00:01:07.120And here to answer some of those questions for me is my good friend Adrienne Daub and our good friend Joan Didion, who's making her return to the pod.
00:01:16.580So this is an episode we've been teasing for a long time.
00:01:19.480We did an episode on San Francisco in the conservative imagination, and we said in passing we've got to also do one about San Francisco as a place that spawns a lot of conservative thought in our own day and a lot of conservative pathologies specifically.
00:01:36.220This will most likely be a series because there's a lot to say.
00:02:20.100But, you know, I'm actually really fascinated to do this one with you because, yeah, I think before I moved out West, I had like an East Coast or a vague idea of what California conservatism was.
00:02:30.760It meant Ronald Reagan, and it meant the reactionary tech industry, which, like, despite what people are now going to try and tell you, actually was moving discernibly to the right, I would say even before the pandemic, but like really acutely since the pandemic.
00:02:45.100And this experience, this time I've spent in California, has shown me that there's actually a bunch of different California conservatisms that are influencing each other and feeding off of each other, but which have discernible, like, distinctions.
00:02:59.460So I think the fact that you're saying discernible is already really helpful. I think you're absolutely right. The tech industry turned right long before people elsewhere seemed to notice. And I think the reason is that these particular kinds of California conservatism that we're going to be talking about are undiscernible, are illegible to a lot of people outside of the state, right?
00:03:20.780Like when people sort of want to figure out, like, how does a kind of free market supremacism lend itself so easily to fascism?
00:03:29.380When people want to know, like, how did these guys get so eugenic?
00:03:32.760How are they so rich and so smart and yet given to conspiracism?
00:03:36.960These are all things that if like we have, you've spent some time out here, are legibly picking up on stuff that's been in the ether for a long, long time.
00:03:48.460And in some way, they're hewing to a proud or not very proud California tradition.
00:03:53.920But you're right that I think that the shock that people professed at the tech industry's rightward lurch, or even the perception that it was a lurch and wasn't just always there, tells us that this kind of conservatism is harder to read than, let's say, the conservatism of a James Dobson or a Dick Cheney.
00:04:11.320It's more idiosyncratic. It doesn't necessarily fall into, I think, the established terms of like, OK, here are the right wing camps that we're used to talking about in, say, like a Republican presidential primary. Right. It's a little more idiosyncratic. It's a little offbeat. It is flexing its muscle now, but it has not always been at the centerpiece of conservative politics and has become so more recently.
00:04:36.820Yeah. And we should say this is a podcast about gender politics. And gender is kind of an underappreciated piece of this story, I would say. That might be our big thesis here. People will think of things like land rights. They'll think of things like the defense industry. They'll think of things like taxes, right? Aerospace, et cetera, et cetera.
00:05:24.860It's her 2003 book about California, Joan Didion's Where I Was From.
00:05:29.500She died in 2021, but she stopped writing, like, the last decade of her life, I guess.
00:05:35.440I think her last big book was The Year of Magical Thinking, which is better, I think, than her other grief book, Blue Nights, about the death of her daughter.
00:05:44.640You can tell that it is not as exactingly edited as some of her earlier work.
00:05:49.600Like, the stuff in, like, the White Album, I think, is a lot leaner.
00:05:52.720And it's telling in that it is an account of California's ethos and politics and culture from a California conservative and from somebody whose political preoccupations become very clear through her narration of California's history.
00:06:09.260That's right. Didion was born in Sacramento.
00:06:11.260Her mother, I believe, I don't know if she was born in San Francisco, but raised in San Francisco, graduate of Lowell High School, not too far from here.
00:06:18.680And so where she's from, she's putting stakes down, right?
00:06:22.600But she's saying she's more California than you.
00:06:24.480And that's kind of the secret theme of the book.
00:06:26.700California, the place famous for being an advent of reinvention and a source of reinvention,
00:06:31.780becomes like almost paradoxically in Didion's telling,
00:06:34.660a place that has like a former, more authentic self, which she can claim, which is also very telling.
