Morning After the Revolution E-Book

Nellie Bowles

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 311

Beschreibung

'Not since Joan Didion in her prime has a writer reported from inside inside a system gone mad with this much style, intelligence and wit ... A perfect book' Caitlin Flanagan From former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles comes an irreverent romp through the sacred spaces of the new left. As a Hillary voter, a New York Times reporter, and a frequent attendee at her local gay bars, Nellie Bowles fit right in with her San Francisco neighbors and friends - until she started questioning whether the progressive movement she knew and loved was actually helping people. When her colleagues suggested that asking these questions meant she was 'on the wrong side of history,' Bowles did what any reporter worth her salt would do: she started investigating for herself. The answers she found were stranger - and funnier - than she'd expected. In Morning After the Revolution, Bowles gives readers a front-row seat to the absurd drama of a political movement gone mad. With irreverent accounts of attending a multi-day course on 'The Toxic Trends of Whiteness,' following the social justice activists who run 'Abolitionist Entertainment, LLC,' and trying to please the New York Times's 'disinformation czar,' she deftly exposes the more comic excesses of a movement that went from a sideshow to the very centre of Western life. Deliciously funny and painfully insightful, Morning After the Revolution is a moment of collective psychosis preserved in amber.

Leseprobe

SWIFT PRESS

First published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2024

|First published in the United States of America by Penguin Random House 2024

Copyright © Nellie Bowles 2024

The right of Nellie Bowles to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Portions of ‘A Utopia, If You Can Keep It’ were previously published in different form in ‘Abolish the Police? Those Who Survived the Chaos in Seattle Aren’t So Sure’ in The New York Times, August 7, 2020.

Portions of ‘Masked Vigilantes Have Always Saved the World’ were previously published in different form in ‘Some Protests Against Police Brutality Take a More Confrontational Approach’ in The New York Times, September 21, 2020.

‘The Failure of San Francisco’ was published in different form as ‘How San Francisco Became a Failed City’ in The Atlantic, June 8, 2022.

Book design by Chris Welch

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781800752719

eISBN: 9781800752726

Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

For my parents

Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion: They are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of “Jedi mind tricks,” etc.).

— Scientific American

Every year on Hummus Day, 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. Thank you to our @SlackHQ community for holding us accountable.

— Slack’s official Twitter/X

Author’s Note

I have changed names to protect private people from having some silly moment show up at the top of their Google. Where you find full names, those are real people.

Contents

Introduction

Part I

THREE ZONES

A Utopia, If You Can Keep It

Masked Vigilantes Have Always Saved the World

Abolitionist Entertainment LLC

Part II

ATONEMENT

Speaking Order

The Most Important White Woman in the World

What I Heard You Say Was Racist

Whose Tents? Our Tents!

We Mean, Literally, Abolish the Police

Part III

MEN AND NON-MEN

Wi Spa

Asexual Awareness Month / The End of Sex

Toddlers Know Who They Are

The Best Feminists Always Have Had Balls

Part IV

MORNING AFTER

The Failure of San Francisco

Struggle Sessions

The Joy of Canceling

Acknowledgments

Introduction

It’s been a little while now, and it might be hard to remember that it was ever any different, but remember the pandemic and the rage. Remember many of us isolated, on our phones, on our computers, the stock market strangely rising as the government sent money flooding into the country. Remember that during all of this, there was a murder. The death was filmed. It went viral. And in the shadow of that pandemic and that murder and that money, American politics went berserk. Liberal intelligentsia, in particular, became wild, wild with rage and optimism, and fresh ideas from academia that began to reshape every part of society. The ideology that came shrieking in would go on to reshape America in some ways that are interesting and even good, and in other ways that are appalling, but mostly in ways that are—I hate to say it—funny.

I remember a particularly hectic October afternoon in 2020.

The New York Times’s celebrations of LGBTQIA+’s A-specific week (the week centering the asexual experience) coincided with International Pronouns Day, so my email was crowded by the time I walked the dog on my street, each house variously declaring in its window that “Black Lives Matter” and “No Justice No Peace” and listing things that the people In This Home Believe. One, a perfect nod to a cartoon, simply said: “Existence is Pain.”

