Historian: This Event Created Trump, Giuliani & Rupert Murdoch - Heather Ann Thompson

0:00What made the American middle class, what made people able to feed their kids, send them to college, buy homes in the suburbs, all the things that were part of this American dream were made possible by a robust federal government, high taxes that provided for the public. And lots and lots of white families benefited from that, including living in public housing that was taken care of, that gave them a leg up. By the time we get to the 70s, lots of black folks who had been left out of all that start to push for inclusion. And meanwhile, there's a global economic downturn. The Reagan Republicans take advantage, frankly, of this moment when there's an economic crisis and there's a civil rights revolution and essentially start to say to white working class people, listen, things are going to hell in a handbasket.

0:48Big government's bad. Trust us in the private sector to take care of everything. And they're kind of given a Faustian bargain because they kind of want to believe it because they're also afraid of black people. They're afraid of this civil rights era, but they're also buying something that's going to cost them a lot, which is this idea that we don't need public services and that you can count on rich people to take care of you. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is Heather Ann Thompson. what a book heather ann thompson fear and fury the reagan 80s the bernie getz shootings and rebirth of white rage which we are living in right now heather ann thompson indeed great to have you on you spent a career examining crime punishment and inequality in america okay and uh you've written some other stuff, but I want to go to this.

1:45This is 1984. America. And lots is going on here in this book. And what a great story. And by the way, I lived it as a 20 year old and I don't remember all of it, but you brought it all back to life for me. So why, why did you pick that subject material before we actually get into the book? Right. Well, first of all, I remember it as well. I remember being in the city, New York City in particular. I grew up in Detroit, but I spent a lot of time in New York City in the 80s. And for those of us who remember it, it was a really gritty, scary time in America that felt like something different was afoot, like cities were falling apart.

2:27And there was kind of a new mean austerity economically on the one hand. But on the other hand, there was like the age of yuppies, people were making a ton of money, and then there was also a lot of hate crimes going on. So that kind of resonated to me with right now, and I'm a historian, and I thought, you know, what is, what's going on today, and where did it really get going, this kind of normalization of all this rage, and all this misinformation, and all this kind of real income inequality that we're living with today. And it turns out all the same folks on the scene today were there in New York City in 1984 when this one kind of crazy traumatic event happens on a subway that will become a trial and it will catapult the political careers of people like Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani and Rupert Murdoch.

3:25And so it turned out this was a story that was kind of ground zero for where we are today i'm gonna throw a theory at you okay what part of detroit did you grow up in by the way the city city northwest side my family i have family in ferndale so i'm in detroit a lot actually uh uh i'm gonna throw a theory at you i think we've had this in our culture from the beginning i think that we've had atavism we've had nativism We've had racism, obviously, with the original sin of slavery in the culture. And we have two things going on in America. We have this soaring, aspirational America that wants to create a more perfect union.

4:05And we want to figure out a way to make all of these disparate people and these different ethnic cultures mesh in America. We have that soaring part of America. But then we also have this knuckle-dragging part of America that's been with us forever. You know, Jill Lepore writes about it in her book about American history. You're writing about it here. Am I right about that, Heather, or am I not seeing it correctly? You are absolutely right. And notwithstanding, you know, the phrase rebirth of white rage, you know, I acknowledge in the book and talk a lot about it in my work in general. Look, racism is baked into the DNA of this country and certainly the impulse to, you know, resort to vigilante violence.

4:51We have a long history of that in this country. But there is a period in this country and it really matters, which is sort of between the 19th century when we have lynching and we have the Gilded Age and we have all the robber barons. and today when there was, you know, a belief that the rule of law mattered, that, you know, lynching still went on, but it was considered outside the bounds of civility and a period of time when we regulated business and we said, you know what, it's not okay to just do whatever you want. And businesses too have to pay into the body public and support things like public roads and public schools and hospitals.

5:30And the question is, when did we then go back to this re-normalization and re-legitimization of really some of the worst income inequality we've seen in 100 years and some of the worst unleashing of gun violence and rage and vigilantism that we've also not seen in 100 years? So it's always there. It's just the question of when do we kind of sanction it and embrace it and celebrate it, you know, in our political sphere? And when do we censure it? When do we push back at it as a collective? You remember the Paul Castellano shooting? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It was a year after this, right? Remember? He was gunned down right before Christmas, you know, December 16th, 1985, in front of Spark Steakhouse.

