This is Democracy – Episode 317: Vigilantism and Violence in American Society

[00:00:19] Intro: This Is Democracy, a podcast about the people of the United States, a podcast about citizenship, about engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today’s important issues and how to have a voice in what happens next.
[00:00:38] Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy.
This week we are very fortunate. We’re joined by a wonderful famous historian and also someone who I have so much, high regard for. I met her years and years ago, and I’ve been following her career for a long time, and it’s really a pleasure to finally have her on, this, podcast. This is Heather Ann Thompson.
she’s a historian at the University of Michigan, where she’s a professor of course, and among many things, she’s the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize for. Her book on the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 called Blood in the Water. Most recently, she has published this really, stimulating and in some ways angering, but angering in a useful way, book, about vigilantism and the Bernard Getz, episode, which we’ll talk about in New York City in 1984 and what happened thereafter.
The book is called Fear and Fury, the Reagan eighties, Bernie Goetz Shootings. And the rebirth of White Rage. professor Heather Ann Thompson, thank you for joining us.
[00:01:47] Dr. Heather Ann Thompson: Oh, I’m so glad to be here with you both.
[00:01:49] Jeremi Suri: We’re of course, joined by Mr. Zachary Suri as well. How are you today, Zachary?
[00:01:53] Zachary Suri: Doing well. Hello.
[00:01:55] Jeremi Suri: You did not live through the early eighties in New York, so you’re gonna get quite an education today, Zachary. Good. So, so Heather, I think that’s the obvious place to start. You and I live through what you write about in this book. So it’s contemporary history as well as traditional history.
but why did you return in, the 2020s to 1984 in New York?
[00:02:21] Dr. Heather Ann Thompson: Well, I think that we as historians, even while we live so much in the past, we cannot help but respond to the world unfolding around us with huge questions about how we got here. And, there’s always a million origin stories.
But there is one thing for sure about where we were in, 20 23, 20 24, 20 22, that really felt jarring. I think just as a citizen of this country, just as a resident of the United States and that jarring feeling. So much to do with what was, what, just a palpable unleashing of, vigilante rage, episodes like Kyle Rittenhouse and, this, a Subway, much more recent subway, killing of a homeless man in New York City.
Even more, probably more startling for most Americans. The storming of the capitol on January 6th, and then of course against all of this was the realization that when people were carrying out this rage, they were legally vindicated. Should it ever go to court. They were found not guilty. And I was just so struck by what felt to me as a historian is this weird return to.
the 19th century, frankly, the, the unleashed lynching culture of 19 19th century and, something else that was happening that resonated with the 19th century, which was this extreme reconsideration of wealth. And I thought, God, these are two really interesting sides of the same coin.
Let’s go back, let’s dig into it. And the eighties seemed like a really good place to start, both because we had taken a political detour, not even detour, I mean turn, abrupt turn with the Reagan, administration. And we also were witnessing one of the most dramatic of that period episodes of white vigilantism.
So. Long-winded response, but that’s what got me there.
[00:04:32] Jeremi Suri: No, and you touched on so many things, obviously the, recurrence of violence from our past, the economic inequalities, the nature of urban decay. You have a really, very persuasive discussion of the South Bronx at the beginning, of your book.
It brought back a lot of memories, to me. just to set the scene here. For many of our listeners who probably don’t know this particular incident, what is the Bernard Goetz shooting? Who is he and what is it that happens that you describe in such detail and details that I didn’t know at the time, from December of 1984?
[00:05:13] Dr. Heather Ann Thompson: Sure. for people of a certain age, we might be familiar with the name Bernard Goetz because he is this kind of rogue figure who ends up on a subway train in 1984 sitting across from four black teenagers, and, in a very, quick encounter suddenly leaps up. And pulls a gun out of his, waistband in a hidden holster and shoots one of them into the chest, shoots another in the back as he’s fleeing, shoots the third kid through his arm that went into his chest and with the fourth kid, tried to shoot him.