00:06:41.360So I started reading this book ready to kind of dismiss it, ready to dislike it.
00:06:47.060But what I found very interesting was Didion shows herself both a keen chronicler of a certain California mindset, and then she shows that she's definitely a victim of it.
00:06:55.800And to some extent, I think the book knows it, too.
00:06:58.180The book is not very structured, but one of the recurring bits that come up is this very daffy essay that eighth grade Joe Didion wrote about, like, the California mindset.
00:07:08.540And she kind of keeps coming back to this ideology that she imbibed as a kid and that on several occasions says she began questioning super late in her life.
00:08:37.960We could be very, very clear in our dislike or our rejection of what she's saying.
00:08:43.600And I think the fact that you notice a kind of over-identification of hers and then she's able to free herself from it.
00:08:49.480And then in freeing herself, she falls back into the problem or back into this kind of over-identification, actually already suggests something about her book, which I think she knows, given the title, Where I Was From.
00:09:01.480Her relationship to California is over-determined, like five ways to Sunday, right?
00:09:05.300In the book, she's trying to give you a sense of the ideology that she imbibed as a kid.
00:09:09.280She tries to come to a place of distance from it and disidentification from it.
00:09:13.560But in the end, you realize that a lot of her conclusions partake of the exact same spirit and, frankly, very conservative spirit that animated that ideology in the first place.
00:09:22.060But then you get the added fact that, like, this is a Californian reporting, let's be honest, to a bunch of New York liberals, right?
00:09:31.580Like, this is a California conservative performing California conservatism for an audience that she's imagining people within five blocks of St. John the Divine.
00:09:41.740Oh, she's also performing it for East Coast conservatives like William F. Buckley. All right. Yeah. Let's be honest about who Joan Didion's audience is. It includes a fair number of conservatives. But, you know, I think it might be useful for our audience at this point to think about, like, what is this ideology that Joan Didion imbibed?
00:10:01.400And for me, what stood out a lot was both as something that she clearly has an ongoing attachment to and then also as something that she tries to trouble and question, although not in the same ways I would, was her attachment to the myth of the pioneer resilience and the myth of westward expansion.
00:10:21.800She goes through, in the early parts of the book, vignettes from the lives of some of her female ancestors who made what she calls the crossing from places like Ohio and Virginia and Arkansas to California.
00:10:36.700And she's talking here about one of these women's sons who's narrating his own mother who made the Pioneer Crossing.
00:12:25.940The Chinese fishing communities along the California coast who were displaced really violently with ethnic cleansing by the white Anglo settlers, American settlers, never mentioned at all.
00:12:38.140So race is not really at the forefront of Joan Didion's worldview.
00:12:41.840I suspect she would think it would be kind of vulgar to consider it.
00:12:44.340But also she looks down on other white people.
00:12:47.280But like this idea that there was once a hero or a heroic class in the mythologized past and that those people had an integrity and a commitment and a sort of like moral capacity that has since been lost.0.57
00:13:04.020And that they were like white people who are better than other kinds of white people.
00:13:07.580That's a through line of conservative thought, I think, like throughout America in a lot of cases.
00:13:13.460It's not something that's particular to California conservatism in its generalities, but in the particular manifestation of it that Joan has adhered to, it's very, very California.
00:13:23.980Yeah, so maybe let's sort of explain what she thinks this ideology is all about or what sort of the situation is that has given rise to it.
00:13:31.220And in each case, I really want to point out that Didion Asmora is saying, we'll put pressure on this and be like, this isn't true.
00:13:38.640But then in a broader sense, it still guides her analysis to a really staggering extent for the fact that this is written in the 21st century.
00:13:45.440So one of the main things she emphasizes is the fact of living in California is just the fact that it populated so quickly.
00:13:54.560that to be a Californian until really the early 21st century
00:14:00.020is to be aware that there were far fewer people in the state
00:15:49.640So that's the first thing she identifies.
