Nellie Bowles’s Morning After the Revolution exposes how The New York Times and liberal media outlets like NPR, pressured by ideological conformity fears, redefined dissent as "disinformation" starting in 2020—even when conservative voices like PragerU were factually accurate. Her 2024 departure followed accusations of being a "Nazi" for dating Barry Weiss and questioning Tom Cotton’s op-ed framing, while leadership ignored Slack-driven militant factions reshaping editorial norms. Critiquing pediatric gender medicine’s rigid pathologization of childhood fluidity, she parallels it with the gay rights movement’s earlier evolution, now advocating for non-partisan skepticism. At The Free Press, she finds a rare space for honest journalism, proving truth thrives outside partisan censorship. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Nellie Bowles.
I was talking about Nellie's book on the Friday show, Morning After the Revolution.
I read it while I was on vacation.
Nellie writes the TGIF column at the Free Press, which is excellent.
I read that every week.
But her book, Morning After the Revolution, it really took me off guard because it's a work of journalism, but it's also honest, which are two qualities that almost never come together in America.
Nellie is everything that we conservatives are supposed to hate.
She's a progressive.
She's gay.
She's having babies in a gay marriage with Barry Weiss, who's the creator of the free press.
And believe me, trust me when I tell you, I would happily hate her if I could.
But I actually like Nellie and Barry both very much, not just because they are nice, generous, thoughtful people, but also because they've come up with this incredibly innovative approach to American journalism, which is trying to tell the truth, which I've never seen in American journalism before.
And I think it's revolutionary.
I think the free press is great.
And I think Nellie is great.
Like I said, I've read this book and it's amazing, but instead of me telling you about it, I will bring on Nellie.
Nellie, it is great to see you.
How are you?
That intro was so kind.
No, it's true.
That was so kind.
I'm great.
I'm doing well.
I'm calling, you're seeing our fancy office.
We're getting a better office, but this is the quietest room I could find right now.
But no, things have been great.
And yeah, I am as surprised as you are to be to be here on a Daily Wire podcast.
I am indeed a lesbian from San Francisco, married to Barry, having babies in a gay way.
I know.
I mean, you know, there's a scene in your book, and I'll let you talk about it in a minute, but there's a scene where one of the guys at the New York Times calls Barry a Nazi.
And all I could think is, I've been trying to get Barry to join the Nazi Party for years.
I haven't gone anywhere.
I don't know what they're talking about.
Why The Disinformation Angle Matters00:13:57
So this book starts out with you as a successful business reporter at the New York Times.
And it reminded me, I worked with Adam Nagurney in a small town newspaper, and I remember how desperately he wanted to work at the New York Times.
And this was your dream job.
Is that fair to say?
Yes.
It was the only dream I had.
Like it was, I wanted to be a writer.
I wanted to be a journalist, and I wanted to work at the New York Times, and that was it.
And when I ended up getting the job, I told my friends, this is my job for life.
It's like getting 10 years a professor.
I'm like, this is forever.
And I went into it really thinking that and wanting that to be true.
And I think that the book is in part a book of just straight reporting and me going around to different places where over the last few years we've seen the revolution.
And in part, a bit of a coming of age and me becoming less naive and realizing that some of these institutions aren't what they say they are.
And so when I got to the Times, it was very good for a couple of years.
It was all hunky-dory.
I was doing big features.
I was getting praise.
It was really smooth and kind of exactly what I expected it to be.
It was a success.
And then when 2020 came, there was just a very much a tightening of what we could and could not write about.
And that was happening at every mainstream liberal or left-wing publication.
So liberal like the Times or left-wing like NPR or whatever.
It was a sudden constraining that was happening.
And it was like, first, because the risk of Trump being elected was too great.
And so it was like, we should compromise everything to make sure that that doesn't happen.
And then also, it was that the revolution was too exciting and too thrilling and too good.
And we shouldn't cover it because the silly parts we had to ignore.