And then walked over and coldly says to him, you look all right. Here is another, and shot in point, blank range. severing his spinal cord, paralyzing him for life. And that guy, became an overnight, folk hero celebrated by the tabloid media, gravitated to by countless. newly resentful and disaffected, white New Yorkers.
and he became the stuff of Legends. He is in the lyrics of Billy Joel’s song. We didn’t Start the Fire. He’s in the song by the Beastie Boys. He is referenced, in so many popular culture context. So for some of us, we remembered his name, but notably, Speaking for myself anyway, I don’t think any of us really knew who his victims were.
And, so I wanted to dig into that story because not only does he, shoot these kids, but then he is on the lamb. There’s a dramatic manhunt to find him, he turns himself in, offers a chilling videotape two hour long, confession. Where he doesn’t candy coat anything. He admits to everything. and nevertheless, what’s gonna unfold in my book, is this incredibly interesting story of how Americans are told that, up is down and down is up.
There’s, this is the birth of the misinformation media. it takes, two grand juries to get ’em to trial. And, we can then talk about the trial, but it’s really a really pivotal moment in legal history because he will be acquitted. That acquittal sets us down a path, I think from which we really still real.
[00:08:02] Jeremi Suri: and just to get a couple of facts on the table that you go through in detail and document, very well in the book, the, four African American teenagers who approached him, actually, I guess only one or two approached him and they asked for $5, but they never violently threatened him. Is that correct?
[00:08:20] Dr. Heather Ann Thompson: Yeah, so this was a, this is super interesting to just go back and say, well, what, what actually happened? Because certainly the lore that has been handed down is that these four black teenagers, basically threatened Bernie Getz. They approached him with sharpened screwdrivers, armed with sharpened screwdrivers, threatened him and tried to rob him.
For $5, but digging into the story, including the really, very detailed confession that gets himself offered, it turns out that’s not at all what happened. These are four kids from a very, economically depressed part of New York City, the South Bronx. Who were on their way that day downtown to a local video arcade where they’re going to, break into, Jimmy Open coin receptacles to get some quarters out.
That’s really quite how poor they were. And so they did in fact have two screwdrivers in pockets, but they were never wielded, never taken out. No one even knew they were there. In fact, they were only found. Later as these kids are stripped, taken to the hospital, they’re in such extreme, extremely dire situation.
And, the sharpened screwdriver was completely made up by, the media. And so what did they do? Well, it turns out that they had one kid, Joseph, only one had in fact asked him for $5. he said first, hi, how you doing? Gets returns to the greeting and then embolden. He says, Hey, do you have $5?
Because in the eighties in New York, panhandling was as regular as breathing air. You might remember Jeremy, like everywhere you went, right? The squeegee guys?
[00:10:11] Jeremi Suri: Yes.
[00:10:11] Dr. Heather Ann Thompson: No. you got five bucks, you got a dollar. Very, commonplace. And the kid who asked his name was Troy Canty. His, thought process was, we can’t go into this video arcade with no money and plausibly be there to play games while we’re gonna try to get some quarters, so maybe I can get $5 from this guy.
So, was it maybe alarming to have four teenagers, boisterous, rowdy teenagers? Sure. But what will be made of this story is completely, absent of facts. And at the end of the day, it is gonna be these four teenagers that are the villains. And Bernie Goetz becomes the victim. And that kind of up is down moment was really what, made me think about like today.
[00:11:03] Jeremi Suri: Sure. Zachary,
[00:11:04] Zachary Suri: I’m curious, obviously the looming figure in all of this is Donald Trump. I’m curious what role he and the his associates, in New York might have played? he’s not known for having been silent on racial politics in New York City.
[00:11:22] Dr. Heather Ann Thompson: Yeah, so it turns out that all of the key figures of today are, were very much, a part of this story that I tell in this book back in the eighties.
And Donald Trump is one of them. He is, much, trying to become the king of New York, become one of the wealthiest New Yorkers. And he also was someone who always flirted with politics, was always interested in first he. He courted the Reagan Republicans and then he courted the Clinton White House.
