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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?

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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.

Today’s News

A federal appellate court ruled that state-run health-care plans cannot exclude gender-affirming surgeries. Columbia University began suspending students who stayed in the pro-Palestinian encampment on campus grounds past the deadline issued by the university. A series of severe tornadoes hit parts of the South and the Midwest over the weekend, killing at least four people in Oklahoma.

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Evening Read

Paramount Pictures / Everett Collection

The Godfather of American Comedy

By Adrienne LaFrance

Somewhere in the hills above Malibu, drenched in California sunshine and sitting side by side in a used white Volkswagen bug, two teenage boys realized they were lost … This was the early 1960s, and the boy driving the car was Albert Einstein—yes, this really was his given name, years before he changed it to Albert Brooks. Riding shotgun was his best friend and classmate from Beverly Hills High School, Rob Reiner.

Brooks had inherited the car from one of his older brothers, and he’d made it his own by removing the handle of the stick shift and replacing it with a smooth brass doorknob. After several failed attempts to find the Pacific Coast Highway, which would take them home, Brooks and Reiner came upon a long fence surrounding a field where a single cow was grazing. Albert “stopped the car and he leaned out the window and he said, ‘Excuse me, sir! Sir?’ and the cow just looked up,” Reiner told me. “And he said, ‘How do you get back to the PCH?’ And the cow just did a little flick of his head, like he was flicking a fly away, and went back to eating.” Without missing a beat, Albert called out, “Thank you!” and confidently zoomed away. “I said, ‘Albert, you just took directions from a cow!’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but he lives around here. He knows the area.’ ”

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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The Homeland star says any actor should be able to play any character, in an interview with the Guardian.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

In our digitally chaotic world, relying on the election-reporting strategies of the past is like bringing the rules of chess to the Thunderdome.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The October 7 rape denialists Finding justice in Palestine Biden’s safe, polite campaign stop in Scranton

New Rules

This past weekend, I was on a panel at the annual conference of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, in beautiful downtown Austin. Several journalists discussed the question: Are we going to get it right this time? Have the media learned their lessons, and are journalists ready for the vertiginous slog of the 2024 campaign?

My answer: only if we realize how profoundly the rules of the game have changed.

Lest we need reminding, this year’s election features a candidate who incited an insurrection, called for terminating sections of the Constitution, was found liable for what a federal judge says was “rape” as it is commonly understood, faces 88 felony charges, and—I’m tempted to add “etcetera” here, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? The volume and enormity of it all is impossible to take in.

The man is neither a riddle nor an enigma. He lays it all out there: his fawning over the world’s authoritarians, his threats to abandon our allies, his contempt for the rule of law, his intention to use the federal government as an instrument of retribution. Journalists must be careful not to give in to what Brian Klaas has called the “Banality of Crazy.” As I’ve written in the past, there have been so many outrages and so many assaults on decency that it’s easy to become numbed by the cascade of awfulness.

The former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer points out a recent example in his newsletter: On a radio show earlier this month, Donald Trump bizarrely suggested that Joe Biden was high on cocaine when he delivered his energetic State of the Union address. It was a startling moment, yet several major national media outlets did not cover the story.

And when Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, it didn’t have nearly the explosive effect it should have. “I had expected every website and all the cable news shows to lead with a story about Trump demanding the execution of the highest military officer in the country,” this magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, told The Washington Post. “If Barack Obama or George W. Bush had done so, I’m sure [the news media] would have been all over it.” (Trump’s threats against Milley came after The Atlantic published a profile of Milley by Goldberg.)

In our digitally chaotic world, relying on the reporting strategies of the past is like bringing the rules of chess to the Thunderdome. There has, of course, been some progress. The major cable networks no longer carry Trump’s rallies live without context, but they still broadcast town-hall meetings and interviews with the former president, which boost ratings. NBC’s abortive decision to hire Ronna McDaniel, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, as a contributor, despite her role in spreading lies about the 2020 election, highlighted the disconnect between this moment and much of the national media.

And then there is the internet. It is certainly possible that richer, more insightful media will emerge from the digital revolution, but we’re obviously not there now. Back in 2016, we worried that social media had become a vector for disinformation and bigotry, but since then, we’ve seen Elon Musk’s extraordinary enshittification of X. In 2016, we worried (too late) about foreign interference and bots. In 2024, we are going to have to contend with deepfakes created by AI.

This year will see some of the best journalism of our lifetime. (You’ll find much of it here in The Atlantic.) But because both the media and their audiences are badly fractured, much of that reporting is siloed off from the voters who need it most. Because millions of Americans are locked in information bubbles, half of the country either won’t see important journalism about the dangers of a second Trump term or won’t believe it.

As Paul Farhi notes in The Atlantic, MAGA-friendly websites have experienced massive drops in traffic, but social media continues to thrive on negativity and providing dopamine hits of anger and fear. And of distraction—last week, the most-liked videos on TikTok about the presidential race included a video of a man singing to Biden and Trump’s visit to a Chick-fil-A.

To put it mildly, the arc of social media does not bend toward Edward R. Murrow–style journalism.

