's a lot to unpack today. But I want to start before all of this, in 2017, when you heard that a heterodox writer was coming to the Times opinion section from The Wall Street Journal. You wrote to her boss to complain. Who was that writer, what were your objections, and what happened next?

NB: I love this question. Also that intro, I love. I'm exhausted just hearing the series of things. I think the next five years are going to be much calmer. That writer is now my wife. At the time I was a very successful young reporter at The New York Times, doing what I had been brought to do there — which is write profiles, send-ups of Silicon Valley characters. I was doing well in that, so I started doing profiles of people in politics. I was loving it. 

There was a writer brought in, who is about my age, a couple years older, to the opinion section. Her name is Bari Weiss and she was brought in to kind of spice things up. I thought, at the time, in 2017, that this was a little silly. I wrote [to her boss] that what we actually needed was geographic diversity. How do you not have an opinion writer based in California? This is silly, fake, Upper West Side dinner party diversity. Yeah, I had a lot of opinions on things. But I was definitely in very good standing with my cohort, and I thought I was right about everything.

TH: Then you went for coffee with Bari and …

NB: A few years later, as time went on, I was reporting and was getting really curious about some of the stuff that was going on, that maybe wasn't something that we were supposed to report on. That wasn't something that we were supposed to be looking at with a critical or comedic eye. And that stuff was basically anything to do with the left, anything to do with progressivism. Anything to do with Democrats, really. But there was just a lot that was really fun to report on there. So I was finding that was happening. 

Then I met Bar. I was in New York visiting one of my editors and I said to him, “I'm going to go have coffee with Bari Weiss this afternoon.” He said, “I don't know, you’ve got to be careful. She's very charming.” And I was like, “I'm going to set her politics straight, don't worry.” We met and we ended up talking, and I just completely fell in love.

So, between that and starting to report on things I wasn't supposed to report on, I very quickly went from being in the good to being completely in the bad. Without really anything changing about my politics, or about my belief system, which was kind of standard liberal lesbian from San Francisco. Likes universal healthcare! Wants affordable housing! And all of these things that I thought mattered to this movement, but actually don't matter and actually aren't the point. 

So anyways, I fell in love and I started reporting on bad stories. Then that led me eventually to be ostracized socially. I started [the book with] being ousted from the lockstep reporters who were in the good, and went on a journey of reporting what I wanted to report on. I ended up leaving the Times and wrote a lot of these essays for this book, doing original reporting and travelling. Using the tool set that I honed at the Times, but reporting on things that I wouldn't have been able to get through the paper there.

TH: The writing here is so vivid and the examples are so well reported out. It really is a time capsule for that time that we were all living through. I want to talk about one of the examples, in terms of what you just brought up about the climate in the media at that time — and about what happened to you in that climate. You write that, “the shift was so fast, it left me dizzy.” One of the turning points came in 2020 with the Capitol Hill ‘autonomous zone’ in Seattle, which you were curious about and wanted to report on. In your telling, this was not received well. You write that one of your colleagues told you he wanted to know when he was older that he'd been on the right side of history. You write in your book that Times colleagues “entered the building on a mission. They weren't there to tell dry news factoids so much as wield the pen for justice.” I think this is still something that's hard for the public to fully understand — how this kind of groupthink plays out in newsrooms. How would you describe the experiences that led you to become disillusioned with and leave the Times to people that are not familiar with the inner workings of the news media? 

NB: I would say that the thing that brought me into journalism was that I have a suspicious personality. I was always bad at teamwork projects. I was bad at sports teams, anything with a team really. I'm a skeptical person. So, I came into journalism because it agreed with that skepticism, with that sense of irony. The shift over the last few years — really, of my generation and younger, but it's a broader shift — is that people are going into journalism because they see it as a tool for advancing their political agenda. To some extent, readers kind of like that. The shift from The New York Times being an ad-based business to being a subscription business is a shift a little bit from a newspaper that tries to appeal more broadly to a newspaper that serves its subscribers. And what do the subscribers want? They want red meat. They want the red meat of “Donald Trump, here's what he did bad today.” They don't want to be paying for a reporter to report on something funny that the Democrats did, or funny that's happening in Seattle, or anything that's happening in San Francisco, for example. So, that real economic movement coupled with that real social movement — and a shift in who became a reporter and why — led to what we saw happen in 2020. Which was really the end of pretending that American journalism was going to be neutral or objective. The end of pretending that was even a goal.