And for a while he was courting Ross Perot as an independent. He was trying to read the tea leaves, where was this country going? And he starts to get fascinated with the New York Post, which is this increasingly conservative. tabloid owned by another. Here’s another familiar figure.
Rupert Murdoch, who, is really, encouraging stoking the flames of white racial resentment in this time period. But also celebrating, wealthy people like Donald Trump. this is the era of greed is good. TV shows like Dallas and Dynasty and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. So, all of these characters are on the scene watching how this case plays out.
Watching what’s happening with public opinion about race, about, vigilante violence, seeing how far the media can go with misinformation. and Trump will run with all of that, but he’s not the only one. Rudy Giuliani is also a key figure here. And he will, become the mayor of New York running on these kinds of, politics of white racial resentment.
[00:13:18] Jeremi Suri: it’s one of the many strengths of your book in that, as you said, the cast of characters in front of us today are all displayed here in their farm system days, in a sense, right? In, a way sharpening their knives and learning their skills that they’re going to use later on for the politics of the next few decades.
And that’s of course how you. Close the book, but I don’t wanna jump ahead. Why Heather, do so many people come out in support of Bernie Goetz? you have this extraordinary statistic in the book. I did not know this, that when the, police create a helpline to find tips, as you describe in the book, Bernie Getz actually goes out on the lamb.
He runs to Vermont and, with a rental car and switches hotels and, is trying to stay away for a while. And you say 1500 people. Called into the, tip line soon after it was created to offer their support for the shooter. Why are people doing that?
[00:14:15] Dr. Heather Ann Thompson: Well, this of course is the million dollar question, and it’s, it, it’s the question that we ask often today, how is it that people can, for example, in Minneapolis, look at the murder of Alex Preti or Renee Goode and.
say it’s okay, even celebrate it. And in, in fact say that what we just saw with our own eyes didn’t even happen. this is an origin story to that, and it turns out that, that emotion, that sentiment in ways I just did not fully appreciate. Was being curated, it was being deliberately stoked and it was being stoked in aid of a much broader, behind the scenes and frankly more insidious political agenda.
And that was the agenda, particularly of the Reagan Republicans, but much more broadly, very wealthy Americans who were. really sick and tired of the liberal politics of the New Deal and of the great society. They hated the high taxes that the wealthy had to pay into it. They really did not like the, civil rights advances that they saw as.
Cramping their style, in terms of who they might hire or who they might rent to. of course, Donald Trump’s father was really, very resentful of those things. And, these are people that had long, wanted to undo the new deal, but the seventies, the late seventies offered them this.
Opportunity, frankly, a dual crisis, an economic crisis unfolding globally and the civil rights tensions at home that are already making white folks feel nervous and, uncomfortable. And the Reagan Republicans understand that this is an opportunity to really just say, look, liberalism in general.
It’s all a failure. it’s the reason why we have crime. It’s the reason why the economy is going to hell in the hand basket. It’s a reason why, you, your, unions are not doing so well. you name it, they become the scapegoat. And then the irony here is that, this global fiscal crisis, it gets back on its feet everywhere else.
But in this country, the Reagan Republicans doubled down on the austerity. That just creates a greater economic crisis at home. And yet they say that crisis is not because income inequality is getting worse and worse, and it’s not because your social services are getting cut and. Libraries are shuttering their doors and public schools are closing.
It’s because of those thugs and criminals, that live in places like the South Bronx that don’t wanna work, The drug addicts that, and it was just this masterful narrative, the welfare queen, I didn’t appreciate the extent to which they relied on this burgeoning conservative media to promote it.
[00:17:30] Jeremi Suri: So, so just so, we’re clear, your argument is not necessarily that all the people who express support for Bernard Goetz understand this larger architecture around them, but that architecture is manipulating the way they see this incident.
