We had to correct her, and we knew how to do it by now. We would not sit quietly in our white-bodied privilege, nor would our corrections be given apologetically or packaged with niceties. There I was, one of about 30 people attending a four-day-long Zoom seminar called “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness,” hosted by the group Education for Racial Equity.

An older white woman whom I’ll call Stacy had confessed to the group that she was ashamed of being white, and that she hoped in her next life she wouldn’t be white anymore. This provided us with a major learning moment. One participant began by amping herself up, intoning the concepts we’d been taught over the past two days: “Grounding, rooting, removing Bubble Wrap.” Then she got into it. “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.”

“Notice how challenging that was,” our facilitator, Carlin Quinn, said. “That’s what getting your reps in looks like.”

Another woman went next, explaining that Stacy seemed to see people of color as better or more desirable, that her statement was “an othering.” Quinn prompted her to sum it up in one sentence: “When you said that you wish you would come back in your next life as a dark-skinned person, I experienced that as racist because …”

“That was racist because it exoticized Black people.”

“Great,” Quinn said. She pushed for more from everyone, and more came. Stacy’s statement was romanticizing. It was extractive. It was erasing. Stacy sat very still. Eventually we finished. Stacy thanked everyone, her voice thin.

The seminar would culminate with a talk from Robin DiAngelo, the most prominent anti-racist educator working in America. I had signed up because I was curious about her teachings, which had suddenly become so popular. DiAngelo’s 2018 book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, had been a best seller for years by the time I joined the toxic whiteness group in May 2021. But during the heat of the Black Lives Matter protests, her influence boomed. She was brought in to advise Democratic members of the House of Representatives. Coca-Cola, Disney, and Lockheed Martin sent their employees through DiAngelo-inspired diversity trainings; even the defense company Raytheon launched an anti-racism DEI program.

In the DiAngelo doctrine, the issue was not individual racists doing singular bad acts. All white people are racist, because racism is structural. To fix one’s inherent racism requires constant work, and it requires white people to talk about their whiteness. Seminars like hers exploded as anti-racism was shifted from a project of changing laws and fighting systems into a more psychological movement: something you did within yourself. It was therapeutic. It wasn’t about elevating others so much as about deconstructing yourself in hopes of eventually deconstructing the systems around you.

[Read: Abolish DEI statements]

Anti-racism courses are less popular today. This may in part be because more people have become willing to question the efficacy of corporate DEI programs, but it’s surely also because their lessons now show up everywhere. In March at UCLA Medical School, during a required course, a guest speaker had the first-year medical students kneel and pray to “Mama Earth” before saying that medicine was “white science,” as first reported by The Washington Free Beacon. The course I took was just a preview of what’s come to be expected in workplaces and schools all over the country.    

DiAngelo and her fellow thinkers are right in many ways. The economic fallout of structural racism persists in this country—fallout from rules, for example, about where Black people could buy property, laws that for generations have influenced who is rich and who is poor. The laws may be gone, but plenty of racists are left. And the modern anti-racist movement is right that we all probably do have some racism and xenophobia in us. The battle of modernity and liberalism is fighting against our tribal natures and animal selves.

I went into the workshop skeptical that contemporary anti-racist ideology was helpful in that fight. I left exhausted and emotional and, honestly, moved. I left as the teachers would want me to leave: thinking a lot about race and my whiteness, the weight of my skin. But telling white people to think about how deeply white they are, telling them that their sense of objectivity and individualism are white, that they need to stop trying to change the world and focus more on changing themselves … well, I’m not sure that has the psychological impact the teachers are hoping it will, let alone that it will lead to any tangible improvement in the lives of people who aren’t white.

Much of what I learned in “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness” concerned language. We are “white bodies,” Quinn explained, but everyone else is a “body of culture.” This is because white bodies don’t know a lot about themselves, whereas “bodies of culture know their history. Black bodies know.”

The course began with easy questions (names, what we do, what we love), and an icebreaker: What are you struggling with or grappling with related to your whiteness? We were told that our answers should be “as close to the bone as possible, as naked, as emotionally revealing.” We needed to feel uncomfortable.