6:18So, I mean, we had gang shooting each other back in this time period. But you did a couple of things here that I want to address. Okay. You were going to write about the 1985 move bombing. But there was something about the Trump administration and the January 6th situation, the 2020 election that made you pivot to Bernie Getz. So what was that? Well, I mean, it was just really trying to wrap my head around. How could we do two things, really? How could we have such an upsurge in support for phrases like, I could shoot anyone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it? Or we could have such support for economic policies that were clearly working against the interests of ordinary working class people.

7:13and you know that needed explaining and and part of the answer was you know smoke and mirrors and the fact that the misinformation media had become so enormously powerful specifically Fox and I you know that had a history it had it had a it had a starting point and in ways that I frankly didn't appreciate myself that starting point was really the 80s this is when and New York City is the real epicenter for this this is when it's a very slow building up of consensus that those kinds of things were okay and it's a sad story because so many people paid such a high price frankly on the one hand for being bamboozled for being sold a completely false bill of goods as to what was going to happen in this country but also sad because the heart of my story is the gunning down of four teenagers whose lives were permanently shaped and not just their lives, but it kind of set in motion this idea of, you know, black criminal kids are the problem, not corporate greed that's out of control, not, you know, laws that are saying, you know, you can carry a gun and defend yourself even when no one's doing anything to you.

8:33So it was a moment when all of a sudden, you know, up becomes down, down becomes up. And I think it's super interesting how gullible in a lot of ways we all were in what turns out to be what I call in the book a long Reagan revolution that Trump, frankly, just inherits. He lifts the veil on it. He doesn't create it. And that kind of surprised me. Okay, so I grew up in this era, right? And I remember the movie Death Wish. And so for listeners listening in, Charles Bronson plays a subway vigilante. And so now, ironically, 10 years later, we actually have a subway vigilante. He gets accosted. He feels like he's had enough.

9:20He fires the gun. The blacks are very upset and the whites are also upset. And this is sort of the rage that you're talking about. and I want to address it from a sociological point of view because I think you say something in the book that people need to hear. We cut the social programs and when you cut the social program, guess what happened? You create more crime because whether you like it or not, the people are just, you know, you got to help certain people, okay? And so there's a group of people would call these people welfare queens, but then there's another group of people say, hey, you've enslaved people.

10:02You took them out of slavery. You didn't give them the right to vote. You didn't give them the right to go into certain parts of the country. You segregated them. And now they're trying to climb out of the bottom. And you don't want to help them. And so now by not helping them, some of them are resorting to crime. Again, I'm not giving an excuse or an alibi for crime. I find crime reprehensible. But I think what I love about this book is that you're describing the sociological implications of everything that's going on that leads to people to make incentive-based decisions that are divergent. Okay.

10:38Yes. Am I, do I have the book, right? I mean, I love the book. You absolutely do. Okay. So tell us about that. Tell us like, be my Sherpa. Okay. Be my guide. Say, hey, Anthony, knock, knock. This is how we're screwing ourselves up. And this is why we're going after each other? Well, I think that you've just nailed it. So crime is a social condition, right? And it doesn't excuse it to try to understand why in some moments in this country is crime out of control and other moments we feel like we're a much safer nation. And one of the really interesting things is that what made the American middle class, what made people able to feed their kids, send them to college, buy homes in the suburbs, all the things that were part of this American dream were made possible by a robust federal government, high taxes, but not as high as Europe, but still higher taxes that provided for the public.

11:37And lots and lots of white families benefited from that, including living in public housing that was taken care of, that gave them a leg up. By the time we get to the 70s, lots of Black folks who had been left out of all that, because a lot of those policies were discriminatory, start to push for inclusion. And meanwhile, there's a global economic downturn. The Reagan Republicans take advantage, frankly, of this moment when there's an economic crisis and there's a civil rights revolution and essentially start to say to white working class people, listen, things are going to hell in a handbasket.