Later that day, Lowell High School, the most prestigious public school in San Francisco, abandoned all admissions requirements when the school board voted unanimously against them. It was an ostensible blow against white supremacy, but it was hard to square that with the working-class Asian teenagers in the room testifying to keep those admissions requirements. The school board got caught off mic calling them “racists,” but the vote meant that more whites than ever would be admitted to Lowell. Strange, that.

The very same week, the city of my birth—my family has lived there for seven generations—passed the CAREN Act, a clever nod to the “Karen” meme, making racially motivated 911 calls a crime. And I noticed Harry and Meghan placed a crystal display in the Zoom background of their Montecito home, which somehow seemed relevant.

It was a new era. Liberals—those weak, wishy-washy compromisers, the hemmers and hawers—were out. Washing them away was the New Progressive. They came with politics built on the idea that people are profoundly good, denatured only by capitalism, by colonialism and whiteness and heteronormativity. It was a heady, beautiful philosophy.

The police could be abolished because people are kind and—once rescued from poverty and racism—wouldn’t hurt each other. Homeless addicts can set up long-term communities in public parks because they absolutely will share space conscientiously with local families. Neighborhoods can be given over to protest movements because those protest movements know how to hold themselves accountable, and because city governments are old-fashioned and unnecessary when people are good. We don’t need to authorize new housing because we can just ask young professionals not to move to a crowded town, and they’ll of course understand. Gender dysphoric children should be given the medical interventions they ask for, at any age they ask, because those children know themselves perfectly. If a nonprofit leader says they are spending money on black lives, then that’s what they’re doing, and to ask for records is part of the problem.

The New Progressive knows that people are good and stable, reasonable and giving.

I was, in those days, in the days of Harry and Meghan and the crystal and the sense of universal goodness, a successful young reporter at The New York Times, a New Progressive doing the only job she had ever wanted.

“The truth is hard,” the ads would say, and I believed in that ad copy in an almost religious way. I felt I’d met destiny when I badged in to visit headquarters. Before I got the offer, I would look in the mirror and practice: “Hi, it’s Nellie Bowles with The New York Times. Hi, Nellie Bowles, New York Times. Excuse me, a question from The New York Times!” In college I would look up the names of all the writers on the front page and try to figure out their paths to there, to that page.

Donald J. Trump was the president when I joined. Subscriptions were surging, and subscribers wanted something specific for their money: The Times would be the heart of resistance. We would champion the beautiful world that could be. My stories—fun riffs from Silicon Valley, investigations into creeps using video games to get kids, send-ups of conservative figures—fit right in. My work was cited in all-company meetings. I wrote big stories. I would go into the bureau on Sunday, and I never missed a happy hour.

Then something changed. The Black Lives Matter movement swept in, and as the movement grew, protests overtook the country and money came fast and some of the #Resistance started to get strange, but our job was to ignore all that. If parts of the movement were goofy it was not funny. My cohort took it as gospel when a nice white lady said that being On Time and Objectivity were white values, and this was a progressive belief, for example. But also it was important to note that there was no revolution happening and any backlash to it was bizarre and also vile. Because if it was happening, it was good. Even after Biden won and the threat of Trump faded, that tight narrative, that party line had to be held.

Everything was deathly serious. The letter X needed to be added to gender-neutral words to indicate extra gender-neutralness, extra pro-trans. Folks became folx. Groups that didn’t want to be given new names were given them anyway, to show gender neutrality. Latino became Latinx. Otherwise, you were a monster.

Most of the new guard at the paper had come there for that revolution. They entered the building on a mission. They weren’t there to tell dry news factoids so much as wield the pen for justice. It was a more beautiful vision of the role of journalism for such a beautiful time, more compelling for the writer and for the reader. Yes, it was a little confusing to do reporting for a place that was so sure everyone was good, except, of course, conservatives, who were very very bad and whose politics only come from hate. Asking for coherence is white supremacy. I figured it out. I loved my job.

New acronyms dropped and then had to be understood quickly or else. An announcement: “May 17 marks the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia, and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT), which celebrates LGBTQIA+ people globally and raises awareness to combat discrimination.” Justin Trudeau says in October 2021: “People across the country are lighting candles to honor Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people who are missing or have been murdered.” An acceptable alternative is: LGBTQQIP2SAA. There’s DEIBJ (diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice) and BBIPOC (black, brown, indigenous, and [other] people of color).