And even labeling it as a revolution, even naming it, would be problematic because then people would be able to push back on it.
We had to sort of also pretend that there was no revolution happening because then if people complain, it's like, what are you complaining about?
There's no there there.
It's in your head, right?
Like, awokeness?
What do you mean?
What does that even mean?
Critical race theory.
Oh, that's just an academic concept they talk about in law school.
That's not a real thing.
Like, that was also part of it.
So basically, we couldn't cover the most interesting story of those years.
And then list just kept growing.
So it's like NPR puts out a statement saying we're not covering the lab league.
Or no, no, sorry.
Let me go back.
NPR puts out a statement saying we're not covering the Hunter Biden.
Yes.
Yes.
They all kind of agree to not cover the Lab League.
They all sort of agreed for years to not cover any of the conversations around pediatric gender medicine.
So I suddenly was in this position of finding that a lot of doors were closing around what I could be curious about.
And it was very frustrating and was driving me a little crazy.
So yeah, I started getting in trouble.
You know, there's a lot.
There's an old saying that when a new administration comes into the White House, the first big shock is that things are just as bad as they thought they were or even worse.
And I read this.
I've been attacking the New York Times for years.
I mean, I just think they used to be a great paper.
They were always a liberal paper, but they used to be a great paper.
And I thought they stopped being a great paper.
And I thought that they took a lot of good reporters with them.
But when I was reading your book, my jaw dropped.
I mean, I thought like this is worse than anything I've ever said about them.
I mean, you have a story in here about a guy.
He had this Soviet title, like the disinformation officer or something like this.
And I mean, what is that guy?
What is a disinformation expert in a newspaper?
What does it mean?
Well, this became a role that a lot of news organizations have now.
And so NBC has one, CNN has these people, and they're disinformation experts.
And what was disinformation?
What is disinformation?
It's kind of in the eye of the beholder.
And what it became over these years was anything that was not helpful to the liberal causes of the day, which sounds so, it sounds like I'm flattening it, but it genuinely was that.
It is that sort of simple.
Like it's not a complex, these people aren't thinking in a complex way about what disinformation might be.
So anyways, so in the case, in my case, I wanted to do a story about Prager University and Prager videos, which it was a good business story.
It was a good sort of politics story.
They were going really viral.
They were doing all these really viral campus things.
And I wanted to do kind of a send-up of them.
Not a puff piece necessarily, but just a send-up of this interesting new company.
Like I'd been doing a lot of funny stories about companies and trends in Silicon Valley.
And I filed it and it was, I thought, pretty good.
And then the feedback I got, all of a sudden it became kind of this, like a bunch of different people read it, a bunch of different, and the feedback I got was I needed to do more with the disinformation angle.
And I was like, I don't know what you mean, the disinformation angle.
Like Prager U is conservative.
It's pro-life or their videos are pro-life, but like that's not disinformation.
It's just something that disagrees with me or you.
And I found myself explaining this to editors, which was weird, like to be saying to a New York Times editor, like, just because they disagree with your politics doesn't mean it's disinformation.
Anyways, so then I was set up to meet with the disinformation guy, the consultant.
Most people have like these staff editors.
In this case, it was a consultant for whatever reason.
And he was like, okay, so if you don't want to say it's disinformation exactly, I think we should look at the Southern Poverty Law Center's assessment of PragerU.
And I was like, okay, sure, why not?
Like, I don't, you know, and I look, and the Southern Poverty Law Center says, PragerU is part of their hate watch.
That's what they categorize, the article they have on PragerU.
And what they say about it is that if you are susceptible, if you're watching PragerU videos, YouTube might then recommend via its algorithm other more right-wing videos.
And then if you click on those, you might get other more right-wing videos, which eventually lead you to like neo-Nazi content.
And so it's like it's linked algorithmically to really bad stuff.
And they wanted me to sort of use that, but I'm like, that's not even disinformation.
Anyways, I was still trying to make good at the paper.
So I put it in the piece and the piece sails through A1, you know, front page.
