We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Adrisianski,
culture editor here at The Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on exit fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to the
premium version of our website as well. It's not often that I can say
I'm joined by one of my very favorite writers, one of my very favorite
journalists, But today that's true because Nellie Bowles is here. Nellie Bulls has
just informed me that her formal title at The Free Brass, one of my
favorite publications, is Head of Strategy Brilliant Okay, which is also it's a
fake title. It's good. But she's also the author, for the purposes
of this interview of Morning After the Revolution Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History
that book us out on May fourteenth. Nelly, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me on and for using very importantly my very
real title. Yeah, well, we're all about accuracy here, Nelly.
And we should say also, if you don't subscribe to TGIF, that is
the weekly news newsletter, that Nelly writes, it is one of my very
favorite parts of the week. And actually, Nelly, maybe we could just
start because maybe some people, I don't know if you ran into this,
but just do people know, like exactly the depth of your journalistic bona fides,
Like how much like amazing reporting you did before. Whole career has been
building out to the moment of doing news summaries largely based on what's going viral
on Twitter. That is the iCal of my journalistic career. But yes,
so that is what I do now. I do a weekly news round up
for the Free Press, which my wife and I started. She really started
and I'm kind of tagging along and help him build it. And it publishes
all kinds of things. And every Friday I write of a Huber column summarizing
what's been going on in the world. And yeah, but before that,
I did real journalism. I did. I did lots and lots of it.
I started my career at the San Francisco Chronicle, a amazing local paper,
and I started. You're like a seventh generation San Francisco And I think
you say in the book like your family is like you're like Joan Didion.
She is the Sacramento, you are to San Francisco. I made my dad
like do the actual sort of diagram because I could never figure it out.
I think I'm sixth and then and then the next generation now who lives there,
is seventh. But yeah, a lot. We've been in San Francisco
for forever. I love this. I'm obsessed with it. Now we live
in LA because it was hard to convince my wife to move to San Francisco.
But during the pandem it was not the best time to sell our city,
I would say, with all the tent encampments that were happening. But
it's the most beautiful city in the world anyways. So I started there and
then I bopped around a little bit freelance, writeful magazines, did a year
on camera advice news, and then joined the New York Times in early twenty
eighteen and or maybe end of twenty seventeen, and I was a New York
Times reporter. I was a reporter for the business section and doing business stories
and then sort of started doing more general features, big profiles, trend stories,
that kind of thing, some investigations, and it was for a long
time pretty great. I mean I kind of lived my journalistic dream for a
few years there and achieved the pinnacle of what I had set out to achieve
as a aspiring journalist or young aspiring writer, and then you ruined it,
and then very ruined it. No. Then then twenty twenty happened and a
lot changed. And this has been written about now so many times. I
mean, it's been written about ad nauseam. But twenty twenty came and journalism
went through a seismic shift, and all of a sudden, the kind of
young cohort that I was in at the New York Times, but at most
mainstream publications, a switch flipped and instead a flip switch sorry, And it
was like, we're not here to pursue curiosity and to find the truth of
what's going on. We are here on a mission to do It's beyond like
activism. It's like moral clarity. It's almost religious. It's almost like we're
on like a mission, like a bigger mission. But it has nothing to
do with journalism, and it has nothing to do with the kind of values
and morals that brought me into it. So anyways, long story short,
I ended up leaving The New York Times a few years, like after four
years or so and wrote this book of essays that it starts with like a
few pages about the times, but it's not like some violin like woe is
me here I have suffered. Mostly it's a collection of reported essays from the
world over the last few years, trying to depict the cultural shift, the
revolution, whatever you want to call it, that we've all seen and lived
through from all the different angles of it. So going to Seattle when neighborhoods
were taken over by Antifa, going to the protests where you see transactivists wanting
to integrate the Women's spa, going to exploring all of these scenes. And
in each chapter, I tried to be on the ground in that place,
because that's the training I had in journalism was I was a future reporter,
so I would go and be on the ground and be listening. I mean,
I started as a party reporter, so really it's all sort of like
an elaborate version of party reporting. Anyways, I'm rambling now, but that's
my story in a quick nutshell, and how I got to this book,
and that's what it is. You're sort of perfectly situated to tell the story
from your background A in San Francisco, which is such a battleground in the
revolution, and be as somebody who had a front row seat to the revolution
happening inside of media. And actually that's one of the things that struck me
about this book, which I can't recommend enough. It is fantastic. There's
so many fascinating observations in it. But the book is really it describes so
much of what happened in media leading up to twenty twenty, in twenty twenty,
after twenty twenty, and I guess I just wanted to get your perspective
on how central the role media played in all of this, because people for
so long saw this ideology that was sort of a curiosity festering on the fringes
of academia at Oberlin wherever else, and then suddenly it was like, this
is the Oberlin Women Studies Department, except it's like literally the like a desk
at the New York Times. Like, how central is media to all of
this? The idea that these these notions that ever stay fringed. I think
I think I kind of believe that at the start that it was largely harmless
and whatever. Like deconstructionism is something that people talk about in college classrooms and
it's fun to think about, but no one actually wants to like dismantle the
United States, and like those are these are these are more like philosophy,
philosophical fun things to discuss. How important was the media in this? I
think, I mean, obviously, I think the media played a huge role
in this in that it it actively lied to Americans about what was happening and
what and said that what they were seeing was not what they were seeing.