One woman loved gardening. Another loved the sea. People said they felt exhausted by constantly trying to fight their white supremacy. A woman with a biracial child said she was scared that her whiteness could harm her child. Some expressed frustration. It was hard, one participant said, that after fighting the patriarchy for so long, white women were now “sort of being told to step aside.” She wanted to know how to do that without feeling resentment. The woman who loved gardening was afraid of “being a middle-aged white woman and being called a Karen.”

A woman who worked in nonprofits admitted that she was struggling to overcome her own skepticism. Quinn picked up on that: How did that skepticism show up? “Wanting to say, ‘Prove it.’ Are we sure that racism is the explanation for everything?”

[John McWhorter: The dehumanizing condescension of White Fragility]

She was nervous, and that was good, Quinn said: “It’s really an important gauge, an edginess of honesty and vulnerability—like where it kind of makes you want to throw up.”

One participant was a diversity, equity, and inclusion manager at a consulting firm, and she was struggling with how to help people of color while not taking up space as a white person. It was hard to center and decenter whiteness at the same time.

A woman from San Francisco had started crying before she even began speaking. “I’m here because I’m a racist. I’m here because my body has a trauma response to my own whiteness and other people’s whiteness.” A woman who loved her cats was struggling with “how to understand all the atrocities of being a white body.” Knowing that her very existence perpetuated whiteness made her feel like a drag on society. “The darkest place I go is thinking it would be better if I weren’t here. It would at least be one less person perpetuating these things.”

The next day we heard from DiAngelo herself. Quinn introduced her as “transformative for white-bodied people across the world.” DiAngelo is quite pretty, and wore a mock turtleneck and black rectangular glasses. She started by telling us that she would use the term people of color, but also that some people of color found the term upsetting. She would therefore vary the terms she used, rotating through imperfect language. Sometimes people of color, other times racialized, to indicate that race is not innate and rather is something that has been done to someone. Sometimes she would use the acronym BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color), but she would then make a conscious grammatical mistake: “If I say ‘BIPOC,’ I find that’s a kind of harsh acronym. I usually add people at the end to humanize it a bit, even though grammatically that’s not correct,” she said.

Language is a tricky thing for the movement. The idea is that you should be open and raw when you speak, but you can get so much wrong. It’s no wonder that even Robin DiAngelo herself is worried. (At one point she recommended a book by Reni Eddo-Lodge—“a Black Brit,” DiAngelo said. For a moment she looked scared. “I hope that’s not an offensive term.” Quinn chimed in to say she thought it was okay, but DiAngelo looked introspective. “It sounds harsh. The Brit part sounded harsh.”)

DiAngelo wanted to remind us that she is white. She emphasized the wh—, giving the word a lushness and intensity. “I’m very clear today that I am white, that I have a white worldview. I have a white frame of reference. I move through the world with a white experience.”

She introduced some challenges. First was white people’s “lack of humility”: “If you are white and you have not devoted years, years—not that you read some books last summer—to sustained study, struggle, and work and practice and mistake making and relationship building, your opinions while you have them are necessarily uninformed and superficial.”

“Challenge No. 2 is the precious ideology of individualism, the idea that every one of us is unique and special.”

She prepared us for what would come next: “I will be generalizing about white people.” She was sharing her screen and showed us an image of middle-aged white women: “This is the classic board of a nonprofit.” She threw up a picture of high-school students in a local paper with the headline “Outstanding Freshmen Join Innovative Teacher-Education Program.” Almost all the teenagers were white. “This education program was not and could not have been innovative. Our educational system is probably one of the most efficient, effective mechanisms for the reproduction of racial inequality.” Lingering on the picture, she asked, “Do you feel the weight of that whiteness?”

[From the September 2021 issue: Robin DiAngelo and the problem with anti-racist self-help]

Another image. It was a white man. “I don’t know who that is,” she said. “I just Googled white guy, but most white people live segregated lives.”

When someone calls a white person out as racist, she told us, the white person will typically deny it. “Denying, arguing, withdrawing, crying. ‘I don’t understand.’ Seeking forgiveness. ‘I feel so bad, I feel so bad. Tell me you still love me.’” She paused. “Emotions are political. We need to build our stamina to endure some shame, some guilt,” she said. Quinn broke in to say that intentions are the province of the privileged. But consequences are the province of the subjugated.

