Fresh Air - Best Of: Fighting for free press in Russia / ‘Fear and Fury’

Episode Date: February 7, 2026

Julia Loktev’s latest documentary, ‘My Undesirable Friends - Part 1: Last Air in Moscow,’ follows independent Russian journalists in the months leading up to, and just after, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The film has arrived in the U.S. at a moment when questions about press freedom feel newly present. “Every day it feels like there is something to bring the story home for Americans, where it almost feels like there’s Easter eggs in the film that become more and more relevant.” she says. Also, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Heather Ann Thompson revisits a 1984 New York City subway shooting, when Bernhard Goetz, a white man, shot four Black teenagers. In the days that followed, Goetz became  a hometown hero. “We are watching someone tell us exactly who they are, exactly what they did, and it will not matter. Up will become down, down will become up. And that also felt very, very familiar to where we are today.” Her book is ‘Fear and Fury.’ Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Over the years at NPR's Fresh Air, we've gotten to talk with a lot of great filmmakers. Now we've made a playlist of some of our favorites, including Martin Scorsese, Stephen Spielberg, Ava DuVernay, Mel Brooks, Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and others. Find all our new playlists and more at Fresh Air Plus at plus.npr.org slash fresh air. From W. H.Y.Y. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, filmmaker Julia Loctiv. Her latest documentary follows independent Russian journalists in the months leading up to and just after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The film has arrived in the U.S. at a moment when questions about press freedom feel newly present.

Every day it feels like there is something to bring the story home for Americans where it almost feels like there's Easter eggs in the film that become more and more relevant every day. Also, historian Heather Ann Thompson revisits a 1984 New York City subway shooting when Bernard Getz, a white man, shot four black teenagers. And the days that followed, Gets became a hometown hero. Up will become down, down will become up. And that also felt very, very familiar to where we are today. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.

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It is hard to get a house. Getting that down payment together, brutal. You shipped off to Djibouti to afford a down payment for a house? Yes, sir. 100%. On Planet Money, the high price of housing. What the Trump administration is trying to do about it? And will it work?

Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. On the ThruLine podcast from NPR, the former slaveholder who took on the KKK and won. He became more and more and more militant as time went on. Listen to ThruLine in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Four years ago, documentary filmmaker Julia Loctiv landed in Moscow to investigate the revival of an old criminal. weapon, the label Foreign Agent, a phrase with deep roots in Soviet-era repression. It was being applied not only to organizations, but to reporters, bloggers, and human rights groups that had spent

decades documenting political persecution. Armed with an iPhone, Lockdiv embedded herself among a group of young journalists working for TV Rain, Russia's last independent television channel, as well as other independent journalists who were deemed foreign agents. The result is My Undesirable Friends, Part 1, Last Air in Moscow, a five-and-a-half-hour documentary that has swept major critics awards and stand as a record of what it looks like when dissent is slowly criminalized in real time. Here's Julia Loctiv, describing how she first entered that world.

The world you're about to see no longer exists. None of us knew what was about to happen. Four months before Russia started a full-scale war in Ukraine, I came to Moscow to make a film with my friend Anya. Anya was a host at TV Rain, Russia's last remaining independent news channel. In the fall of 2021, it was still allowed to operate online, which is unimaginable now. By the end of that year, the Kremlin labeled more than 100 individuals,

and outlets as foreign agents. Those designated were required to stamp government disclaimers on everything they published, even personal social media posts, with penalties that could include steep fines or imprisonment. The film has arrived in the United States at a moment when questions about press freedom and the risks of reporting in politically charged spaces feel newly present here too. Just last week, journalist Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, were arrested by federal agents after covering a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, a case that is drawn sharp criticism from press freedom advocates.

Julia Loctiv was born in Russia and immigrated to the United States at age nine. Her filmmaking, across documentary and fiction, focuses on people living through history as it unfolds, often capturing private moments inside systems of power that are closing in. Her previous films include moment of impact, day night, day night, and the loneliest planet. Julia Loctiv, welcome to fresh air, and thank you for this film. It is sobering, but a necessary watch. Hi, thank you. I'm so excited to be here.