So what’s to be done? I don’t have any easy answers, because I don’t think they exist. Getting it right this time does not mean that journalists need to pull their punches in covering Biden or become slavish defenders of his administration’s policies. In fact, that would only make matters worse. But perhaps we could start with some modest proposals.

First, we should redefine newsworthy. Klaas argues that journalists need to emphasize the magnitude rather than simply the novelty of political events. Trump’s ongoing attacks on democracy may not be new, but they define the stakes of 2024. So although live coverage of Trump rallies without any accompanying analysis remains a spectacularly bad idea, it’s important to neither ignore nor mute the dark message that Trump delivers at every event. As a recent headline in The Guardian put it, “Trump’s Bizarre, Vindictive Incoherence Has to Be Heard in Full to Be Believed.”

Why not relentlessly emphasize the truth, and publish more fact-checked transcripts that highlight his wilder and more unhinged rants? (Emphasizing magnitude is, of course, a tremendous challenge for journalists when the amplification mechanisms of the modern web—that is, social-media algorithms—are set by companies that have proved to be hostile to the distribution of information from reputable news outlets.)

The media challenge will be to emphasize the abnormality of Donald Trump without succumbing to a reactionary ideological tribalism, which would simply drive audiences further into their silos. Put another way: Media outlets will need all the credibility they can muster when they try to sound the alarm that none of this is normal. And it is far more important to get it right than to get it fast, because every lapse will be weaponized.

The commitment to “fairness” should not, however, mean creating false equivalencies or fake balance. (An exaggerated report about Biden’s memory lapses, for example, should not be a bigger story than Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to invade European countries.)

In the age of Trump, it is also important that members of the media not be distracted by theatrics generally. (This includes Trump’s trial drama, the party conventions, and even—as David Frum points out in The Atlantic—the debates.) Relatedly, the stakes are simply too high to wallow in vibes, memes, or an obsessive focus on within-the-margin-of-error polls. Democracy can indeed be crushed by authoritarianism. But it can also be suffocated by the sort of trivia that often dominates social media.

And, finally, the Prime Directive of 2024: Never, ever become numbed by the endless drumbeat of outrages.

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Today’s News

The Senate dismissed the articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and ruled that they were unconstitutional, ending his trial before it got under way. House Speaker Mike Johnson will proceed with a plan, backed by President Joe Biden, to vote on separate bills to provide aid to Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific. The proposed move has raised criticism from some conservative representatives. Four Columbia University officials, including the president, Nemat Shafik, testified in a congressional committee hearing about student safety, free speech, and anti-Semitism on campus.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Something Weird Is Happening With Caesar Salads

By Ellen Cushing

On a November evening in Brooklyn, in 2023, I was in trouble (hungry). I ordered a kale Caesar at a place I like. Instead, I got: a tangle of kale, pickled red onion, and “sweet and spicy almonds,” dressed in a thinnish, vaguely savory liquid and topped with a glob of crème fraîche roughly the size and vibe of a golf ball. It was a pretty weird food.

We are living through an age of unchecked Caesar-salad fraud. Putative Caesars are dressed with yogurt or miso or tequila or lemongrass; they are served with zucchini, orange zest, pig ear, kimchi, poached duck egg, roasted fennel, fried chickpeas, buffalo-cauliflower fritters, tōgarashi-dusted rice crackers. They are missing anchovies, or croutons, or even lettuce … Molly Baz is a chef, a cookbook author, and a bit of a Caesar obsessive—she owns a pair of sneakers with “CAE” on one tongue and “SAL” on the other—and she put it succinctly when she told me, “There’s been a lot of liberties taken, for better or for worse.”

Read the full article.

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On October 7, Hamas terrorists crossed the border into Israel and massacred more than 1,100 Israelis. The depths of Hamas’s sadism are almost too sickening to comprehend. Babies and children butchered. Parents murdered in front of their children. Families bound together and then burned alive. Others were tortured, and their bodies mutilated while both alive and dead.

Even the harshest opponents of Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza acknowledge, albeit often half-heartedly, that Hamas acted with brutality on October 7 in killing innocents. But many of those same critics refuse to acknowledge the widespread sexual assaults against Israeli women that day.

Since allegations of sexual violence first appeared in the fall, a contingent of anti-Israel activists have sought to disprove them. “Believe women” and “Silence is violence” have been rallying cries of progressive feminist organizations for decades. But the same empathy and support have not been shown for Israeli victims.

Many prominent feminist and human-rights groups—including Amnesty International and the National Organization for Women—said little about the sexual-violence allegations. International organizations tasked with protecting women in wartime kept their powder dry. UN Women waited until December 1, nearly two months after the Hamas attack, to issue a perfunctory statement of condemnation.

Israel’s critics have insisted that a lack of firsthand accounts from rape survivors or forensic evidence undercut Israel’s accusations—and have dismissed claims that systematic sexual violence occurred as “unsubstantiated.” Others have accused the Israeli government of “weaponizing” accusations of rape to justify Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza, as an open letter from dozens of feminist activists put it in February. The letter has since been signed by more than 1,000 others.