No one was exempt from the revolution; all brands needed to announce they were with the New Progressives or they were against us. For a few years, there was no brand in my life that didn’t apologize for its past horrors or at least raise a fist against the cops. Our dog shelter posted for donations to Black Lives Matter. (I faved it, of course.) Seventh Generation, which makes my favorite toilet paper, posted: “We support defunding the police.” Oreo’s corporate account posted: “Trans people exist.”

Pepé Le Pew was cut from the Space Jam movie for normalizing rape culture. The Muppet Show got a warning label, and the sexy M&M was butched up a bit. Some Dr. Seuss books were banned, and the Jane Austen House museum added details about her family’s role in the slave trade. “There’s a disturbing nexus of organic food and white supremacists,” the business magazine Fast Company announced. “Ultimately, grocery shopping is the least avoidable and one of the most ethically compromised activities in our lives,” The New Republic announced.

At various points, my fellow reporters at major news organizations told me roads and birds are racist. Voting is racist. Exercise is super racist. Worrying about plastics in the water is transphobic.

Brandeis University put out a new list of verboten words: trigger warning is now banned as violent language. So is picnic. University of Washington added a few more verboten phrases: brown bag lunch, grandfathered in, and blind spot. Stanford University admins made an even longer one, adding basket case. I toured a house, and the real estate agent apologized for accidentally using the term master bedroom. Don’t even think about using the word woman: Johns Hopkins University released a new language guide that defines a lesbian as “a non-man attracted to non-men.” (Yep, that’s me.)

The assertions kept becoming more random and brazen. One I always think about is when a lawyer and frequent MSNBC expert voice made a curious claim: “Rape did not exist among native nations prior to white contact,” she wrote. “I repeat, rape *did not exist* among native nations prior to white contact.”

Progress itself became suspect. Here’s how a top medical journal described a new Alzheimer’s drug: “A landmark Alzheimer’s drug approval would likely deepen racial inequities in dementia care.” Because: “The emergence of any new drug could really widen healthcare disparities that already exist.” And when the Covid vaccine meant we could be unmasked, there was The Washington Post with the piece: “Masks are off—which means men will start telling women to ‘Smile!’ again.”

The heat was turning up a bit. An NAACP vice president, Michelle Leete, spoke one night at a school rally in Virginia, blasting opponents of the new progressive educational orthodoxy. “Let them die,” she said. That seemed a little severe.

The search for skeptics was also growing. A Colorado cake baker once sued over refusing to make a gay wedding cake was sued again for refusing to make a gender-transition cake. Are there no other bakers?

If some of the new rules felt bizarre and maybe oppressive, that was OK. I always think of what one Bay Area business leader wrote: “Effective anti-racism feels like oppression and that’s OK. When you’re trying to pilot a ship against a current you can’t point at the destination.”

At the beginning of this, I was covering culture, tech, and power at the Times, but I hesitated to write about any of these changes. Not only would this get me in trouble at the paper, but also it was messy for my own moral compass. I owe a lot of my life to political progressivism, and I bristled at the alternative, which certainly wouldn’t want me. If you want to be part of the movement for universal health care, which I did and do, then you cannot report critically on #DefundThePolice. If you want to be part of a movement that supports gay marriage, and I did and do, then you can’t question whatever disinformation is spread that week. Fine, I can identify as a non-man attracted to non-men. If anything going on in the movement looked anything but perfect, the good reporter knew not to look.

Mind you, I wasn’t canceled. Never have been. Nothing hugely dramatic happened to me at the Times, really. I suspected my curiosity and my writing would eventually get me in trouble, though, and it did, especially when I talked to people in a few neighborhoods that had indeed abolished their police.

You don’t need to hear about how very wounded I was about mean tweets (not that they’re seared in my mind, but would you like a list?) or newsroom leaders passing around pictures of me as a teen at a party (fine, I was a debutante). It’s a little petty and grimy.

The main group of in-house Narrative Enforcers at the New York Times were the Disinformation Experts, and they clocked me as a problem. One day I was writing a profile of PragerU, a conservative viral-video production studio that had perfected trolling college campuses with funny student-on-the-street videos. After I’d done most of my reporting, I was told that I needed to meet with the in-house Disinformation Expert, a special person who would discuss how to incorporate disinformation analysis into my piece.

I’ll call him Todd. He’s cool, a prolific Slack presence.

