Morning After The Revolution

Have you ever looked around your workplace, school, or city and felt like the rules changed overnight—and no one told you how to live by them? In Morning After the Revolution, Nellie Bowles argues that the post-2020 progressive wave didn’t just tug American life leftward; it attempted a sweeping moral and institutional renovation—policing, education, race, gender, media, philanthropy—guided by a faith in human goodness and the promise that “we can start over now.” Bowles contends that this vision delivered some real insights and poetic hope, but, when installed at scale and speed, it often ran aground on reality, producing unaccountable movements, bizarre incentives, civic decay, and a new social ritual of public shaming. To understand what changed, you have to see how it felt to live inside the revolution—and what it looked like the morning after.

What the revolution believed

Bowles captures a worldview you probably recognize from your inboxes and sidewalks circa 2020–2021: people are essentially good but denatured by oppressive systems (capitalism, policing, whiteness, heteronormativity). Abolish or defund those systems and communities will self-govern peacefully; children “know themselves” better than parents and experts ever did; feelings outrank facts; and language can heal the world if you get it right (folks becomes folx; Latina becomes Latinx; lesbian becomes “a non-man attracted to non-men”). Brands, schools, and media all joined in—sometimes earnestly, sometimes as theater—creating a sense that progress demanded total alignment. (Compare: Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind on how moral communities enforce order through shared sacred values.)

Three theaters of change

Bowles reports in three vivid arenas. First, the streets: Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) and Portland’s direct-action scenes tried to model police-free utopias. For a few festival-like weeks, CHAZ built gardens, mutual aid, and community safety squads—until shootings, delayed ambulances, and unresolved murders collapsed the experiment. Second, the seminar room: a booming industry of “atonement” reshaped workplaces and universities with frameworks like Tema Okun’s “white supremacy culture,” Robin DiAngelo’s “white fragility,” and somatic workshops where white participants chanted “I am racist,” rocked their spines, and hummed shame out of their bodies. Third, the home front: the gender vanguard moved from pronouns to medicalization, with pediatric clinics promoting early social transition, puberty blockers, and surgeries; the new “asexual spectrum” expanded the LGBTQIA+ tent; and high theory recast “femaleness” as self-negation (à la Andrea Long Chu), challenging legacy feminism from within.

Follow the money, measure the harm

When enthusiasms meet cash flows, you get Abolitionist Entertainment LLC-level stories. Bowles digs into the tsunami of funds pledged to Black Lives Matter and adjacent groups (The Washington Post estimated $50 billion pledged in one year), then traces how local activists in Minneapolis watched flashy newcomers raise millions for “police abolition,” while incrementalists quietly won reforms like 911 mental-health dispatch (Travis’ Law) and limits on no-knock warrants. Meanwhile, leaders at the marquee BLM entity bought mansions, launched influencer houses, and framed basic nonprofit transparency (Form 990s) as a tool of white supremacy. (For contrast, see Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All on elite philanthropy’s performative drift.)

Why it matters to your city (and your sanity)

Bowles’s hometown, San Francisco, becomes the movement’s stress test: soft-on-street-crime policies, open-air drug scenes, and baroque housing vetoes collide with romantic self-image. The outcome isn’t a Nordic social democracy; it’s a city of boarded-up shops, shrinking public-school attendance, and record overdoses—leading liberals (especially Asian American parents) to recall school board members and DA Chesa Boudin. The lesson: institutions are fragile; rhetoric without guardrails can turn compassion into tolerated cruelty; and civic life degrades when leaders outsource reality-testing to vibes.

What you’ll take away

You’ll see how utopian experiments falter when facing violence and human frailty; how anti-racism workshops turned confession into a corporate sacrament; how homelessness got instrumentalized by activists; how “defund” ran into a homicide spike and a practical turn back to policing; how the gender frontier moved faster than evidence and consent; and how one city’s voters signaled they want both justice and order. If you felt tribeless or tongue-tied in recent years, Bowles offers a map: stay curious, insist on results over vibes, and beware any movement that forbids you from noticing what you see.