And when you walk down the street and you see disorder or whatever, this
or that chaos or that, that actually you're not seeing. And I think
we all know now that various examples of that during COVID of the media kind
of like shutting down discussion in ways that were really inappropriate and discussions that should
have been really fair. And I think people for a few years, I
think less so now, but for a few years lived in a lot of
fear of crossing very random, very strong sort of media set rules about here's
where discussions are allowed and here's where they're not. And if you talk about
the classic example, if you talk about the lably, you're a racist and
like these crazy notions that make no sense, but so as it relates to
the book and like being in it and being in the mainstream media during the
start of this it basically was that all the most interesting stories that were happening
for a few years were off limits to mainstream media reporters. You weren't allowed
to touch them, you weren't allowed to look at them with a curious open
mind, you weren't allowed to find them funny or or to find them to
be something like newsworthy. The book starts with me like obsessively trying to get
up to Seattle to cover the Chaz takeover where Antifa took over a neighborhood,
and it was really hard, and I was facing a lot of pressure from
colleagues who are like, why do you want to do this, Like this
is this is a weird thing that you want to go and cover Antifa,
Like why would you want to highlight this? It's not right. We don't
want to show Americans what's happening there. It's not right to do that because
that might give the wrong impression to people. And it sort of drove me
a little nuts. And yeah, anyways, I think the media plays a
huge role in this whole thing. And yeah, just in making people fearful
of talking about things they shouldn't be fearful of talking about, or curious about
things that they shouldn't be fearful of being curious about. And people who've never
worked in media might wonder what that process of, you know, being told
or maybe the erection of boundaries, like what that actually looks like in a
newsroom where you say, like you weren't really like you had to push to
go to Seattle where there was this fast which is the most story exactly,
So how does that are people telling you don't go to Seattle, Nelly that
will help Republicans But like, you know, that's sort of a joke,
but how are those parameters established? I'm serious, I'm not. No,
it's not like as subtle as you might think. It really is. Like
the Hunter Biden laptop story is inconvenient for Democrats and so we're going to say
it's fake news, and like it's like, okay, I also like a
lot of things about Joe Biden, but the Hunter Biden laptop story is not
fake news. Like I can't it's it's it's not crazy making, it's nuts
and it's not journalism and it's a boring way to look at the world.
And so yeah, it happens through like very unsubtle ways, but it also
happens through small social ways. So how it applied to me at the times
was basically like what you imagine like middle school cafeteria politics to be just little
gentle bullying. And when I would publish something eventually that was anything but the
perfect party line, I would have colleagues openly calling me on on Twitter or
whatever, calling me a fascist or you know, saying really nasty things about
me. And I think at the time I was quite naive about how this
all worked, and so I was shocked and very upset and so like,
you know, emotionally heard. I thought these people were crently, you know,
you get now I can look at it with some amount of distance and
now it seems sort of funny or whatever, But at the time it was
very meaningful, and I was very like upset that I was being pushed around
on these stories or bullied or called a fascist by people I'd had dinner with.