00:15:51.080The second thing that she talks about is she tries to put pressure on this idea of the yeoman farmer as a sort of character in the California story.
00:16:02.140I think she's responding to some extent to the work of Victor Davis Hanson, which is kind of wild to me.
00:16:07.420I'm like, OK, I didn't know you cared, but OK.
00:16:09.960Yeah. Classicist and Hoover Institution inmate currently who wrote about his connection to the land and to a kind of yeoman ideal as a Central Valley farmer.
00:16:20.060And she points out that really the kind of blood and soil ideology that people associate with farming just never was able to take hold in California because when we talk about our farming community, usually we call them growers, right?
00:16:35.460And she does a lot with language and says, like, these aren't people who've worked the land.
00:16:40.340She points out that, like, a lot of the landowners who are understood as the big agricultural producers in California have never actually lived in the place where they're growing, right?
00:16:49.140Like a classical agrarian farmer would.
00:16:51.340They live in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and they own these big tracts of land in the Central Valley and down on the coast.
00:16:57.560Yeah, there's a line she quotes, I forget from whom, that their relationship to the land is as casual as that of the migratory workers they employ.
00:17:05.060So, like, she's really trying to puncture that.
00:17:06.860And I think that's well observed, right?
00:17:08.500That connection to the land doesn't quite do for them what they think it does, right?
00:17:13.240And that it doesn't work as obviously and easily as it would, for instance, in parts of the Midwest and the American South.
00:17:21.360And then the third point, I think, that she really wants to drill down on, in the order of the book, it's the first thing that she talks about, is a relationship to the federal government that is deeply pathological, right?
00:17:34.460And this is where her own conservatism comes in, but also where I think she's super good at skewering other conservatives.
00:17:39.820Because her point ultimately is to say Californians since the Mexican War and since the railroad have been really good at telling themselves that they've lifted themselves up by their bootstraps, whereas the entity doing the lifting up of their bootstraps has in fact been the federal government.
00:17:58.000These people have been living on the dole of other states.
00:18:02.100This was the point where I told you, Adrianoff, Mike, I was like, this is the thing that like Didion and I think like people on the left like us would both critique the California rugged individualist myth, but she's critiquing it from this place of like dependence on federal subsidies.
00:18:21.460She's, it's very old school Republican, right?
00:18:24.520She's like, oh, you think you're independent, but you're actually being paid for by a daddy government that is insulating you from market forces.
00:18:34.080Whereas somebody like me would be like, well, you stole all that land from people you forced off of it with violence, right?
00:18:40.700Like that's a different, like there's different forms of like cheating that I think different political impulses would point out.
00:18:50.240I think I read it slightly differently.
00:18:52.220I think she's accusing them of self-deception, right?
00:18:54.860She's just saying your money didn't come from where you say it comes from or where your self-conception thinks it comes from.
00:19:00.880And I mean, I think this is very much under the impression of Reagan and the tax revolt that she's basically saying you think you never took anything from the government.
00:19:09.660Everything you own is basically due to government largesse.
00:19:14.440But you're right. Her ideal clearly is someone not dependent on government largesse where we're like right back to a Goldwater Republicanism, right?
00:19:21.920That may be Joan Didion's personal view, but I think mostly she's interested in the inconsistency.
00:19:27.520But it is true that like the federal government was paying people back for the genocides they committed doesn't seem to enter into her moral calculus very much.
00:19:37.260There's a line from Jack London's Valley of the Moon that she quotes where one of the characters says, like, us native-born Californians, we're owed something because we took this land from the natives.
00:21:57.600flashing back to the Haight-Ashbury and to
00:21:59.660all these unmoored kids she saw there.
00:22:01.320But you're exactly right that in some way there's one kind of cleavage, one kind of cutting of connection that she's very alive to.
00:22:09.680And then there's another one that almost doesn't enter into her field of vision, right?
00:22:13.420The book is so fascinating just in its blind spots.
00:22:16.640But then there's the other connection that she has a lot of moral inquiry to, the sort of like denied connection to the East, not the severed one, but the sort of disavowed one, which is the funding of the federal government.