News outlets that reported on the violence were fiercely attacked. For example, in late December, The New York Times published an investigation that thoroughly detailed the evidence of mass, systematic sexual violence. The story drew an immediate response from Hamas, in language echoing that used by Western activists. “We categorically deny such allegations,” Basem Naim, a Hamas leader, said in a statement, “and consider it as part of the Israeli attempt to demonize and dehumanize the Palestinian people and resistance, and to justify the Israeli army war crimes and crimes of genocide against the Palestinian people.”

Stridently anti-Israel independent journalists and activists immediately tried to pick apart the Times story, which culminated in late February with the publication of a more-than-6,000-word exposé by the left-wing outlet The Intercept that accused the Times of flawed reporting. The left-wing magazine The Nation accused the Times of “the biggest failure of journalism” since the paper’s reporting in the run-up to the Iraq War; the leftist YES! magazine claimed, “There is no evidence mass rape occurred.”  

Considering the vitriolic attacks against Israel since October 7, none of this should come as a surprise. The bloodied and dismembered bodies of dead Israelis had barely been collected before accusations of genocide were being levied by anti-Israel activists. Six months later, such denouncements are routine.

Across the United States and Western Europe, criticism of Israel’s actions quickly and predictably veered into rank anti-Semitism, with Jewish organizations, cultural institutions, artists, and individual Jews targeted by pro-Palestine activists because of Israel’s actions.

[From the April 2024 issue: The Golden Age of American Jews is ending]

But rape denialism falls into its own separate and bewildering category. Why have so many of Israel’s critics—and pro-Palestine activists—chosen to fight on this hill?

Many insist, like the feminists who signed the open letter, that they are questioning claims used to justify a war they oppose. But there is also a disquieting sense that pro-Palestine activists believe they must defend Hamas. Accusations of systematic rape and sadistic sexual violence not only tarnish the terrorist group, but also undermine the notion that October 7 was legitimate “armed resistance” against Israeli occupation.

Instead of believing women, these activists have chosen to take the word of a terrorist organization that is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians and that has constantly denied that any sexual assaults occurred on October 7.

Six months into the war in Gaza, many pro-Palestine activists in the United States are so fully invested in the cause of Palestinian liberation, for which Hamas claims to be fighting—and so steeped in their hatred of Israel—that they are casting aside the progressive ideals that they regularly invoke when castigating Israel. In doing so, they are exposing themselves as hypocrites whose ideology is not forged in a set of universal values but rather is situational and dependent on ethnicity or skin color.

Rape denialism also feeds the widely held belief among Israelis that non-Jews refuse to acknowledge the horrors of October 7—and that the world is hopelessly biased against them. At the same time, it excuses Hamas’s actions and perpetuates the notion that Palestinians have little agency or responsibility for the continuation of a 75-year-old conflict with no end in sight. It pushes both sides to retreat to their respective corners, unwilling to see the humanity in the other, and makes the long-term goal of peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians that much more difficult to achieve.

Orit Sulitzeanu is the director of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, an NGO that serves as a coordinating body for the country’s nine rape-crisis centers. As she tells every reporter who calls her, ARCCI does not work for or receive money from the Israeli government.  

In the days and weeks after October 7, ARCCI began getting “trickles of information” from doctors and therapists who were encountering survivors of sexual violence. “Everyone talks to us, and the community of therapists in Israel is small,” Sulitzeanu told me. The calls were intended not to alert ARCCI but rather to ask, “What do we do?”

As Sulitzeanu told me, Israel has virtually no experience with rape during wartime: “No one could imagine what happened, actually happened.” Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, the former vice chair of the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and a law professor at Bar-Ilan University, told me that Israel was so unprepared for the onslaught of sexual-abuse cases on October 7 that during the intake process in Israeli hospitals, women who survived the Hamas massacre were not even asked if they had been sexually assaulted.  

Quickly, ARCCI began holding webinars to help therapists understand the special characteristics of sexual violence in wartime. And as time went on, Sulitzeanu and her staff noticed that the stories they were hearing were remarkably consistent.  

The group put together a report combining the information it was receiving (mainly from eyewitnesses and first responders) with media reporting in Israel and around the world. “Hamas’s attack on October 7th included brutal sexual assaults carried out systematically and deliberately against Israeli civilians,” it concluded. “Hamas terrorists employed sadistic practices aimed at intensifying the degree of humiliation and terror inherent in sexual violence.”

The report’s section titles tell the story in even more vivid and disturbing detail:

“Systematic Use of Brutal Violence to Commit Rape”

“Multiple Abusers/Gang Rape”

“Rape in the Presence of Family/Community Members”

“Sexual Offenses of Males”

“Execution During or After the Rape”

“Binding and Tying”

“Mutilation and Destruction of Genital Organs”

“Insertion of Weapons in Intimate Areas”

“Destruction and Mutilation of the Body”

The next month, the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict reached similar conclusions, although without using the word systematic. After a two-and-a-half-week mission to Israel, the UN body concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks.”

The UN report does not ascribe responsibility to Hamas and relies on careful, qualified, legalistic language. But Halperin-Kaddari believes the UN report should be applauded. It is, she says, the “most accurate and comprehensive” accounting of the sexual violence that took place that day—and she praised it, in particular, for verifying accounts when possible but also debunking allegations that were not true.  