Well, you know, we're talking to each other just days after two American journalists were arrested by federal agents for covering a protest in Minnesota. And the first thing I thought about was you in this documentary. and how unnervingly timely it is that we are speaking right now. What was your reaction when you first heard the news? I mean, it's my reaction, as I keep hearing news after news after news. Every day it feels like there is something to bring the story home for Americans where it almost feels like there's, I hate to put it this way, but it's strangely like there's Easter eggs in the film that become more and more relevant

every day, whether it's arrests of journalists, obviously. I mean, small, like throwaways, like somebody talks about the end of comedy shows. Or there's a moment where Russia's largest, oldest NGO Memorial, which is a human rights organization that was dedicated to preserving the memory and researching cases of political repression, going back to Stalinist times, but also now. And they're shut down by the courts. And the judge uses the explanation of why should we the victors in World War II have to be ashamed of our history. And so then I hear, you know, Trump talking about the Smithsonian and saying, why can't we talk about, you know, only the pleasant things in our history.

Why do we have to talk about things like slavery? And this constant echo where one thing after another every day, it feels like something in the film starts to. to resonate in a different way here for the U.S. Take me back to 2021. You are home here in the United States, but you're watching something unfold in Russia. Independent journalists are being labeled foreign agents by the government. And at that point, there were, I think it was around 25 people on the list.

What made you think at the time, I need to get on a plane, there is possibly a film here? Yeah, this is a film where, the conception to execution was just a matter of a couple weeks. And I think the only delay was me getting a tourist visa to Russia because I'm an American citizen and not a Russian citizen. So, as you mentioned, I was born in Russia. I came to the U.S. as a kid. But I still followed, you know, news of what was happening in Russia. And there was this New York Times story that I think the headline was something along the lines of Russian journalists getting named foreign agents

and fighting back with humor. And I think the humor was also part of what caught me in the beginning, you know, because it had this photo of these two very familiar to me-looking girls that could have been walking down the street in Bushwick, frankly, you know, and, you know, with mom jeans and some cool t-shirts. Except they happened to be foreign agents. And Russia was declaring these individual journalists as well as media foreign agents. And it had just started.

for example, like, if I was declared a foreign agent, then I would have to put this on everything, you know, not just my articles, but you'd have to introduce me. This is Julia, a foreign agent. If I put a cat picture on my Instagram, I'd have to put, this is by a foreign agent, you know. And it was more than just, I'm a foreign agent. It's like a paragraph in big, bold letters, depending on where you're, what the platform that you're on. Absolutely. I mean, it was this very legalistic, exactly. The summary was, I'm a foreign agent, but it was in legalistic terms, you know, saying, Like, this has been created and or distributed by a source of mass media, foreign agent, carrying out the function of a foreign, you know, it was in very legalistic terms.

And, for example, if I was a foreign agent and you were introducing me on this show, you would also have to state this because if you didn't say I was a foreign agent, you'd get a fine and eventually jail. I mean, everyone was trying to figure out what on earth does this mean for us? And there were so few people, as you said, it's kind of hard to imagine because right now, There are hundreds, hundreds of foreign agents, but at the time, it was really new. And I had a friend, Anna Njamsar, who was a host at what was Russia's last remaining TV channel, TV rain. If you saw the Navalny film, for example, much of the footage you're seeing is TV rain. It's the kind of thing where everybody tuned in. Alexei Nalvani.

Yeah, Alexei Navalny. It was this kind of center of the opposition. And my friend Anna had just started this incredible show called Who's Got the Power, where under an authoritarian government, she was focusing on people who were trying to make lives better for someone, whether it be people with disabilities, the homeless population focusing on press freedoms, but various activists and civil rights leaders who were trying to create a different kind of politics under this government. And we thought it was quite disturbing, you know, when a society forces members of the society to mark themselves everywhere as suspect, not really belonging to this society as foreign agents. But it had just really started. And we said, OK, let's try to make a film about this. Let's see where this goes. And it was all happening so fast once you arrived there, though, that you shot most of it on your iPhone. I mean, you really said, okay, I really need to get as close to this as possible. And you pulled out your iPhone, and we're talking hours and hours over a span of time, just using your phone primarily.