Someone who has integrated an anti-racist perspective, DiAngelo told us, should be able to say: “I hold awareness of my whiteness in all settings, and it guides how I engage. I raise issues about racism over and over, both in public and in private … You want to go watch a movie with me? You’re going to get my analysis of how racism played in that movie. I have personal relationships and know the private lives of a range of people of color, including Black people. And there are also people of color in my life who I specifically ask to coach me, and I pay them for their time.”

I was surprised by this idea that I should pay Black friends and acquaintances by the hour to tutor me—it sounded a little offensive. But then I considered that if someone wanted me to come to their house and talk with them about their latent feelings of homophobia, I wouldn’t mind being Venmoed afterward.

When DiAngelo was done, Quinn asked if we had questions. Very few people did, and that was disappointing—the fact that white bodies had nothing to say about a profound presentation. Silence and self-consciousness were part of the problem. “People’s lives are on the line. This is life or death for bodies of culture.” We needed to work on handling criticism. If it made you shake, that was good.

One of the few men in the group said he felt uncomfortable being told to identify as a racist. Here he’d just been talking with all of his friends about not being racist. Now he was going to “say that I might have been wrong here.” He noticed he felt “resistance to saying ‘I’m racist.’”

Quinn understood; that was normal. He just needed to try again, say “I am a racist” and believe it. The man said: “I am racist.” What did he feel? He said he was trying not to fight it. Say it again. “I am racist.”

“Do you feel sadness or grief?”

“Sadness and grief feel true,” he said.

“That’s beautiful,” Quinn said.

Some members of the group were having a breakthrough. Stacy said she was “seeing them finally … Like, wow, are there moments when this white body chooses to see a body of culture when it isn’t dangerous for them?” One woman realized she was “a walking, talking node of white supremacy.” Another finally saw how vast whiteness was: “So vast and so, so big.”

For a while, a dinner series called Race to Dinner for white women to talk about their racism was very popular, though now it seems a little try-hard. The hosts—Saira Rao and Regina Jackson—encourage women who have paid up to $625 a head to abandon any notion that they are not racist. At one point Rao, who is Indian American, and Jackson, who is Black, publicized the dinners with a simple message: “Dear white women: You cause immeasurable pain and damage to Black, Indigenous and brown women. We are here to sit down with you to candidly discuss how *exactly* you cause this pain and damage.”

One could also attend a workshop called “What’s Up With White Women? Unpacking Sexism and White Privilege Over Lunch,” hosted by the authors of What’s Up With White Women? Unpacking Sexism and White Privilege in Pursuit of Racial Justice (the authors are two white women). Or you could go to “Finding Freedom: White Women Taking On Our Own White Supremacy,” hosted by We Are Finding Freedom (a for-profit run by two white women). The National Association of Social Workers’ New York City chapter advertised a workshop called “Building White Women’s Capacity to Do Anti-racism Work” (hosted by the founder of U Power Change, who is a white woman).

So many of the workshops have been run by and aimed at white women. White women specifically seem very interested in these courses, perhaps because self-flagellation is seen as a classic female virtue. The hated archetype of the anti-racist movement is the Karen. No real equivalent exists for men. Maybe the heavily armed prepper comes close, but he’s not quite the same, in that a Karen is someone you’ll run into in a coffee shop, and a Karen is also someone who is disgusted with herself. Where another generation of white women worked to hate their bodies, my generation hates its “whiteness” (and I don’t mean skin color, necessarily, as this can also be your internalized whiteness). People are always demanding that women apologize for something and women seem to love doing it. Women will pay for the opportunity. We’ll thank you for it.

[Tyler Austin Harper: I’m a black professor. You don’t need to bring that up.]

After DiAngelo, I went to another course, “Foundations in Somatic Abolitionism.” That one was more about what my white flesh itself means and how to physically manifest anti-racism—“embodying anti-racism.” Those sessions were co-led by Resmaa Menakem, a therapist and the author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.

Menakem stressed how important it was not to do his exercises with people of color, because it would wound them: “Do not have bodies of culture in a group of white bodies. White bodies with white bodies and bodies of culture with bodies of culture.”