And it was weird. It was we're super weird. But I think
the other thing was being in San Francisco and being from there. It made
me really open to the idea that maybe some of the policies that were gaining
popularity in twenty twenty through twenty twenty three to I mean, they're still popular
now, but when it was really starting, that maybe some of those didn't
actually have the impact that we wanted them to. So you live in San
Francisco, you're seeing really like pure distilled progressive policies in action, but a
lot of policies for a long time. If you send them to me,
I would say, yeah, I completely agree. Like we shouldn't punish people
who are addicted to drugs with police, like with Carcero solutions, Like we
shouldn't A lot of those policies make sense to me intuitively and emotionally and with
empathy, and almost person shouldn't be put in jail for being homeless, it's
horrible, like and then living in San Francisco, or like just it's not
all about the street stuff. It's also like, let's say, equity policies
in schools. We all want everyone to succeed more, we all want things
to be more fair, we all want, you know, everyone to do
well in school. And so I was also on board with a lot of
the kind of progressive notions around education that you saw put in a place in
San Francisco. The trouble was the actual reality, the actual what actually happened
once those policies were put into place in San Francisco led to the opposite outcome
of what was desired, And it was just very hard to deny that.
So even as the press was saying, you know, it's a beautiful thing
to let people have the freedom to sleep on the sidewalks and drugs should be
legal, even as everyone is saying that, everyone's saying it's backed by science
and research and this is the better way. You're walking down the streets and
you're walking past someone who is just dying on the sidewalk, and you're being
told the best thing for you to do is just to walk along, pay
your taxes. Lots of people are helping support that person, but you look
at the numbers and guess what they are just dying on the sidewalks. Like,
the actual thing that was happening was brutal, And with the schools with
like the sort of hard left of San Francisco successfully banned eighth grade algebra and
yeah, and because they were like for equity, it was like and literally
the equity was too many Asian students were testing into this and it was kind
of looking weird. And so eighth grade algebra was this was the excel of
rated eighth grade option, and so it was banned, and so everyone had
to take the same sort of class that I would have taken also in eighth
grade, of like mediocre math students. And the result of that, it
is not in the end all of a sudden, kids are all in general
that or at math. It's just that the high achievers didn't get as successful
as they could have. And it just each of these policies I was looking
and I was seeing that it was having kind of the opposite of the intended
effect, and it was having it was almost like sort of absurdist actually,
And so yeah, I started writing about it and reporting on it. Not
that it's easy to make the street scenes of San Francisco like funny, So
that chapter is not exactly funny, but I tried in the others to be
more funny. But anyways, so yeah, that's that's how it started.
And in both the media and being at the New York Times and seeing the
hypocrisy there and also being living in San Francisco and being from Seattle and San
Francisco are gripping and poignant. And that's actually something I wanted to talk to
you about. Is you end the book almost on a hopeful note for San
Francisco. You say sort of this backlash that's happening is real. I think
is the verbiage you use. So I just wanted to see Ellie if you
could one talk to us about what you've watched happen. This is a huge
question, but you know, just basically you talked about a lot of it
just now, but like what San Francisco was like when you were growing up
versus what it is now and why you think the backlash is real. I
know a lot of people have heard about chesa bedeen and all of that,
but is it you know, it doesn't have staying power. Are the people
of San Francisco really going to be counter revolutionaries? I I I think not
counter revolutionaries, but I think there is a movement of the moderate and the
same, the kind of common sense Americans, the people who are not like
obsessed with an ideology right or left, who just kind of like want things
to be a little better and want life to be nice and all that,
who are finally, at least in San Francisco, and I think more broadly,
who are finally starting to come out of the woodwork say it's enough and
say like we're not going to be just like bullied and shamed out of saying
reasonable things. So in San Francisco you saw that. I'm sorry I keep
talking about It's just one chapter, I promise to the listeners. There's other
chapters. It's not just about my hometown. But I love talking about my
hometown. I'll talk about for hours. But it's also such a good symbol
of America, you know, like what's happening? I agree, I think
local reporting on San Francisco could tell you everything you need to know about America.
But the basically what happened is after a couple of years of increasing really
insanity and huge numbers of deaths from fentanyl and among the homeless, the schools
just failing. My favorite part was the the school board. Schools were still
shut for COVID obviously in San Francisco, basically shut for like they would have
done it for decades, and yet they were having school board meetings on zoom.
