Heather Ann Thompson

But it's also important to remember that there was always a response to this.

From the very beginning, you know, Black New Yorkers are really clear about what is happening here.

And they are demanding justice for these teens and the civil rights community.

is largely extremely outspoken, in fact, about what is actually happening here and the hypocrisy.

If a black man would have gotten on that train and shot four rambunctious horsing around white teenagers, would this story even remotely resemble the one that would unfold?

And I don't think anyone actually even believed that it would have been the same, and yet it didn't matter.

You know, virtually every president had doubled down after Reagan on the economic conditions that then left us where we are today, right?

The

the anger, the disillusionment, all the things that we see today.

But Obama came of age at a time when there was some pushback to that.

There was some real pushback on the ground.

Occupy was a pushback to that consolidation of wealth and what that was really looking like in ordinary people's lives.

And Black Lives Matter was pushing back at that unleashed

violence, particularly against, and I would say with respect to President Obama, not just black men, of course, black women too.

And there was this moment of hope, I would say, but it was so, as you point out, the hostility to it was immediate.

It was profound.

And it actually then fueled the Fox News reaction that you read on steroids.

And then we start to see an even more virulent misinformation media come in that wake.

Yeah, exactly.

And you can really see that Trump himself understands this.