Halperin-Kaddari noted that investigators “found the same pattern of violence and sexual assault combined with an extreme degree of cruelty and humiliation, and it occurred in several locations in a relatively short period of time.”

This systematic nature of the abuse is obvious from both reports. For example, ARCCI recounts the eyewitness testimony of one survivor who said that the Nova music festival was an “apocalypse of bodies, girls without clothes.” In addition, it notes that “several survivors of the massacre provided eyewitness testimony of gang rape” as well as accounts from first responders of bodies unclothed and bleeding heavily from the pelvic area, and genital mutilation.

[Graeme Wood: A record of pure, predatory sadism]

The UN report draws a similar conclusion, finding “reasonable grounds to believe” that rape, gang rape, and the sexual abuse of female corpses occurred at the Nova festival.

At Kibbutz Kfar Aza and Kibbutz Be’eri, the UN found evidence that female victims had been undressed, bound, and killed (though the mission team “was unable to establish whether sexual violence occurred in kibbutz Be’eri”). In its investigation at Kibbutz Re’em, the UN said there were “reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred … including rape.” On Road 232, a key escape route from the music festival, the UN found “reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred,” including “the rape of two women.” In addition, “along this road, several bodies were found with genital injuries, along with injuries to other body parts.”

At an Israel Defense Forces base overrun by Hamas terrorists, there were, according to media stories cited in the ARCCI report, dead soldiers shot in the genitals and as many as 10 female soldiers with clear evidence of sexual assault. The UN report is more circumspect on this issue, saying that reports of genital mutilation are “inconclusive.” But Halperin-Kaddari told me that she saw documentation showing that victims had had weapons fired into their sexual organs.

Both reports also agree that hostages released from Hamas’s captivity had been, in the words of the UN special representative, subjected to “sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” The UN report also concluded that violence may be “ongoing” against the approximately 100 hostages, including young women, still held in Gaza. In its response to the Times story, Hamas pointed to the treatment of Israeli hostages, whom they insisted were being well cared for: “If the Hamas resistance fighters held such ideas of sex violence, they would mistreat those who were in their captivity,” a Hamas representative wrote in a lengthy Telegram post at the time. Recently, however, The New York Times published a firsthand account of sexual assault and torture from an Israeli hostage released from Hamas captivity in November.

For Shelly Tal Meron, a member of the Israeli Knesset for the opposition Yesh Atid party, the indifference of once-former feminist allies to the sexual violence on October 7 has been acutely painful. “I sent letters to UN Women, as well as #MeToo and human-rights organizations,” she told me. The response was “complete silence. I was astonished.”

“Before the war,” she said, “I was a member of the Knesset’s women’s-rights movement. I would fight for gender equality and I would work with international organizations. Whenever [attacks on women] happened in other countries like Ukraine or Syria, I felt solidarity.” In the aftermath of October 7, she said, “I felt completely betrayed.”

What is most galling about the pushback on allegations of mass rape is that it is precisely the lack of firsthand accounts and forensic evidence—as well as the initial fog of war—that has opened the door to rape denialists. As Dahlia Lithwick, the senior legal correspondent at Slate, told me, denialists are “capitalizing on the stigma and shame of sexual assault—and often frustrating lack of evidence in these situations.”

That, according to the feminist author Jill Filipovic, is hardly an unusual circumstance. “Sexual violence in conflict is virtually never documented the way sexual violence might be documented on the cop shows you’ve seen,” Filipovic wrote on her Substack last December. “The Israeli recovery and medical teams treated the places where people were attacked on Oct. 7 as war zones and the aftermath of terror attacks, not as standard crime scenes in which a primary goal is to identify a perpetrator.”

Complicating matters further is the particular emphasis in Jewish law on expeditious burial. Sulitzeanu told me that those at the army base who were preparing bodies for burial had “no capacity to keep the evidence from those killed.” The “first priority,” she said, “was to save living people. Second, to collect bodies. Third, identify them and prepare for burial.” Everything else, including proving that widespread rapes had taken place, was secondary.

There is also the distressing reality that so few of Hamas’s rape victims survived. Some were dispatched with a bullet to the head after they’d been assaulted.  

The handful of survivors of rape during the attacks on October 7 have, so far, been unwilling to speak publicly. ARCCI has been so adamant in safeguarding them that Sulitzeanu refused to confirm that her association had spoken with them or that their stories were included in the group’s report. The survivors refused multiple requests to meet with the UN mission team, which the UN report chalked up in part to “the national and international media scrutiny of those who made their accounts public.”

The latter fear is almost certainly a direct by-product of the response to the New York Times story—headlined “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” Buttressed by interviews with more than 150 “witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers, and rape counselors,” as well as “video footage, photographs,” and “GPS data from mobile phones,” the story features allegations of sexual violence, including eyewitness accounts. It was the most authoritative investigation by a major American news outlet and should have dealt a major blow to the efforts at denialism and deflection.

But as soon as the Times article appeared, so, too, did the pushback. Much of it came from journalists with a long track record of animosity toward Israel, but it reached a crescendo in late February when The Intercept published its story.

