Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci
Historian: This Event Created Trump, Giuliani & Rupert Murdoch - Heather Ann Thompson
28 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What historical event does Heather Ann Thompson connect to today's political climate?
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 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. Big government's bad. Trust us in the private sector to take care of everything. And they're kind of given a Faustian bargain. Be
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.
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Chapter 2: How did the Reagan era influence public perception of crime and race?
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.
Yes.
Okay. And you've written some other stuff, but I want to go to this. This is 1984. Yeah. 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?
Chapter 3: What role did the media play in shaping political narratives in the 1980s?
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 and there was kind of a new mean austerity economically on the one hand, but on the other hand, there was a 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. And so it turned out this was a story that was kind of ground zero for where we are today.
I'm going to throw a theory at you. Okay. What part of Detroit did you grow up in, by the way?
The city-city, northwest side.
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Chapter 4: What significance does the Bernie Goetz shooting hold in American history?
My family, I have family in Ferndale, so I'm in Detroit a lot, actually. I'm going to 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, and 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. 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.
We 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.
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Chapter 5: How does Heather Ann Thompson explain the rise of white rage in America?
And today we when there was a belief that the rule of law mattered, that 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
And the question is, when did we then go back to this renormalization and relegitimization 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's a year after this, right?
Chapter 6: What impact did economic policies have on crime rates in urban America?
Remember?
Yeah, that's right.
It was gunned down right before Christmas, you know, December 16th, 1985, in front of Spark Steakhouse. So, I mean, we had a gang shooting each other back in this time period. But you did a couple of things here that I...
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. 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.
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Chapter 7: What are the sociological implications of cutting social programs?
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.
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. He fires the gun.
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Chapter 8: How can understanding history help us address current societal issues?
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 who would call these people welfare queens, but then there's another group of people who say, hey, You've enslaved people. You 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 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.
Well, I think, yes.
Do I have the book right? I mean, I love the book.
You absolutely do.
Tell us about that. Tell us, like, be my Sherpa. 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
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