Todd and I chat. He tells me that I need to more fully emphasize the Southern Poverty Law Center assessment of PragerU. The Southern Poverty Law Center started in the 1970s as a civil rights organization filing litigation against the Ku Klux Klan. They’ve turned now to putting out media reports on everyday conservatives, and their report on PragerU is categorized under “Hatewatch.” PragerU is a purveyor of Hate.

The Hatewatch file was based on the work of a sociologist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill named Francesca Tripodi. She had “analyzed scriptural inference in conservative news practices,” the SPLC explains:

Tripodi spent extensive time with a conservative women’s group and a college Republican group for her study. “It was through these groups that I started learning about PragerU and how much it is a beloved source of news and information amongst most people I spoke with,” she tells Hatewatch. “[PragerU] gets people questioning and looking for more information, and if nothing else, it is very blatantly algorithmically connected” to the extreme right content found on YouTube, Tripodi explains.

In other words, this sociologist was accusing PragerU of hate because it was connected, via an algorithm, to other things that were worse.

I needed to chide PragerU for the sin of getting people questioning and for the fact that when you search for Republicans on YouTube, you can also eventually find yourself being recommended videos from people further to the right.

I said OK. So I added more SPLC into the story.

In the meantime, I became fascinated by Todd and the movement he was leading inside the paper.

He spent a lot of time in the NYT Slack posting in the #Disinformation channel, which, when I was in it, had some hundred members who posted a stream of conservative news links as a sort of group disinformation watch. Sometimes people would ask about whether something is Bad, like a picture of some people holding three fingers up—Hey, is this white supremacy? (It wasn’t.) He’d post TikToks that were apparently disinformation—like a video made by some nurses making fun of Covid restrictions. He’d drop in tweets calling out right-wing internet activity from accounts with names like @socialistdogmom.

Todd was there in Slack to remind everyone that the idea Covid might have come from a lab was a conspiracy theory. He was the authority on these things.

Anyway, this is also not a story about my heroism, pushing back on the disinfo complex. The opposite. In the end, I wanted the hit of that byline. I needed a byline like I needed dinner, and they needed more on PragerU’s disinfo.

So I called up someone at Berkeley who I knew would give me the quotes that were needed. And I added to the story:

Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said he notices an impact from PragerU’s content, which he describes as close to the edge of conspiratorial disinformation but not quite there.

“It sits at this border between going off a cliff into conspiracy thinking and extreme kinds of prejudices in the name of anti-political correctness,” he said.

The piece ran. I got the praise I needed. Good placement too (A1, thank you very much). And I didn’t think much more about it.

A few months after the PragerU story, at the height of the frenzied summer of 2020, a large swath of Seattle was taken over as an “autonomous zone.” The heart of Seattle’s gay neighborhood had been blocked off by masked vigilantes who were maybe throwing a party? As a San Francisco non-man attracted to non-men, I imagined a group taking over the city’s gayborhood, The Castro, and declaring it a new city. That seemed kind of fun! But Seattle was turning into chaos, and I knew there were shootings.

All the media I was getting was either extremely right-wing (look at this woke hellhole) or very left-wing (10 reasons why local vigilante violence is actually better than police). I wanted to get out there and see it. And I found an easy story for a West Coast business reporter: the local businesses were suing the city for encouraging the occupation.

My colleagues sensed something was going wrong when I pitched traveling to Seattle. Why did I want to see what was happening there?

I ran into a colleague who was a rising newsroom leader. He said he was worried about me and this. He was worried about what these story ideas said about me and if I was thinking about my career. He was worried I was into all this cancel culture stuff. I said, I’m just so curious about what’s going on up there, what else am I supposed to do? He said, “That’s a question for a therapist, not an editor.”

Antifa was nonsense, fake, a nothing-burger, a non-story, not interesting and not real, he said. The reason he doesn’t go to Seattle and cover things like this is because he knows right now is time for white people to sit certain things out. Some things that are not important things shouldn’t be covered. The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) and whatever was going on there wasn’t important. Antifa wasn’t important. Why do you care? No but seriously why do you care?

He said when he’s old, he always wants to know that he was on the right side of history. Why did I want to be on the wrong side? (I’m pretty sure the extent of my place in history will be in a few family scrapbooks, if I’m very lucky.)

Later, a reporter at New York magazine who I knew was friends with my colleagues called me up. He said soberly that he heard I was red-pilled and trying to cover things that shouldn’t be covered. Did I have any comment?