I'm really happy and I'm sort of content with myself.
And, but it, it, it didn't sit right with me.
And the whole thing just felt so weird, like just not journalism.
And then, yeah, the disinformation people at all of these news organizations are in a way a kind of shadow editorial structure.
And they, they, it tends to be kind of bottom up instead of top down.
Like the editor-in-chief of the New York Times, the editor-in-chief, the people who run these organizations, they want more complicated stuff.
They don't, they don't actually want necessarily what the movement wants.
And you see that now with like the Joe Kahn, the editor of the Times, comes out explicitly now in 2024, saying this went too far.
Some of the young employees don't have our values, all this stuff that he's saying out loud now.
But disinformation was the cudgel and the word that was used because that sort of rank and file used to police other reporters and to police the content.
And why was disinformation so useful?
Because the platforms like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube would use that.
If there was a New York Times story that said this is disinformation, well, then certainly it shouldn't be allowed on YouTube.
And certainly it shouldn't be allowed on Facebook.
And certainly it shouldn't be allowed on Twitter.
So it was very important to say these things were disinfo because then all the platforms knew what to do.
And that was to take them off to censor.
Wow.
So it was sort of a system.
And that was the goal.
That was the explicit goal to get it to get these things deplatformed.
What was the moment then?
You've got this job that you love.
You're in line with the politics to some degree.
What's the moment when you said, I got to get out of here?
Or did you?
I mean, I mean, it's so pathetic because, like, literally, an editor said to me when I started dating Bear, after I'd started doing some of these stories, and then I started dating Barry, and it was just like, and an editor said to me, she's a Nazi.
She's a Nazi, right?
And I, even after that, I was like, well, I could probably make it work here.
I don't know.
Like, I was so dumb about how much this movement was winning and how much my sort of old thoughts were losing.
I would, I just started going a little bit nuts with all the stories I couldn't write about, and I just knew I couldn't stay.
Yeah.
But there wasn't one, there were a few different aha moments for me.
And then eventually, I, you know, it's hard when you're in this doesn't happen as much in conservative spaces, but in liberal spaces, when you're in the kind of squeeze of the movement, where the movement is saying, you're an old school liberal who's not with us on the progressives, or you're a whatever fascist, and you're not, you're not with us.
The squeeze is very hard.
It's really social.
You have friends who are writing mean things about you online.
Like the colleagues I'd had dinner with were tweeting that I was a fascist.
Like the editors were passing around photos of me as like a teenager because I'd been a debutante and these photos came out.
It was all very funny.
And I mean, at the time, I was like so mortified.
And now I look back and I'm like, well, the photos are great.
I look great or just 19-year-olds.
But I don't know.
When was the moment?
There's not, it's, it just was like a constant, and it was really hard.
And then, and then eventually, um, I guess the moment when like I really was, it was really done was when the Tom Cotton, or at least emotionally for me, when I knew I was dead man walking, was when the Tom Cotton op-ed came out.
And I didn't tweet out the tweet we were all supposed to tweet that this op-ed puts black lives in danger and puts my colleagues in danger.
And when I did that, I got a bunch of texts from colleagues and people saying basically.
This is the Tom Cotton thing saying we should use the military to shut down the George Floyd riots.
And we were all supposed to say that it puts us and our friends in danger.
And I just didn't think it did.
And I just couldn't, I couldn't cancel the kid who they wanted us all to cancel, the sweet Adam Rubens team.
I know he was such a nice guy.
And he was also down.
He was down the ladder from the people who actually made the decision.
You know, this just leaked his name, like the whole thing.
I mean, it was really so dark.
I mean, it all sounds so Soviet.
And it's shocking to me that there are no grown-ups at the Times who said, you know, this is not how we do this.
I mean, I know Dean Bucket always struck me as genuinely a broken guy, but like.
There are grown-ups.
Sorry, I'm like, I look so schleppy and sweaty right now.
There are grown-ups who are trying.