00:22:26.980Yeah. Just for our listeners who are not from here, this would be the military aid immediately after statehood. It would be the big infrastructural investments of the late 19th century, including the Transcontinental Railroad where, you know, a lot of very important, very wealthy Californians got super rich off of basically grifting the federal government.
00:22:49.420The swamp draining. I didn't realize how much of Northern California and the Central Valley were swamps before these massive federal infrastructure projects to dry out that land and make it farmable.
00:23:00.360Then it becomes the aerospace industry in the L.A. Basin. Then it becomes Silicon Valley. Right.
00:23:05.580She's very good at pointing out none of this would exist if it weren't for massive investment and frankly, wasted investment from forces elsewhere in the country.
00:23:14.800The other reason why I think she dwells on that wagon, which becomes a little bit clear a little bit later in the book, is this idea that, like, you also have to move on, right?
00:23:24.320This idea of California as an amnesiac society, which is sort of something she's trying to counteract.
00:23:29.080She's trying to say this is the place where you start over.
00:23:31.100It's the place where you don't remember where you're from.
00:23:34.220It's the place where you reinvent yourself.0.92
00:23:36.820And this is where there's an interesting sort of gendered aspect, because I think one place that she then returns to is California's sort of very troubling and very strange biopolitics of madness.0.51
00:23:49.240The fact that this state had almost nothing by the time it started opening as mental hospitals.
00:23:54.720And even still today, when you drive through rural parts of the state, you barely will ever see a building with more than three or four floors.
00:24:03.060But the most impressive ones, which are often off on the other hill while you're driving up a highway, will turn out to be an abandoned state mental hospital, right?
00:24:13.940And the way Didion tells it, the women in her family were all afraid of going there, of ending up there.
00:24:20.100And the fact that you discard what encumbers you and that what encumbers you is often a woman who doesn't entirely behave according to the way you'd like her to behave.
00:24:29.860She's setting up actually a gendered argument there about the tendency towards abandonment keeps going and keeps becoming a form of self-discipline for these people who like to think of themselves as very individualistic, but who actually have real trouble dealing with individuality, with people who don't quite fit the mold.
00:24:47.220Joan Didion, famously a woman who had several nervous breakdowns in her youth.
00:24:51.720And I think thinks of them as hereditary, right?
00:24:53.980She casts back in her family tree and it's very moving.
00:24:57.480The fact that I think she might have been a brownie scout or something like that, going to entertain the inmates at the local asylum.
00:25:04.200And she understands that as like a warning, right, as a possible future that she is trying to avoid as much as possible.0.75
00:25:11.840And of course, that makes me think of one of the most important texts to come out of the very early kind of beats and hippie movements in Northern California, of course, is Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is based on his experiences in Menlo Park at the hospital there.
00:25:26.740Right. So the idea that counterculture is this kind of reaction to the California spirit that Didion describes, you know, where her two obsessions, like she hates the hippies and she hates this particular kind of California conservatism where she can't see that actually the smelly long hairs are actually in her corner and are on her side.
00:25:45.480At least about this, yeah. But like, you know, she's good at sort of skewering this late 19th, early 20th century like rancher class of Californians, right? She has this, what's the name of that ranch along the central coast that's like 20 miles of coastal real estate?
00:26:03.020I mean, the famous example of this for our listeners is the Irvine Ranch, right, which made up a large swath of Orange County and which the Irvine family has been sort of dining out on ever since.
00:26:15.980And today it holds the city of Irvine.
00:26:18.380It holds the University of California at Irvine, right?
00:26:31.580Which was developed differently and is still a little more spread out.
00:26:35.700Yeah. And I mean, that's the thing. She's not wrong about this, right? The way these farms have evolved is highly varied, but they've all evolved, right? In places like Marin County, a lot of this stuff was given to the county in order not to be built on, right? And now they're nature preserves. And people use those nature preserves to keep newcomers out.