Finally, there was the issue of my love life. I’d started dating a known liberal dissident on the Opinion side of the paper. A Joe Biden voter who would simply never go Bernie Sanders. A Hillary Clinton voter who never went AOC. She wrote such dissident liberal takes as: “We shouldn’t worry so much about ‘cultural appropriation’ because America thrives when cultures blend,” and “The Women’s March leaders should stop saying antisemitic things.” And we were a couple. We both wanted to write about the movement. We’d fight over whether it was good or bad, me usually arguing the efforts were largely good.

Between dating her and trying to write about the most interesting story of the moment—the revolution!—people very quickly decided I was an in-house enemy. A fascist, right in their midst. The shift was so fast it left me dizzy.

One early evening I was having drinks with an editor and a group of colleagues. The editor, who I liked a lot, heard I was dating this very bad liberal. And he looked at me straight in the face and said he thought it was pretty messed up.

He wanted to know: How could I do that? “She’s a Nazi. She’s a fucking Nazi, Nellie,” he said. I tried to laugh it off and he kept going. “Like are you serious, Nellie?” He lobbed another she’s a Nazi. My colleagues agreed. He kept going. He couldn’t believe I would do this, like wow. Eventually I got him to change the subject.

At the time, in the situation at the New York Times, it was normal, or at least becoming so. My colleagues were saying worse. Sometimes quite publicly. Editors who used to chat with me in the cafeteria suddenly pretended I wasn’t saying hi. Maybe California has made me soft? I wondered, unable to handle standard East Coast media cultural mores. Anyway, I liked that editor. God help me but I still like him. He’s a kind man. Other than this. I didn’t want to get him in trouble.

He thought my ideas were all a little worse after that.

It feels good to be in the flow of one’s community and to be on the side that calls itself justice. And I am in fact for that. I ran the Gay-Straight Alliance at my high school, and I was the only out gay kid for a while, sticking rainbows all around campus. After college, I fit in well with the Brooklyn Left. I’ve been to a reading of The Nation writers at the Verso Books office, and, my God, I bought a tote. When Hillary Clinton was about to win, I was drinking I’m With Her-icanes at a drag bar.

Writing critically about this revolution was placing me outside it, no matter how many disclaimers I put. It didn’t matter how I voted or whether technically I shared similar political goals. The only ones who can write about the changes are literal comrades. Otherwise? You’re just another fascist pumping out disinformation. As you can imagine, I don’t want to be a fascist, and I don’t want to produce disinformation.

The trouble is, I became a reporter because I didn’t trust authority figures. Newspaper work gave me an opportunity to monetize a suspicious, itchy personality. As a reporter, I spent over a decade working to follow that curiosity. It was hard to suddenly turn that off. It was hard to constantly censor what I was seeing, to close one eye and try very hard not to notice anything inconvenient, especially when there was so much to see.

So I started reporting. I don’t have any other skills, so that’s what I’ve kept doing here in this book. When I started this, I was a little angry. After I wrote some of these chapters, I quit the paper. And as I continued to report, I married that girlfriend and we started a new media company. It so happened that over the course of these years—dragged out thanks in part to the birth of our daughter—I got to see the arc of the movement as it rose, remaking our institutions from the inside, transforming the country.

I traveled to Portland’s late-night Antifa rallies and spent days in the no-cop autonomous zones of Seattle and Minneapolis, looking for utopia. I looked at the attempts to atone for our collective sins, visiting homeless encampments run by BMW-driving socialists and taking courses led by America’s leading anti-racist educators, who happen to mostly be middle-aged white women. When the revolution made a turn from race to gender, I followed it, exploring why so many children were being born into the wrong bodies, their genders suddenly so far from their flesh. Finally, I looked back at what we made—reporting on what it all added up to in San Francisco, my hometown. And I looked at what it means to sit out a cancellation. Throughout these chapters, I try to capture the furies of the moment, the hottest battles of a few fiery years.

I want you to see the New Progressive from their own perspective, not as a caricature. Even as I reported on the issues, I was constantly struck by the movement’s beauty. There is pleasure and community in cancellation. There’s poetry in police abolition.

And some policies are even good. There are statues of historical figures that absolutely should be toppled. There are reparations that should be paid.

The New Progressive is trying to help. They see real problems, real pain. So many of the solutions should work. If only people behaved.