12:15Big government's bad. trust us in the private sector to take care of everything and they're kind of given a Faustian bargain because they kind of want to believe it because they're also afraid of black people they're afraid of this you know civil rights era but they're also buying something that's going to cost them a lot which is this idea that we don't need public services and that you can count on rich people to take care of you I don't think I appreciated how much that moment we began an austerity that then explains why people have to sell drugs it explains why cities are falling apart it explains why whether you're a white person or a black person in a city night of new york you're fearful you feel like everything is coming apart at the scenes and some people see that for what it is but most people are being fed a steady diet through things like the new york post and the daily news of, well, what's going on here?

13:16Again, it's not that rich people are getting richer and richer and richer. It's that you've got these poor welfare queen, underclass criminal thugs who don't wanna work. And that messaging, while completely inaccurate, was really powerful. And we've inherited that times 10. Thank you for tuning into Open Book. And if you haven't already, Please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week. We've got a lot more coming. And now back to the show. So, but, I mean, look, it's an amazing country. So if you get the policies right and people get a good education, what can happen is they can lift themselves out of poverty, right?

13:59Absolutely. They can go from lower middle class into the upper class and live the American dream. And you do write in this book about economic gains that Blacks and Latinos, particularly Black and Latino New Yorkers, have made, but then they get actively rolled back. Is this a story about an neglect, Heather, or is this a story about deliberate policy? Deliberate policy. So you're talking about, for example, in the South Bronx, where the four teenagers that I write about come from, you're talking about a public housing complex that when white folks lived there after World War II, it is, you know, supported, there's funding, the playgrounds are kept up, people have jobs in the public sector, you know, you get to work for the city, you get to work for the state, you get to send your kids for free to the community college.

14:52system in New York to the city college system of New York. You have a leg up and you have a leg forward. And then we get to 1981 with the first Reagan tax cuts, and then we just double down on it ever since. And it's literally stripped. All these budgets are literally stripped. And so, for example, teenage kids that could get summer jobs through a program called CETA, those jobs just disappear. And these were jobs that allowed people to intern in my city of Detroit for like Ford Motor Company, or, you know, in the city of New York, you could work for all kinds of really interesting companies, but then they'd hire you.

15:32So we're talking literally of evap, shuttering public libraries, getting rid of public programs that people needed, and then looking at those people and saying, what's your problem? Why are you selling drugs? or why are you so poor or why can't you get out of public housing? And the saddest part of this is that that took work. It took effort. And there's only one real beneficiary in this story. And that's the people who'd always push back at the New Deal on the public sector. And those were the wealthiest Americans. They didn't want to have to pay into it, frankly. And they say it. They say it in my book.

16:13So Bernard Gates, gets his burner gett still alive you you decide not to interview him yeah tell us why you did that and why you went with more of the archival history of this as opposed to uh reaching out to him and seeing if he would be available for the book well part of it is i'm a historian i'm not a journalist so i do my work quite differently you'll see that there's hundreds of pages of footnotes i'm really in the trial transcripts at the moment. I'm in the city records. I'm looking at, I'm in the Reagan library trying to figure out what was Reagan doing. So I'm always, that's my approach to writing books.

16:52And that's, you know, why they're kind of steeped in what was actually happening in the moment. But I actually was considering talking to him and I was considering talking to the victims. And when I realized I couldn't talk to the kids that he had shot, I'm like, you know what, I'm going to not talk to him because I realized he'd been talking all along. He still is getting interviewed about this. And I wanted to step back and say, don't tell me now in retrospect what you did or justify what you did. Let me just go back to the beginning and piece it all back together again. What really happened on December 22nd, 1984, and what really happened in the trials that followed.

17:32And it's a pretty interesting story, I think. I feel like there's a large section of the media that makes money off of the rage, breaks money off of the racism, makes money off of the split in the society and the demonization of players in the society. And so go to the mid-1980s and set the scene for me in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post tabloid that he still owns. Yeah. Comes an American citizen, actually, to own all this stuff. Right. And he is promoting this and the impact that this is at. So describe what it is and then describe what the impact of it has been over 42 years. Oh, it's so crazy.