Yeah, I had initially had this idea that I would have a cinematographer because I don't know. I thought, you know, I would shoot it in a normal way, like the way you're supposed to shoot documentaries, you know, with a little bit of a crew. But then as soon as I arrived, it was so clear that the best thing that I had was my access to people. And also kind of how comfortable people seem to feel with me. You know, I speak Native Russian, but I also, I don't know, it's just one body in the room when people really opened up to me. And also people are used to being filmed with a phone. Like the presence of phones is not a big deal. I did have a little, eventually got a little lens on my phone and a little microphone.

but it was just really me with the phone, and I think that so affects how people behave because there's an intimacy to the film, and that's what you see is it's not like a normal documentary with interviews and, you know. It's a slice of life in real time that we're seeing in this moment. I want to talk a little bit more, but first let's take a short break.

If you're just joining us, my guest is filmmaker Julia Loctiv. Her documentary film My Undesirable Friends, Part 1, Last Air in Moscow, is about independent Russian journalists in the months leading up to and immediately after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. This week on Consider This, it's called an AI spiral,

when a person communicating with an AI chatbot loses touch with reality. When I thought I was communicating with the digital god, I got dopamine from every prompt. Artificial intelligence, human consequences. This week on Consider This. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This year on ThruLine, NPR's History Podcasts. For generations, an American quest has shaped the world. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Now, 250 years in, what is that pursuit really about?

Join us each Tuesday for an essential new series, America in Pursuit, from ThruLine, on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts. You know, Julie, I think there's an assumption for some listeners that Russia has always, to a certain extent, been a close society when it comes to the press, that independent journalism was never really possible there. But that's not exactly true, right? I mean, can you give us a picture of what the media landscape is. actually looked like before this crackdown? No, absolutely. It's, you know, there was, it's kind of amazing before this crackdown. What was possible? There were reporters, there were a lot of reporters focusing on corruption, you know,

government officials who were channeling huge amounts of money towards their mistress's yacht or things like this, you know, it's all interconnected. And they were writing about this out in the open and obviously writing about social issues and human rights out in the open. And the fact that all of this was possible is kind of unimaginable now because, you know, at that point, Russia had initially invaded Ukraine in 2014. Obviously, there's been a low-scale war happening there, but nothing of the kind of war that has been happening since February of 2022. Bombing Kiev, tanks rolling in, the kind of war that we've been seeing was utterly, utterly unimaginable when I started filming. And it was utterly unimaginable

until the morning it happened. And so we're watching for most of the film these characters, and we know what happens. We know Russia starts this full-scale invasion. But they don't. They don't know what's about to happen because what ends up happening is in that first week of the full-scale war, all that independent journalism becomes impossible in Russia. And all of these characters try to work to live another day, to just keep reporting the truth. I mean, it's things like calling the war a war is illegal in Russia. And then it became to a certain point where it wasn't even just about the journalism anymore. It was about their lives and essentially fleeing for their lives because there was no way that they could do their work or have a life in Russia after the war started.

So I was there filming during the first week of that full-scale war. And every day they were trying to figure out how do we get to report tomorrow. And there were all these restrictions being put on them. Like the Russian communications authority said they had to only report what is confirmed by the Ministry of Defense. And they would find all these ways around it, you know, like they would be showing an apartment building bombed in Ukraine. And then they would say, you know, after they would say, we are obligated to say that the Russian Ministry of Defense says it is only bombing military targets when clearly we have just been shown that they are bombing an apartment building, not a military target. And then they would find all these other ways to try to, again, just to live another day to be able to report the truth to Russians. And they came out with a statement against the war.

all of them were extremely against us and horrified, but they kept getting more and more threats. Eventually, all these media would get shut down, and they were facing this choice of literally, do we go to work tomorrow, or do we go to the airport? And they decided to go to the airport, because the logic went, if they keep working, they really risked being thrown in jail. And if you're in jail, you're not much use to anyone as a journalist. You can't report from jail. And And so they made the choice to leave so they could keep reporting. Take me to your frame of mind as a filmmaker because here they are grabbing carry-ons, no idea where they're going, headed to airports.

What was going through your mind about your own safety as you capture this chaos? It's interesting because I think I thought about my own safety more when I first started coming to Russia. And then during that first week of the full-scale invasion, I became monomaniacal. The only thing I could think of was my footage and getting it out and making sure I was capturing things and making sure I was filming. I mean, Brittany Greiner had just gotten arrested. But I was like, well, I'm not a famous basketball player. You know, it's that thing you do where you logically try to explain to yourself why, you know, you'll be okay.