[00:17:44] Dr. Heather Ann Thompson: Absolutely. And in fact, the extent to which that was true was quite startling.
people are making judgment calls about who’s the victim and who’s the villain in this based on what they’re learning in the media. But if you look at what they’re learning in the media, this is when I, keep using the word curated for a reason, because, people were given the facts.
Many of the media had the facts in hand, but nevertheless distorted them. So. Thus the story of the sharpened screwdrivers. Here’s another really interesting one. These teenagers had amassed, really a slew of misdemeanor citations, in their youth. for things like jumping the sur subway, turnstiles, riding the subways ’cause they had no money.
Or again, jimmying opened these coin receptacles. When they are in the hospital recovering from these horrendous gunshot wounds to Bronx judges, look at these misdemeanor ju violations, and they suddenly issue this blizzard of warrants for these kids’ arrest. So what do you think that does? Of course, the headlines then become.
Victims, not so much. These, are, dangerous criminals who have 13 warrants out for their arrest. Right?
[00:19:07] Jeremi Suri: Gosh,
[00:19:09] Dr. Heather Ann Thompson: And, so quickly, it, so you’re reading this, what are you supposed to think, Right. Sharp and screwdriver criminals with 13 warrants. and, and what’s really going on, of course, meanwhile, is that the Reagan republicans are saying, you know what, Rupert Murdoch.
Who owns the New York Post, who’s publishing so many of these stories. He’s our guy. He’s gonna help us to translate this domestic agenda that we want to put in place, and he is gonna help us. His papers in England will help us, translate our international agenda. So it’s sounds conspiratorial, but it actually isn’t.
It’s just very, it is, it’s clear self-interest, and really remarkably effective.
[00:19:55] Jeremi Suri: Zachary,
[00:19:56] Zachary Suri: I’m curious what happened in New York as you understand it. I, I think people who, besides myself who do remember the 1980s and seventies and the nineties, remember New York as you described.
but I don’t think that’s how most people my age think of. New York or have experienced New York. So I’m curious, what changed in New York and why did that same change not happen, across the country?
[00:20:28] Dr. Heather Ann Thompson: So by that you mean that it becomes, for example, cleaned up and
[00:20:33] Zachary Suri: right, or that the same kind of, I guess what I would say is, the high profile crime tabloid, stories, Become less the sort of dominant narrative of New York City.
[00:20:48] Dr. Heather Ann Thompson: Oh, interesting. Yeah. well, so what’s fascinating to me, I grew up in Detroit actually in the seventies and the eighties and spent a lot of time in New York as well. And so I think what’s on the one hand like New York is not unusual.
It is in some respects, every city in the sense that. This, crisis of austerity, the urban crisis, if you will, of the eighties, is really playing out everywhere and in many cities. The kind of curation of how we understand it is going very similarly. ’cause even at some point, even the mainstream media and the nightly news is, beating the drum about crime and drug addiction and drug dealers and crack and wilding kids with zero context, not talking about.
The fact that the entire social safety net had been eroded and so forth. So this is universal, but one thing that happens in New York, which is I think for particularly your generation, that becomes the, the bellwether of wow, cities get cleaned up. they gentrify, they know New York becomes a place people aren’t afraid to go anymore.
It, and that’s. The Giuliani, years. And what I didn’t also quite appreciate was the extent to which, all of the Giuliani miracle of gentrification and kind of quote unquote cleaning up New York was still part and parcel of this same political moment that we were in, which is how did he accomplish cleaning up New York through extreme rates of policing?
Some of the highest incarceration rates ever in the, in New York State’s history. by essentially moving poverty out of the city, places like out of Manhattan and into the boroughs. and meanwhile giving tax breaks and incentivizing development for rich people so that New York became one of the most glittery.
Fun to be in if you have money, but most unequal cities, in the country. And that too ends up playing out in San Francisco, even in Detroit now. so we’re it is an interesting way in which it’s the same thing. It just, it looks a lot gl more glittery than it did in the eighties.
[00:23:21] Jeremi Suri: it’s interesting, as you were describing that, Heather, I was also thinking of Austin, Texas, and gentrification.
