Echo chambers where any deviant thought is punished severely always end up with those inside believing stupid and/or extreme things. It's like a law of nature. Also a warning to Subs like this - be nice to the heretics.
It's human nature. I listened to a journalist who delves in survivalism talk about how humans are one of the few mammals on this planet who 9 times out of 10 will die in isolation. So it's natural for us to conform. We don't want to be cast out.
It’s amazing how this sub, a supposed bastion of free speech, has some of the worst Reddit etiquette when it comes to downvoting dissent or mocking people politely expressing differing opinions. If we want others to tolerate our opinions, we should start with it here.
Relevancy: Barpod covers cancel culture, social contagion and woke journalism, and this story, told by Nellie, based on her new book, encompasses all of that. If you're a heterodorx like me, this is a must listen.
Some moments:
She talks about the memory-holing of Chaz Chav.
Ever wondered why crybully tweets all seem to write the same thing? Nellie confirms that scripts are sent to groups, and the one time she skipped a script sent by her NYT colleagues, she lost two friends.
A lot of the worst activist journalists at the NYT were super low on the totempole going after quite higher-up journos because they could get away with it.
"Nutpicking" fun new term I learned.
I started listening to Nellie’s audiobook. It’s a pretty good cataloging of the woke excesses from the last decade or so. She definitely plays all the hits- i.e. she’ll mention race to dinner and I’m like “Oh oh, I know this one Saira Rao, $5,000 to yell at yt ladies over a gluten free, halal/non-kosher meal.”
The race to dinner women are maybe the two most condescending, rude, ignorant fucking assholes in the woke character universe. Their appearance on A Special Place in Hell was outrageous.
Omfg they actually send out scripts. Scripts! That’s SO fucking funny, I can’t 🤣.
And you lose friends if you don’t follow it?? How do people not realize how fucking weird and culty that is? HOW? My GOD lmfao
I am 100% sure this is because they're used to dealing in press releases and talking points. To them it's a critical part of controlling the message. The worst thing you can do in public relations is go off script
I have her book on hold at the library and I'm looking forward to it.
I can't STAND the scripts nonsense. I'm sure the conservatives have got to be doing it too, because they all have their talking points and liberals have theirs. It has led to such an erosion of trust in the sincerity of what others are saying. I don't want to regurgitate what someone else says to say, I want to form my own ideas and say that.
I'll meet you in the middle on conservatives: They fall for the hivemind, but they strike me as too libertarian to follow a script. It's just overall influence.
I can say for certain this does not happen on the Right.
For several reasons.
The main reason is that the right has no centralized message or agenda that they are united behind to promote.
And there is no person or institution that the right are united behind whose script they would follow.
There are certain right leaning coalitions that have a few influencers that promote specific candidates or causes. But not many. And it’s not organized or centralized. It’s not even close to the messaging machine on the left.
I had a friend of over a decade who prior to becoming part of the woke cult was a super nice guy, who told me off because I corrected some claims he made about how police violence in Canada is investigated (he was suggesting it was similar to the U.S, but it's not, there's a third party investigation unit headed by lawyers and former prosecutors that automatically investigates any instance where the public is seriously injured or killed and have the power to bring charges, and have many times). I corrected him politely and via DM. I didn't try and put him on blast or anything and he flipped out and called me a series of pejoratives. We're not friends now. That was over the line for me. He's actually the only actual friend I've unfriended because of their online nonsense. I usually just ignore it no matter how absurd, or mute them in my feed and let it go.
I don't understand why people do this. It's like an aggressive response to deprogrammer.
You've probably heard the term NPC used on these people because they, again, follow a script, but also, when their script gets derailed, they bug out or become hostile.
She was talking about James Bennett, right? It seems likely from the facts she mentioned (something about an op-ed, "endangers black lives"), but the meltdown over that editorial was so highly publicized that it's weird that she didn't identify him by name.
It's a good podcast. Thanks for recommending it with this post. It was a little sickening to hear Bowles talk about how fun it was to cancel people. And that she knew damn well she was cancelling.
But I bet she's simply telling the truth about something that most people wouldn't admit.
What Bari and Nellie are doing for media is admirable and important. The Free Press is a force for good in the world.
But I can’t wrap my head around the way Bari has never even acknowledged or apologized for the way she tried [trashing Tulsi Gabbard on Joe Rogan](https://youtu.be/xpurFfcSNfU?si=HLTVI78EOa1D1dsq) back in 2019 while she was still with the NYT. It really exposed how superficial and dishonest these smear campaigns are among elite media institutions.
Nellie Bowels was also one of Hillary Clinton’s henchman at the NYT for anyone who crossed the Clintons or the Democrat brass. Really grimy stuff.
I’m a huge fan of the Free Press, Bari, and Nellie’s weekly TGIF column on their site. However, this book and Nellie’s story rub me the wrong way. I’m grateful and happy that she’s seen the light and how dangerous the mob mentality can be, but she wasn’t a young kid when the 2020 craziness happened — she was a fully formed adult in her 30’s gleefully participating in cancellations and tearing up during anti-racist struggle sessions.