Like, there's a lot of people within the New York Times who don't want it to be the caricature of the New York Times.
They want it to be great.
This is a place of thousands of reporters.
There's a lot of great ones.
I think that in a lot of our news organizations and our universities, like a lot of our mainstream liberal institutions, a small faction gained an outsized amount of power in the conversation.
And they did this because the leadership had no idea what to do.
And so you had kind of new technology forms.
You had Twitter and you had internal Slack.
And so like with the Times, for example, and I'm sure it's the same for every news organization, there was a giant Slack room where anyone could post and tag anyone else.
And you knew you were in the thunderdome of like 4,000 New York Times-related people.
And so you would have like a junior editor from Wirecutter posting, dragging one of the senior political reporters and saying they were being too soft on Trump this morning.
And that senior political reporter would feel like she had to like weigh in and respond.
And then Dean Bucket would weigh in and respond.
And it was like the flattening of the hierarchy and where, and it's very frightening, even if it's 50 people who are doing the activism within an organization of thousands.
If you have a really flattened structure like that, those 50 can be very loud and very scary.
And so they just gained a lot of power.
And I think now there's some effort to say, hold on, this is how are we giving up all our power to this group?
But yeah, they've been really successful.
Progress Isn't Linear00:06:08
It's actually a small number.
It's not super popular, a lot of these ideas.
I know, but they do it in the culture at large as well.
I mean, they have an enormous cultural, you know, enormous cultural power.
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K-L-A-V-A-N- No Ease in Clavin.
I just make it look this easy.
There are no ease in February.
You have a paragraph.
I'm saying this from memory, but there's a paragraph in there where you say, you know, I'm for universal health care.
I was and I am.
I'm for gay marriage.
But you would have certainly, certainly happen for that.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
No, you have an investment in progressivism, but your chapter on transgenderism, and I don't mean to insult you.
I want to say up front that you're a highly intelligent person, but you sounded like Matt Walsh.
I mean, the man is obviously an animal.
But that chapter destroys the transgender.
I mean, even from the first sentence, which is suddenly God was putting people in the wrong bodies, you know, and by the end of it, I was laughing at it because it's a very funny piece, but it's still also a shocking piece.
And the thing that you talk about that really resonates with me a lot is the gaslighting is we're not doing this, but we are.
And if we are, it's good, but we're not.
You know, I mean, it's crazy making.
So I guess what I want to know, do you feel when you see that, when you see that kind of craziness, what does it throw you back on in yourself?
You know, if you're, you have an investment in this movement, this personal, and we all vote our personal interests.
That's what everybody does.
You're voting your personal interests.
And now you see this movement going off into what is kind of Mengele style doctrine.
Where does that put you?
It's an interesting thing because it's obviously complicated, right?
Obviously, really complicated.
And part of me for years felt like, who am I to say after benefiting from all this progress, not just gay rights progress, but the progress of being a woman who can vote, the progress of being a woman who can open a bank account?
Like there's so many steps in the progressive march.
And who am I to say, stop now or stop the no, this, not this?
And what I realized is, in part, and it's just a part of hard answer, but in part, it's that right now when we look back, the movement of progress looks linear and looks simple, but it wasn't in retrospect.
Like the gay marriage fight, there were a lot of people, a huge number of progressive gays who didn't want gay marriage and thought that was a regressive idea.
And it took Andrew Sullivan and sort of actually more moderate and conservative gay guys to say, actually, we want this.
It's better for our taxes.
It's better for this.
We don't, we don't, the radicalism you're preaching isn't isn't the next step in progress.
Actually, these really tangible, basic things are.
And that won out.
Now we look at it and we all think that was the obvious progressive thing, but at the time it was uncool to be arguing for that because it was heterosexual.
But with the pediatric trans stuff now, I mean, in part, I look at it and I feel really a visceral connection to the conversation because I was a kid who was obviously not perfectly gender conforming as a young person, right?
I played with trucks.
I had a low voice.