The harm caused by processing your whiteness with a person of color had also been stressed in the previous course—the book DiAngelo had recommended by Reni Eddo-Lodge was called Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. But at the same time, Quinn had said that we should talk with people of different races about our journey and let them guide us. It all seemed a bit contradictory.

One participant had a question for Menakem about community building. She was concerned because she had a mixed-race group of friends, and she wanted to be sure she wasn’t harming her Black friends by talking about this work.

“There’s no way you’re going to be able to keep Black women safe,” Menakem said. “If you’re talking about race, if race is part of the discussion, those Black women are going to get injured in the process.”

“That’s my worry,” she said. The problem was that she and her friends were actually already in “like, an anti-racism study group.” Menakem was definitive: “Don’t do that,” he said. “I don’t want white folks gazing at that process.”

A few years have passed since I was in these workshops, and I wonder if the other participants are “better” white people now. What would that even mean, exactly? Getting outside their ethnic tribe—or the opposite?

At one point Menakem intoned, “All white bodies cause racialized stress and wounding to bodies of culture. Everybody say it. ‘All white bodies cause racialized stress and wounding to bodies of culture.’” We said it, over and over again. I collapsed into it, thinking: I am careless; I am selfish; I do cause harm. The more we said it, the more it started to feel like a release. It felt so sad. But it also—and this seemed like a problem—felt good.

What if fighting for justice could just be a years-long confessional process and didn’t require doing anything tangible at all? What if I could defeat white supremacy from my lovely living room, over tea, with other white people? Personally I don’t think that’s how it works. I’m not sold. But maybe my whiteness has blinded me. The course wrapped up, and Menakem invited us all to an upcoming two-day workshop.

This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History.

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More than 200 years ago, Alexander Hamilton defied partisanship for the sake of the country’s future; if he hadn’t done so, American history might have taken a very different course. Today, Republicans face the same choice.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The Trumpification of the Supreme Court “No one has a right to protest in my home.” Columbia University’s impossible position

A Red Line

Alexander Hamilton loathed Thomas Jefferson. As rivals in George Washington’s Cabinet, the two fought over economics, the size and role of government, and slavery. They disagreed bitterly about the French Revolution (Jefferson was enthralled, Hamilton appalled). Hamilton thought Jefferson was a hypocrite, and Jefferson described Hamilton as “a man whose history … is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country.”

But starting in late 1800, Hamilton broke with his fellow Federalists and provided crucial support that put Jefferson in the White House. He was willing to set aside his tribal loyalties and support a man whose policies he vigorously opposed—a choice that saved the nation from a dangerous demagogue but likely cost him his life.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain probably never said. The quote’s attribution is apocryphal, but the point seems apt, because about 220 years later, Republicans face the same choice Hamilton did. They now have to decide whether felony charges, fraud, sexual abuse, and insurrection are red lines that supersede partisan loyalty.

Alexander Hamilton’s red line was Aaron Burr, whom he regarded as a dangerous, narcissistic mountebank and a “man of extreme & irregular ambition.” Burr was Jefferson’s running mate in the 1800 election, in which he defeated the Federalist incumbent John Adams. But under the original Constitution, the candidate with the most electoral votes became president, and the second-place finisher became vice president. Bizarrely, Jefferson and Burr each got 73 electoral votes, and because the vote was tied, the election was thrown to the House, which now had to choose the next president. Many Federalists, who detested and feared the idea of a Jefferson presidency, wanted to install Burr instead.

The result was a constitutional crisis that threatened to turn violent. “Republican newspapers talked of military intervention,” the historian Gordon Wood wrote in Empire of Liberty. “The governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania began preparing their state militias for action. Mobs gathered in the capital and threatened to prevent any president from being appointed by statute.”

Hamilton was faced with a difficult choice. He was a leading figure among Federalists; Jefferson was the leader of the faction known as Democratic-Republicans. And the 1790s were a historically partisan era. Yet “in a choice of Evils,” Hamilton wrote, “Jefferson is in every view less dangerous than Burr.” Washington, in his Farewell Address (which Hamilton helped draft and which Donald Trump’s lawyers misleadingly quoted this week), sounded the alarm about the growing partisan factionalism that he thought was tearing the country apart. Political parties, he said, could become “potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.” Hamilton was convinced that Aaron Burr was exactly the sort of cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled man that Washington had warned against.