Bowles drops you into 2020 Seattle as protesters transform Capitol Hill into CHAZ—a five-and-a-half block, police-free commune with gardens, free clinics, teach-ins, and armed sentries in lawn chairs. The pitch was seductive: abolish cops and communities will self-organize; harm will recede; a better culture will bloom. For a few afternoons, it felt like a block party for justice. Then night fell.

Daylight utopia, midnight violence

At noon, kids chalked and non-profits tabled. By midnight, armed factions multiplied: private condo guards, Black Lives Matter security, the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club, and nameless men in black. Business owners like Faizel Khan (Cafe Argento) endured smashed windows, dwindling sales, and 911 operators telling them to meet police outside the zone. John McDermott (Car Tender) tackled an arsonist, only to be swarmed by a live-streaming crowd accusing him of “kidnapping”—then doxxed as a “snitch.”

The promises—“No good cops, no bad protestors” and “No cops, no problem”—curdled when nineteen-year-old Horace Lorenzo Anderson Jr. was shot, then carted to a hospital in a pickup because ambulances wouldn’t enter. Weeks later, sixteen-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. was killed; no one was charged. City leaders praised a “block party” until they didn’t; then thousands of mayoral texts vanished, and taxpayers settled wrongful-death and records suits. The experiment lasted under a month.

The media mirage

Bowles shows how coverage bifurcated: right-wing outlets looped lurid clips; prestige media often framed mayhem as myth (“fiery but mostly peaceful”). Seasoned commentators flirted with justifying property destruction as “catharsis” (David Remnick citing MLK’s line via Victor Hugo), and pundits elevated Antifa as heirs to WWII anti-fascists (The Lincoln Project’s “The Real Antifa”). Meanwhile, leaflets urged readers to cut brake lines and “kill cops… and their children.”

Portland’s night school

In Portland, Bowles attends a “direct action” night class: a park becomes an outfitting hub with free armor, literature like “Why We Break Windows,” and paint-balloon kiosks. Organizers debate where to march (“too diverse here; go where it’s whiter”), then berate homeowners as “spineless.” The logistics—umbrellas to block cameras, GoPros to capture pushes out of context—suggest ritualized escalation over community persuasion. (Compare: Malcolm Gladwell’s “small-world” analysis of protest networks in The Tipping Point; when tight networks reward risk, theater can trump outcomes.)

When allies moved on

The coalition of BLM VIPs and masked street activists proved tactical, not durable. As donor-class BLM mainstreamed and the optics of nightly clashes soured, bail funds kept flowing—but the brand polished itself and stepped away. On the ground, businesses reopened; volunteers scrubbed slogans and urine; and a few die-hards huddled in parks, nostalgic for the peak. The progressive project had tasted sovereignty—and discovered how quickly utopia attracts its opposite.

(Parenthetical perspective: Erica Chenoweth’s research shows that disciplined, nonviolent movements achieve mass buy-in and durable wins; here, performative menace undermined claims to legitimacy.)

While streets churned, a parallel revolution colonized conference rooms and Zoom tiles. Bowles guides you through a booming marketplace of anti-racism framed as inner work: identify as a “white body,” confess perpetual complicity, and pay to practice shame-regulation. The promise: if you can unlearn “white supremacy culture,” justice will flow outward from your unclenched nervous system.

From lists to liturgy: Tema Okun’s catechism

Tema Okun’s “White Supremacy Culture” list—perfectionism, sense of urgency, worship of the written word, objectivity, individualism—moved from niche workshop to Smithsonian poster and K–12 math frameworks (“A Pathway to Equitable Math”). In Oregon, officials delayed meetings by citing the “urgency” item; in California, curriculum writers debated whether insisting on procedural fluency in math “reinforces objectivity.” Okun speaks in spiritual terms: whiteness severs people from earth and spirit; the fix is to dismantle “the table,” not diversify it. (Contrast: Ibram X. Kendi’s institutional focus in How to Be an Antiracist; Okun locates supremacy in habits themselves.)