00:26:56.860In Silicon Valley, the Stanford Farm became what's today known as the farm or Stanford University.
00:27:02.420And then meanwhile, in Irvine, Irvine is famous for parceling out land for subdivisions at extremely measured rates in order to basically assure possible buyers that their investment would not depreciate.
00:27:16.420That is to say, the Irvine ranch was subdivided in tranches in order to make sure that property values would only ever go up, up, up, up, up.
00:27:24.660The fact that the dividend of that is that you're going to have homelessness. The fact that it keeps housing as a precious commodity that there isn't too much of is sort of already implicit in that. The fact that you kind of drip, drip, drip it out. It's not that you had a bunch of ranch land and then one thing happened to it. But the different things that could happen to it, the different paths that this farmland could go down really impacted what different parts of California did and what they look like and frankly, what their politics are. She's quite right about that.
00:27:53.600But so I do think that there's something really interesting about the fact that, like, Didion has this funny way of both diagnosing these pathologies of the rancher class and then sort of essentially adopt their way of viewing California history, right?
00:28:07.780Like, her story skips from the Donner Party and Leland Stanford's Union Pacific straight into the suburbanization of the 1930s and 40s and, you know, conveniently leapfrogs all the stuff that Mike Davis, for instance, talks about in this beautiful city of quartz, right?
00:28:23.260The unions, the union busting, the mass politics and the working class politics of the turn of the century.
00:28:28.560And when we meet the working class in Didion's picture of California, you're right, above all the white working class, for instance, in this deindustrialized suburb or subdivision called Lakewood, which is sort of at the south end of L.A. near Long Beach, they sort of function as witnesses of deindustrialization and failure and of decline, but also centrally of its engines.
00:28:52.240Right. Like she thinks that these people are kind of victims, but also they are where the California dream goes to die.
00:28:59.200Like they are a debased form of Californianess.
00:29:02.660Their presence is a symptom of the decline.0.98
00:29:05.740Yeah. Yeah. And I think we could talk more about the Lakewood thing.
00:29:08.940That's the most sort of deeply reported piece of this book, which is because she was sent out to Lakewood to report on this story in, I think, 1993 or 1994.
00:29:23.440So this is the so-called Spur Posse, a group of high school students who were arrested by the sheriff's department for a kind of game of sexual dares that very clearly shaded into sexual assault, including statutory rape.
00:29:40.860And Joan Didion was sent out to interview them.
00:29:45.400And I would recommend both the piece and what becomes of it in Where I Was From with qualifications.
00:29:52.720Because in the end, the ways in which Didion tries to contextualize what happens is extremely predictable, right?
00:30:01.380She's like, Lakewood is a place that defines itself as middle class, solidly middle class.
00:30:08.360Something that Didion constantly undercuts.
00:30:10.860She keeps quoting people, being like, well, this is a nice middle-class community.
00:30:18.420Which both is like weirdly catty, but also like there's a purpose to it.
00:30:23.060She's like, again, like these people are deceiving themselves, right?
00:30:26.220It's also a place where there's been serious deindustrialization.
00:30:30.460The events at Liquid High sort of happen a year or two after, I think, the last McDonnell Douglas plant there relocates to, I want to say, Tennessee.0.70
00:30:39.640Like, it's one of those things where, like, something awful happens to a disfavored class,
00:30:44.400and then a writer for The New Yorker goes there and is like, man, the factory just closed, huh?
00:30:49.580And it's like, okay, like, I know you're not making a direct causal inference, but, like, it feels a little trite, you know?
00:31:36.700The way she talks about these young people often can sound sort of like, what is that first Brett Easton Ellis novel, the one that he wrote when he was really young?
00:31:43.420Rules of Attraction, Less Than Zero, one of those?
00:31:48.020Like, Wasted Youth, the kind of stories that we all love about Southern California youth and we tell every five years are like, they're like this now.
00:31:56.360It's like, dude, can I interest you in James Dean, you know?