Yes. In Austin. it’s really interesting. I think it’s a major contribution your book is making in taking this moment and saying that’s the moment that’s pregnant for our current world. Whereas the opposite is often I think what we think, certainly what Zachy expressed is to some extent what I feel as someone who grew up in New York, I go back to New York, it has all kinds of issues, but I at least until recently thought that the New Yorker, Bernard Getz and Edward Koch, who was mayor then and others, that that was, that has gone away.
that, that heavily racialized, violent vigilante in New York had gone away. Your argument is actually, it’s the origin of where we are today. Heather?
[00:24:06] Dr. Heather Ann Thompson: Yeah, and I think that was, someone who, like you have, spent time in, in the city. it was hard to get my head around the continuities.
but then they became quite clear, I think, as I. Kind of peeled back the layers a little bit. There’s no question today that you know, you can go into New York City and it is, times Square. Times Square is no longer a place where you see. You know so much. Homelessness is not a place where you see the drug trade playing out in front of your eyes.
It’s not a place that feels so unsafe, so, so crisis filled. But at the end of the day, New York has become a place that is. Utterly unlivable for people. And that means that you can look in the window of a Gucci store, right? And it is beautiful and it’s glittery and it glistens, but you can’t afford anything in it.
And I think the real evidence of why that is the case or how true that is, is what’s happened in the recent. Mayoral election. the fact that a democratic socialist like Momani can win by a landslide indicates that, this glittery city, is, not in fact delivering. For the people who actually have to try to live there.
And it is, again, it’s a lifting of the veil in New York City on the inequality, what it means to be in a city without sufficient safety net anymore. what it means to have undone the New Deal and the great society in our American cities. But the other thing we’ve inherited, of course, is meanwhile, we’ve inherited the carte bl for people who feel angry when they feel that, right?
they can’t afford their rent. they can’t, make it anymore. They can’t put their own kids in college. Unfortunately, a lot of ’em are still susceptible to this idea. That’s because of the immigrants. That’s because of, the criminal class. That’s because of the people who are actually worse off than they are.
So it’s a lot to unpack. I hope that the book, does it through this story because the tentacles to the past and present are pretty, pretty clear. Yeah. even the NRA gets. Intimately involved in the Bernie Goetz case, and it’s, it pays attention to what happens to the outcome of his trial and then runs with it.
this is where we get stand your ground laws, this is where we get Supreme Court decisions that allow police officers and individuals to merely to say they felt unsafe. And it’s okay to kill another US citizen. So, it is, it’s a lot. I, it’s a, it leaves us a little bit with our head spinning, I think about where we are today, frankly.
[00:27:15] Jeremi Suri: I think so, but hopefully spinning in a productive direction. Zachary, you’ve spent a lot of time in New York City. you’re close to it and you’re there quite often. does, Heather’s account, or what parts of Heather’s account resonate most with you?
[00:27:32] Zachary Suri: Well, I don’t know if I’m qualified as a New York City compensator, but I do think that, I do think that, one of the great ironies of our, political moment that we don’t talk about enough is that, for decades, the Republican Party in particular, Americans across the board complained that our politics was dominated by coastal elites or by New York City in particular.
And yet the great, the sort of most successful populist of our generation came out of New York City. And I think this story might, take one step towards explaining that very strange phenomenon.
[00:28:09] Jeremi Suri: Yes. Yes. And also I think what Heather’s getting at so well is that there isn’t a certain way a crackdown on small scale violence from certain groups, but a permission structure, I don’t know if that’s a good way to talk about it, Heather, but a permission structure given to certain people to use more violence for their own defense.
Is that sort of what you’re getting at, Heather?