And I really just, you know, I was staying in this hotel that was literally surrounded. Like every time I walked out, I had to walk past this wall of riot police and helmets, you know. So I would just kind of keep my head down and go to wherever I needed to go to film. And most of the time I was filming in private places. You know, people, the whole film takes place in their living rooms, in newsrooms, in their cars. You were in the car a lot of the time. the film takes place where we spend our lives, which is, you know, at work, at home, and on the way from one to the other. And at other people's homes, it's really where people spend most of their lives. So I met them where they were. But where I felt most at risk, honestly, was every time I went to their workplace, especially in that first week. Because many of these newsrooms, you know, I mean, some of them that were bugged. There were journalists at some of these. outlets that had been killed, a lot of them were taking great risks. There'd been searches.

And so especially during that first week of the full-scale war when there was so much pressure and I was afraid every time I was there, you know, I thought anything can happen at any moment while they're sitting there trying to report on the news. But then I sort of thought, you know what, they're coming to work here. They're taking that risk. This is the risk they're facing every day just to come and report on the news. So I just need to shut up and film. I want to go back a little bit because I actually want to talk about the journalists themselves. I mean, you mentioned how they were young journalists, 20s and 30s, most of them women. They seem to be highly accomplished, highly skilled. What were their backgrounds?

Anya, for instance, tell us a little bit about her. She's. sort of the protagonist in this, the person that you're following throughout, and then you have these intersecting journalists that you're also checking in with. Well, Anya starts out as really like almost our guide into the world. She was the one person I knew, and it kind of feels like you have this brilliant friend in Moscow. You go to visit her, and then she introduces you to all these other friends. She's also the oldest of our characters, even though she's also quite young. But she is just incredibly talented. She's a novelist. She's a writer. She's a writer. now she's an archivist, a journalist.

She just is so multi-talented and had worked across different things. And, you know, she comes from this intellectual Moscow family where her father was a Solzhenitsyn scholar, and she comes from this. And then some of the characters are super young. Our youngest character, Xusha, she's 23. You know, she's not that far out of journalism school, to be honest. Because, you know, part of how this works is we very specifically did not try to choose, like, the most famous, the most illustrious journalists in Russia. We wanted to have this be about just ordinary peoples who were trying to create a better world in this society.

And so a lot of the characters are super, super young, you know. Two of them talk about how they were in first grade when Putin came to power. Like she says this beautifully She says, well, as long as I've known we There was such a thing as a president Because, you know, when you're three, you don't really Know what a president is You know, it's been Putin

A bunch of the characters are super, super young I mean, they're constantly referring to Harry Potter as a way of understanding Putin's Russia. They watch gossip girl. They hate watch Emily and Paris, you know. They live in a world that's very connected to our world.

and a lot of them just went straight from journalism school and many of them decided at a super young age, you know, like at 14, 15, you know, they decided this is what I want to do. But now, of course, all of them are now in exile. None of them can really go back to Russia, can step foot in Russia, and a lot of them have criminal cases against them. Russia does this thing where it arrests and sentences people in absentia.

And so, for example, there's a character, she appears only on air in part one, but she becomes actually one of the leading characters in part two. Her name is Liera. She's actually the youngest one. She's when we start seeing her. She's 22.

She's hosting this New Year's special. She says she decided to become a journalist at 15. Her mom wants her to become a banker. But now she's an anchor on TV Rain in exile. they're now operating out of Amsterdam. She is an extremist terrorist, according to Russia, and that's not in Russia. That's not just an insult like the way Trump throws it around. It is a legal status. She's declared an extremist terrorist. She's also been charged in absentia for spreading fake news about the Russian army because she talked about war crimes in Boucha. And several other TV rain

anchors also have been charged and sentenced for the same thing. Julia, the women, the journalists that you follow, they are continuing to live. They're into music, they're into fashion and dinner parties and dark humor, even with this threat hanging over them. What did you learn from them about how you keep fighting in the face of it? Absolutely. They keep living, and I think one of the things that's huge is community. community. And it's something that always played a role there. You know, people live, I always kind of say that Russian kind of, they live in, you know, in hordes and communities. They're not solitary. They live in kind of, they're constantly going to friends' houses and people are gathering and somebody

else will come over. And that is a huge part of what binds people together and keeps them strong and makes them able to do things. And there was a lot of energy in that. And I think community is huge. And there's a lawyer who speaks at a gathering. She says, you know, let joy and laughter also be a part of our resistance. And I think that's important. As, you know, they say, well, you know, Putin would like us to just curl up in a fetal position and cry. But we will continue to laugh.