Even though Jefferson was “too revolutionary in his notions,” Hamilton was willing to swallow his disagreements, because Jefferson was “yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly Government.” In contrast, “Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself—thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement—and will be content with nothing short of permanent power in his own hands.”

Defying his fellow Federalists, Hamilton waged a vigorous and ultimately successful campaign to derail the scheme to install Burr. Jefferson was elected president on the 36th ballot after a group of Federalist congressmen flipped their votes for Burr, choosing to abstain instead.

Hamilton’s career in politics, already badly damaged by scandal, was effectively over. Burr, who became vice president, never forgave Hamilton, and on July 11, 1804, he fatally shot Hamilton in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. Burr was charged with murder but served out his term as vice president, immune from prosecution. Three years later, he was arrested and charged with treason after he allegedly plotted to seize territory in the West and create a new empire. He was acquitted on a technicality, and fled the country in disgrace.

But for Hamilton’s willingness to defy partisanship, American history might have taken a very different course.

Like Hamilton, we live in an age of fierce loyalties that make crossing party lines extraordinarily difficult. If anything, it is even harder now, especially for Republicans living with social pressures, media echo chambers, and a cult-like party culture compassed round, in the words of John Milton. Many public figures in the GOP have shown that they cannot break free of partisanship even in the face of rank criminality.

For example: Former Attorney General Bill Barr and New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu acknowledge Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, and his culpability in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. But both men have said they would vote for Trump. Sununu has said that he would do so even if Trump is convicted of multiple felonies, suggesting that his crimes would be less important than his political differences with the Democrats. Former Vice President Mike Pence has said he would not endorse Trump, but he has also ruled out voting for Joe Biden.

Even former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who declared that Trump “is wholly unfit to be president of the United States in every way you think,” cannot bring himself to support the Democratic incumbent. We’re still waiting for Nikki Haley to say how she will vote in November.

So far, only Liz Cheney seems to be taking a position that rhymes with Hamilton’s choice two centuries ago. “There are some conservatives who are trying to make this claim that somehow Biden is a bigger risk than Trump,” she said. “My view is: I disagree with a lot of Joe Biden’s policies. We can survive bad policies. We cannot survive torching the Constitution.” Alexander Hamilton would, I think, approve.

Related:

Trump’s willing accomplice The validation brigade salutes Trump.

Today’s News

ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, released a statement yesterday asserting that it has no plans to sell the social-media app, in light of the potential national ban. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the U.S. will give Ukraine additional Patriot missiles as part of a $6 billion aid package. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing. Blinken indicated that Chinese leaders had not made any promises about the U.S. demand that China cut its support for Russia’s defense industry.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: The author Adam Hochschild recommends books that vividly illustrate moments of great change. Atlantic Intelligence: As a technology, AI is “quite thirsty, relying on data centers that require not just a tremendous amount of energy, but water to cool themselves with,” Damon Beres writes. Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explores why it’s so hard to answer the question What makes us happiest?

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Evening Read

Tony Evans / Getty

We’re All Reading Wrong

By Alexandra Moe

Reading, while not technically medicine, is a fundamentally wholesome activity. It can prevent cognitive decline, improve sleep, and lower blood pressure. In one study, book readers outlived their nonreading peers by nearly two years. People have intuitively understood reading’s benefits for thousands of years: The earliest known library, in ancient Egypt, bore an inscription that read “The House of Healing for the Soul.”

But the ancients read differently than we do today. Until approximately the tenth century, when the practice of silent reading expanded thanks to the invention of punctuation, reading was synonymous with reading aloud. Silent reading was terribly strange, and, frankly, missed the point of sharing words to entertain, educate, and bond. Even in the 20th century, before radio and TV and smartphones and streaming entered American living rooms, couples once approached the evening hours by reading aloud to each other.

Read the full article.

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I’m hoping to spend some quality time this weekend with Auggie and Eli, who still think they are lapdogs. That’s me under there.

— Charlie

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Opponents of the Iraq War gathered to disrupt the Republican National Convention in 2004. Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in New York City; some put the total as high as 200,000. A minority of the protesters disregarded police lines. More than 1,800 people were arrested.

