‘Every year on Hummus Day,” the workplace-messaging company Slack announced in May 2021, amid skirmishes between Israel and Hamas, “we like to share a fun little tidbit about Slack notifications. We realize now, this year, and specifically today, was not the right time to do that.” Quite why a software company was marking Hummus Day — let alone apologizing for doing so — boggles the mind, but it emblematizes the bizarre spirit of extremist activism that overwhelmed much of America several years ago.

Nellie Bowles, a writer and co-founder (with her wife, Bari Weiss) of the Free Press, plumbs the depths of this movement in Morning after the Revolution, her amusing, disturbing survey of the vicissitudes of the “successor ideology” that has come to replace traditional liberalism.

Bowles began her journalistic career as a card-carrying bien-pensant progressive, dutifully writing for the New York Times about the usual topics. But when the explosion of activism following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd affected the entire country, her curiosity about Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other allied groups began to alarm her colleagues. “Why do you care so much?” her editors asked. Merely covering the excesses of the new movement made her suspect: “Writing critically about the revolution was placing me outside of it, no matter how many disclaimers I put.”

But in her crackling new book, Bowles gets the last laugh, cheerfully skewering the woke with their own words and revealing details of her eye-opening reporting that didn’t make it past her Times minders — er, editors. Bowles’s assault on the regnant pieties of the woke class finds its target in part because she disarms her quarry through charm and careful listening.

For instance, she visited CHAZ, the five-and-a-half-square-block, cop-free Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone established and patrolled by Antifa and company in the heart of Seattle in the summer of 2020. Before terminating the experiment in the wake of multiple murders and sexual assaults, the grandees of the city’s political machine warmly endorsed CHAZ, as did liberal pundits across the U.S.

But everyday Seattleites chafed under its oppressive rule. Bowles profiles Faizel Khan, a gay coffee-shop owner targeted by angry CHAZians for evincing insufficient anti-police fervor. Armed riflemen sat outside his shop, denying entry to customers; he awoke one morning to find his café’s windows smashed and its contents ransacked. Horrified by what he called a “white occupation,” Khan sued the city for allowing the inmates to run the asylum.

Bowles also visited Portland’s Antifa encampment, the scene of mayhem and infernos calling to mind the infamous “fiery but mostly peaceful protest” in Kenosha, Wis., as it was creatively dubbed by a CNN chyron. She found crudely printed pamphlets explicitly calling for the death of police officers and instructing followers on how to employ an “ethanol jelly stove” to burn cop cars.

And she trekked to Minneapolis, where outside groups pumped $30 million into an “abolish the police” campaign in neighborhoods where actually vulnerable Twin Cities residents needed law-enforcement protection the most, even as they wanted to reform police tactics. “We’re like, ‘why are you pushing this?’” Michelle Gross, a community activist working to reduce police brutality, told Bowles of the outside abolitionist agitators. “We know that the community does not even want it. . . . It’s utterly ridiculous.”

Meanwhile, mainstream outlets such as the Atlantic, Slate, and NBC News praised the police-abolition movement. One Minneapolis “violence interrupter” innocently told Bowles: “We’re not armed with guns but we are armed with a lot of training and a lot of experience and a lot of relationships. Also a lot of love.”

Back in the real world, the very residents most exposed to the crime surge that followed the 2020 protests naturally preferred a robust police presence. In Oakland, Calif., where in 2021 the city council slashed the police budget, and armed bandits robbed a news crew while it was interviewing the city’s chief of violence prevention, Bowles attended a memorial held in a heavily black neighborhood for 71 victims of homicide. A radical, mostly white anti-police counter-protest gathered, with one nitwit shouting, “They’re using your pain as a shield!” An older black woman shouted back: “White privilege is standing here. You don’t have a right to be here.” Her companion barked, “We’re trying to save our people. You are not our people. Get the f*** out!”