And even as we're fighting. And I think generally dark humor is a huge, huge, huge role in this film. and really a huge role in Russian society. It is. Yeah, I was just going to say it feels very much cultural. I mean, they've had a century of dark things, and a lot of how it's been dealt with is dark humor. Well, there's that one scene where one of the journalists she's doing,

when you're deemed a foreign agent, you have to fill out these financial reports, right? And she's filling out financial reports of her expenses, her disclosures to the Russian government, we're seeing her have to calculate things like her Netflix account and her cat food and all of those things. And there's real consequences to her not getting it right, right? And she's making fun of it along the way.

There's nothing to do but laugh to keep from crying. No, absolutely, because, yeah, that's one thing we didn't mention. If you were a foreign agent, you also had to declare all your expenses to the government. So because, you know, that pair of underwear that you bought yesterday is now supporting a foreign agent. And so they would have to just detail all their expenses to the government. And of course, I mean, how can you not laugh? There's this sequence that you feature in the film, My Undesirable Friends, right after, I think it was like around February, into February of 2022.

So Russia invades Ukraine. And there's this sequence at TV Rain in those first few days where, um, the journalists that you're following are watching the news hit in ways because this is the time period when Western companies then start pulling out one after the other. So there are no Apple stores, no more Nike, no more IKEA. And then they realize that they have to leave as well. And you kept those cameras rolling. How did that feel in the moment when you started to see these bigger institutions say it's time for us to leave as well? Oh, it's all happening so fast. You know, my bank. bank cards stopped working. My credit card stopped working. It was like day by day. Russia was getting cut off from the world. And we have to, you know, that's something I keep emphasizing is that the Moscow you see in the film and the Moscow of these characters lives is not that different from New York or Paris. I mean, ideologically, yes. But, you know, they're used to a Zara store on every corner,

an H&M. They're going to restaurants. They're going to, yeah. They love machalates. They like, you know, watch Netflix, constantly refer to it. They take it for granted that there's an Apple store and an IKEA. And one of them cracks a joke then because obviously all these things are being shut down. Along with the press being shut down, the international stores are pulling out. And one of them is like, no, you know, I think she says she's like, no more Nike or Apple, we don't have a country anymore. You know, like, because these are all things they've started to take for granted. This is a very interconnected Russia for these characters, you know.

They've grown up in a very globalized world. And of course, now it's very, very different. And it's familiar. I mean, I think that's what's striking is so many films we see about, and pretty much all films, to be honest, like pretty much every film I've seen about Russia. it looks like a very far away place. Like it looks very, but, you know, it looks like it has nothing to do with you.

We see all of the old architecture. We don't. Right. Right. Or you see the old architecture or you go to some small town where, oh my God, these people are so weird. And, you know, the characters all seem so like one step away from the Soviet Union. And these are characters you might know. I mean, they're in crazy.

I know that sounds really cheesy, but so many people have said to me, like, they're just like. course, you know, and it's a bit, it sounds ridiculous, but it is true that they are incredibly familiar to us and their world and their hopes are incredibly familiar to us. You know, for example, you know, how they feel about queer rights. I mean, they're like how most of my friends feel. This film was your way of doing something, and it's a film about Russia, but it also makes the viewer ask, what does it mean to be the opposition under a government that you oppose? What is your role? What can you do? And I want to know, what do you tell Americans when they ask you this question? I wish I had some really great advice. I think, and yeah, it's absolutely a film about living under, you know, trying to do good under a government you oppose, trying to do good when you don't get results, you know, honestly, and still trying to do that. And I think that's really important.

