Heather Ann Thompson

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.

And that needed explaining.

And part of the answer was smoke and mirrors and the fact that the misinformation media had become so enormously powerful, specifically Fox.

And that had a history.

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,

Black criminal kids are the problem, not corporate greed that's out of control, not laws that are saying you can carry a gun and defend yourself even when no one's doing anything to you.

So it was a moment when all of a sudden 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.

Well, I think, yes.

You absolutely do.

Well, I think that you've just nailed it.

So crime is a social condition, right?