It's the Brian Lowe Show on WNYC.

Good morning again, everyone.

So some of you have a certain age and may remember,

and many others of you may have read about, the infamous subway shooting of

1984, a man named Bernhard Getz, gunned down four black teenagers on the number two train,

and of course the media ran wild with a story. It was, of course, a real story.

The New York Post and the Daily News published hundreds of pieces with sensational headlines,

framing the teens as hardened criminals, and Gets as a sort of vigilante hero.

It was an era-defining incident in the Koch 80s, the Reagan 80s, the time when crime and poverty

were running rampant in the city, certainly compared to now, despite the fact that the shootings

appeared to be basically unprovoked to critics of gets, prevailing public public opinion pretty quickly cited with him and celebrated

the shootings as an act of bravery or at least self-defense from a mugging.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Heather Ann Thompson recently published a book that details

the shooting and its political backdrop. The book offers a rich

narrative account of the incident and how the public's reaction to it offers crucial insight

into the kind of racial resentment that politicians have been capitalizing on before, certainly,

but also maybe in a different way ever since. It's also about the fallout of

Reaganomics, the rise of conservative media in the city, maybe the country, the weaponization of

fear that has come to define a big part of American politics. I'll also note that it's a

page turner. She dives into the lives of the victims whose names are

Darrell K.B. Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramsor, and I mention their names because they are far less

famous than Bernhardt gets himself. And through their stories, she lays out a deep political and

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