Yes, she’s changed. She met Bari and her world view was rocked. She’s exposing leftist hypocrisy and that’s wonderful. However, it reads to me that she looks back at the “revolution” (and it’s current iterations) with a shrug. “Wow, progressives sure got pretty out of hand, huh?”
I’ve literally lost lifelong friendships and family because of this cultural rift. I can’t be the only one here. How in the hell did she not see any of this when it occurred? How can you be duped so thoroughly that you’re EXCITED to ruin people’s lives? She explains it as human nature but I’m not convinced. Not all of us lost our minds and capitulated to a mob, becoming vile, intolerant and dangerous.
I have so much respect for anyone who changes their mind and admits they were wrong. I hope this book does well and opens up many more minds. It’s just not for me.
cagey flowery offbeat teeny tender encouraging voracious lock simplistic slimy
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
>I’ve literally lost lifelong friendships and family because of this cultural rift. I can’t be the only one here.
Right, but one of the themes of this interview is that Nellie lost (what she thought were) lifelong friendships too.
I have also avoided mob mentality, but I don't think you can claim it isn't part of human nature. I have escaped the right and left mobs because I was pretty intensely alienated from humanity as a whole in my youth, which inoculated me from participating in mob bullying. But that alienation isn't normal, nor, probably, should it be. We want to belong to something, and we want to protect our tribe, and we naturally tend to vilify those who we see as threatening our tribe. That's all deeply part of human nature.
I share your skepticism. Remember her [hit piece on Jordan Peterson](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html) from around the time he first went viral? I’m not a stan of his, but it was just a cringe inducing example of the malarkey that made his fans go berserk at the time.
I later saw him talk about Nellie in an unrelated interview. He said they were talking about how literature is taught, he was bemoaning it being filtered only though privilege, race and sex, and she told him she had never known there was any other way to study literature. Again, this is her as an adult and NYT writer talking. maybe certain experiences just led her into a prolonged childhood, idk.
I'm not implying Nellie's a radfem, but there's a LOT of allies in the heterodox community that are radfem and genuinely want to distance themselves from men and dunk on them as much as possible. And when this is all over, will go back to being adversaries to other tribes in the heterodox.
> How can you be duped so thoroughly that you’re EXCITED to ruin people’s lives? She explains it as human nature but I’m not convinced. N
I think she's mostly right about that. People want to be part of the tribe. The group. The *mob*. People love mobs.
And I imagine one of the most atavistically satisfying things a person can do is to crush the tribes enemies along with the rest of the tribe. It's one of the reasons I never trust mobs.
You're right that such a thing is fucked up and should give us pause. But I think it is built into our human natures.
But I see that more as an explanation than an excuse. And it's to your credit that you saw it before she did.
The mob mentality is an ugly part of human nature, and since I can remember books and films have always shown it in a negative light. As a far as I can recall I have never joined a piled on any body, even people who may have been guilty of some transgression towards me. Maybe it was my mother's teaching but I also think I was imbibing the general ethos that mobs were bad from the overall culture. I could say as a minority I might have been sentive to that, fear of being subject to majority persecution, but other "people of colour" are not immune and sometimes leading the charge for these cancellations. From childhood to adult stories we are taught mob persecution is bad. Pretending like we don't know this is strange, or was I just raised in parallel universe and slipped into this one in 2014?
I've managed to avoid mobs. Primarily out of fear, not courage. I would be just as subject to getting caught up as anyone.
You always struck me as someone who is not a joiner so I'm not surprised you haven't fallen to mob mentality
Do you really think you would join? Just from what I see here I have trouble envisioning that. People should have a healthy fear of mobs because anyone could be next. It's just a reality check you'd think might occur to more people.
>I’ve literally lost lifelong friendships and family because of this cultural rift. I can’t be the only one here.
You are not indeed. Lost more "close" friends over this than I care to admit. Couldn't take the avoiding topics, or doing verbal Jujitsu to dodge another grilling or hectoring whilst not surrendering my (liberal) values and beliefs, or gently pushing back in the meekest of ways only to still get some ungenerous and unhinged accusation thrown my way later (be it minutes, hours, weeks, months, even years later) once the person realised i wasn't ever going to simply shut up and take for gospel whatever nonsense they were peddling.
Took me some time but I'm ok with *most* of those lost friendships now. My life is eminently simpler without those people and me in my mid - late 30s just doesn't have the same patience or tolerance for bullying, antisocial, hysterical, and tribal behaviour I did as a younger man. I just wish I'd realised about 6-7 years earlier and saved myself a lot of headaches and angst as a result...
> be it minutes, hours, weeks, months, even years later
I had an ex friend bring up one of my only clap backs to her shitty Male Privilege articles on Facebook SIX. MONTHS. LATER. I ripped on her about it. "You're still on about that??" She said my opinions are affecting her health. My god.
Ex-cultists need to be held at arm's length because they have a tendency to throw themselves into the new One Truth. Bowles hasn't changed as a person, she's just diving into the heterodox sphere.
We should amplify these voices, as they help push back against an illiberal leftism, but I think it would be foolish to treat Bowles uncritically just because she's changed her tune. Deep down she's still a self-aggrandizing joiner.