18:23The story is so crazy. When Reagan is on his ascendancy, essentially, Murdoch is not in the United States, but quickly is realizing the importance of media to the creation of a new conservative political order. in the United States, in England, with Jack Patcherism. Kind of, you know, this is a goal for a lot of folks. He's one of them. And he decides he's coming to the United States with one goal, which is to dominate the U.S. media market. And he's going to start that goal realization in New York City by purchasing the New York Post at the end of the 70s, a tabloid paper, but one that had been relatively liberal in orientation and one that tons of New Yorkers read on the subway every day.

19:11You know, you get one on any street corner. And his goal was to beat out the competing paper, which was the Daily News. And the way he was going to do it was through sensationalism, through rage baiting, race baiting, but also through subtly giving people a steady message, which is liberal government is a failure. the public sector is a failure, the problems you're experiencing in the city are because of welfare cheats and lazy blacks. And you're going to get a different thing if you start supporting people like Reagan, if you start supporting privatization, if you start admiring guys like Donald Trump, who's always featured prominently in the New York Post, his flashy lifestyle.

19:58Greed is good right this message that greed is good you too can be a millionaire if you just work hard enough and that what i didn't fully appreciate was the beginning of really what we see today he will go on to own fox news as this very vast uh fox just as a very vast but network and very strategically become the largest purveyor of news in the United States, the most watched news in the United States. And over time, much more misinformation, much less fact-checking and bias-checking. And it's going to be a very, very important tool, as we later saw, for the rise in what we have right now, which is the hordes of immigrants coming over the border.

20:52Keep your eye on them. Don't keep your eye on the fact that the tax rate for rich people is lower than it's ever been since the 19th century. Keep your eye on the three-headed baby. Don't keep your eye on the fact that there's no more public hospital care for X, Y, and Z. So you can get the point. I didn't realize how deliberately this was all kind of crafted over 50 years to end up where we are right now. So I want to test something on you and get your reaction to it. And I'm a byproduct of this, by the way, because my dad grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania. Some of the family went to go work in Detroit for the assembly lines, union jobs, good wages, by the way, middle class houses in Ferndale.

21:44And then my father went out to Long Island to mine sand. And so that's where I ended up on Long Island. But I feel like there was a period of time, and maybe it was accidental or maybe it was planned, where there was some sensibility from the rich about taking care of the poor and middle class. That there was a notion, let's go to Henry Ford, for example. I mean, I'm a horrific guy in many ways, an anti-Semite, a Hitler sympathizer. but actually understood that by doubling the wages at the Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, that he was going to put people into small homes. There's going to be a good public school system.

22:26His quote was, I want the people to make enough money so they can afford the car that they're making. This way they don't come after me with a pitchfork and a torch at my mansion. And there was a notion that we were going to at least make sure that there was aspirational living standards in America. We have broken from that, but we don't do that anymore. And it's led to this rise of populism as well. There's a tremendous amount of anger in the country. There's white anger, there's black anger, but there's generally a very large group of people while certain people are ascending to the trillionaire status.

23:03There's a group of people that are like WTF and you're not helping me. So let's burn the whole system down. Yeah, that's right. So one, what is your reaction to that? Was that an intentional idea, the noblesse oblige by the wealthy? Was it accidental? And then number two, if I'm right about what I'm saying, is there a way to return to that or are we going into a place that we really can't come back from? So there's a lot there, Heather and Thompson. Take a deep breath and answer that question, please. It's a great question. So there's a little bit of a yes and no in there. So on the one hand, when we look back in American history, there is this kind of romantic view that at least there was a time, and I do think it's a little romantic, that rich people understood they had to take care of at least enough people through philanthropy.

23:54And it's not that that wasn't the case. There was always philanthropy. There was always rich people that were willing to, you know, fund a hospital or set up a library or, you know, try at least to give a little bit back. But one of the most dramatic things that happens over the course of the 20th century, it's the thing that actually allowed your, you know, your family to become union members. It took a lot of fights, deep, deep fights. Ford was in a bitter, bitter battle with the UAW, the UAW insisting that workers had the right to a decent wage and Ford bringing in goon squads to absolutely try to break the union.

24:36By the way, unsuccessfully, there was a union that came into Ford. And the truth is that rich people, every bit of the taxes they had to pay, they had fought it really from the beginning. They fought the New Deal. They fought the funding that it would take for things like Social Security for everybody. They fought unions tooth and nail. They fought the idea that they would have to contribute to public housing for people. And we've missed that history. We've lost that history. And that's one of the reasons why we've been able to trust rich people to do the right thing again. And it's always been hard for rich people to imagine that they had an obligation to a bigger public.