You know, we are so used to measuring things in results. And I'm probably a spoiler alert, but this comes up in the second half. It's one of the most important moments for me in the second half is I got a message, a video message from this character, Edick, who we see getting, you know, where we're waiting for him outside of a police station in part one. He's a TV rain anchor. He also happens to have gotten arrested in Navalny, the film. But he's an anchor at TV Rain, and he sends me this really lovely message, and he says, you know, I like the story of Sisyphus. But I don't think of him as a victim.

I think he finds meaning in pushing the stone. And I think that's incredibly important. I think that's the lesson that, you know, if there is a lesson, It's the things that people say in the film. Let like joy and laughter be part of our resistance, you know, finding meaning and pushing the stone and not giving up even when things seem rather hopeless. Julia Loctiv, thank you so much for this documentary and for this conversation. Thank you. Julia Loctave's film is My Undesirable Friends Part 1, Last Air in Moscow.

Coming up, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Heather Ann Thompson talks about her latest book, Fear and Fury, the Reagan 80s, the Bernie Gett shootings, and the rebirth of white rage. This is Fresh Air Weekend. Sources and Methods is NPR's National Security podcast. When World News changes by the hour, we help you zoom out to understand shifting alliances, global flashpoints, and what is really happening in places like Iran, Venezuela, Greenland. Our reporters on the ground connect the dots to explain a world order changing beneath our feet. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. World News is changing by the hour.

On sources and methods, NPR's national security podcast, we zoom out to explain shifting alliances, global flashpoints, and what's really happening in places like Iran, Venezuela, Greenland. Our reporters on the ground connect the dots to help you understand a world order changing beneath our feet. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Getz, stood up, unzipped his jacket, pulled out a gun,

and shot all four of them. In the days that followed, Gets became a hometown hero. Tabloids crowned him the death-wish vigilante, and who 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 with the city could not. A jury later acquitted gets 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 Getts shootings, and the rebirth of white rage.

Heather Ann Thompson, welcome to fresh air. So glad to be here. I want to start with Bernie gets. 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, he's still living in the city, he's still giving interviews, he defends what he did. But you actually decided not to interview him for this book. How come? Well, in part because the really striking thing about this event at the time, and as it's been remembered since, is that the story is all about him. The story is about writing the justification for what he did on that subway so many decades ago. And so much so that I am really embarrassed, actually, to say that when I began to think about this case again,

I didn't know the names of the teenagers he'd shot. And I suspected that I was not alone, that there was a complete erasure, actually, of the serious victims of this. And I suspected that I was. crime. I want to get more into the young men and who they were and what you found out through your research, but I want to know what you found out about Gets, who he was before the day he shot those teenagers. He was the youngest child of a quite strict father and quite domineering father. He grew up in rural New York, clearly felt alone, a bit picked on by his peers as a child. And I think from the very beginning was exhibiting a problem with authority and feeling misunderstood and anger and all of those things. But I also was struck by the way in which

that was not the explanatory thing that we might think it was. He, yes, he was a loner and he was an electronics nerd who lived by himself and worked for himself in part because he was. He, yes, he was a loner, he had a difficulty, I think, getting along with others. But on the other hand, he was a guy who would step outside of his apartment in the 1980s, New York, and just be so irritated and angered at the garbage piling up on the stoop and the sex trade going on on street corners and the scores of people suffering, the ever-deepening AIDS epidemic. And he felt, a degree of abandonment and fury by that and saw all of it as the fault of a liberal do-gooder government that was not taking care of business, not cleaning things up. And in that sense,

he was this every man, white American who was feeling dislocated and discombobulated by the time of the 70s and ever more so as the austerity of the 80s kicked in. And that viewpoint, that narrative, I mean, New York in 1984, just to put ourselves there, you articulated it quite well, but it was genuinely a dangerous place. Crime was high. The subway was very chaotic. Lots of crimes happening on the subway. I remember it. Many of us do. It was grim. It felt dangerous to be in the subways. It felt abandoned to walk down almost any city street, wherever you grew up. And it felt like we were in an absolute crisis in the 1980s. And so it wasn't that I doubted the sentiment on the ground,

but what was striking to me was why was it that people were interpreting that really terrible urban situation as the fault of its weakest residence, its most marginalized residents, those who were already poor, those who were suffering, frankly, this crisis far worse than they were. And that was when I really began to dig into the politics of the Reagan 80s and more importantly, the economics of the Reagan 80s. The Reagan Republicans were so fascinating because they weren't new in the sense that they wanted to undo the social safety net and the kind of legacy of the new deal.