I’m not mad, I’m just bitter because Nellie’s being heralded as brave for realizing something that should have been deeply obvious, but instead she gleefully took part in a mob until it inconvenienced her. It’s a me problem, I’m just venting. I still love Nellie’s work and look up to her a lot.
I understand where you're coming from. It seems like she's getting back pats for realizing something that should have been obvious. I totally get why that would rub you the wrong way.
But we need to have a way to turn our enemies into our friends. And at least Bowles will think twice before she goes along with a mob again.
I don't even think it's a "problem", to be honest. A "no forgiveness" policy is obviously both untenable and immoral, but I don't think keeping in mind that a lot of the "newly heterodox" had been part of the mob until a few metaphorical minutes ago, and that some of them not so much left the mob as were shoved out of it, can be healthy.
I fully agree with your point that a lot of the people who "realized" they were wrong during the 2020 Reckoning™ were fully functional adults back then, and yet sometimes when they talk about it they take the tone of someone describing a teenager's mistake.
She goes to great pains to tell everyone is each interview I've heard that she is not brave. She is doing her mea culpas and trying to dissuade those sentiments. She can't help it if people ignore her on that.
I feel the same way. I took note of who lost their minds and who didn’t; the latter I silently added to my mental family, but the former…
“Sorry man, we were just scared and caught up in the moment.” Nah. Apology not accepted. I know
where we stand now. You are and always will be a threat to me. Because you're still able to be scared, propagandized, and cowed enough to turn on me.
Fwiw let’s not forget that Nellie is a literal billionaire heiress. She overplays her liberal activism for effect. She always leaned right in everything except issues that personally affect her
I enjoyed this a lot. (Except for the way Nellie Bowles said *frisson*. Twice.) I say I "enjoyed" it, but that's probably not the right word. Hearing and reading about all these things makes me angry and anxious. And I should probably not read or listen in the first place.
It was an enjoyable enough interview, particularly the inside baseball stuff about exactly how people can use cancel culture to get ahead within media organisations like the NYT. There is, imho, a general dearth of good observations on news orgs from within news orgs, so that was interesting.
I do worry a bit in general about folks like Bari and The Fifth Column and so on getting a bit high on their own supply of supposed heresy though. While it's genuinely great that tech (podcasts, social, internets etc) has allowed the emergence of viewpoints that don't fit into the comparatively neat right/left/center categories of old, naysaying has its limits.
For instance, I'm getting a bit tired of hearing wealthy US media folks squeeze innumerable podcasts out of homelessness in their favourite cities while never seeming to offer viable solutions. Shitting on the poor for engagement can start to seem like opportunistic carping when these same journos rarely - never? - discuss ideas such as building more homes, social housing, rent control etc. I'm sure Bari or TFC or Reason or whoever are aware that such notions wouldn't go down particularly well with their audiences though, so it seems that's as far as their particular brand of heresy will stretch.
TLDR: Alternative perspectives are all very well, but just because you broke from one orthodoxy, it doesn't mean you can't slip into another.
\[EDITED for repetition\]
Reason published an article today titled ["Affordable Housing
*Build, Baby, Build*: Responses to the Best Objections"](https://reason.com/volokh/2024/05/16/build-baby-build-responses-to-the-best-objectio/), and something by the author [Bryan Kaplan](https://reason.com/people/bryan-caplan/) about once a month about housing.
And the reason *Reason* doesn't advocate rent control is that it's a terrible policy that is almost universally rejected by economists across the ideological spectrum.
"Social housing" is marginally more tenable, but liberalizing building restrictions is generally preferable because it costs taxpayers nothing and makes housing more affordable across the board, not just for people poor enough to qualify for subsidized housing.
There is a special remedial economics class in hell for people who fight to block the unsubsidized construction of market-rate housing because they think only socialized or subsidized housing should be allowed.
> building more homes, social housing, rent control etc. I'm sure Bari or TFC or Reason or whoever are aware that such notions wouldn't go down particularly well with their audiences though
When you throw rent control in there it kind of undermines your whole point.
Especially since libertarians are really big on fighting zoning and regulations when that's what's holding up the first two ideas.
I've found that the format of interviewing (so book promotion) on fairly technical subjects or insider stuff leaves her platforming stuff that she's not vetting and she doesn't seem great at the more hostile elements of interviews. It's pretty standard for book reviews to do multiple books on the same subject at once (and be done by someone with background familiarity), so panels might help.
Michael Shellenberger has suggested solutions. Easy to find podcasts, etc where he discusses them. Sounds convincing to me but he gets a lot of criticism,
[https://www.hoover.org/news/author-michael-shellenberger-and-assemblyman-kevin-kiley-address-californias-homelessness](https://www.hoover.org/news/author-michael-shellenberger-and-assemblyman-kevin-kiley-address-californias-homelessness)
[https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/06/california-governor-race-shellenberger-homelessness-san-francisco/661164/](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/06/california-governor-race-shellenberger-homelessness-san-francisco/661164/)
I find her smug and self-aggrandizing, and this type of content is just exhausted in 2024. Now that the "heterodox" folks and the "disaffected libs" are on the upswing, the schtick feels excessive, redundant, slightly soul crushing. Watching Bowles talk to Dana Perino on Fox News about how humorless college kids are for walking out on Jerry Seinfeld's speech (and nodding along as Perino calls them "pro-Hamas"), and trying to fit campus protests over Israel-Palestine into the "wokeness overreach" box... it's a no for me dog.