We're instead of discussing like how to make the schools COVID safe for like
improved ventilation or whatever. They were discussing which school names needed to be changed
because of the racist history and the racist comments of people such as Dianne Feinstein,
who is deemed as beyond the pale to have a school named after Abraham
Lincol. Don't even get me started about like Lincoln or Washington. My god,
so neither of whom was friends with Harvey Milk. Just insane, really,
I don't even want to know what they said about lesbians, and like,
this was just getting so absurd it was hard to deny. And you
had Chessa Boudin as the district attorney, and so the top cop in the
city was a socialist, leftist whatever like activist who very strongly didn't believe in
carcerol solutions to problems. So he just didn't believe in the fundamental part of
his job. And so you had really the perfect ground for a major backlash,
and that's what you had. And so for the first time in some
thirty years or whatever, San Francisco had a recall. They recalled Chessa,
they recalled the school board, and it was largely led kernel of it The
reason why the eighth grade algebra thing is so interesting is because the kernel of
it was led by Asian parents who were absolutely sick of being kind of actively
discriminated against and having the rub pulled out from under them for a lot of
the pathways of opportunity that that they built in the city. The one elite
public school, loll was it's sort of elite status was removed by removing the
test that would let people into it. Kind of the stivet city of San
Francisco. Anyways, So you had a moderate revolution for the first time.
I'd never seen that, and it was pretty amazing. And now it's had
a huge number of wins in the city. You see a lot more common
sense policies coming in. I'm not saying that San Francisco is now some like
moderate utopia, but you've had a reformation within the progressive world. Now how
this is covered in the media. It's covered as right wing fascist adjacent activists
funded by right wing billionaires have taken over San Francisco. San Francisco is no
longer progressive city. San Francisco's you know, it's covered in the mainstream media
as it's like basically it's like the Kuklux Klan took over the city as far
if you were just reading the mainstream media on this, but it's just a
bunch of like Swiat liberals who were like, maybe we can keep the standardized
tests for high school admissions, which, again within the world, like the
Times of Washington Post, is consideredly the outer edge of white supremacy. But
yeah, so it did really harden me. And so the end of that
chapter is like really hopeful, and I do, I mean more broadly,
I feel really hopeful right now, and like in what we're seeing in a
lot of this kind of centrist moderate revival of like normal people politics. And
it's the constant battle in the Biden administration between the Biden leftists and the Biden
sort of moderates I think are probably more in keeping with him, however alert
he is to the world. But and I think it's a battle happening on
the right too, between the you know, this book really focuses on the
spaces I was in, which are progressive spaces and cities and blue states,
but I think there's a mirror happening on the right for sure, with the
battle between the fringe and the and the centrist moderates anyways, but at least
in progressive spaces there has been a reformation to some extent. Although although now
well now that I'm looking at like schools and what's happening on campus, that's
obviously so I can get away. That's what I was going to ask you
about, because the sort of central I think disagreement that some of our listeners,
probably me and then people at the Intercept would have with like what you're
describing, is they would say there's something fundamentally Like the Intercept guys would make
that argument from like a socialist Marxist perspective, like there's something fundamentally broken about
capitalism, therefore downstream of it, everything else is miserable and corrupted. From
the right, there's an argument right now that we have maybe it would come
down to secularism or postmodernism that like something broke, that, like Nietzsche saw
something that was happening across the West, it's broken, and here we are.
But what's so interesting about what you're saying is that and I was talking
to Jennifer Say about this last week. A lot of people isn't a lot
of people like jen They feel like, you know, I didn't leave the
Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me. So I've rethought some things,
but I still feel like I'm fundamentally centered in the same place that I always
was. And you know, Bill Ackman is on this odyssey of personal discovery
to where do you find yourself and all of this, Like, do you
feel as though you've changed anything fundamental in your ideology, that you've come to
reject anything that was fundamental in your ideology, or do you feel like it's
this other the trappings of the new left, or are the things that you
can kind of trim and get away get rid of. I think that,
I mean, I think I've become much less idealistic. I think a lot
of the ideas underpinning modern progressivism or modern leftist politics are just super idealistic and
have this vision of humans as being so beautiful and pure and good, like
you can only believe and abolish the police if you think that people by nature
are good and that their souls are kind, and that they don't want to
hurt each other, and that if given enough resources, they won't hurt each
other, they won't steal from each other. I mean, part of the
notion of this is so crazy because the idea that like they just need resources.
It's like the rich don't do theft, Like are you kidding me?
