Kristi Noem

Dirty Harry.

And I feel like we're in that moment again, right?

We, we are, we are meant to admire on social media, the wealthy, the elite, but meanwhile, we are meant to, you know, arm ourselves and, and walk with severe suspicion on our city streets.

So it's, it's alarming.

You know, we, we can't look at Minneapolis right now, I think, and not feel alarmed.

You know, usually it is, there's something about the way that I learned it or it continues to be told that just doesn't strike me as the full story.

It just doesn't bear the smell test.

I'm always gravitating towards these really powerful events that I know or I suspect very strongly have kind of shaped where we went.

impacted the direction the country took.

But I'm also very persuaded that we've only heard one side of it, usually the side of the people with the most power in that story.

So I'm always intrigued to kind of go back and tell all of the stories and try to humanize the experience of how it all unfolded at the time.

At Attica, for example, we were told that all these brutal, violent prisoners had killed hostages at Attica, and it kind of became this excuse for mass incarceration and not caring about conditions behind bars.

And lo and behold, I dig in, and that's not at all what happened.

And in fact, there's a massive cover-up at Attica, which we don't say that word cover-up lightly as historians or as journalists.

I mean, you have to have real evidence to say that.

And this was a slightly different

approach in this book because I wasn't looking for cover up or I wasn't looking for, you know, smoking gun.

I was just looking to understand, like, how did we end up here where, you know, our eyes aren't to be believed and decorum is out the window and it feels like our democracy is in real danger.

And I wanted to understand how that could have happened in such a short period of time.

Yeah, I think so.