As soon as I went through puberty, which was because of all the hormones in the milk, probably like around like 11, like I knew something was different.
Something was wrong.
I was attracted to women.
I could tell.
And at 14, I really knew and I came out.
And it just, when I look back at myself and realize how I would have been seen now and what could the influences that might have happened, I think for sure I would have thought I was a boy.
It's an easier answer.
It says, I'm not gay.
I'm a boy.
Like it's that, oh my God, I want to wear pants and I don't like makeup and I play with trucks.
I'm a boy.
And so for me, when I hear all the pediatricians now saying this rhetoric of like, does your son wear a tutu sometimes?
That's a gender message and you should take that really seriously.
Like when I hear that, I'm like, that's offensive.
And we need to just expand what it means to be a little boy and a little girl.
Cannot Represent Permanent Opinions00:09:42
And these can be open categories.
And also, I mean, realistically, within the gay movement, there are a lot of people I dated who were gay and now are married to men and straight.
Right.
So there's that flexibility.
There's nothing permanent about being gay for a year when you're 19 or 17 or whatever.
Like there's nothing permanent.
And that's really a nice thing.
And to make these choices and these changes in a permanent way, it's just a big deal.
Yeah.
Like if you're being honest and to pretend like little kids, whatever.
I could ramble about this for a while.
Well, I mean, you're really, you're actually depriving a gay person of his gay life by butchering him.
Yeah.
So here's another thing I wondered.
I really, I was, I grew up in a liberal household and I was just assumed to be a liberal.
One of the things that I noticed as I changed, and for me, it's all policy.
You know, it's all about the fact that I think capitalism works pretty well and needs guardrails, but it's better than socialism.
And freedom.
I like freedom a lot.
But one of the, I can't help myself.
I do too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But one of the things that I notice you do in the book, and you do it ironically, but I noticed that it was a big part of the left-wing movement, was you use terms Republican and conservative as pejoratives.
And one of the things that drives conservatives like me kind of crazy is if there are a thousand conservatives in a room and one guy walks in with a swastika, he's in the center of the photo in the New York Times because he represents what conservatives are, where the rest of us are thinking, who's the nut, the Hitler nut who just walked in.
And I wonder, has your opinion about that changed?
I mean, my opinion was revolutionized when I realized, oh, wait, Reagan was right about a lot of things.
I may have disagreed with him here, here, and there, but he was right about.
Has that changed for you at all?
Just wait, my opinion generally on conservatives that maybe conservatism is a more complex movement than you think it is.
Oh, yeah, of course.
I mean, I think that one of the various mean reviews of the book from the mainstream media said that I think of progressivism is something you grow out of.
And it's not entirely untrue, but it's more that I just think a lot of militancy in politics is something you grow out of.
Like as you get older, it's just harder to have, at least for me, like really militant beliefs and harder to think of one group as all bad and one group as all good.
Like just the black and white thinking that's so easy when you're 22 gets a little harder.
And I think that, yeah, I mean, of course, when I was in the movement, I had a very simplistic view of anyone outside the movement.
And then as soon as you're, and it wasn't like I, like the book is not like a hero's journey where I'm some like great figure.
It's, it's, I come off looking kind of bad.
Like I do the wrong thing in like most instances.
But but like when you're sort of ousted from it or whatever happened, in my case, not canceled, but like kind of ousted, yeah, you start to look around and think about the categories a little differently.
Yeah.
Just to remind you, we're talking about the book, Morning After the Revolution by Nellie Bowles, which I highly recommend.
First of all, it's a great read.
I mean, it really is a good read.
It's just good journalism.
And it's so rare now that I read good journalism that I thought, oh, I remember that.
There used to be, there used to be good journalism.
So now, I mean, I'm just, I can't help it.
I'm fascinated by this.
This is the apparent election that's coming up is obviously not one of the highest moments in America.
Every morning I wake up and think, you know, Jefferson once ran against Adams in this country.