[00:28:29] Dr. Heather Ann Thompson: Oh yeah. I think you’re both absolutely right on. New York. New York becomes the place where, so much of this is getting tested out, but at the end of the day, what is being tested out is. How do you essentially take a nation that after World War II in particular, builds an American middle class, albeit, overwhelmingly white middle class because of its discriminatory nature.
the safety net was discriminatory. But we build an American middle class and it required buy-in, from, across the class spectrum, and many people benefited from it, but the people that always hated it were the uber wealthy. And what we have seen since the eighties is a very successful erosion.
Of that social safety net and perhaps more alarmingly an erosion of the principles behind it. it’s been a cultural shift that helping out your neighbor is bad. the government is bad. liberals are bad. Any social programs are bad. Anything public is bad. Public schools, public hospitals, public housing, and what I think we need to think through is that took a great deal of work.
to undo all of that. And it took a lot of work because in fact, it was against everybody’s interests, right? some of the people being harmed the most right now are in fact Trump voters by the economics of the Trump administration. And so to understand that we have to ask, well, how in the world would they have ever bought into it?
And, people aren’t stupid. They’re not just dupes. But they are definitely trusting, of our media infrastructure. They’re trusting of, the people that they have been told, have made it as businessmen. And so, you start to understand in a whole new way, why was it significant that Donald Trump used to be on the Apprentice, for example, or.
worldwide wrestling because he was very deliberately curating, his popularity among people who he would rely on later on to be his voters. And he’s quite explicit about it.
[00:31:04] Jeremi Suri: Yeah. Yeah. I think you show a lot of, new evidence of just that point. Heather, I want us to close, this really fascinating and stimulating discussion.
we in a way, as you close the book, you really are at pains in the book to bring to life. The four African American teenagers who are both, liable throughout this story, but also are, are in, are invisible to us. We can’t see them in many respects. You wanna bring them back into light.
You use their names, you tell their stories beautifully, and you close with Darrell K’s story in a photo of Darrell Kabe. I just wanted to give you a chance to close, not by talking about Trump or Bernie Goetz, but. But talking about the four, the four African American teenagers.
[00:31:54] Dr. Heather Ann Thompson: Well, I so appreciate that, Jeremy, because, again, I, began by saying, I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know who the victims were, but I knew Bernie Getz, and even to this day, he still alive.
He lives in Greenwich Village. He gets to routinely tell the story through his perspective. And yet these teenagers lives were utterly destroyed. only two of them are still living and, not because they died of old age, but because of the wreckage that became of their lives and the one who is still living is paralyzed and brain damaged, and the other one has managed to escape this.
He doesn’t wanna talk to anybody about this. It’s been so traumatizing and I thought it was really important that we, we, we told this story. From the perspective of the whole part of New York, that paid a huge price for all this, a huge price for the austerity politics We’ve been doubling down on with every administration since.
Reagan, a huge price for the unleashing of racial violence, and I wanted to resurrect their stories, but also to end. With kind of a reminder that once we unleash this, that we, we forget about what it really looks like on the ground, when we endorse these kinds of politics.
And so I wanted us to come back full circle to. The four teenagers who are going down trying to get some quarters out of a video machine because that’s what their lives are offering them, and then start back at that beginning as we imagine the future.
[00:33:42] Jeremi Suri: yes. Well, I think you do that very effectively.
I hope, in fact, I’m certain our listeners. Have really been, first of all, intrigued by this story, wanting to learn more, but also get a sense of the color and the, ways in which this is a big story about politics, but also a very human story with, all the elements of tragedy and villainy. bill built into it.
Heather, thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:34:06] Dr. Heather Ann Thompson: Well, thank you for giving me the opportunity to share this.
[00:34:09] Jeremi Suri: And Zachary, of course, thank you for joining us. And I wanna just reiterate, the title of the book is Fear and Fury, and this is by Professor Heather and Thompson available at all of your local bookstores.
And please go to your local independent. Bookstore. Thank you most of all, to our loyal listeners and loyal subscribers to our substack for joining us for this week of This Is Democracy.
[00:34:34] Outro: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.The music in this episode was written and recorded by Scott Holmes. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This is Democracy on Apple Podcast, Spotify and YouTube. See you next time.