Yet the convention itself proceeded exactly as planned. President George W. Bush was renominated, and subsequently won reelection. In so doing, he became the only Republican presidential candidate to win a popular-vote majority in the 35 years since the end of the Cold War. In 2014, New York City paid $18 million to settle the legal claims of people who contended that they had been wrongly swept up in the 2004 convention arrests.

Some radical opponents of President Joe Biden hope they will have better success disrupting the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this year. They imagine they can do to a political convention what they have done at America’s prestige universities. They are almost certainly deluding themselves.

Biden’s opponents have based their plans on a folk memory of events in 1968. For The Free Press, Olivia Reingold and Eli Lake reported from an activist planning meeting: “‘Have you heard that the Democratic National Convention is coming to Chicago?’ [a leader] asks the crowd. ‘Are we going to let ’em come here without a protest? This is Chicago, goddamn it—we’ve got to give them a 1968 kind of welcome.’”

In 1968, a poorly disciplined Chicago police force brutalized protesters and journalists in front of television cameras. The horrifying images symbolized a year of political upheaval that smashed forever the New Deal coalition of pro-segregation, conservative white southerners; unionized workers; northern ethnic-minority voters; and urban liberals. A Republican won the presidency in 1968—and then again in four of the next five elections.

Exactly why the utterly self-defeating tumult of Chicago ’68 excites modern-day radicals is a topic I’ll leave to the psychoanalysts. For now, never mind the why; let’s focus on the how. Is a repeat of the 1968 disruption possible in the context of 2024? Or is the stability of 2004 the more relevant precedent and probable outcome?

From 1968 to today, responsibility for protecting political conventions has shifted from cities and states to the federal government. This new federal responsibility was formalized in a directive signed by President Bill Clinton in 1998. The order created a category of “National Special Security Events,” for which planning would be led by the Secret Service.

National Security Special Events draw on all the resources of the federal government, including, if need be, those of the Defense Department. In 2016, the federal government spent $50 million on security for each of the two major-party conventions.

Those funds enabled Cleveland, the host of the 2016 Republican convention, to deploy thousands of law-enforcement personnel. Officers were seconded from across Ohio, and from as far away as Texas and California. Federal funds paid for police to be trained in understanding the difference between lawful and unlawful protest, and to equip them with body cameras to record interactions with the public. The city also used federal funds to buy 300 bicycles to field a force that could move quickly into places where cars might not be able to go, and that could patrol public spaces in a way that was more approachable and friendly.

[George Packer: The campus-left occupation that broke higher education]

In the end, the convention was mostly orderly and peaceful—despite the presence of civilians taking advantage of Ohio’s open-carry laws to bear rifles around town. A rare moment of public-order drama was recorded on the second-to-last day of the convention, when about 200 officers faced a small group that tried to burn an American flag. One of the protesters inadvertently set his own pants on fire. A police officer was recorded yelling, “You’re on fire, you’re on fire, stupid!” The man pushed away officers as they doused the flames and was arrested for assault.

At the Democratic convention in Philadelphia in 2016, police negotiated ways of permitting peaceful protest with demonstrators. At one point, dissident Bernie Sanders supporters tried to breach the convention perimeter. More than 50 were arrested; most were released without charge.

The mostly virtual conventions of the pandemic year 2020 attracted fewer demonstrators. At the one-day Republican convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, police had little difficulty turning back protesters who tried to breach the convention’s perimeter. At the Democratic convention in Milwaukee, demonstrators apparently did not even try to force a breach; instead, they marched up to the security perimeter, made speeches, then marched away again.

The widespread recent pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses have been distinguished by more rule-breaking than the convention protests of the past two cycles. But campuses are special places, lightly policed and weakly governed. Pro-Palestinian protesters have proved considerably more circumspect when they march in places where laws of public order are upheld.

On January 13, 2024, a protest sponsored by American Muslim groups drew thousands to Washington, D.C., culminating in demonstrations at the White House. Only two people were arrested. Many more arrests occurred on January 16, when a group sponsored by the Mennonite Church trespassed inside the Capitol’s Cannon House office building, but that protest involved old-fashioned civil disobedience—lawbreaking that did not threaten injury to anyone, followed by peaceful acceptance of arrest.