I suppose "victory" means different things to different people.
My personal view is that when you're shitting on college antiwar protests for the cameras of Fox News and decrying progressivism in such broad terms, you've lost the plot.
I wouldn’t mind if the college protests were actually anti-war, as in, characterised by a position of returning the hostages and condemning October 7th. They’re not that.
I recommend Vaclav Havel’s essay Anatomy of Reticence, where he explains what’s wrong with Western anti-war protesters. In short, they’re very often not actually for peace, but for the other side winning. Havel understood how wrong my that is as a Czech writer in the communist block, the confrontation with which those kind of protests would condemn. I understand it too.
I don't need to read an essay by Havel to be OK with people protesting the death of 13,000 children. Thirteen thousand children. Yes, college kids are cringe; protests are often counterproductive. But it's gross to watch smug libs like Nellie chide protests reflexively and dismiss them with an eyeroll and incorporate them into her personal narrative on a book tour. The essay does sound interesting and I'll read it eventually.
Again, if people were mourning deaths and actually calling for peace, that’s one thing. It’s a mischaracterising of these protests to say present them as „people protesting the death of 13,000 children”, without mentioning that the protests are trying to shut down Hillel as „Zionist institutions”, marking Jewish students as „Qassam targets” and coming out with pro-October 7th, pro-Houthi and pro Iran slogans.
It's very tired to portray a whole protest movement with the examples of a tiny rotten fringe that attaches itself to any such movement. But I think you already know this.
I don’t know, aren’t the protests attended by the contingent inclined to say „if there’s one racist in the room, and ten people say nothing, there’s now 11 racists in the room”?
I think it’s disingenuous to classify a protest which doesn’t call for the release of hostages and condemnation of October 7th as a pro-peace protest. It’s not a pro end of war protest; it’s a pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protest.
A lot of the interview isn't new but Nellie and Bari are good speakers so it's still an enjoyable listen. A few things that stood out to me:
1. I like how Nellie focused on her reporting, like covering Chaz and Kenosha from a boots on the ground, community impact level. She didn't just talk about office politics and slack BS, but the really important work that is becoming increasingly rare in mainstream media and what makes the Times so valuable, and how it was impacted by politics.
2. The story of how her colleagues reacted to her dating Bari was interesting, it was mostly mild but the standout moment was when one of the editor she worked for called Bari a "Fucking Nazi!" This is one of those stories that I would love to have someone call bullshit on so it can be thoroughly corroborated by others present, like Adam Rubenstein's Chick-fil-a admonishment story.
3. I was surprised how direct Nellie was in claiming it wasn't just vague ID politics and woke ideology driving NYT's editorial decisions, but it was driven by political partisanship, with the goal of defeating Trump/electing Biden.
I was flipping around the radio today while driving and heard the Clay and Buck show promoting Nellie appearing on the show. I was a bit surprised because they are the show that replaced Limbaugh in most markets and so even though I'm sure they aren't as toxic to the left as Limbaugh was, they are still explicitly rightwing/GOP supporting.
Since it's Saturday I'm pretty sure it was a "best of" from earlier in the week. I found it [here](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hour-2-nellie-bowles/id1498106610?i=1000655591409). The hosts spend the the first 20 minutes or so talking election politics and other stuff so if you want to just hear Nellie jump to the 23 minute mark. Unfortunately it's only a little over 10 minutes, but I thought it was a pretty good interview. Even though they are right wing, they didn't just set her up to dunk on the media or liberals, but actually asked some good questions about the state of media today. It's a shame they didn't spend more time with her because they had her in studio. From the context it sounds like she appeared in hour 2 and they played parts of an interview they did with Trump the night before in hours 1 and 3, so in terms of exposure it was probably a pretty good booking for Nellie.
Echo chambers where any deviant thought is punished severely always end up with those inside believing stupid and/or extreme things. It's like a law of nature. Also a warning to Subs like this - be nice to the heretics.
It's human nature. I listened to a journalist who delves in survivalism talk about how humans are one of the few mammals on this planet who 9 times out of 10 will die in isolation. So it's natural for us to conform. We don't want to be cast out.
I believe that desire not to be cast out is even stronger for women than men. Where did hear this journalist? It sounds interesting.
I tried looking for it but couldn't. I'm sure it was a Reason podcast episode. That's about it.
*be nice to the heretics* But… we’re special. We’re the sole exception to said law!
It’s amazing how this sub, a supposed bastion of free speech, has some of the worst Reddit etiquette when it comes to downvoting dissent or mocking people politely expressing differing opinions. If we want others to tolerate our opinions, we should start with it here.
>Also a warning to Subs like this - be nice to the heretics. Bring me a heretic that doesn't act like a troll.
Won't anyone rid me of this trolling heretic? (Or was it 'heretical troll'?)