White Fragility, corporate edition

Robin DiAngelo’s training—in Bowles’s telling—functions like corporate sacrament. In one class, white women confess fears of being “a drag on society,” practice saying “I am racist,” and learn to “center race in all settings.” DiAngelo advises paying people of color to coach you, adding that white opinions are “necessarily uninformed” without “years” of work. Embodied sessions (Education for Racial Equity) push further: participants chant, hum, massage toes, and rock their “spines of dignity” while a facilitator explains, “All white bodies cause racialized stress and wounding to bodies of culture.” Resmaa Menakem (My Grandmother’s Hands) frames racism as a “WBS virus” lodged in flesh; mixed-race circles are banned to prevent harm. The emotional logic is compelling; the civic math is harsher: workplaces pivot away from policy levers to personal dramaturgy.

Status, stacks, and the scramble up

The “progressive stack” (who speaks first) sorts worth by oppression. Bowles shows the incentive it creates: white women ascend by re-identifying as Native (Andrea Smith), Afro-Latina (Jessica Krug), or pan-Indigenous (Kay LeClaire), or by leaning into disability/queerness. Corporations echo back with “JEDI” ads and “cisgender millennial” CIA spots. The result for you: you learn the scripts, swap your identity tags, and hope the next meeting doesn’t recenter a new rubric that knocks you back down.

(Context: John McWhorter’s Woke Racism critiques this turn as a religion of original sin and ritual purity; Bowles offers field notes from inside its ceremonies.)

If you live in a blue city, you’ve seen tents replace lawns. Bowles’s case study—Los Angeles’s Echo Park—shows how a local encampment became a stage for revolution and a test of compassion. The camp’s leaders (many housed activists) framed the park as a commune: gardens, paid roles for the “unhoused,” and a security team on skateboards. Democratic Socialists of America volunteers delivered gourmet food, iPad DJ nights, and drum circles. The message: housing isn’t the answer yet; the encampment is a living rebuke to capitalism.

Who pays, who stays, who’s safe

Neighbors like Andrea Martinez Gonzalez—progressive, Spanish-speaking, born and raised—stopped bringing kids to the park after public sex, knife fights, and a man crushing a duck in broad daylight. City hotel rooms were offered through Project Roomkey, but many refused (curfews, no drug use, indoors). Homeless leaders called shelters “carceral.” Jed Parriott—BMW-driving, activist royalty—emerged as a spokesperson, scolding homeowners to “tough this out” and demanding eminent domain to seize private property for housing. (He often described residents as “we.”)

Then an eighteen-year-old volunteer, Brianna Moore, died from fentanyl and cocaine in a tent; her body was moved, unreported, for days. Activists responded by planting a garden where she died. When the city finally fenced the park overnight, protesters screamed “ACAB” and compared officials to Trump. Cleanup crews removed 35 tons of waste, 180 pounds of feces, and 30 pounds of needles.

The hard part you can’t Instagram

Bowles reminds you: real solutions require boring capacity—permits, detox beds, mental-health courts, and housing built at less than $837,000/unit. When cities can’t deliver that, performative care fills the void, and residents—housed and unhoused—pay the price.

(Comparison: Michael Shellenberger’s San Fransicko documents similar dynamics across the Bay; Bowles’s reporting adds granular, human-scale scenes from Echo Park.)

Bowles tracks how “Defund/Abolish the Police” leapt from campus to Congress to corporate comms. Planned Parenthood, The Atlantic, and city councils embraced abolitionist language. For a time, saying “reform” marked you as compromised. Then the data rolled in: a historic homicide spike (nearly 30% in 2020), record child gun deaths, and mayors pleading for answers after seven-year-olds were shot. Idealism met blood and sirens.

What replaces police?

Violence interrupters were touted as the humane alternative. In Minneapolis, Muhammad Abdul-Ahad’s team of unarmed men in matching polos used relationships to defuse fights. Director Sasha Cotton called it “compassionate accountability.” It’s brave work—but dangerous and limited: in Chicago, 12% of interventionists reported being shot at in a single year; several have been killed on the job. Interrupters help with social beefs and retaliations; they don’t handle armed robbery in progress, murder scenes, or crime spikes citywide.