Now, obviously there's no such thing as pure objectivity. We all have biases and it's really interesting to plumb those. Of course. But the goal was to be objective. The goal was to remove your biases, to fight that, to stay skeptical. In 2020, we saw the end of that goal. We saw people basically say, “That's a bad, white supremacist goal.” 

I wanted to go up to Seattle, where a group of progressives, you could call them anarchists — however you want to describe Antifa politically. I think we all have a sense, an image in our mind, of what Antifa is. They took over the gay neighbourhood of Seattle and declared it an autonomous zone. They put up barriers around the neighbourhood so that cars couldn't drive in. They declared it their own city within the city. The mayor of Seattle came out to support it and thought it was kind of fabulous and kind of chic. 

Now, I was seeing these videos coming out at night, these shaky handheld videos with scenes of violence, scenes of people handing around guns, scenes of chaos. None of the reporting that I was seeing was really believable. It was either really right wing reporting, that was like “Leftists Destroy Seattle,” all caps. Or then, really progressive, i.e. mainstream legacy media, reporting. That was like “Seattle, Another Day in Utopia.” Like, “The Organic Garden is Flourishing.” I was like, “There's got to be something in the middle here, between these two things I'm being presented with.” I wanted to go up there. And that was the beginning of real pushback from my colleagues and from basically the culture at The New York Times. Which was: “You're not allowed to go and see what's up there, and you shouldn't want to. And why do you want to? And if you want to, that says something worrisome about you.”

I had found a great angle for a business reporter, which was that a bunch of the local businesses were suing the city. Because, of course, they pay taxes and the city wasn't providing the things they pay the taxes for, including protection. The police weren't allowed into the zone. It was completely shut off. And then after I finally got that story through, my bosses — my actual editor and boss, most of the higher-ups at the Times that I dealt with — were really supportive and excited. 

[The pushback] was a movement of “the people” at the New York Times. After that story came out, they started really coming after me. They tweeted all these nasty things — what you see now over and over. At the time, it was shocking to me. Now I'm familiar with how this plays out, it's like a playbook. But basically, people who I really liked started tweeting nasty things about me and calling me all sorts of names.

I was a debutante when I was a teenager, which is embarrassing. It is what it is. I was 18; it was a family tradition. They started passing around photos of me as a teenager that I'd uploaded to my private Facebook. But of course, I had friended all these people. I thought we were friends. So, I was just getting very embarrassed. I managed to get a few more stories through and I stayed for a couple more months. But basically, it became very clear that if I stayed at the Times and continued trying to write about 2019, 2020, 2021 — the most interesting stories that were happening, which were the revolution — if I tried to keep writing about that in whatever way I could, I was going to be badly smeared at some point. I could just feel it. 

Donald McNeil, this great science reporter, who had maintained skepticism during the Covid time — not skepticism of Covid, but he was curious about things like the lab leak. He was curious about things. He was an open-minded, old school reporter. He had recently gotten really smeared. I watched that happen. I realized that I couldn’t sit around and wait for these people to figure out a way to do this to me. They were already calling me a fascist online. They were calling me a white supremacist. These were people I worked with. I was not going to sit around and wait until they figure out a way to make my life miserable.

TH: It's interesting, I do think it's hard for people sometimes to understand the exact mechanisms, how this plays out. It's not as cut and dry, and conspiratorial, as some might believe, but it's also ... 

NB: Oh no, there's not a planning meeting or something, where they all decide, “Nellie is on the outs today.” No, I don't think that anything like that happened.

TH: But it's very effective the way that it does function. It's extremely effective and it's very insidious. I want to talk, now, about your shift in perspective. I really relate to it. I grew up on the West Coast, in very progressive circles. My parents lived on several communes before I was born, including one in San Francisco.

NB: I love that. You're a commune baby.

TH: I had this deep skepticism growing up, because I saw what these utopian movements looked like up close. I started to get this central nervous system response during 2020. I got it again reading your book. One of the places I saw that most was with the anti-racism movement, which became so New Age, and self-helpish, in the worst possible ways. You write about a woman who epitomizes this trend, Tema Okun. She reminds me of people I grew up around. You wrote that with her seminal paper, white supremacy culture, “the anti-racism movement could shift from a political movement grounded in facts to an emotional and spiritual one.” Tell us about her work.