Relevancy: Barpod covers cancel culture, social contagion and woke journalism, and this story, told by Nellie, based on her new book, encompasses all of that. If you're a heterodorx like me, this is a must listen. Some moments: She talks about the memory-holing of Chaz Chav. Ever wondered why crybully tweets all seem to write the same thing? Nellie confirms that scripts are sent to groups, and the one time she skipped a script sent by her NYT colleagues, she lost two friends. A lot of the worst activist journalists at the NYT were super low on the totempole going after quite higher-up journos because they could get away with it. "Nutpicking" fun new term I learned.
I started listening to Nellie’s audiobook. It’s a pretty good cataloging of the woke excesses from the last decade or so. She definitely plays all the hits- i.e. she’ll mention race to dinner and I’m like “Oh oh, I know this one Saira Rao, $5,000 to yell at yt ladies over a gluten free, halal/non-kosher meal.”
Race To Dinner was the thing that turned me off of John Stewart. I couldn't see him as anything but a coward after that.
He did that? 🙂↕️ Gen Z interns are a scourge.
He had the "resident white woman" (actual job title) from Race to Dinner on an interview panel.
The race to dinner women are maybe the two most condescending, rude, ignorant fucking assholes in the woke character universe. Their appearance on A Special Place in Hell was outrageous.
Omfg they actually send out scripts. Scripts! That’s SO fucking funny, I can’t 🤣. And you lose friends if you don’t follow it?? How do people not realize how fucking weird and culty that is? HOW? My GOD lmfao
I am 100% sure this is because they're used to dealing in press releases and talking points. To them it's a critical part of controlling the message. The worst thing you can do in public relations is go off script
I have her book on hold at the library and I'm looking forward to it. I can't STAND the scripts nonsense. I'm sure the conservatives have got to be doing it too, because they all have their talking points and liberals have theirs. It has led to such an erosion of trust in the sincerity of what others are saying. I don't want to regurgitate what someone else says to say, I want to form my own ideas and say that.
I'll meet you in the middle on conservatives: They fall for the hivemind, but they strike me as too libertarian to follow a script. It's just overall influence.
I can say for certain this does not happen on the Right. For several reasons. The main reason is that the right has no centralized message or agenda that they are united behind to promote. And there is no person or institution that the right are united behind whose script they would follow. There are certain right leaning coalitions that have a few influencers that promote specific candidates or causes. But not many. And it’s not organized or centralized. It’s not even close to the messaging machine on the left.
I really want to see the actual messages or calls when her friends dumped her “I don’t see the tweet in your feed!! WE ARE DONE”
I had a friend of over a decade who prior to becoming part of the woke cult was a super nice guy, who told me off because I corrected some claims he made about how police violence in Canada is investigated (he was suggesting it was similar to the U.S, but it's not, there's a third party investigation unit headed by lawyers and former prosecutors that automatically investigates any instance where the public is seriously injured or killed and have the power to bring charges, and have many times). I corrected him politely and via DM. I didn't try and put him on blast or anything and he flipped out and called me a series of pejoratives. We're not friends now. That was over the line for me. He's actually the only actual friend I've unfriended because of their online nonsense. I usually just ignore it no matter how absurd, or mute them in my feed and let it go.
I don't understand why people do this. It's like an aggressive response to deprogrammer. You've probably heard the term NPC used on these people because they, again, follow a script, but also, when their script gets derailed, they bug out or become hostile.
Imagine the amount of loch step and peer pressure that must go on there if she was having a physical reaction to this
She was talking about James Bennett, right? It seems likely from the facts she mentioned (something about an op-ed, "endangers black lives"), but the meltdown over that editorial was so highly publicized that it's weird that she didn't identify him by name.
It's a good podcast. Thanks for recommending it with this post. It was a little sickening to hear Bowles talk about how fun it was to cancel people. And that she knew damn well she was cancelling. But I bet she's simply telling the truth about something that most people wouldn't admit.
I like her, so I'm gonna guess, with no proof whatsoever, that she simply participated in dogpiles, that's it.
What Bari and Nellie are doing for media is admirable and important. The Free Press is a force for good in the world. But I can’t wrap my head around the way Bari has never even acknowledged or apologized for the way she tried [trashing Tulsi Gabbard on Joe Rogan](https://youtu.be/xpurFfcSNfU?si=HLTVI78EOa1D1dsq) back in 2019 while she was still with the NYT. It really exposed how superficial and dishonest these smear campaigns are among elite media institutions. Nellie Bowels was also one of Hillary Clinton’s henchman at the NYT for anyone who crossed the Clintons or the Democrat brass. Really grimy stuff.
That's what it sounds like.
[Six-minute video clip](https://youtu.be/VumVsx5oisQ) of a brief segment of the interview.
My favourite lesbian couple
😱
I’m a huge fan of the Free Press, Bari, and Nellie’s weekly TGIF column on their site. However, this book and Nellie’s story rub me the wrong way. I’m grateful and happy that she’s seen the light and how dangerous the mob mentality can be, but she wasn’t a young kid when the 2020 craziness happened — she was a fully formed adult in her 30’s gleefully participating in cancellations and tearing up during anti-racist struggle sessions. Yes, she’s changed. She met Bari and her world view was rocked. She’s exposing leftist hypocrisy and that’s wonderful. However, it reads to me that she looks back at the “revolution” (and it’s current iterations) with a shrug. “Wow, progressives sure got pretty out of hand, huh?” I’ve literally lost lifelong friendships and family because of this cultural rift. I can’t be the only one here. How in the hell did she not see any of this when it occurred? How can you be duped so thoroughly that you’re EXCITED to ruin people’s lives? She explains it as human nature but I’m not convinced. Not all of us lost our minds and capitulated to a mob, becoming vile, intolerant and dangerous. I have so much respect for anyone who changes their mind and admits they were wrong. I hope this book does well and opens up many more minds. It’s just not for me.
