Tanya Mosley

This is Fresh Air.

I'm Tanya Mosley.

Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson has written a new book that explores fear, how it has become one of the most powerful forces in American life, powerful enough to excuse violence, shape policy, and decide whose lives matter.

Fear and Fury tells the story through a small cast of characters.

Four black teenagers, a white man who decided he was under threat, a media ecosystem that turned fear into profit, and a political system that rewards weaponizing fear.

Three days before Christmas in 1984, the teens, who were from the South Bronx, boarded the subway headed downtown.

They were loud and rambunctious.

One of them asked the white man sitting alone for $5.

That man, Bernard Goetz, stood up, unzipped his jacket, pulled out a gun, and shot all four of them.

In the days that followed, Goetz became a hometown hero.

Tabloids crowned him the death wish vigilante, and he received thousands of fan letters, cash donations, and public praise from everyday New Yorkers to celebrities and powerful media figures who framed him as a man who had done what the city could not.

A jury later acquitted Goetz of everything but carrying an unlicensed gun.

Thompson argues the case marked a political turning point when white racial fear was sanctioned by law and leveraged by elites who learned how useful fear could be.

The book is titled Fear and Fury, the Reagan 80s, the Bernie Goetz shootings, and the rebirth of white rage.

Heather Ann Thompson, welcome to Fresh Air.

I want to start with Bernie Goetz.

He was acquitted of attempted murder for the shootings.

He served less than a year on the gun charge.

And he essentially returned to life in New York.

Right now, he's in his 70s.