Pro-Palestinian groups have blocked bridges in some U.S. cities to stall traffic. But this tactic, too, has depended on tacit permission from the authorities. The 80 pro-Palestinian demonstrators arrested for halting traffic on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge in November 2023 escaped criminal convictions by each accepting five hours of community service. That leniency was more or less an open invitation to try it again, which they did on the Golden Gate Bridge in April.

In this country and in Europe, some have inflicted criminal violence against Jewish people. Just last week, for example, French media reported on the case of a Jewish woman in France who was allegedly kidnapped, raped, and threatened with murder by a man who told her that he sought to “avenge Palestine.” At a protest in California in November 2023, a pro-Palestinian protester inflicted fatal injuries on a Jewish man. But these crimes have occurred in the absence of police, not—as at a national political convention—in front of thousands of officers.

Where faced with clear rules backed by effective enforcement, pro-Palestinian protests on this side of the Atlantic have generally deferred to lawful authority.

Past practice is, of course, no guarantee of future behavior. A large number of people do seem to want to mess up the Democratic convention. When I spoke with Democratic Party officials involved with convention planning, they seemed acutely aware of the hazards and deeply immersed in countering the risks.

Maybe they will overlook something. Maybe protesters will discover an unsuspected weak point, overwhelm police, wreak viral-video havoc, embarrass President Biden, and thereby help Donald Trump. The better guess is that they will not only fail in that but also be unable to mobilize any large number to attack police lines and risk serious prison time.

In the meantime, however, the talk of convention disruption has achieved one thing: It has at least temporarily diverted the conversation toward the antidemocratic extremists who may assault the Democratic convention that will renominate Biden, and away from the antidemocratic extremists who will take the stage unmolested to address the Republican convention that will renominate Trump.

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American voters have never been more polarized—except, perhaps, when it comes to the shared belief that shooting a puppy is wrong. Has Kristi Noem’s admission of such an act doomed her political future?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

David Frum: “The plot to wreck the Democratic convention” America lost the plot with TikTok. Touch screens are ruining cars. Will Americans ever get sick of cheap junk?

The Shot Read ’Round the World

Say this for Kristi Noem: She has an eye for literary detail.

The South Dakota governor is one week out from the publication of her new book, No Going Back (more on that title later). On Friday, The Guardian reported on one of the anecdotes Noem shares with her readers. In the book, the governor recalls the day she realized that her puppy, Cricket, had crossed the line from poorly behaved menace to, well, a problem that needed solving. Noem led Cricket to a gravel pit. Then she pulled the trigger. “It was not a pleasant job,” the governor writes. “But it had to be done.”

It’s the phrase gravel pit that stands out most—imagery fit for a Cormac McCarthy novel. Typically, campaign books don’t scream “literature.” They’re more or less marketing tools meant to showcase a politician’s character and leadership skills. Noem likely believed that recounting this saga (in addition to a story about killing a goat) would serve as a testament to her courage and her rural bona fides, endearing her to millions of potential voters. Instead, Noem publishing these sentences may one day be remembered as the gravest mistake of her career.

The backlash has been swift. Beyond Democrats and liberals seizing on the moment, even some Republicans and conservatives have offered condemnations. “Omg - now my blood is boiling,” the right-leaning social media influencer Catturd told his 2.4 million followers on X. “Remember, I’m a country boy who lives on a ranch. There’s a huge difference between putting an old horse down who is suffering, than shooting a 18 month dog for being untrainable.” In reality, Cricket appears to have been 14 months old. According to The Guardian, the puppy had attacked other animals, and Noem maintains she decided to put the dog down because it showed “aggressive behavior toward people by biting them.”

With some scandals, members of the American public have notoriously short memories, or at least they may be more inclined to forgive. But certain images never leave the collective psyche—especially when they involve dogs. This fundamental truth transcends politics. Michael Vick was one of the most dazzling NFL quarterbacks of the past quarter century, but you probably remember him first and foremost as the dog-fighting guy. The act of shooting a dog, as Noem did, is, for some, impossible to stomach. (Though once a dog has attacked a human, that calculus changes for others.) Canine execution was once the dark joke of the January 1973 death-themed issue of National Lampoon, the cover of which featured a man holding a revolver against a floppy ear along with the warning “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.” (The pup in question, Mr. Cheeseface, looks bewildered.)