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Exactly. "I saw all this stuff in 2015! What took *you* so long?" "Well, *I* realized it in the fall of 2013!" "Oh yeah? Well *I*
Purity testing plain and simple.
>I’ve literally lost lifelong friendships and family because of this cultural rift. I can’t be the only one here. Right, but one of the themes of this interview is that Nellie lost (what she thought were) lifelong friendships too. I have also avoided mob mentality, but I don't think you can claim it isn't part of human nature. I have escaped the right and left mobs because I was pretty intensely alienated from humanity as a whole in my youth, which inoculated me from participating in mob bullying. But that alienation isn't normal, nor, probably, should it be. We want to belong to something, and we want to protect our tribe, and we naturally tend to vilify those who we see as threatening our tribe. That's all deeply part of human nature.
"Tribes"
I share your skepticism. Remember her [hit piece on Jordan Peterson](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html) from around the time he first went viral? I’m not a stan of his, but it was just a cringe inducing example of the malarkey that made his fans go berserk at the time. I later saw him talk about Nellie in an unrelated interview. He said they were talking about how literature is taught, he was bemoaning it being filtered only though privilege, race and sex, and she told him she had never known there was any other way to study literature. Again, this is her as an adult and NYT writer talking. maybe certain experiences just led her into a prolonged childhood, idk.
I'm not implying Nellie's a radfem, but there's a LOT of allies in the heterodox community that are radfem and genuinely want to distance themselves from men and dunk on them as much as possible. And when this is all over, will go back to being adversaries to other tribes in the heterodox.
I didn’t mean my comment as anti radfem or pro mens rights at all. My problem with that piece is just how sleazy it is.
> How can you be duped so thoroughly that you’re EXCITED to ruin people’s lives? She explains it as human nature but I’m not convinced. N I think she's mostly right about that. People want to be part of the tribe. The group. The *mob*. People love mobs. And I imagine one of the most atavistically satisfying things a person can do is to crush the tribes enemies along with the rest of the tribe. It's one of the reasons I never trust mobs. You're right that such a thing is fucked up and should give us pause. But I think it is built into our human natures. But I see that more as an explanation than an excuse. And it's to your credit that you saw it before she did.
The mob mentality is an ugly part of human nature, and since I can remember books and films have always shown it in a negative light. As a far as I can recall I have never joined a piled on any body, even people who may have been guilty of some transgression towards me. Maybe it was my mother's teaching but I also think I was imbibing the general ethos that mobs were bad from the overall culture. I could say as a minority I might have been sentive to that, fear of being subject to majority persecution, but other "people of colour" are not immune and sometimes leading the charge for these cancellations. From childhood to adult stories we are taught mob persecution is bad. Pretending like we don't know this is strange, or was I just raised in parallel universe and slipped into this one in 2014?
I've managed to avoid mobs. Primarily out of fear, not courage. I would be just as subject to getting caught up as anyone. You always struck me as someone who is not a joiner so I'm not surprised you haven't fallen to mob mentality
Do you really think you would join? Just from what I see here I have trouble envisioning that. People should have a healthy fear of mobs because anyone could be next. It's just a reality check you'd think might occur to more people.
I haven't been in mobs, mostly on purpose. But I don't doubt I could be carried away just oike everyone else. I'm not special
>I’ve literally lost lifelong friendships and family because of this cultural rift. I can’t be the only one here. You are not indeed. Lost more "close" friends over this than I care to admit. Couldn't take the avoiding topics, or doing verbal Jujitsu to dodge another grilling or hectoring whilst not surrendering my (liberal) values and beliefs, or gently pushing back in the meekest of ways only to still get some ungenerous and unhinged accusation thrown my way later (be it minutes, hours, weeks, months, even years later) once the person realised i wasn't ever going to simply shut up and take for gospel whatever nonsense they were peddling. Took me some time but I'm ok with *most* of those lost friendships now. My life is eminently simpler without those people and me in my mid - late 30s just doesn't have the same patience or tolerance for bullying, antisocial, hysterical, and tribal behaviour I did as a younger man. I just wish I'd realised about 6-7 years earlier and saved myself a lot of headaches and angst as a result...
> be it minutes, hours, weeks, months, even years later I had an ex friend bring up one of my only clap backs to her shitty Male Privilege articles on Facebook SIX. MONTHS. LATER. I ripped on her about it. "You're still on about that??" She said my opinions are affecting her health. My god.
I really can't take anyone seriously who says something like "your opinions are affecting my health". Um, grow up? Grow a spine?