Meanwhile, some progressive leaders quietly sought personal security. Rep. Cori Bush pushed “defund” while spending $70,000 on private protection (“You would rather me die?”). In Oakland, a memorial for homicide victims—organized by Black families—was drowned out by mostly white ACAB activists shouting “Police are domestic terrorists.” The moral optics flipped.

Ballots, budgets, and a course correction

Cities tinkered, then retreated. New York briefly disbanded plainclothes gun squads, then reconstituted them; Portland cut ~$15M before hiring back; Austin told residents to call 311 for non-emergencies. Polls suggested only a minority of Black Americans favored cutting police budgets. In places like San Francisco, prosecutors who de-emphasized quality-of-life crimes and traffic-stop gun cases struggled as burglaries rose and fentanyl scenes metastasized.

(Context: Thomas Abt’s Bleeding Out argues for focused deterrence and “hot people/places” strategies; Bowles shows what happens when you skip straight to abolition.)

“Follow the money,” Bowles advises, then she does. She finds two parallel stories: local veterans of police-accountability work in Minneapolis grinding out statehouse wins; and charismatic newcomers raising millions for abolition, then going quiet while cash sloshes through consultancies, influencer houses, and luxury real estate.

Local doers vs. national darlings

In Minneapolis, Michelle Gross, Johnathon McClellan, and Del Shea Perry pushed practical steps: crisis-response dispatch (Travis’ Law), limits on no-knocks, and jail medical standards (Hardel Sherrell Act). At the same time, “Yes 4 Minneapolis” and groups like Black Visions Collective and Reclaim the Block raised tens of millions to abolish the police department—then largely vanished as voters rejected the charter change. Locals kept asking: Who are you? Where did the money go?

The mansion era

At the movement’s flagship entity, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, cofounder Patrisse Cullors—who described herself as a “trained Marxist”—bought multiple homes (Topanga Canyon, with an LLC named “Abolitionist Entertainment”), paid relatives’ companies hundreds of thousands for “security” and “creative services,” and acquired a $5.88M Los Angeles compound (“Campus”) with a soundstage. BLM Canada bought a $6.3M former Communist Party HQ for an arts center. When journalists asked for Form 990s, leaders said the filings were “weaponized” and “triggering.” State attorneys general restricted BLM fundraising until paperwork arrived.

(Compare: ProPublica’s long tradition of watchdog reporting; Bowles’s tone is wry, but the stakes are concrete—trust in civil society depends on sunlight.)

Bowles treats gender not as a Twitter fight but as lived complexity. She reports the Wi Spa saga (Los Angeles, 2021), where a person with a penis in the women’s naked area sparked protests; elite outlets dismissed it as a ‘right-wing hoax’—until registered sex offender Darren Merager was charged with indecent exposure. Then she looks upstream to pediatric medicine: toddlers “sending gender messages,” puberty blockers as “childhood uninterrupted,” and surgeons debating orgasm and fertility in patients transitioned at Tanner stage 2.

From slogans to consent

In hospital videos (later pulled), Boston Children’s clinicians said children “from the womb” may indicate trans identity; behaviors like refusing haircuts or “playing with ‘opposite-gender’ toys” were listed as signals. UCSF’s Diane Ehrensaft encouraged reading preverbal “actions” as gender. LA’s Johanna Olson-Kennedy argued teens “make life-altering decisions all the time” (marriage, college) and that chest surgery is reversible via implants; Minnesota’s Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan said good parenting is to “listen and believe.”

At a Duke-hosted forum, surgeon Marci Bowers noted early-blocked youth “never experienced orgasm.” Bowles highlights the tradeoff: irreversible effects vs. the claim that puberty itself is an unconsented imposition. When detransitioners and journalists questioned protocols, some officials cast nonprofit transparency and press scrutiny as racism or harassment.

(Context: Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage focused on adolescent girls; Bowles broadens the lens to media denial and the clinical language creep around toddlers.)

What is a woman? Bowles explores a startling answer from acclaimed trans authors who now dominate elite feminist discourse. Andrea Long Chu (Pulitzer-winning critic) writes that “everyone is female, and everyone hates it”—defining femaleness as self-negation, “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank eyes,” and aligning it with “sissy” porn’s bimboification. Grace Lavery frames trans women as the joyous inheritors of womanhood, resented by “leaky boobs and the school run.” Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt casts biological women with XX tattoos as TERF villains. This is feminism recoded as eroticized submission—and it’s fashionable.