If you’ve come to this book, maybe you’ve got your mind set and want to be told how right you are (yes, 2020 was bad, you might say, cracking this open). But my ideal reader for this book, if I’m being honest, is someone like myself, someone who now feels a little tribeless, a person of curiosity, someone whose politics are more exhaustion than doctrine.

This book is also for my family, who are confused about why my beloved old boarding school headmaster released what looked like a hostage video and why there are committees now to propose abandoning Jane Austen and Shakespeare at every prep school in America (but obviously no changes to a $70,000 and up annual tuition—how else would the recording studios stay so lovely?).

This book is for people who want to understand why Abraham Lincoln is canceled and why Lena Dunham is always on the edge. The movement makes new moral rules so fast that “brown-bag lunch” and “trigger warning” are actually bad now. You’re probably bad.

When it comes to the rage and indignation, some of it might seem bizarre—how could everyone have been this angry all the time? But I think a lot about allergy science: When the area around a child is very well disinfected, her immune system will keep searching for a fight. It doesn’t relax and call it a day. It keeps hunting. It finds peach fuzz and fresh-cut grass, strawberries and pollen. The allergy that develops to those is not fake. The throat tightening and the rash are very real. Broad metrics showing quality of life getting better and more comfortable have nothing to do with what our bodies feel and what they need to do.

So, yes, many Americans are insulated and rich, comfortable and healthy, with plenty of food. It is that rage even during comfort that won me the right to vote and to work and the right to marry a woman and, heck, order sperm online. I know I owe my whole life to the impulse of those who wanted to make what was weird and illegal into what is normal and lauded, to those who saw that things were good but knew they could be better.

But I also know that the immune system looking for new battles can do strange things. It can turn inward and kill its own body.

Part 1

THREE ZONES

A Utopia, If YouCan Keep It

It’s a little offensive now to say that the occupation of this Seattle neighborhood by a group of anti-fascists was a party, because bad things did happen (a boy was killed), but for a little while, inside the new armed borders of the hippest neighborhood in town, it really was a party.

The neighborhood arose in the summer of 2020, during the surreal months when Covid coincided with the renewed Black Lives Matter movement, which sought to reshape how America polices. White-collar workers were home, Zooming for a meeting or two, freaked out, angry, online, alone, and generally very available, all the time. And America’s police were caught on camera doing what sure looked like a murder (a knee held on the neck of a black man). Things felt open-ended and chaotic. When a group of black-clad anti-fascists in ski masks marched into Seattle’s historically gay neighborhood of Capitol Hill to start a new police-free autonomous zone, there was a collective shrug. Why not? How about we see?

There’d been protests for a week in the neighborhood before the new borders went up. Police had put barricades around the precinct when the protests heated up, around June 1. Half a dozen elected officials joined in with the anti-fascists and Black Lives Matter crowds to protest. Nights were especially raucous. The crowds grew. Police boarded the precinct windows. They put in stronger barricades. Finally, during the middle of the afternoon of June 8, the police abandoned the precinct. It was a huge win for the protestors. Right away they dragged the police barricades out, using them to build new neighborhood borders. (Eventually Seattle’s Department of Transportation would come in to help install nice concrete barriers.) The new city was formed. It was five and a half square blocks.

Along the edges of the community, young men sat on lawn chairs with long guns on their laps. They didn’t stop much of anyone, except troublemakers. Reporters, they would sometimes stop. The autonomous zone was not a free-for-all. The young men were mostly locals, public school teachers, baristas, grad students, and various healing arts practitioners. They were masseuses and Reiki specialists. They were vaguely underemployed software engineers working on Zoom. It was less zip-tiecarrying Navy SEALs, like you might find on January 6, and more young people who were described as sensitive or stoned. Which is not to say they were uncomfortable with violence. Putting violence back on the table—being armed, being even a little scary—was the core of Antifa’s method.

Within the walls of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, the new residents could make a utopia. It would be called CHAZ. It would be a place without the old world’s racism and the old ways of talking and thinking. This would be an entirely different project: A fresh start. Anyone who crossed into the new city would be automatically on board. Those who happened to be there already would have to get on board or leave. No one wants to live in capitalist hell—CHAZ was a gift.