But that is the idea in those communities, and it was quite effective for
years, but effectively one over the left, the fun movement. But I
think I've definitely lost that like idealism around human nature and around Yeah, but
I don't I don't think I identify differently politically. I mean, I don't
know what did you put in TJF last week? You said you identify as
like Hillary Owa and someone Hillary Oh wait, and John Betterman posts stroke.
I don't know what happened during that stroke. John Betterman is suddenly my favorite
politician. But yeah, I mean, I think the whole idea of all
these labels is sort of like ridiculous and doesn't apply to most Americans who identify
its independent or are like swayable, Like it's it becomes kind of like a
parlor game of like I think it's probably it's very relevant in DC which political
party you identify with and which politician all that, But I think a lot
of that is unnecessary this point, especially in a place like California where everyone's
a Democrat. You're just fighting. It's intra democrat fighting, and so I
guess I would identify as like a moderate Democrat in California and like who knows.
But but largely I think another shift within Naya Vidte saying right, I
think I'm mispassing so many words. Is the both on the right and on
the left. Right now, you see a desire for kind of revolution and
a desire for big change. Throw it all out like restart and we'll figure
it out. On the other side, and I think I am more skeptical
of that than I was, and I now am more for technocratic small changes
and improvements in the world because I don't know of the revolution. I don't
know, like what you see when Antiva take over a neighborhood in Seattle,
it's certainly a revolution, but I don't know if we need to start from
scratch, like America's got problems, but I'm not sure we need a full
overthrow of our city governments, any full overthrow of our police, like the
police can certainly be improved, but I don't know if they need to be
abolished. Per se, you are not qualified to be the mayor of Minneapolis.
But okay, so actually on that point, I'm gonna start a campaign
for small improvements over time. Actually probably very attractive to a lot of people,
especially in San Francisco. But a moderate California Democrat who perhaps owns an
AR fifteen, like, do you actually this is I think it's early in
the book. Did you actually go out and buy an AR fifty? No
comment on my personal home safety incredible regiment. No, no, no,
genuinely, I I'm not anti gun, though I don't I don't know.
I mean, was that always the case? Yeah? I grew up.
I grew up around guns and shooting, and my dad's side of the family
are farmers in the Central Valley, and this is why San Francisco is such
a symbol. There's duck hunting out there. Yeah, But my job,
honestly mostly was like doing the little duck calls. I was the one making
the squawks with the duck call to get the ducks to the area. Because
I'm not known as a great shot in my family. I would say that's
one of the reasons of that California's decline is so again so poignance, because
California has like the frontier history, and there was so much help, like
if you're listening to the beginning of La Confidential and they're rolling these old ads
of the American dream being you know something that you can discover in San Francisco.
You can live this wonderful middle class life and it's sort of self exploration
and becoming self made American, and it's all it seems like it's almost impossible
to be middle class in California, almost impossible to feel like your family is
safe in California. It's just been such a rapid flipping of what California stands
for. I mean, like, let's just talk about housing. That is
a kind of perfect example of progressive idealism getting in the way of the stated
goal. So let's say the goal is more housing, affordable housing. Yeah,
the actual thing that progressives are doing in California is blocking housing at every
single turn and making it so you know, you want to turn a parking
lot into a duplex, and you will face years, if not decades,
of environmental reviews that are thrown at you. Obviously, this got to a
kind of comedic state in San Francisco where you're trying to declare laundromats as historic
and all this stuff. But it's the whole state. And and it's this
is another kind of like bizarre flip. It's considered right wing to want to
let people build apartments in California, and it's considered crazy to suggest that supply
and demand might be a factor in housing prices. Like that is considered like
the wildest edge of economic thinking. And I it's another that was another kind
of point. I read about it a little bit in the book. There's
like a fetishization of homeless encampments and of the homeless as like a visible symbol
of capitalism's declined. And I think that a lot of those folks are sort
of used as a prop in very smart leftist thinkers political dramas that they're setting
up. And those same thinkers then are very resistant to any efforts to actually
make housing more portable in California or in the American West. Just timing at
every level, and they usually use similar tactics. It's usually environmental reviews and
all this, and it's sort of like, you can't build a three story
building there it will cast a shadow for twenty minutes a year on our chicken
coop in our backyard. And are you against backyard chickens? And it's like,
what are you talking about? So it's just it's so frustrating because the