25:21Remember that the public that needs that kind of help, I mean, we're talking about children. We're talking about disabled people. We're talking about elderly people who can't work. We're talking about an entire society that needs good roads or protected food or, you know, education. education and in american history it's always been the case that to get that we've had to really fight hard for it and the belief that will be taken care of by benevolent rich people you know it it benefits some people more than others for sure but for the broader society we need policies that are race neutral um you know that are that are broader distributive for everybody and someone might say, well, that's socialism or that's communism, but I just want to flag it and say, you know what?

26:141968 in America was not communism. If you look at what's going on right now, even in a place like Sweden or Canada, it's not communism. It's just a more robust safety net for Americans. And we've lost it here. We are in terrible shape right now. And you know how we know it, Anthony, because if you ask anybody, like, would you rather send your, if you had all the money in the world, would you rather send your kids to, you know, public school or private school? Would you rather go to a private hospital or a public hospital? Would you rather live in a privately secure neighborhood or a public housing unit?

26:56Like, everyone's real clear that the public sector has been broken, but it was deliberate. Yeah, it makes me sad, you know, but I think it's real. And I think that we have to recognize always that America is quite messy and that we've got lots of progress and a lot of families have done very well here, including mine and even yours, Heather. But I think we have to also accept that we can be doing better. And if you have a tiny bit less, if you have 900 billion as opposed to a trillion, not really sure how your lifestyle is going to change. I found as I've gotten financially independent, that you're not not being boastful and just being observant.

27:39I don't think my life has necessarily gotten anything but more complicated. And I think we have to recognize that there's a paradox to the wealth. That's the irony. We would be better taking care of our fellow citizens than living in barbed wired security compounds, protecting ourselves from our fellow citizens. So I think that's the big resonating message from your book, which I loved. Okay. So we're now down to the five words okay and so you listen to my podcast before my producer I come up with five words from your book I need one or two sentences from you okay you ready okay justice we have a long history of fighting for justice and winning more justice for everybody and we just need to remember that history.

28:29Race. Race is the thorn in the side of this country. It is the most divisive thing that this country still tackles. But it is also the thing that we can move towards greater understanding and justice. You know, Obama, Obama, who I went to law school, would be very pissed at me. But he He created Trump, by the way. And people could say whatever the hell they want, but I'm going to go to Van Jones. Trump is a white lash. That's what Van Jones said to Obama. I didn't say do it on purpose, and I'm not blaming Barack Obama. I'm just saying that this is the tension in our country about race. And it's, frankly, it's disgusting, but it's true.

29:18Okay, let's go to power. Or ordinary people have an extraordinary amount of power, but they have to overcome their racial divides and they have to overcome their prejudices to embrace that power for the good of everyone. so it's interesting because what i got from your book when i hear the word power i think of economic empowerment because if we could just figure out a way to make people feel economic empowerment they become to my mind they become less racist they're like hey i got mine so let the other person have his or hers you know what i mean just feel like it's interesting let's tie that to your Obama comment, because what's really interesting about this is that Obama actually won by a landslide of Americans across the spectrum.

30:09Across the board. He's got conservatives to vote for him. That's right. But the reason is because he was so determined, actually, to deal with those racial divisions and to deal with those economic inequalities. And one of the ways to understand Trump, and I think you're hinting at this, is that for people who had worked so hard to make sure rich people didn't have to pay taxes, to make sure that there was no regulations on business, that had taken a long time, a lot of effort. Obama was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. We're not going back to the social safety net. We're not going to go back to supporting that broader public.

30:45And so the backlash to Obama was also really crafted to maintain the power of wealthy people. And so it's so interesting the way your words, justice, race, power. They're all so intimately connected. We just have to be careful to make sure that we understand that what's causing what, because it's so easy to go to the end of the story and say, oh, I guess everyone's just racist. Oh, I guess that this is just the way this country. I think it's way more nuanced than that. I think it's way more subtle than that. Yeah. And I think you do a great job of explaining that. Okay. Last two words. You ready?