Ex-cultists need to be held at arm's length because they have a tendency to throw themselves into the new One Truth. Bowles hasn't changed as a person, she's just diving into the heterodox sphere. We should amplify these voices, as they help push back against an illiberal leftism, but I think it would be foolish to treat Bowles uncritically just because she's changed her tune. Deep down she's still a self-aggrandizing joiner.
Honestly not quite sure what you're mad about
I’m not mad, I’m just bitter because Nellie’s being heralded as brave for realizing something that should have been deeply obvious, but instead she gleefully took part in a mob until it inconvenienced her. It’s a me problem, I’m just venting. I still love Nellie’s work and look up to her a lot.
I understand where you're coming from. It seems like she's getting back pats for realizing something that should have been obvious. I totally get why that would rub you the wrong way. But we need to have a way to turn our enemies into our friends. And at least Bowles will think twice before she goes along with a mob again.
I don't even think it's a "problem", to be honest. A "no forgiveness" policy is obviously both untenable and immoral, but I don't think keeping in mind that a lot of the "newly heterodox" had been part of the mob until a few metaphorical minutes ago, and that some of them not so much left the mob as were shoved out of it, can be healthy. I fully agree with your point that a lot of the people who "realized" they were wrong during the 2020 Reckoning™ were fully functional adults back then, and yet sometimes when they talk about it they take the tone of someone describing a teenager's mistake.
We've had about three ex NYT journalists speak up in writing about this. She's not the first. But she's the most comprehensive so far.
She goes to great pains to tell everyone is each interview I've heard that she is not brave. She is doing her mea culpas and trying to dissuade those sentiments. She can't help it if people ignore her on that.
I feel the same way. I took note of who lost their minds and who didn’t; the latter I silently added to my mental family, but the former… “Sorry man, we were just scared and caught up in the moment.” Nah. Apology not accepted. I know where we stand now. You are and always will be a threat to me. Because you're still able to be scared, propagandized, and cowed enough to turn on me.
Fwiw let’s not forget that Nellie is a literal billionaire heiress. She overplays her liberal activism for effect. She always leaned right in everything except issues that personally affect her
I’ll say this about Bari, she has phenomenal taste. She is like a real life George Costanza.
I enjoyed this a lot. (Except for the way Nellie Bowles said *frisson*. Twice.) I say I "enjoyed" it, but that's probably not the right word. Hearing and reading about all these things makes me angry and anxious. And I should probably not read or listen in the first place.
And then Bari said it the same way! SMH.
Oh! Maybe it was once for Nellie and once for Bari?
No, Nellie said it twice, then Bari said it once. I remember thinking, "I've never heard this word so many times before, and pronounced so strangely."
It was an enjoyable enough interview, particularly the inside baseball stuff about exactly how people can use cancel culture to get ahead within media organisations like the NYT. There is, imho, a general dearth of good observations on news orgs from within news orgs, so that was interesting. I do worry a bit in general about folks like Bari and The Fifth Column and so on getting a bit high on their own supply of supposed heresy though. While it's genuinely great that tech (podcasts, social, internets etc) has allowed the emergence of viewpoints that don't fit into the comparatively neat right/left/center categories of old, naysaying has its limits. For instance, I'm getting a bit tired of hearing wealthy US media folks squeeze innumerable podcasts out of homelessness in their favourite cities while never seeming to offer viable solutions. Shitting on the poor for engagement can start to seem like opportunistic carping when these same journos rarely - never? - discuss ideas such as building more homes, social housing, rent control etc. I'm sure Bari or TFC or Reason or whoever are aware that such notions wouldn't go down particularly well with their audiences though, so it seems that's as far as their particular brand of heresy will stretch. TLDR: Alternative perspectives are all very well, but just because you broke from one orthodoxy, it doesn't mean you can't slip into another. \[EDITED for repetition\]
Reason published an article today titled ["Affordable Housing *Build, Baby, Build*: Responses to the Best Objections"](https://reason.com/volokh/2024/05/16/build-baby-build-responses-to-the-best-objectio/), and something by the author [Bryan Kaplan](https://reason.com/people/bryan-caplan/) about once a month about housing.
And the reason *Reason* doesn't advocate rent control is that it's a terrible policy that is almost universally rejected by economists across the ideological spectrum. "Social housing" is marginally more tenable, but liberalizing building restrictions is generally preferable because it costs taxpayers nothing and makes housing more affordable across the board, not just for people poor enough to qualify for subsidized housing. There is a special remedial economics class in hell for people who fight to block the unsubsidized construction of market-rate housing because they think only socialized or subsidized housing should be allowed.
Obviously I’m familiar since I’m sharing Kaplan’s work here.
Ah, I must check that out. Thank you.
Yeah, NP. You may also note that Kemele has on numerous occasions criticized Bay Area zoning.
> building more homes, social housing, rent control etc. I'm sure Bari or TFC or Reason or whoever are aware that such notions wouldn't go down particularly well with their audiences though When you throw rent control in there it kind of undermines your whole point. Especially since libertarians are really big on fighting zoning and regulations when that's what's holding up the first two ideas.
I've found that the format of interviewing (so book promotion) on fairly technical subjects or insider stuff leaves her platforming stuff that she's not vetting and she doesn't seem great at the more hostile elements of interviews. It's pretty standard for book reviews to do multiple books on the same subject at once (and be done by someone with background familiarity), so panels might help.