politics of this get really bizarre, and all of a sudden it's called like
right wing to want affordable housing for people, and it's crazy. And I
just sort of reject first of all those labels that are thrown at people who
do this, and it's just another great example of ideals lead to literally the
opposite of the stated thing. And you could say, maybe there's some of
these people who are actually idealists, and maybe some of them are just very
very clever and don't want more housing because it will make their house price go
down, or they don't want they don't want things to get better actually because
they benefit in some way from the chaos or from the high costs or whatever,
and that they're using this supposed idealism. So that's that's also a fair
argument that it's not actually truly held believe you know. Yeah, I was
actually while I was reading this book, I in the middle was listening to
the Free presss. I think it's the latest podcast you guys did with Paul
Kingsnorth and oh he's amazing, absolutely, and on this environmental question of watching
the sort of state of desire differ so dramatically from the outcomes, and that
ground even desire is The environmentalist movement is the most frustrating leftist movement right now
by far, because the sticks are really high, Like you want the environment
to be you want the water to be clean and the air to be clean,
and speak yourself, but you've got this movement, Like my favorite is
the Sunrise movement, which I reference a little bit in the book, But
it's like supposedly the movement of Zoomer Zoomer millennial or environmentalists. It's supposed to
be like the big cool gathering. It's got the best website, it's got
all the graphics, it's like really chic and hip, and they're doing stuff
that is absolutely antithetical to environmentalism. Plus most of what they're there, if
you look at their social media or look at what they're actually protesting, it's
all like around abortion, or around is your Palestine, or around defund the
police, or it's like all of these other issues that have nothing to do
with gathering a coalition of people to want to support clean air and clean water,
want to clean up this or the that, Like it's antithetical to the
actual cause. Yeah, the environmental was a movement today needs needs a major
reformation. So you write about Patrice's Colors and an amazing character, which is
a beautiful perfect and you know the founders of Black Lives Matter, right,
And you have this great quote from w Comal Bell that I had totally either
mister forgotten about. This is a thing he said on CNN owned by like
Time Warner. Quote. Antifa is short for anti fascist. Picture a table.
On one side of the table is Hitler and Mussolini and on the other
side is the popular performer Raffi. Which side of the table are you sitting
on? I'm with Raffi. So this brings us to the kind of class
question and Patrice's Colors is a good example of that too. A self proclaimed
Marxist who takes the BLM money and quite literally builds a mansion. And you
have w come Alball Bell talking about this on corporate media on CNN for one
of the biggest corporations in the world, with not a hint of self awareness.
So these are really self proclaimed class warriors. I mean, these are
people who believe that what they're doing is rooted in a sort of centering of
the working class. Where does the left or where did the left sort of
go wrong in this revolution? How central is class to all of this.
It's a core part of this, I think, on that sort of situation
in particular, it also goes back to the media question, because these were
groups like BLM was a group that was fundraising and taking huge amounts of money
and spending it in ways that we're not being reported on, and that we're
not being covered and tracked by the real heavyweight investigative reporters in our country.
It was being ignored intentionally because it would be so inconvenient. And so you
had this group raising huge amounts of money off of the names of murdered children
often I mean to me Rize, raising enormous sums of money and spending it
in ways that were basically unscrutinized. And I mean the most hilarious example,
of course, is they bought a multimillion dollar mansion in La with like a
sound stage, and it looked like a great party house. I mean,
I can't say they made a bad party house choice, but they bought a
party house, a very safe space, a very very safe space for the
leadership who needed that safe space. But it's just I mean, it's theft,
right. It might not be legally theft, and maybe it's allowed,
but it's stealing from people who donated thinking they were helping the cause of life
for black Americans. And because the media refused to cover it for so long,
it allowed for that theft to take place, and because it was for
boten to talk about, and we're boten to say, you know, what's
going on? Where is this money going? And in part yeah, like
you were just referencing. Of course, it is a class issue, because
all of these issues are kind of irrelevant to the rich, Like how is
it it's actually nice if you own your own house, you don't want more
housing to be built, so you want to give to the Sierra Club to
block new housing and to make it impossible. You might not even want wind
power because the sound of that wind power might annoy you when you're in your
weekend house in Napa, and so you might give to the Sierra Club also
to block more wind power whatever and request environmental reviews to stop it up.