And I, you know, I'm not a fan personally of Donald Trump, but I do look at Biden and I think this is awful.
You know, it's happening.
What do you do now as a political person?
Or is that a secondary consideration for you?
I mean, where do you go in your situation?
In my situation, you don't go anywhere.
You just get comfortable with not being a party member.
But I think that that shouldn't be unusual.
Like most journalists should just feel sort of discomfort with both parties and like they're kind of floating around politically.
That's a good thing.
Like being a little unsure is a good thing.
And the fact that it's unusual enough that we're even having this conversation where you're like, well, what, like, is crazy.
Like, this should be, it shouldn't be so obvious who every New York Times reporter is voting for.
Like, it should be a little bit weird and ambiguous, and maybe they're not voting, and who knows?
I don't know.
Me personally, sometimes I'm like, am I an RFK person?
I have no idea.
Yeah.
But then he picked that VP who I can't get on board with.
But no, I don't feel the need to pick a side.
And I think that's really good.
Like, I think the pressure to be tribal and for journalists and writers to be tribal necessarily is not.
It didn't used to be this way.
I mean, first of all, because reporters originally were not college-educated people all the time.
They were smart people who didn't go to college, and they hated everybody with power.
And that was really apologizing.
You know, I have to tell you that when I worked with Adam Nagurney, we were small town reporters.
And he went on to become a very left-wing reporter at the New York Times, in my opinion, when I would read his stuff.
But a great reporter.
He was a great, the guy was a great reporter.
He was a born reporter.
But he scolded me at times for writing too biased to the left, for writing from a liberal bias.
And he would point it out and say, you said this, but you can't prove that and all that stuff.
And then the Times kind of took him over, I thought, and made him into their image, which was not as bad as it is now.
It was still just a liberal paper then.
But I think it's in tribute to you that you kind of woke up.
I mean, it's like, you know, the free press is doing great work.
And what would you really find?
It's amazing.
I mean, this is me in one of our various like storage rooms.
I mean, storage rooms.
This is like, you can, it's a great, it's, it's a great ride.
I mean, I think that basically Bear left first from the Times and then I followed.
And as the free press has grown, we've gone from like we were both sort of angry in different ways when we left.
I felt very wounded by like, how could the old world reject me?
I'm everything that's, I did everything right.
Like I did, got the A's.
I got the SAT score.
I got the internships.
I got the, I did it all right.
And so I was so sort of offended in a quite entitled way.
And then Bear was just like wandering around like drinking spicy margaritas and talking about how she should be a rabbi and like a Nazi rabbi.
Of course, yeah.
And then the free press, this little newsletter that just that was at the time called Common Sense just started taking off.
And it turns out there's a lot of people who feel a little bit in between stuff or feel a little bit like NPR doesn't speak to them, but also maybe the Daily Wire doesn't always speak to them.
And they feel sort of like tossled between or they like a little from NPR.
They like a little from the Daily Wire and they want places that can have a conversation that is interesting to them.
Anyways, so it's just been, it's been great.
And it's been a little newsletter and then now it's growing and it's, we've got podcasts and just have a lot of fun.
Yeah, it's really good stuff.
And it's all sort of dissidents.
It's a lot of dissidents from the old world who had various fallings outs and this and that and then find themselves at this new in this kind of new beginning.
Yep.
Nellie Bowles, the book is Morning After the Revolution.
Highly recommended.
Nellie, it's great talking to you.
It's great to see you.
And I hope everything goes right with the baby.
I have to let you go before you have the baby, it looks like.
So I don't want to keep you here.
Thank you so much for having me on.
It's just, it's an honor.
All right.
I hope to see you soon.
So I'm really serious about this.
If you are a conservative and want to see a progressive come to the wall of wokeness, it's an amazing experience.
I mean, for me, for someone outside of the progressive world, it's just an amazing experience to see that happen and realize that things are as bad as we say they are here.
And I think it's wonderful to see someone who I disagree with on many things, but who believes in honesty and journalism.