HEATHER ANN THOMPSON — Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage - with E.J. Dionne Jr. episode artwork

EPISODE · Feb 24, 2026 · 59 MIN

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON — Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage - with E.J. Dionne Jr.

from Politics and Prose Presents · host Politics and Prose

In this masterful, groundbreaking work, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson shines surprising new light on an infamous 1984 New York subway shooting that would unveil simmering racial resentments and would lead, in unexpected ways, to a fractured future and a new era of rage and violence.On December 22, 1984, in a graffiti-covered New York City subway car, passengers looked on in horror as a white loner named Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teens,  Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur, at point-blank range. He then disappeared into a dark tunnel. After an intense manhunt, and his eventual surrender in New Hampshire, the man the tabloid media had dubbed the “Death Wish Vigilante” would become a celebrity and a hero to countless ordinary Americans who had been frustrated with the economic fallout of the Reagan 80s. Overnight, Goetz’s young victims would become villains.Out of this dramatic moment would emerge an angry nation, in which Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and later Fox News Network stoked the fear and the fury of a stunning number of Americans. Drawing from never-before-seen archival materials, legal files, and more, Heather Ann Thompson narrates the Bernie Goetz Subway shootings and their decades-long reverberations, while deftly recovering the lives of the boys whom too many decided didn't matter. Fear and Fury is the remarkable account and a searing indictment of a crucial turning point in American history.HEATHER ANN THOMPSON is a historian and the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. She writes regularly on the criminal justice system for myriad publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Thompson’s policy work includes serving on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the US. She also co-runs the Carceral State Research Project at the University of Michigan.Thompson is in conversation with E.J. Dionne, Jr.,  a bestselling author, a syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in The Washington Post and nearly a hundred other newspapers, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University. His Why Americans Hate Politics won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a nominee for the National Book Award. He is a regular commentator on National Public Radio and on other radio and television programs. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Mary Boyle, and their three childrenPURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593702093?ic_referral=9t-wxz5omgqjYl7OvUWKeIVABhvdnauq4YXMAzJR4xUwM-F0LfG-8gg2YdPg477ItY55uDPjXRL__I9PQmv5gbcwYWeDt3_FAfnSCxSF6Yk-2JQ8-l6V0sFbz3ZXgHaV4U-O08I

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HEATHER ANN THOMPSON — Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage - with E.J. Dionne Jr.

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