Here's the thing: fear of this very outcome probably played a part in the decisions she made in her "heated moment".

The white supremacist *myth* that Political Correctness means your life can be ruined for One Little Mistake gives a perverse incentive to make much bigger ones. https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1265273236088029184

And it doesn't just play out in regards to race, but it's part of the framework of white supremacy and I felt it important to put that in the first tweet so it's clear I'm not saying "This wasn't racist, this wasn't about race." Because it was, it so clearly was.

I saw somebody trying to defend her by writing off her behavior as "a classic panic attack" - I think she was in a panicked state. Not a panic attack. The panic was: this Black man is filming me. He's going to put it on the internet. Everyone will think I'm One Of Those Racists.

The myth, held even among many liberal and progressive whites, is that a culture of political correctness has given undue/undeserved social weight to the words of people of color and other oppressed minorities. (Never mind the oppressed bit, I guess?)

In her mind, she wasn't the one escalating. He was, by hinting at the slightest consequences. In her mind, her life was being ruined the moment he pulled out the camera. If you'd asked her what was happening in the moment, she might have said she was being (forgive me) "lynched".

White people who want to think of ourselves as being good, nice, decent, (forgive me) "woke"... if we aren't willing to do actual work and expose ourselves, on an ongoing basis, to the discomfort of actually facing consequences and changing, this is where we wind up.

If we're not doing the work, if "racist" is just a label we put on other people, just a way of keeping score and marking which team we're on and by God we're on the right one, then sooner or later we're all going to have our Amy Cooper moment.

This is not to defend her or to twist what she was doing into anything other than racism. She believed her reputation was worth his life. She was prepared to fight for her reputation at the cost of his life. She was *NOT* prepared to back down, compromise, admit she was wrong...

...even though any of those things would have saved her reputation without requiring her to endanger a man's life by taking an action that goes against those values she wants to believe (and needs us to believe) are intrinsic to her character.

I believe that character includes who we are in the heat of the moment. I don't think that's a contentious idea, at all, right up until someone says the N word on a stream or threatens to call in a hit squad on a man who politely points out a posted rule.

But whatever excuses you can wrangle for how she behaved in the moment, she created that moment herself out of her (myth-taken) fear of the power dynamic of political correctness ruining lives, and her inability/unwillingness to be corrected on something by a Black man.

TL;DR - She could have leashed her dog. If she was afraid of what that video would show the world about her, she could have swallowed her pride and leashed her dog. Or walked away.

I don't have any reason to believe she's a conservative or a Republican or a Trump supporter (nor am I asking for info about that, it's irrelevant).

But this dynamic, this myth, this "panicked" reaction... it plays into reactionary recruiting tactics.

Nobody who deals with systemic oppression actually wants their oppressors walking around in a state of tense, perpetual pre-panic about invisible lines and unstated rules. That does not actually help anyone.

The myth of political correctness includes the fact that anyone is in favor of something called "political correctness". It lets us imagine that people who speak up when we step on their toes (or elbow them in the face) are just powertrippers concerned with arcane rules.

But for someone who isn't interested in dealing with discomfort, confronting their privilege, or doing the rest of the work, the idea of PC is kind of alluring: just say the magic words and you're a good person.

But reality is more complicated than the myth, and so there are no magic words that work for all situations, which makes it seem like the rules keep changing.

And then one terrible day the magic doesn't keep you safe, as it had promised.

To believe in the myth of political correctness is to believe in the myth that there is a PC police, who are all powerful and will come for anyone who transgresses, so the moment that you see things start to go wrong, you're in a fight for your "life".

(Not your actual life.)

And there's a pipeline to the right, to the far right, for people who "ran afoul of the PC police" and then found out "no apology is ever sufficient for THOSE PEOPLE" (e.g., "I couldn't bring myself to actually apologize, but they didn't even care I was hurt by the consequences")

In the trans community, we see people in the extremist bigot groups talking about these interactions as their "peak trans" moments. A certain Irish sitcom writer is in the midst of a years-long personal and professional meltdown over criticism that conflicted with his self-image.