00:32:00.180They've been like that for a while, yeah.
00:32:02.280Turns out it's a kind of alienating place.
00:32:03.940But yeah, because the Spur Posse sort of like the perpetrators tried to basically parlay their sudden notoriety into mainstream media success, right?
00:32:19.160They sort of used the avenues of sort of talk TV to, I don't know, launch a career in ways that like Didion is clearly kind of grossed out by.
00:32:31.640But she clearly sort of thinks about it as like, oh, here's this like fake industry, the entertainment industry, luring these people in who can't get a real job anymore because the McDonnell Douglas plant closed.
00:32:44.040And so I think on the one hand, like that feels a little simple.
00:32:48.460On the other hand, there are a couple of things here that I find very interesting.
00:32:51.260One is there is this kind of shift, this idea that like which we have today when it comes to the influencer-dom, right?
00:32:57.620Like, it's the career goal that takes over when the other goals go away.
00:33:02.200And then the other thing she points out, which I think is a very good fact for her to have run down,
00:33:07.060she's like, you know, we think of these kids, this is also the era of the Menendez brothers, et cetera, et cetera, right?
00:33:15.820A lot of them didn't go to a serious four-year college.
00:33:20.960And if I understand her correctly, she's sort of implying it's because at McDonnell Douglas you didn't have to.
00:33:25.900You did a couple of classes at the local community college for free, and then you could go into the aerospace industry.
00:33:32.540I found that interesting for a couple of reasons.
00:33:34.300Like, she's sort of saying, well, suddenly there are these pressures on these young men to have a different view of their own future.
00:33:42.680A future where they are competing a lot more with other young men for, you know, fewer spots.
00:33:49.820That kind of scarcity mindset to her, I think, is like Ur-Californian and it's absolutely pathological.
00:33:55.900The reason I had to think of that is because, of course, if you think about, like, Californians and college, the McDonnell-Douglas plan closes sometime in the early 90s, the Spur Posse investigations in the 92-93, 1996 brings Proposition 209.
00:34:11.440Prop 209, which banned affirmative action, racial affirmative action in California colleges and universities.
00:34:18.580You see where I'm going with this, right? Like, she doesn't come out and say it, but the idea that college suddenly matters a great deal more, and that's why we have to keep them out of it, right? And the wrong people are getting to enjoy it. I was like, yeah, man, that's a really astute excavation of a homology. This feels like it rhymes.
00:34:37.500California is good at moving from something being abundant, you know, water, land, college, et cetera, et cetera, to a moment when you realize there is not enough of it to go around and people are getting it who don't look like me, who are not white, and we need to, you know, destroy the system in order for them not to partake of it.0.89
00:35:29.740Like Jews finally get into the American mainstream middle class and the membership's worth there is, in my mind, diluted by its extension to black people or like to women, right?0.97
00:35:43.860There's something about that wounded entitlement that is like sort of similarly at work in this move that Didion is making.0.96
00:35:50.000But it does remind me of somebody else.
00:35:52.860Maybe that's a good place to return to a, well, not quite fave of the podcast.
00:35:58.380You know, a person who has now really gone out of her way to basically use this kind of like, the latest wave of newcomers has destroyed California in two successive waves, which is really kind of an accomplishment.
00:36:13.720It's easy to kind of do that for one group.
00:36:15.980Takes a real California pro to do it for two, right?1.00
00:36:20.700So we're going to leap forward into the 21st century, but can you give us a rundown on who Nellie Bowles is and why she matters for this story?
00:36:28.380Nellie Bowles is a scion of one of these old California ranching families.
00:36:35.760Her parents are the heirs to something called the Nice Company, I believe.0.57
00:36:41.480They make like clementines and that palm pomegranate juice.
00:36:45.740That's them, like a lot of agricultural products, right?
00:36:48.600They own a ton of water rights in California.
