Nellie Bowles, a journalist at The New Press, is a committed Progressive.
Back in 2017, she achieved her top career goal when she was hired as a reporter at The New York Times. And, in the "Age of Trump," she was pleased that the Times was the "heart of the resistance."
Bowles felt at home with the "new guard" at the paper "that was so sure everyone was good, except, of course, conservatives, who were very very bad and whose politics only come from hate."
But during COVID-19, when the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement blossomed on the political landscape, Bowles began to sense a significant change on the left.
The "New Progressives," as she calls them, were leading a political movement that was going mad.
Old line liberals, she realized, were out because they were perceived as "wishy-washy compromisers, the hemmers and hawers."
They were being washed away by the New Progressives whose politics were "built on the idea that people are profoundly good, denatured only by capitalism, by colonialism and whiteness and heteronormativity."
When Bowles, an honest liberal, began to question some aspects of New Progressive orthodoxy, she was taken aback when colleagues at the Times told her she was moving toward the "wrong side of history."
For daring to be out of step, Bowles began to receive mean Tweets, was ignored by other reporters, and was "clocked" as a problem by the disinformation experts, "the main group of in-house narrative enforces at The New York Times."
To determine if the New Progressives were helping people, Bowles began to investigate on her own. The result is her new book "Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History."
The bulk of the work, written after she quit the Times in 2021, examines various aspects of a political movement she believes has gone radically astray.
To understand the bizarre ideology the New Progressives have embraced, Bowles writes:
"I traveled to Portland’s late night Antifa rallies and spent days in the no-cop autonomous zones of Seattle and Minneapolis, looking for Utopia.
"I looked at the attempts to atone for our collective sins, visiting homeless encampments run by BMW — driving socialists, and taking courses led by America’s leading anti-racist educators, who happen to mostly be middle-aged white women.
"When the revolution made a turn from race to gender, I followed it, exploring why so many children were being born into the wrong bodies, the genders suddenly so far from their flesh."
Bowles’ investigations disclosed in her book, capture the furies and excesses of far-left movements "that went from a sideshow to the very center of American life."
Here is a rundown of a few of her findings:
During the 2020 "Summer of Rage," Bowles witnessed shops being "torched for racial justice but also because it just feels good to burn something down sometimes."
While protesters were rioting and looting, she notes, "mainstream media toyed with the idea that righteous vigilantes were very, very good."
NPR, for example, had guests who promoted the need for riots and looting.
Nicole Hannah Jones, of "The 1619 Project" fame, told CBS News that "destroying property that can be replaced is not violence. To use the same language to describe those two things is not moral."
Few of the New Progressives, Bowles concluded, couldn’t care less if small businesses were destroyed. A Jacobin magazine writer argued "we shouldn’t fetishize mom and pops. They offer low wages, skimpy benefits, and inferior labor protections."
Then there is the police issue.
Bowles’ reporting on it is extraordinary reading.
One pamphlet Bowles picked up in Seattle, titled "I want to kill cops until I’m dead," included this appalling passage: "Police officers must be killed, the families of police officers must be killed, the children of police officers must be killed, the friends and supporters of police officers must be killed. . . .
"We will not address nor entertain questions or morality here, whether murder is right or wrong, whether or not the children of police officers deserve to die, whether we will be able to live with ourselves after the rivers of blood."
A group of so-called peaceful protesters listed in a brochure easy ways to injure police.
"First: our favorite simple time device to burn a cop car is an ethanol jelly stove. Then: removing a small amount of air from tires in the hope of enabling a car crash. And last: partly severing a vehicle’s brake cables."
As for defunding and abolishing the police, Bowles writes, it "went from a fringe wild idea to the very center of American Progressive politics, and it went there fast."
The ACLU bellowed "Divest from police and reinvest in the Black and Brown communities they unjustly target."
And then there was this ludicrous publication, "Defunding the police: What it means and why Planned Parenthood supports it."
I could go on and on if it were not for word limitations.
However, rest assured, Bowles’ other dispatches on the ideological excesses of the New Progressives will be painful, comical, and insightful reading.
George J. Marlin, a former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is the author of "The American Catholic Voter: Two Hundred Years of Political Impact," and "Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy." Read George J. Marlin's Reports — More Here.
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