Welcome to the Quillett Podcast. I'm your host Jonathan Kay, a senior editor at

Quillett. Quillett is where free thought lives. We are an independent

grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

If you'd like to support the podcast, you can do so by going to quilett.com and becoming a paid subscriber.

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articles and early access to Colette social events. And this week you're in for a

treat because my guest isn't just a razor sharp observer of the American

culture wars. She's also wickedly funny in person as well as in print. Her name is Nellie

Bowles, whom you might know from her work covering Silicon Valley at the New York Times, until she quit in 2021 after observing, or perhaps enduring is the better word, her newspapers slide into vicious social justice bullying among young

members of the editorial staff. Since then she's helped start up the popular

LA-based journalism outlet The Free Press with her wife Barry Weiss. And she's also found

time to write a great new book called Morning After the Revolution,

Dispatches from the wrong side of history, which chronicles Progressive America's dissent into extremism and

social panic during her tenure as a journalist, especially following the

2020 murder of George Floyd. Bulls is an unrepentant liberal who still rhapsodizes at great length about the

bohemian wonders of her native San Francisco, but don't worry I edited most of that stuff

out.

The point is that her book isn't one of those one-sided

culture war manifestos from a left-wing blowhard who suddenly becomes a right-wing blowhard.

Her analysis of how BLM, gender activism, harm reduction, and police reform all slid into crankish extremism is informed

by empathy, nuance, and, most importantly for me, good humor.

Along the way we talk about other liberals who got mugged by reality, such as fellow American

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