The founders of the new neighborhood, set atop the old one, dug into the park lawn and planted a community garden, and the good Seattle mist helped it grow. They set up a free neighborhood library, giving books to all. They set up a clinic providing health care, for everyone, and while the care was basic, it was also free. Food trucks came and musicians did too. Cops couldn’t enter CHAZ and didn’t need to, thanks to community-run safety efforts and a new culture of equality and compassion that would make crime all but disappear. Weeknights were a smorgasbord of activities—movie nights and dodgeball games, Marxism readalouds. The city’s homeless and addicted were welcomed with open arms. Art could and did go everywhere—on the pavement, the asphalt, the walls of shops and restaurants.

If you didn’t know what happened at night and if you didn’t look too closely at the armed guards on the edges of the new city, if you didn’t see that the community library was just some books on a folding table, and if you didn’t think about what exactly was the sewage and waste disposal plan here, if you stopped being so suspicious and just enjoyed something for once, then you’d have seen the perfection in CHAZ. For a generation more comfortable tapping on the glass of their phones, here in the newly liberated CHAZ was something tangible.

The neighborhood had been one of those nice, liberal, gentrified ones, with rainbows painted onto the crosswalks. The insurgents who laid claim to those blocks said that progress didn’t need to be incremental. It could happen fast. A revolution didn’t need to be polite.

Seattle’s then mayor, Jenny Durkan, loved it. She was in her early sixties, typically dressed in bright blazers and white pearls, her strawberry blonde hair perfectly blown out into the helmet that’s popular for successful women of that age. The autonomous zone had “a block-party atmosphere,” she told curious reporters. President Trump took aim at her and the city, describing Seattle as having been taken over by domestic terrorists. He wrote: “Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game. These ugly Anarchists must be stopped IMMEDIATELY. MOVE FAST!” She said instead that it was “a peaceful expression of our community’s collective grief and their desire to build a better world.” She especially loved the “food trucks, spaghetti potlucks, teach-ins, and movies.” She sent barbed wire and Porta-Potties to the autonomous zone.

Politically, lots of anti-fascists are also anarchists, and their goals fit well with many Black Lives Matter activists’. The antifascists had been operating in the Pacific Northwest for decades as anti-racist skinheads, a kind of mirror to the more familiar yes-racism skinhead. These proto-Antifas went by the moniker Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, or SHARP. Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter, a social-media-hashtag-turned-protest-movement started in the 2010s, had grown, primarily thanks to the warm embrace from glossy magazines and CEOs. Antifa wants the destruction of capitalism and the state’s monopoly on violence, while BLM wants a deep expansion of state power and potentially a new national anti-racism branch. So there were some differences.

But both groups hated the cops. Both groups wanted the abolition of police and prisons. The chant—“No good cops in a racist system”—worked for both of them. BLM’s corporate consultants needed a military arm, so they could work together for a little while.

There was a list of demands for the return of the neighborhood to the City of Seattle. They included abolition of imprisonment, along with de-gentrification and more equitable history lessons for elementary school children.

CHAZ leaders wanted autonomy, and they got it. They were free. The police were told not to enter these blocks. Signs hung at the border: No good cops no bad protestors and No cops no problem. They would create a localized anti-crime system. The anti-fascists were pulling off their ski masks, and everyone was getting along. Seattle was going all in.

It’s hard to tell when exactly CHAZ turned dark. Any troubles in the zone were downplayed. But online, shaky and dimly lit videos of CHAZ at night depicted big men passing out guns. Groups seemed to be doling out punishments, shoving people, screaming, shooting. But the videos were hard to interpret. And the only places that posted them were right-wing websites that pumped them out with blaring all-caps headlines. It was all SEATTLE DESTROYED BY LIBERALS. I didn’t trust any of it. So I got on a plane and flew to Seattle.

Faizel Khan, who watched the barricades grow stronger through the windows of his café, wasn’t opposed to the occupation per se. A gay man, he had moved from Texas to Seattle’s Capitol Hill to be somewhere welcoming and fun. He wanted a less racist country and believed in Black Lives Matter.

He called his shop Cafe Argento. Their tagline on Facebook: 12th Avenue’s Sexiest Coffee House. They made a great egg sandwich. For a while, things in his new city seemed alright. He supported Black Lives Matter because he supported progress.

His new city officials—that loose collective of anti-fascists and local Black Lives Matter leaders—held meetings to announce the community events. It was unclear how leadership of their new city was structured, who exactly was making decisions. But people were coming in from all over to see the new city, and for a little while the businesses were OK. It didn’t last.