Last week the Washington Post bashed the recently released book, "Morning After the Revolution," by Nellie Bowles, the oafish right-wing grifter wife of equally oafish right-wing grifter Bari Weiss.
Now here comes the New Yorker: Nellie Bowles's Failed Provocations by Molly Fischer.
My absolute favorite description of Bowles's work in the piece: "incuriousity."
The book just reflects, unexamined, an experience—hers—of being caught in the online slipstream. “The transition from Black Lives Matter to Trans Lives Matter was seamless,” she writes. “The movement simply pivoted: The conversation about racism was now about transphobia. Done! Go!” Maybe this was how it felt scrolling through Instagram at the time; on the page, it reads as incuriosity, even credulity. Surely a book premised on a united and overpowering new movement ought to offer some account of how the people, the institutions, and the ideas it encompasses came into concert. Lacking that, the main thing that B.L.M., pediatric gender clinics, and San Francisco nimbys appear to have in common is that they began to vex Bowles around the same time.
But I am disappointed in the credulity of Molly Fischer - she seems to believe that just because Bowles likes to compare herself to Joan Didion, Bowles is also a Serious Writer, albeit not a very good one.
Nellie Bowles is working for Bari Weiss (like Weiss's sister Suzy) whose media property "The Free Press" is simply a method of promoting right-wing beliefs, likely funded by right-wing ghouls like Supreme Court corrupter Harlan Crow.
The New Yorker revealed the Weiss-Crow connection, less than a year ago:
Nellie Bowles is working for Bari Weiss (like Weiss's sister Suzy) whose media property "The Free Press" is simply a method of promoting right-wing beliefs, likely funded by right-wing ghouls like Supreme Court corrupter Harlan Crow.
The New Yorker revealed the Weiss-Crow connection, less than a year ago:
But it was Weiss, more than anyone else, who was clearly the group’s big draw. She brought in a half-million-dollar donation from Harlan Crow, a Texas real-estate developer who, ProPublica recently reported, paid for years of undisclosed vacations and private-jet travel for the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Bowles is a right-wing political operative, plain and simple, which is why, apart from her lack of talent as a writer, her book doesn't wonder about the people targeted as the enemy. This passage from Fischer's piece says it all:
It is difficult, though, to see Bowles’s subjects as more than caricatures when her descriptions of them are so generic. She writes that Seattle’s sixtysomething mayor has “hair perfectly blown out into the helmet that’s popular for successful women of that age.” Protesters in their teens and early twenties, meanwhile, possess “that coiled squirrely energy men have then.” At such moments, Bowles is not identifying and describing types; she is gesturing toward them, relying on readers to supply a portrait they already have in mind.
Well of course Bowles is "relying on readers to supply a portrait they already have in mind." That's how political propaganda works. Why would Bowles spend her time thinking about and describing individual human beings? That's not what her audience or her funders want.
And it should never be forgotten how extreme Bowles is - she promoted the psychopathic Libs of TikTok a couple of years ago:
Another week and another funny investigative report from Libs of TikTok, this time about a Portland lesbian bar, Doc Marie’s, that closed a week after opening...
Bowles links to the Libs of TikTok Substack and to "our friends" the grifting goons Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog, who also link to Libs of TikTok.
Libs of TikTok and its creator Chaya Raichik are infamous for engaging in stochastic terrorism. And they are still at it: Waukesha middle school receives bomb threats after Libs of TikTok post; Planet Fitness outlets receive bomb threats after far right derides gym policy; Northwest ISD teacher — subject of Libs of TikTok posts — targeted by hoax bomb threat.
Imagine being a committed supporter of Hillary Clinton in 2016, as Bowles apparently was, to, in a mere six years, publicly expressing your admiration for the humor of an extremist right-wing, gay-bashing soulless monster like Chaya Raichik.
That's the corrupting power of far-right plutocrat money in action.