00:36:51.420So one thing you'll sometimes hear in like a shorthand, like ad hominem against Nellie Bowles is that her family owns all the water in California, which is not exactly true, but it's not that far off.0.99
00:37:06.540And she is, you know, part of this lineage of Californians that Joan Didion, you know, sort of skewers and romanticizes at the same time.
00:37:15.840But now Nellie Bowles, who is briefly something like a journalist at The New York Times, has married Barry Weiss, friend of the show, or excuse me, Barry Weiss, I've been told over and over again.
00:37:27.240I don't know why she just doesn't spell it, Barry, if she wants it said that way.
00:37:31.300But Barry Weiss is, of course, the power broker in this newer kind of California conservatism, or maybe not so new, but the Silicon Valley right wing, which is partaking, of course, of California conservatism's, you know, heavy industrial subsidies from the federal government, partaking of California conservatism's willingness to abandon former, like, friends and obligations, California conservatism's deep investment.
00:38:01.300And in eugenics from the 20th century and late 19th century, now being revived by these Silicon Valley conservatives.
00:38:08.140So it's interesting to see this kind of like hidden figure, somebody like Nellie Bowles, who's connecting these different strains of the California right.
00:38:15.680Yeah, exactly. So Bowles, from 2017 to, I want to say 2020 or something like that, she wrote a lot about the tech industry and tech industry culture in San Francisco.
00:38:27.700and the overall tone of the texts was that of,
00:38:34.900like this was a moment when sort of the tech clash had really set in.
00:38:37.860It was fashionable to beat up on the tech industry,
00:38:39.700but she beat up on them always from a kind of odd place, I thought, right?0.97
00:38:44.920Because there's always a healthy dose of nostalgia
00:38:47.220for the kind of San Francisco that they destroyed, right?
00:38:57.700But there was a moment when, like, you could have confused her for a Kara Swisher or something like that.
00:39:03.220But that was ultimately not where she was coming from.0.87
00:39:06.220It really was a kind of, I mean, nimbyism is putting it too strongly, but, like, it was this idea that, like, these newcomers were doing California wrong.
00:39:15.500And I thought it might be worth just very briefly to go through a couple of the headlines and a couple of the stories that she sort of covered when she was briefly a tech reporter for The New York Times, so 2017 to early 2020s.
00:39:27.700I would invite our listeners to just kind of pay attention to these and see if you notice what exactly is happening here.
00:39:34.920So, among her first stories in 2017 was Silicon Valley now has its own populist pundit.
00:39:44.320And it is about a man that Californians will know quite well because he is currently running for governor.
00:39:49.520It's Steve Hilton, the Republican candidate for governor at the moment.
00:39:52.500The next one, to fit into Silicon Valley, wear these wool shoes.
00:39:57.240Apparently, there were shoes that people were wearing.
00:40:00.720Then we get to answering your questions about the controversial Google memo.
00:40:04.440This is about the James Damore, Google's ideological echo chamber story.
00:40:09.600Then on September 23rd, 2017, James Damore is the picture here.
00:40:19.460Then November 10th, 2017, men at work wonder if they overstepped with women too.
00:40:24.000So we're getting into the Me Too moment, and Nellie Bowles is sort of using the tech industry to ask, has this movement, which has just started, remember, gone too far?
00:40:35.320Then November 9th, 2017, Twitter facing another uproar, pauses its verification process.
00:40:41.460So this is again about like deplatforming, free speech issues, etc, etc.
00:40:45.700Then December 5th, 2017, a reckoning on sexual misconduct? Absolutely. But how harsh, women ask.
00:40:52.580So these are among Bowles' first New York Times pieces.
00:40:56.680This is what she thinks she was hired for.
00:40:59.740And for all we know, that is what she was hired for, right?
00:41:03.300What I think these all have in common is they use the tech industry to raise questions really about what would come to be called wokeness.
00:41:09.640This uses the tech clash moment to really prepare a very different kind of backlash.
00:41:15.960And from today's vantage point, of course, all this has aged terribly because we know that there was nothing intrinsically woke about the tech industry, much to the contrary.
