Ouch

It's actually rare that our great newspapers do a scathing review of a conservative, so a little treat.

What is the function of this genre, the conservative memoir of political awakening? And can it vindicate the contention that progressivism is simply a rite of passage, rather than a seriously considered platform? For my part, I suspect that maturation is not always a boon. “Morning After the Revolution” demonstrates that, if leftism is a hazard of adolescence, conservatism is all too often an unfortunate symptom of aging, not unlike senility.

Now that Bowles is employed by the Free Press, a bastion of free thought, what free thoughts is she thinking? Very few, as it turns out. In fact, it can be difficult to discern any at all in her book.

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Some of the anecdotes Bowles shares are indeed about movements, albeit distinct ones: In a chapter titled “Whose Tents? Our Tents!,” she scoffs at the anti-homelessness movement in Los Angeles, and Black Lives Matter is a recurrent fixation. But some of her reporting treats isolated incidents that are not plausibly cast as part of any broader campaign. Is an irritating podcast about asexuality with fewer than 300 ratings on the App Store “remaking our institutions from the inside”? Are the three professors who pretended to be people of color for academic clout really “transforming the country”? (Given that there are 1.5 million college faculty members in America, the tendency these outliers represent appears to be less common than the rarest forms of cancer.) And what, if anything, do diversity, equity and inclusion workshops have in common with doctors who treat trans children? “Morning After the Revolution” is, at best, a grab bag of Bowles’s pet peeves.