What is most striking about the exhaustive Intercept article is the apparent dearth of original reporting. There is little indication that the authors made any serious effort to contact Israeli government officials, the leaders of Israeli NGOs, or—with three exceptions—even the specific individuals who are named in their story and whose credibility they malign. Instead, The Intercept focuses its inquiry on a freelance Israeli journalist who helped report the story, Anat Schwartz, scrutinizing her social-media activity and parsing a Hebrew-language podcast interview to attack her credibility and, by extension, the credibility of the story as a whole.

The Intercept also sought to chip away at the Times article by focusing on alleged inconsistencies—a process that is easier than it seems when it comes to reporting on sexual violence. After a terrorist attack that killed more than 1,100 Israelis over multiple locations, misinformation ran rampant. False stories, one infamously alleging that multiple babies had been beheaded and another claiming that babies had been strung up on a clothesline, proliferated. In cases of sexual violence, Halperin-Kadderi told me, “it’s not unusual for misinformation to spread,” and beyond trauma-related inaccuracies and memory failures, there could be a tendency “to exaggerate and amplify,” which she links to the high levels of trauma associated with sexual violence—both for survivors and for eyewitnesses. She also noted that exaggerated accounts of sexual violence can be “instrumentalized by leaders to portray their enemy in the darkest way possible.” Even Jeremy Scahill, one of the co-authors of the Intercept article, noted in an interview that inconsistencies in eyewitness accounts do “not necessarily mean that they didn’t witness something.”

[Read: Hamas’s genocidal intentions were never a secret]

But The Intercept, in its effort to undermine the credibility of witnesses to sexual violence on October 7, painted with a broad brush, creating an inaccurate picture. The flaws in its approach are perhaps best illustrated by the complicated case of Shari Mendes, an IDF reservist who served in the army unit responsible for preparing female bodies for burial and whose testimony Schwartz said helped convince her that there had been widespread sexual violence on October 7.

In the weeks after the attack, Mendes worked 12-hour shifts cleaning and preparing bodies for burial. In an emotional and graphic speech delivered at the United Nations on December 4, Mendes related what she and her team saw: women shot so many times in the head, sometimes after death, that their faces were practically obliterated; multiple women with gunshots in their vagina and breasts; faces permanently cast in distress and anguish.

In an interview in October, though, Mendes told the Daily Mail that “a baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded, and then the mother was beheaded.” That was not true. However, Mendes was neither the first person nor the only person to make this allegation. A video falsely claiming to show such an atrocity had made the rounds on social media in the days before the interview was published, and similar claims were promoted by a first responder.

Ryan Grim, another co-author of the Intercept article, told me that such “demonstrable fabrications” had “thoroughly discredited” Mendes, and the article notes that “she has no medical or forensic credentials to legally determine rape” (a point that Mendes has publicly acknowledged). The Intercept story questions why the Times would “rely on Mendes’s testimony,” and in an interview last month, Scahill suggested that Mendes is among the Times’ “premiere witnesses.” But in fact, Mendes is quoted a single time in “Screams Without Words,” relaying her account of having seen four women “with signs of sexual violence, including some with ‘a lot of blood in their pelvic areas.’” Mendes’s claims are backed up by a second witness, an army captain working at the same facility, who added the horrifying detail that “she had seen several bodies with cuts in their vaginas and underwear soaked in blood.”

The Intercept story fails to mention any of this, and it provides no indication that its reporters attempted to speak with Mendes. (I reached out to Mendes, who declined to comment.) Instead, it criticizes the Times for quoting “witnesses with track records of making unreliable claims and lacking forensic credentials.”

The Intercept has applied useful scrutiny to some specific claims within the Times story. One of the accounts of apparent sexual assault relayed by the Times came from a paramedic in an Israeli commando unit who said he had discovered the bodies of two teenagers at Kibbutz Be’eri. A March 4 article in The Intercept concluded that two victims “specifically singled out by the New York Times … were not in fact victims of sexual assault,” and the Times has since updated its story to note that a video of the scene appears to contradict the paramedic’s account.

But that skepticism is not limited to individual witnesses or accounts. The Intercept concedes that “individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred” but is quick to add that “rape is not uncommon in war.” It raises doubts about the extent to which Hamas members were responsible for attacks, noting that “there were also several hundred civilians who poured into Israel from Gaza that day.” (It is not usually the left that tries to blur the distinction between Palestinian terrorists and Palestinian civilians.) The central question, The Intercept contends, is whether the Times “presented solid evidence” to back the claim that, as the newspaper put it, “the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.” And it devotes more than 6,000 words to calling into doubt that it did.

Yet The Intercept made no mention of independent efforts to answer this question. There is no reference to the ARCCI report—published a week before The Intercept’s story—which relied on 26 separate media reports from the Israeli press, The Guardian, the BBC, The Times of London, and other outlets, as well as confidential sources, eyewitnesses, and interviews with first responders. Neither does it mention a November 2023 report by Physicians for Human Rights, which concluded that “widespread sexual and gender-based crimes” had taken place on October 7. (Asked for comment, Grim dismissed these reports as “derivative of Western news reports and based on the same sources.”)

The Times published a follow-up story on January 29, addressing many of the questions raised by critics of its article. Even in light of criticisms of the piece, the Times said in a recent statement that it continues to stand by its coverage “and the revelations of sexual violence and abuse following the attack by Hamas.”