Collateral damage: sports, language, history

Institutionally, the new settlement rewrites categories: lesbians become “non-men attracted to non-men” (Johns Hopkins glossary); women are “bodies with vaginas” (The Lancet cover), men remain “men.” Athletics experts at a Duke symposium say you can’t tell males from females on a poster; the ACLU declares “trans athletes do not have an unfair advantage,” despite male puberty’s musculoskeletal edge. Shakespeare’s Globe reenvisions Joan of Arc as nonbinary; The New York Times floats Louisa May Alcott as trans. The message you get at work or school: say it’s inclusive or risk being marked dangerous.

(Compare: Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls on the costs of collapsing sex into identity; Bowles adds the pop-cultural tone shift and its prestige rewards.)

San Francisco is Bowles’s beloved lab—and warning. With stunning views and elite self-regard, the city tried to operationalize 2020’s ethic: de-emphasize “quality-of-life” enforcement, tolerate open-air fentanyl scenes, and slow-walk housing with shadow studies and $682 “discretionary review” filings. The result wasn’t Scandinavian social democracy; it was civic fragility hiding behind progressive manners.

What residents lived

A safe-consumption plaza blocked press questions while young people nodded off on Market Street. A homeless man’s body lay for 11 hours near a $4.8M home. Public-school kids stayed remote long after private schools reopened, while the school board debated stripping Lincoln’s name and denying a gay white dad (Seth Brenzel) a parent committee seat for being the wrong identity. Lowell High’s merit admissions were scrapped as “inherently racist.” DA Chesa Boudin deprioritized low-level prosecutions, limited “gang enhancements,” and avoided charging cases from “pretextual stops.” Burglaries rose; fentanyl deaths exploded (806 in 2023, a grim record). Voters recalled three school board members (including Alison Collins after anti-Asian tweets) and then Boudin; Mayor London Breed pivoted from “defund” rhetoric to emergency policing in the Tenderloin.

The lesson for your city

Compassion without capacity curdles into cruelty. When housing approvals hinge on 0.001% “shadow” changes to a park and overdose scenes get privacy fences instead of detox beds, public trust collapses. The recall wave—led largely by Asian American parents—signaled that liberals want safe streets, real schools, and honest math more than solidarity theater.

(Compare: Jane Jacobs’s insistence on eyes-on-the-street pragmatism; Bowles echoes her: civilization is maintenance, not mood.)

Finally, Bowles asks why so many of us joined public shamings—and why apologies stopped working. She traces modern “struggle sessions” (from Soviet and Maoist self-criticism to Slack announcements about Hummus Day) that reward purity and punish nuance. The point isn’t growth; it’s theater: apologies can’t be accepted because there’s no one authorized to forgive.

Case studies in circular firing squads

Food writer Alison Roman criticized Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo’s branding, apologized repeatedly, lost her NYT column—only for Teigen to be exposed for bullying a teen (who received DMs urging suicide). At Bon Appétit, a Halloween “brownface” photo felled editor Adam Rapoport; Gimlet’s Reply All launched “The Test Kitchen” on that scandal, then its own host-reporters (Sruthi Pinnamaneni, PJ Vogt) were ousted for insufficient union zeal—after two episodes and a final apology episode. Land acknowledgments proliferated (“we live, laugh, love, and learn” on unceded land), substituting incantation for restitution.

Why it felt so good

Bowles admits canceling can feel “warm, social—like a potluck.” You defend a friend, signal virtue, and exile a threat inside your tribe (not the actual political opposition). It’s bonding-by-banishment. But it corrodes trust. She describes the moment she wouldn’t join a pile-on against a young man she liked: texts rolled in asking why she was “quiet.” A dear friend finally called her racist and hung up. That was the price of leaving the flow.

(Compare: Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public on networked outrage; Bowles supplies the micro-ethnography of how it feels to live under it.)