At its most entertaining, Morning After the Revolution hones in on this hollowness. In a chapter the place Bowles attends a multiday course referred to as The Poisonous Developments of Whiteness, the place contributors are inspired to pillory one another for making inadvertently racist remarks, Bowles captures farcical particulars like being requested to therapeutic massage her ft till she will bodily really feel the whiteness infecting every toe. (Afterward, the trainer tries to promote contributors on a further two-day workshop.)
Nonetheless, the writing in Morning After is, too usually, merely not ok. Bowles strives for a wry have an effect on, however the result’s usually flat or irritatingly blogger-voiced. She describes a police officer killing George Floyd as an individual “doing what certain seems to be like a homicide.”
Maybe she might get away with it had been the prose extra entertaining—however because it stands, Bowles’ arguments usually don’t stand as much as scrutiny, and there’s no stylistic victories to distract from how muddled her theses are. “It sounded wild. It sounded pie within the sky. However cities truly handed resolutions to defund or, in some circumstances, abolish their police departments. It was all actually occurring,” she writes in a chapter on how absurd and damaging she finds the Defund the Police motion. It’s the opening of a piece that implies that American cities are more and more crime-addled as a result of the Defund motion led to drastic reductions in police presence. In it, Bowles describes how she turned so frightened of crime whereas pregnant that she went to the shop to purchase a gun, implying that the progressive motion in opposition to police brutality has left her ready the place she has no alternative however vigilantism. (She summarizes her view of the progressive argument as such: “The actual white supremacy is just not shopping for a gun.”)
The chapter is among the e book’s most revealing, as a result of it elides details in favor of a tidy narrative. Crime is a legitimate concern for Los Angelenos, now because it has been for town’s whole historical past, however the premise that the protests in 2020 led to speedy reductions in legislation enforcement that then led to speedy spikes in violence and mayhem is fathoms too pat.
Whereas some main cities within the US did scale back police spending, many others truly elevated spending. No metropolis abolished its police pressure within the wake of the 2020 protest motion. In Los Angeles, the place Bowles describes herself as fretting about rapists leaping via the home windows of her Echo Park residence, the police funds elevated greater than 9 % between 2019 and 2022. Whereas the LAPD did shrink in dimension, it didn’t evaporate. Statewide, the drop in legislation enforcement staffing in 2021 was 2 %, for instance, which is noteworthy. (There have been concentrated recruitment efforts to bolster these numbers.) But it surely additionally makes Bowles describing how she pays for personal safety guards so she will “dwell as if there are police” come off as remarkably hyperbolic. Additionally: remarkably impolite to the police!
Deceptive anecdotes are threaded all through the e book. In its introduction, Bowles rattles off a listing of foolish repercussions of the New Progressivism. “Pepe le Pew was reduce from the Area Jam film for normalizing rape tradition” she writes. This may, after all, be absurd—if it had been true. The rumor that the sexy cartoon skunk Pepe le Pew was deemed too problematic for the Area Jam sequel took off on social media in 2021, after New York Instances columnist Charles M. Blow wrote about how the Looney Tunes character, together with a number of different well-liked childhood cartoons of yore, was problematic. However as a Deadline report famous, Pepe le Pew’s scenes had truly been reduce when the movie modified administrators, means earlier than Blow’s column went viral. It’s straightforward to fact-check this sort of tidbit, and Bowles opening her e book with a fudged instance like this speaks to Morning After’s bigger failing. It’s not the work of a skeptic slashing in opposition to conference. It’s a e book meant to verify biases relatively than complicate them.
Morning After the Revolution hopscotches throughout acquainted Mental Darkish Net speaking factors on this means, mashing flatly written first-person reporting with sloppily gathered factoids and mixing till the narrative sounds believable sufficient should you don’t cease to seek the advice of Google: DEI is silly, “gender ideology” is a harmful fad, calls to defund the police are naive, children nowadays are too rattling delicate, asexuals are pretend and simply need consideration. Any reader with even a glancing familiarity with these speaking factors needn’t learn this e book for brand spanking new data. However this e book is just not meant, I think, to influence the uncommitted. An enchiridion for an in-group, Morning After the Revolution is bound to consolation the already snug. It’s Hen Soup for the Anti-Woke Soul.