The UN mission team similarly concluded that the existence of a few false allegations did not undermine the other evidence of sexual violence in “at least three locations” on October 7. Nor did it limit its inquiry to searching for inconsistencies, paying attention only to those claims it had some reason to doubt. Instead, the investigators took pains to carefully review the scenes, to talk to eyewitnesses and first responders, and to assess the evidence in its totality before presenting the conclusion that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred.”

Semafor’s Max Tani recently reported that The Intercept “is running out of cash,” and that Grim and Scahill had suggested that its board resign and turn operations over to them and the remaining staff. But the publication’s skeptical coverage of the war has apparently been a bright spot for its financial health. “The Intercept’s unapologetically hostile view of Israel’s post-Oct. 7 military operation in Gaza has galvanized its readers and supporters,” Tani wrote, “who have responded by helping the publication set internal records for small-dollar donations.”

Grim refused to say whether he believes that Israeli women were raped on October 7 and, if so, whether any of these assaults were committed by Hamas members. (His two co-authors did not respond to any questions.) Instead, he said he had “addressed these questions repeatedly” and pointed to an interview in which he had said that “the idea that there would be no sexual assault is not taken seriously by pretty much anybody who understands war and violence.”  

Considering the overwhelming evidence that sexual assault took place, despite the inherent challenges in collecting such evidence in wartime, it’s difficult to fathom why so many on the anti-Israel left continue to deny that it occurred or cast doubt on its significance.

The most obvious explanation is that by questioning what happened on October 7, activists hope to undercut the rationale for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Showing that systematic sexual abuse didn’t happen would, they believe, demonstrate that Israel is engaged in a mass public deception to justify killing Palestinians.

But some experts I spoke with see other factors at play.

The charge that Jews have exaggerated and weaponized their suffering has long been the basis for Holocaust denialism, said Amy Elman, a professor of political science and Jewish studies at Kalamazoo College who has written extensively on anti-Semitism and women’s rights. Now that same claim is being used by anti-Semites to portray efforts at justice for October 7 as “part of a larger nefarious scheme to harm Palestinians.” “Rape denialism is absolutely consistent with Holocaust denialism,” Elman said, and “this rape denialism is another form of anti-Semitism.”

One of the more troubling aspects of the left’s response to October 7 has been to cast the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians in simplistic terms: Palestinians are the oppressed, dark-skinned minority population; Israelis are the white oppressors. Never mind that Israel is a diverse, multiethnic society. (Most American Jews trace their origins to immigrants from Europe, but the majority of Israeli Jews descend from those who came, most often as refugees, from the Middle East and North Africa.) This reductionist binary has also made it easier to explain the conflict to a younger generation unfamiliar with Arab-Israeli history but well versed in the American civil-rights movement.

Natalia Melman Petrzela, a historian at the New School, says that this black-and-white framing has led to a distorted view of what happened on October 7—one that is informed by a reductive view of modern feminism. “There is a very powerful and understandable resistance on the left,” she told me, “to centering ‘white feminism’ or white womanhood in understanding the experiences of women and the purpose of feminism, domestically and internationally.” By this logic, white feminism is inherently “problematic”—and because many on the left see Israelis as white, she says, they “see any defense of Israeli women as some sort of capitulation to ‘white feminism.’”

Moreover, claims of sexual assault against white women have historically been used to justify racial violence, which has, according to Elman and Petrzela, led some pro-Palestine activists to compare Hamas to Emmett Till, who was accused of whistling at a white woman in the Jim Crow South before his brutal murder. It’s “unhinged,” Petrzela said, “but in some ways totally predictable.”

Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for The Guardian, suggested to me that left-wing rape denialism is, in effect, a refusal to believe that Hamas could stoop so low as to engage in sexual violence. On the surface, this sounds bizarre. Hamas massacred more than 1,100 Israelis, the majority of whom were civilians, and has a long history of massacring Jewish civilians, including children. How could any crime be considered worse than murder? But Freedland says that there are leftists who are prepared to countenance “armed resistance” but cannot do the same for sexual violence. “You can see why it would be essential for them to say that Hamas was ‘only’ guilty of killing and not guilty of rape.”

Freedland noted that Hamas itself has consistently denied that its fighters committed sexual crimes, perhaps in an effort to retain its standing among devout Muslims. “Hamas would be nervous of being seen not as warriors for Palestine but as a bunch of rapists who bring shame on Islam,” he said. Indeed, as Sulitzeanu pointed out to me, some Israeli Arabs who have stood in solidarity with the victims of October 7  have also refused to accept that their Palestinian brethren could commit such heinous, un-Islamic crimes.

Frankly, none of these efforts to whitewash the carnage of October 7 makes much sense. You can acknowledge Hamas’s barbarism while still condemning Israel’s military response or criticizing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Indeed, many have done precisely that, including the Biden administration and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. You can raise questions about specific rape allegations—as the UN report did—while still accepting the overall weight of the evidence.