00:41:26.600And part of why we know that is because they pay, you know, Nellie and Barry a lot of money to get reactionary pablum out there.
00:41:34.580But the most important thing here really is, I think, that this journalism, which purports to be about a particular industry and about a particular region, ends up basically just making it a standard and a, frankly, quite incurious one for, you know, backlash politics.
00:41:52.960Anyway, and then, you know, she marries Barry and she discovers a new set of Californians that's doing California wrong and has, in fact, ruined San Francisco.
00:42:02.600Do you want to tell our listeners about these people, Moira?
00:42:15.360Her, like, I had a conversion to conservatism book
00:42:18.980because some woke people annoyed me on the internet in 2020.
00:42:23.700That seems to be the general radicalization pattern of people like this.
00:42:27.660Yeah, the book is called Morning After the Revolution,
00:42:30.740And it's all about San Francisco and how it's gone wrong.
00:42:34.820And we'll be talking about it quite a bit in the second part of this.
00:42:37.960And we should say that she positions this book pretty insistently as a kind of Didion-esque exploration of left-wing San Francisco foibles, right?
00:42:49.100The title, Morning After the Revolution, is itself a play on a Joan Didion essay on the morning after the 60s.
00:42:55.080And it has two separate targets. Corporate speak in tech. And indeed, one of the book's two epigraphs is a tweet from the company Slack and grassroots woke excess. Right. And the persistent focus is, as she calls it, quote, the city of my birth. My family has lived there for seven generations. Right.
00:43:18.600She starts the book in a particular week in October 2020 when it's like a sexual awareness week at the New York Times or something and also International Pronouns Day.
00:43:27.660And at the same time, Lowell High School in San Francisco gets rid of its admissions requirements, right?
00:43:33.440This is the way she sort of grafts things together.0.93
00:43:36.240It is, you know, things she observed around her and then like changes in San Francisco above all the election of progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin to sort of show how the city, her city, where her family has lived for seven generations, how it's being ruined by wokesters and the tech industry, who again in this book from 2020 still sort of seem to figure as one and the same.0.97
00:44:00.320And it's a bad book. We'll talk more about it in the second part, but it's a book of stunning credulity and lack of curiosity.0.90
00:44:08.380You can really tell that she wrote a lot of this during the Zoom era, right?
00:44:12.940There's not a whole lot of talking to people. There's a lot of listening to people's webinars.
00:44:17.460But importantly for us in this first episode is that at the center of that credulity and incuriosity really is the city of San Francisco.
00:44:25.420and holds the sense that she kind of owns it and its meanings
00:44:28.520and can diagnose, based on a webinar she once attended or whatever,
00:45:57.300In our next episode, I want to talk about four different things.
00:46:01.200So one is the idea that sort of comes down from the ranchers in Didion,
00:46:04.300but really we could also talk about with suburbanization,
00:46:06.540which is the politics of land ownership,
00:46:08.200the idea of homeownership and being able to carry certain privileges with you, right?
00:46:14.080We'll have to talk about Prop 13 in that regard,
00:46:16.660which allows you to take your old tax rate with you if you move house, right?
00:46:21.420I want to talk more about eugenics, which is an interesting through line that I think Didion doesn't do nearly enough with.
00:46:27.540I want to talk about the question of conspiracism, which has its own sort of interesting gendered angle in the sense that from the John Birchers in Southern California to the tax revolt in Orange County to birtherism, right?
00:46:39.440We get to these kind of conspiratorial politics that are often driven by women, by suburban women.
00:46:45.580And finally, I do want to talk about the tax revolt itself, because I think that's such a fascinating story and such an important export of the state of California and explains so much of where we're at in our politics right now.
00:46:57.880I've been wanting to delve into that for a long, long time, so I'm excited that this episode gives us a chance to do that.
00:47:03.700So we'll have another California episode in a few weeks, and then we'll have a San Francisco episode crowning all that, which will focus on Silicon Valley just in time to coincide with the release of What Tech Call is Governing, coming August 18th.