More than a bit masochistically, Bowles participated in various “antiracist” struggle sessions. She attended a course in May 2021 entitled “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness,” where one white woman told another, “Stacy, what I heard you say about wanting to come back as a dark-skinned person in your next life was racist because as white people we don’t have the luxury of trying on aspects of people of color.” Another admitted, “I’m afraid of being a middle-aged white woman and being called a Karen.” Yet another bemoaned the suffering she was causing her non-white husband by “constantly perpetuating this toxic whiteness at him.” Many of these organizations exude a religious fervor, and some expressly wear a religious mantle: One of them, Crossroads Antiracism Organizing and Training, was originally called Crossroads Ministry.

At a different seminar, the “somatic abolitionist” Resmaa Menakem informed his mostly white audience that “all white bodies cause racialized stress and wounding to bodies of culture.” In response, one woman with a southern accent confessed, “I feel like I’m experiencing the pain that I have caused black and brown bodies.” The pain is the point. “Effective anti-racism feels like oppression,” Bowles quotes one Bay Area business leader as saying, “and that’s OK.” The privilege of self-flagellation at workshops like these can run as much as $5,000 per person.

Bowles also dropped in on homeless encampments, including one that had overrun Echo Park Lake, near downtown Los Angeles. Mostly Latino residents were disgusted by the crime, drugs, and disease that had infested what used to be the crown jewel of the neighborhood and were fighting to force the city to clear the tents, but mostly white activists insisted it remain in place. “I’m sorry that you don’t like that you have to see this, that you have to see poverty,” Jed Parriott, a BMW-driving son of a Hollywood producer and self-appointed Echo Park encampment leader told local news.

A proud lesbian, Bowles also explores the rapidly proliferating panoply of contemporary sexualities. Asexual, demisexual, allosexual — the queer umbrella has widened beyond recognition. One podcaster who identifies as asexual lamented that “a lot of times what we get is, ‘I acknowledge that the way you feel is valid, but I don’t think you belong in this community.’” Bowles voices her amazement at how quickly the trans movement has swallowed lesbian and gay activism. She even finagles an interview with Darren Merager, a registered sex offender who sometimes identifies as a female and who exposed himself in the women’s section of a spa in L.A.’s Koreatown, sparking outrage among ordinary Angelenos and, in turn, a massive backlash by trans activists.

And Bowles takes on the new feminists, roasting their bizarre notions of femininity. Andrea Long Chu, a trans book critic for New York magazine, wrote clumsily and profanely of “distilling the femaleness to its barest essentials — an open mouth, an expectant a[**]hole, blank, blank eyes.” One Times opinion writer described an emerging trend of feminists who identify as “bimbos” this way: “Value me, look at me, not because I’m smart and diligent but for the fact that I’m not.” Progress? Hardly.

Finally, Bowles tackles her beloved hometown of San Francisco, a city that nearly collapsed after “every progressive idea bumping around America came to be tried out.” San Francisco has established dedicated “safe” drug-use zones, supplied needles and even “clean” drugs to addicts, supplied water and electricity to makeshift homeless tent cities, restrained criminal prosecutions, and downgraded to misdemeanors a host of dangerous behaviors.

Predictably, crime and drug overdoses have skyrocketed. “We’re normalizing people dying,” the mother of a local addict told Bowles. The city has become “one of the epicenters of organized retail crime,” a CVS executive proclaimed. Scores of shops — chain stores and quaint boutiques alike — have been shuttered, decamping for the suburbs. Meanwhile, an extremist school board scrapped entrance exams for the city’s selective public schools because “‘merit’ is an inherently racist construct designed and centered on white supremacist framing.”

Bowles finds that this revolution has reshaped America in ways that are “appalling, but mostly in ways that are — I hate to say it — funny.” Applying the same humor that she deploys to marvelous effect in her weekly TGIF column for the Free Press, she presents a marked contrast, as a quintessential happy warrior, with the dour, angry activists she confronts.

And, ultimately, Bowles furnishes reason for hope: the morning that comes after the (largely failed) revolution. Sane San Franciscans overwhelmingly recalled Chesa Boudin, the city’s awful progressive district attorney, along with half of the school board. YIMBYs and other neighborhood activists have retaken gems like Echo Lake Park. Police budgets in major cities have largely been restored to pre-2020 levels. Traditional feminists and gay-rights activists have begun to push back against the crazies. And talented journalists like Nellie Bowles have seen the light.