[Read: Netanyahu is Israel’s worst prime minister ever]

Instead, many on the left seem determined to justify what happened on October 7 as a legitimate act of Palestinian resistance. “The images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating,” one American professor recently wrote. But acknowledging Hamas’s atrocities doesn’t invalidate Palestinian demands for self-determination. You can still embrace Palestinian nationalism and, unlike Hamas, advocate for a two-state solution while also acknowledging that Hamas’s actions on October 7—including the systematic rape of Israeli women and girls—are simply not defensible. Leftists who genuinely support Palestinian statehood do that cause, and themselves, no favor by denying the overwhelming evidence of sexual violence.

The rape denialists might think they are winning a near-term public-relations battle against Israel, but denying Palestinians agency, and accusing Israel of fabricating allegations of mass rape, does far more harm than good.

Above all, it denies reality, perpetuates misinformation, and feeds the empathy gap that separates the two sides. When Israelis and Palestinians look beyond the walls—both real and metaphorical—that separate them, few see fully formed individuals with legitimate grievances and fears that are worthy of their sympathy. Instead, they glimpse caricatures.

As pro-Palestinian activists rightly demand that Israel come to grips with how its policies breed humiliation and desperation among Palestinians, so too must supporters of the Palestinian cause face the reality that rejectionism and terrorism have contributed to Israeli fears that peaceful coexistence is not possible.

When such activists surrender their ideals and dismiss the evidence that sexual violence took place on October 7, they feed the already overwhelming belief among Israelis and Diaspora Jews that those who advocate for the Palestinians and witheringly criticize Israel’s actions are simply not interested in their humanity.

Any solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict must start by recognizing not just the lived reality of Jews and Palestinians, but the abundant feelings of trauma and fear that have made reconciliation so difficult to achieve. Rape denialism pushes Israelis and Palestinians further apart. It isn’t just wrong; it doesn’t just diminish the trauma experienced by Israeli women on October 7—it makes the pursuit of peace and genuine reconciliation impossible.

Democratic Party analysts and left-leaning economists have had quite enough of their fellow Americans’ complaints. As a striking number of poll respondents express alarm, despair even, about the rising cost of living during Joe Biden’s presidency, experts shake their heads. Don’t people realize that jobs are plentiful, wages are rising, and inflation is in retreat?

Few have struck this chord more insistently than Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and liberal New York Times columnist. In a February column titled “Vibes, Vegetables and Vitriol,” he suggested that inflation is no longer worrisome and backed up his view with field research.

“Now, I go grocery shopping myself, and am occasionally startled by the total at the cash register—although that’s usually because I wasn’t factoring in the price of that bottle of scotch I picked up along with the meat and vegetables,” Krugman wrote.

[Annie Lowrey: Inflation is your fault]

The modern Democratic Party, and liberalism itself, is to a substantial extent a bastion of college-educated, upper-middle-class professionals, people for whom Biden-era inflation is unpleasant but rarely calamitous. Poor, working-class, and lower-middle-class people experience a different reality. They carry the searing memories of the Great Recession and its foreclosure crisis, when millions of American households lost their home. A large number of these Americans worked in person during the dolorous early days of the pandemic, and saw its toll up close. And since 2019, they’ve weathered 20 percent inflation and now rising interest rates—which means they’ve lost more than a fifth of their purchasing power. Tell these Americans that the economy is humming, that median wage growth has nudged ahead of the core inflation rate, and that everything’s grand, and you’re likely to see a roll of the eyes.

Krugman in his column confessed that he had “no idea” what he paid for roughly the same groceries three years earlier, although he allowed that olive oil seemed costly. He and other economists talked of a “vibecession”—an admixture of gloom and worry and misinformation that prevents Americans from seeing the rosy nature of the economy. This is a common take among prominent Democrats and left-leaning economists, all of whom speak with an eye on the upcoming presidential election. In late February, California Governor Gavin Newsom appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and declared that Biden had conducted a “master class” in economic helmsmanship. “The economy is booming; inflation is cooling,” Newsom said, adding, “All because of Biden’s wisdom, because of his temperance.”

[Gilad Edelman: The English-muffin problem]

Around the same time, the Harvard economics professor Jason Furman, who served as chair of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, posted on social media: “If a year ago you had told someone [that inflation] would come down to 2.5% they would be surprised & delighted.” Just before Biden’s State of the Union address last month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer predicted that “Americans will hear a clear theme: America’s economy is accelerating, inflation is decelerating.”

These commentators have been asking near as one: Where’s the problem?

Such talk of a victory lap once again appeared premature this week, with the news that the consumer price index was 3.5 percent higher in March than a year earlier, a worse reading than many economists had expected.

But even a cooling inflation rate simply means that prices are growing more slowly. Consumers—particularly those whose wages have not kept pace—still remember years of soaring price increases.

Moreover, the core inflation rate, defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and carefully studied by the rate setters at the Federal Reserve, excludes food and energy costs—economic indicators that affect Americans’ daily lives. As the financial analyst Barry Ritholtz long ago noted, core CPI measures “inflation ex-inflation,” meaning inflation without inflation.

[Rogé Karma: What would it take to convince Americans that the economy is fine?]

“The macroeconomy looks great, and it might appear inflation has cooled,” the University of Massachusetts at Amherst economist Isabella Weber told me. “But when you disentangle the indicators that actually matter to Americans day to day, it’s not so pretty.”