What is it about dogs, in particular, that tugs at our core? In a recent essay for The Atlantic, Tommy Tomlinson, the author of the new book Dogland, offered his own unique admission: “By any measure, I loved my mom more than our dog. If I could bring one back, I’d pick her 100 times out of 100. So why, in the moment of their passing, did I cry for him but not for her?” Many dogs, even the bad ones, are seen as unimpeachable. Elected officials, not so much.

Noem is (was?) considered to be among former president Donald Trump’s top prospects for a 2024 running mate. Now she’ll have to fight to escape being branded the woman who once killed her own puppy. Many people seem to want her to express some form of contrition. On Friday, Noem posted a screenshot of the Guardian article, writing, “We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm.” Then she plugged her book. “If you want more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping, preorder ‘No Going Back.’”

Yesterday, with the online fervor still raging, Noem released a second statement, standing by the idea that shooting the puppy, rather than, say, putting it up for adoption, was the “right” thing to do. “I can understand why some people are upset about a 20 year old story of Cricket, one of the working dogs at our ranch, in my upcoming book—No Going Back,” her statement read. “The book is filled with many honest stories of my life, good and bad days, challenges, painful decisions, and lessons learned … Whether running the ranch or in politics, I have never passed on my responsibilities to anyone else to handle. Even if it’s hard and painful. I followed the law and was being a responsible parent, dog owner, and neighbor. As I explained in the book, it wasn’t easy. But often the easy way isn’t the right way.”

No Going Back’s subtitle—The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward—is the exact sort of phrase you expect to read in a studied politician’s carefully curated treatise. Many of these books are often quite rote, devices meant to serve as the starting point of a national campaign. A lot of them, but not all of them, are bland by design. Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father is perhaps the most notable exception to the rule, but there are others. Jason Kander, once seen as an heir to Obama’s Democratic Party, published a memoir in 2018 about his time serving in Afghanistan and working in state politics that largely fit the political-book mold, right down to the title: Outside the Wire: Ten Lessons I’ve Learned in Everyday Courage. But four years later, he returned with a second memoir, Invisible Storm, showcasing edges of his life that he had sanded down in his first outing. The result was an honest and radically candid look at the depths of his PTSD.

Typically, but not always, political books are produced with the help of a ghostwriter. Noem’s publisher did not respond to my request for comment as to whether Noem used one.

This morning, I called the journalist Maximillian Potter, who collaborated with Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado on his political memoir, The Opposite of Woe, and served as an editorial consultant on the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s memoir, The Power of One. (Potter is also the co-author of an Atlantic investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct by the Hollywood mogul Bryan Singer.) He was careful to note that the Guardian report may not include the chapter’s full context; still, Noem has not refuted any of the details. What stood out most to Potter was how Noem, according to the report, writes that she “hated that dog.” “I’ve never heard anyone refer to a pet or an animal with hate. As a collaborator, that’s the word I would have discussed,” Potter told me. “I think part of a ghost or a collaborator’s job on projects like this is to not discourage the author from sharing their truth; it’s to be a thought partner and help them think through what it is they’re really trying to say.”

Potter also brought up an old political idiom, often attributed to Robert F. Kennedy (senior), later popularized by Chris Matthews: “Hang a lantern on your problem.” Maybe that’s what is really going on here. In the book, Noem reportedly notes that a construction crew watched her kill both the puppy and the goat. Perhaps, as her national profile grows, and as potential vetting for Trump’s VP gets under way, Noem sought to get in front of any potentially damaging story that might emerge through opposition research. (Her chief of communications did not respond to my request for an interview.)

Noem is midway through her second term as governor, and she’s ineligible for a third. No Going Back was supposed to be a prelude to her next chapter. Trump even blurbed it: “This book, it’s a winner.” But if he doesn’t pick Noem for VP, her new book’s title may have prophesied the end of her political story.

Related:

The governor who wants to be Trump’s next apprentice Pets really can be like human family.

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