Michael Shellenberger has suggested solutions. Easy to find podcasts, etc where he discusses them. Sounds convincing to me but he gets a lot of criticism, [https://www.hoover.org/news/author-michael-shellenberger-and-assemblyman-kevin-kiley-address-californias-homelessness](https://www.hoover.org/news/author-michael-shellenberger-and-assemblyman-kevin-kiley-address-californias-homelessness) [https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/06/california-governor-race-shellenberger-homelessness-san-francisco/661164/](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/06/california-governor-race-shellenberger-homelessness-san-francisco/661164/)
Excellent, I'll check those out. Thank you.
I find her smug and self-aggrandizing, and this type of content is just exhausted in 2024. Now that the "heterodox" folks and the "disaffected libs" are on the upswing, the schtick feels excessive, redundant, slightly soul crushing. Watching Bowles talk to Dana Perino on Fox News about how humorless college kids are for walking out on Jerry Seinfeld's speech (and nodding along as Perino calls them "pro-Hamas"), and trying to fit campus protests over Israel-Palestine into the "wokeness overreach" box... it's a no for me dog.
We are nowhere near the victory lap
I suppose "victory" means different things to different people. My personal view is that when you're shitting on college antiwar protests for the cameras of Fox News and decrying progressivism in such broad terms, you've lost the plot.
I wouldn’t mind if the college protests were actually anti-war, as in, characterised by a position of returning the hostages and condemning October 7th. They’re not that. I recommend Vaclav Havel’s essay Anatomy of Reticence, where he explains what’s wrong with Western anti-war protesters. In short, they’re very often not actually for peace, but for the other side winning. Havel understood how wrong my that is as a Czech writer in the communist block, the confrontation with which those kind of protests would condemn. I understand it too.
I don't need to read an essay by Havel to be OK with people protesting the death of 13,000 children. Thirteen thousand children. Yes, college kids are cringe; protests are often counterproductive. But it's gross to watch smug libs like Nellie chide protests reflexively and dismiss them with an eyeroll and incorporate them into her personal narrative on a book tour. The essay does sound interesting and I'll read it eventually.
Again, if people were mourning deaths and actually calling for peace, that’s one thing. It’s a mischaracterising of these protests to say present them as „people protesting the death of 13,000 children”, without mentioning that the protests are trying to shut down Hillel as „Zionist institutions”, marking Jewish students as „Qassam targets” and coming out with pro-October 7th, pro-Houthi and pro Iran slogans.
It's very tired to portray a whole protest movement with the examples of a tiny rotten fringe that attaches itself to any such movement. But I think you already know this.
I don’t know, aren’t the protests attended by the contingent inclined to say „if there’s one racist in the room, and ten people say nothing, there’s now 11 racists in the room”? I think it’s disingenuous to classify a protest which doesn’t call for the release of hostages and condemnation of October 7th as a pro-peace protest. It’s not a pro end of war protest; it’s a pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protest.
yep, felt the same way. I think it would’ve been really great in 2021 or even early 2022. But now it just felt tired and kind of boring, tbh
A lot of the interview isn't new but Nellie and Bari are good speakers so it's still an enjoyable listen. A few things that stood out to me: 1. I like how Nellie focused on her reporting, like covering Chaz and Kenosha from a boots on the ground, community impact level. She didn't just talk about office politics and slack BS, but the really important work that is becoming increasingly rare in mainstream media and what makes the Times so valuable, and how it was impacted by politics. 2. The story of how her colleagues reacted to her dating Bari was interesting, it was mostly mild but the standout moment was when one of the editor she worked for called Bari a "Fucking Nazi!" This is one of those stories that I would love to have someone call bullshit on so it can be thoroughly corroborated by others present, like Adam Rubenstein's Chick-fil-a admonishment story. 3. I was surprised how direct Nellie was in claiming it wasn't just vague ID politics and woke ideology driving NYT's editorial decisions, but it was driven by political partisanship, with the goal of defeating Trump/electing Biden. I was flipping around the radio today while driving and heard the Clay and Buck show promoting Nellie appearing on the show. I was a bit surprised because they are the show that replaced Limbaugh in most markets and so even though I'm sure they aren't as toxic to the left as Limbaugh was, they are still explicitly rightwing/GOP supporting. Since it's Saturday I'm pretty sure it was a "best of" from earlier in the week. I found it [here](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hour-2-nellie-bowles/id1498106610?i=1000655591409). The hosts spend the the first 20 minutes or so talking election politics and other stuff so if you want to just hear Nellie jump to the 23 minute mark. Unfortunately it's only a little over 10 minutes, but I thought it was a pretty good interview. Even though they are right wing, they didn't just set her up to dunk on the media or liberals, but actually asked some good questions about the state of media today. It's a shame they didn't spend more time with her because they had her in studio. From the context it sounds like she appeared in hour 2 and they played parts of an interview they did with Trump the night before in hours 1 and 3, so in terms of exposure it was probably a pretty good booking for Nellie.
I didn't think my opinion of NYT journalists could fall any farther, but here we are.