The consumer price index for food rose 25 percent from 2019 to 2023. The jump in 2022 was the highest since the late 1970s. As of two years ago, Americans spent 11 percent of their disposable income on food, the highest share in three decades, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Food-price inflation falls most heavily on the poorest 20 percent of Americans, who spent nearly a third of their income on food in 2022, the latest year for which USDA data are available. By contrast, the highest-income fifth of households spent on average 8 percent. “If you are spending 25 to 30 percent of your income on food and prices have jumped 25 percent, you are in real pain,” Weber said.

Other staples of life have also grown more expensive. Gas prices have gone up by about 50 percent in the past four years. Fuel-oil prices jumped by more than half from March 2020 to March 2024. Home prices have gone up nearly 50 percent nationwide since the start of the pandemic; the ratio of home prices to income has reached an all-time high. Once-sharp increases in average rents nationwide have slowed but not reversed. The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard reports that poor and working-class renters suffer disproportionate pain. “Among renter households with an annual income under $30,000, the median amount of money left over after paying for rent and utilities was just $310 a month,” the center found, adding that affordability is at an all-time low.

According to recent data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, half of Americans who earn less than $35,000 a year have reported difficulty paying everyday expenses, and nearly 80 percent are “moderately” or “very” stressed by recent price increases.

Then there’s the problem of money, which has become far more expensive to borrow. The Federal Reserve Board’s efforts to tamp down inflation by pushing up interest rates have exacted a painful toll on working- and middle-class Americans—a toll not captured by the inflation rate.

The average mortgage interest payment has increased threefold since 2021. The combination of high prices and high interest rates has shut many Americans out of homeownership altogether. High rates also hurt many people who already own homes: Interest rates on equity credit lines and loans, which many Americans use to pay for home repairs, college tuition, and larger purchases, more than doubled from January 2022 to July 2023. High interest rates punish low-income renters, too, by hampering local and state agencies from financing below-market-rate apartments.

The extra costs keep mounting. Interest payments on new cars have risen 80 percent since the pandemic began. Credit-card interest rates are another burden. In March 2022, before the Federal Reserve started raising rates in response to inflation, the average credit-card rate was 16.3 percent, according to Bankrate. Two years later, it sits above 20 percent.

All of this inflation-related misery has begun to catch the eye of the economics establishment. Recently, four researchers, including the International Monetary Fund economist Marijn Bolhuis and the former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, released a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper noting that consumers are remarkably attuned to what’s going on. “Consumers, unlike modern economists, consider the cost of money part of their cost of living,” the authors write. Consumer unease about costs and borrowing, they say, is greater than at any time since the late 1970s and early ’80s. The authors developed an “alternative” consumer price index that more closely tracks actual costs felt by American consumers. The researchers claim that their preferred inflation index would explain most of why consumers feel more sour than official statistics would normally predict.

Many commentators’ eagerness to ignore inflation’s toll appears inescapably tied to Biden’s precarious reelection prospects. The president is more clear-eyed than his cheerleaders. Several months ago, he largely stopped touting the joys of “Bidenomics” and talked instead about challenging the corporations that raised prices and padded profits. During the State of the Union, Biden pledged to take on corporations that quietly shrink their products and hike prices out of greed. “Too many corporations raise prices to pad their profits, charging more and more for less and less,” Biden said that night. “That’s why we’re cracking down on corporations that engage in price-gouging.”

Mainstream economists cringe at this kind of populist rhetoric; their assumption is that the austerity that follows raising interest rates is an unfortunate but necessary medicine. Similarly, the suggestion that wealthy corporations should bear more of the pain, and the working class less of it, has come to sound radical to some economists. In late 2021, amid the rising prices and supply-chain disruptions of the pandemic, Weber, the UMass economist, proposed a once-popular and now unusual form of economic therapy: limiting what companies can charge for food and energy. “Large corporations with market power,” she wrote in The Guardian, “have used supply problems as an opportunity to increase prices and scoop windfall profits … What we need instead is a serious conversation about strategic price controls.”

Krugman and others harshly dismissed her idea—the Times columnist panned it on Twitter as “truly stupid.” He later deleted the post and apologized. The German and British governments enacted something similar to Weber’s ideas in limited form on energy prices. Weber, whose argument that corporate greed helps accelerate inflation has since been echoed by figures such as European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, has gained acclaim as an iconoclastic thinker about inflation.

“I have been ridiculed in obnoxious ways, but people sense the injustice,” Weber told me. “Many Americans worked throughout COVID; they saw friends die; they think, I did all the things I’m supposed to do, and I still can’t afford this life.”

Perhaps the economic turmoil of Biden’s term will ease in the seven months before the election, and consumer agitation will cool in tandem with inflation. Krugman offers tart counsel to Americans: “Maybe my message here sounds like Obi-Wan Kenobi in reverse: Look, don’t trust your feelings.”

The temptation for liberal economists and politicians to deny the pain experienced by many Americans, and to condescend when they might instead try to empathize, is perhaps understandable in a fraught election year. But working- and middle-class Americans might conclude that they are wiser to trust their feelings and checking accounts than to rely on liberal economists riffing as Jedi masters.