At its most entertaining, Morning After the Revolution hones in on this hollowness. In a chapter the place Bowles attends a multiday course known as The Toxic Trends of Whiteness, the place members are inspired to pillory one another for making inadvertently racist remarks, Bowles captures farcical particulars like being requested to therapeutic massage her toes till she will bodily really feel the whiteness infecting every toe. (Afterward, the teacher tries to promote members on a further two-day workshop.)
However, the writing in Morning After is, too usually, merely not adequate. 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 appears like a homicide.”
Perhaps she may 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 in the sky. But cities really handed resolutions to defund or, in some circumstances, abolish their police departments. It was all actually taking place,” 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 grew to become so frightened of crime whereas pregnant that she went to the retailer to purchase a gun, implying that the progressive motion towards police brutality has left her able the place she has no selection 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 one among the guide’s most revealing, as a result of it elides information in favor of a tidy narrative. Crime is a legitimate concern for Los Angelenos, now because it has been for the metropolis’s complete historical past, however the premise that the protests in 2020 led to fast reductions in legislation enforcement that then led to fast spikes in violence and mayhem is fathoms too pat.
While some main cities in the US did cut back police spending, many others really elevated spending. No metropolis abolished its police pressure in the wake of the 2020 protest motion. In Los Angeles, the place Bowles describes herself as fretting about rapists leaping by the home windows of her Echo Park residence, the police price range elevated greater than 9 p.c between 2019 and 2022. While the LAPD did shrink in measurement, it didn’t evaporate. Statewide, the drop in legislation enforcement staffing in 2021 was 2 p.c, for instance, which is noteworthy. (There have been concentrated recruitment efforts to bolster these numbers.) But it additionally makes Bowles describing how she pays for personal safety guards so she will “reside as if there are police” come off as remarkably hyperbolic. Also: remarkably impolite to the police!
Misleading anecdotes are threaded all through the guide. In its introduction, Bowles rattles off an inventory of foolish repercussions of the New Progressivism. “Pepe le Pew was reduce from the Space Jam film for normalizing rape tradition” she writes. This would, 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 Space Jam sequel took off on social media in 2021, after New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow wrote about how the Looney Tunes character, together with a number of different fashionable childhood cartoons of yore, was problematic. But as a Deadline report famous, Pepe le Pew’s scenes had really been reduce when the movie modified administrators, approach earlier than Blow’s column went viral. It’s straightforward to fact-check this sort of tidbit, and Bowles opening her guide with a fudged instance like this speaks to Morning After’s bigger failing. It’s not the work of a skeptic slashing towards conference. It’s a guide meant to substantiate biases somewhat than complicate them.
Morning After the Revolution hopscotches throughout acquainted Intellectual Dark Web speaking factors on this approach, mashing flatly written first-person reporting with sloppily gathered factoids and mixing till the narrative sounds believable sufficient when 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 guide for brand new data. But this guide is just not meant, I believe, to steer the uncommitted. An enchiridion for an in-group, Morning After the Revolution is bound to consolation the already comfy. It’s Chicken Soup for the Anti-Woke Soul.