If you're really rich or even upper middle class, safety in the streets isn't
the most relevant thing, you can get good home security, or maybe you
live in New York City in an apartment where you're up five levels that makes
you inherently safer, or you've got a doorman that makes you extraordinarily safe.
Public safety is basically irrelevant if you live in an apartment in New York with
a doorman and take cabs, and a lot of our media world does live
like that. Like I'm thinking lately about personal safety more in part because of
my wife with her just whacky need to have political ideas. But literally,
we're thinking we want to move to a doorman building in New York City because
that's the safest place to live. No wonder these people think it's absurd to
talk about public safety or think it's pure racism to talk about public safety.
They're not living in a neighborhood where it actually matters. And you can play
that out with so many of these things. Let's say take the schools.
Many of the activists who are for eliminating the tests to get into stuiveit Center
into Lull any of these elite public schools. They don't send their kids to
public high school. It's irrelevant, it doesn't matter. It's just an ideas
game, and like we talked about, the ideas behind it are often beautiful.
All people are equal. Why do we have a test? Like all
these notions are these wacky, beautiful ideas. But the class issue is basically
that a lot of the philosophies and policies that were thrust on America for the
last four years come from people to whom they don't apply and to whom it
makes no difference. Why don't they see that because people have been pointing this
out for at least five plus years now. Definitely luxury beliefs, Rob Henderson,
I mean right, beautifully. I mean that's be able to it falls
on deaf ears. It's like it doesn't consciousness why. I mean, that's
like a psychological question. I think that a lot of them are true believers
and think it can be done right. And maybe there will be initial suffering
in this neighborhood as we figure out the new form of police, but eventually
it will be beautiful and they will be happy and they will like this.
I think there's some of that thinking, and then I think some of it
is just genuine provincialism. I think some of these people have lived in a
beautiful wealthy neighborhood of Brooklyn for all their life. Maybe they come from a
suburb that was also safe. They just have no concept of it. They
don't think of themselves necessarily as if a critical or as elites, and it's
just kind of the blindness that comes with the provincialism of that and the foolishness
that comes with that. Well, now let's end on a vibe check because
I feel like you're now one of those people that is a magnet, likely
for the gripes of other people who are still inside the industry. Maybe they're
inside the Democratic Party, They're probably inside the nonprofit sort of infrastructure. Your
optimism, I imagine, has to be informed to some extent by what you
hear from other people who are in a similar position to you. So what
are you what are you hearing? I mean, do you think this is
really something that has momentum. I'm optimistic because I am seeing some pushback and
I am seeing movements that are happening that are like, no, we don't
want to do this, and yes we weren't common sense. I don't know
if I'm like bigly fully optimistic. What I'm seeing vibe check wise is a
lot of people interested in coming to the free press. I think there is
some amount of corrective happening inside big newsrooms where like for a few years,
the Slack channels were a major place where people would police reporters who step out
of line, and it would basically be a public drumming of some reporter in
front of a few thousand other reporters. And those channels have been shut down
Slack for few I don't if you don't know what slack is, God bless
If you do, you know what I'm talking about. And I think there's
been some amount of leadership trying to say to the younger employees, you know
that we follow a set of rules here. But I'm not optimistic about our
big news organizations or something to like reform themselves. And I think that's also
okay. Like I'm optimistic about the ecosystem of journalism and the writing. I'm
optimistic about the new places that are sprouting up and the competition that's happening.
But I don't think like the Washington Post or the New York Times are going
to be having some internal reformation anytime soon. I was worried about it for
a little while because for our business. If one of those places decided to
become a little less crazy by even like five percent, we're in trouble.
And blessedly they have decided to stay the course and continue on their mission of
telling a very narrow perspective of what's going on in America and of the issues
of the day. Someday the Free Press can buy The New York Times.
Absolutely, Yes, that's the plan. That's our eighteen month plan. Yes.
Well again. The book is called Morning After the Revolution, Dispatches from
the Wrong Side of History. It's out May fourteenth. Cannot recommend it enough.
It's a super fun and fascinating read. Nellie Bowls, thank you for
joining us. I appreciate it so much. Thank you so much for having
me on its pleasure, of course, even listening to another edition of The
Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Leksashinski, culture editor here at The Federalist. Will
be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious
for the fray. You right, well, you