liberal America. Rich people in America had long wanted to do that. Conservatives in America had long wanted to do that. But they were kind of brilliant in that they were able to understand the power of racial resentment. They were able to connect that racial resentment to a critique of liberalism in a really kind of brilliant way, alarming but brilliant way. And so by the time they take the White House,

They are, meanwhile, dismantling the very funding that people need for their public schools to have the trash picked up, to fund public health centers and research for public health. And all of the things that New Yorkers really need are being stripped and are being eroded. But no one's eye is on that ball, right? They are instead focused on the wreckage that they see on the ground. And where this takes us to, let's go to this day. Gets is on the train. These four teenagers are on the train as well. They're traveling from the Bronx to lower Manhattan. One of the boys, Troy Canty, he either asked for or demanded $5 from Gets. And then what happened next? Well, before we can actually even get to what happens next, I think we need to go back a few years in the South Bronx where Troy Canty came from and his three teenage friends that were on the train that day. The suffering that Bernie gets saw on the street every day he left his Greenwich Village apartment was all happening in the South Bronx in a far more acute way. This is a neighborhood where people are absolutely in despair.

Public sector jobs have dried up. One of the important employers of teenagers, for example, in the summer, they were called CETA jobs. They're eradicated by the Reagan administration. Funding for drug rehab, funding for occupational and educational opportunities, all of these are being eradicated. And so for these teenagers, there isn't much to do. There isn't much hope. And there's a whole lot of need on the ground to have some money. And there's a few choices. And one of them is the illegal drug trade. But, you know, teenagers themselves were very loathe and leery to get involved in that. Illegal markets are always dangerous. And these four teens were on their way. And into Manhattan because they wanted to go to a video arcade there to jimmy open the coin receptacles. And we might remember those old arcades you'd put in a quarter to play pinball. Well, they would collect those quarters.

They'd jimmy it open. They'd get a little cash that day. And so what was kind of bringing everyone on the train together in that moment, including the passengers, was they're all sharing an urban crisis, but they are all responding to it. differently, feeling differently about it. And that's how this whole moment kind of ignites, I would say, on December 22nd, 1984. Right. So they're headed to Lower Manhattan to go to an arcade to break into a video game and take the quarters, essentially, take the change and have a little bit of money. And Troy asks or demands that gets, give him $5. Yeah, he says, you know,

Do you have $5? And even that is an interesting kind of moment because why does he want $5? He wants $5 because he knows that if they go into this arcade with no money in their pocket, it's not even plausible that they're going to play some games. So that's sort of a thinking ahead kind of thing. But by axing for $5, this is panhandling. And the other thing about New York City in this moment is panhandling is rampant. The others on the train that day had also seen these teenagers and were unalarmed. You know, they were unconcerned.

And every exchange that these teenagers had with the other passengers, hey, how are you? Do you have a light? No one felt the need to get off the train. No one felt threatened. No one felt the need to talk to the conductor. It all felt very ordinary. It felt very regular. But not to Bernie Gatz.

When these four teenagers are on the train and when Bernie gets stands up suddenly, by the way, Troy Canty thinks he's reaching for his wallet. He's relatively, you know, he thinks, oh, okay, that's nice. The man's going to give me $5. The man's going to give me $5. And when he turns suddenly and he assumes a combat position and to use his own words, lays down a pattern of fire and takes out first Troy Canty in the chest, then Barry Allen in the back as he. he is running. Then James Ramzor threw the arm and the bullet goes into his lungs as he's trying to flee. He misses Daryl Keeb. And the most chilling part of this story is that he then walks over to Daryl Kee, who at this point is cowering on his seat and he says, you look all right. Here's another. And he shoots in point blank

range severing his spinal cord. I want to play a clip of Gets. It's video of his first. It's video of his first interrogation, he's talking with authorities about what he did and why he did it. Let's listen. If I had more bullets, I would have shot them all again and again. My problem was I ran out of bullets, and I was going to gouge one of the guys' eyes out with my keys afterwards. You can't understand this. I know you can't understand this. That's fine.

The only reason I didn't do it is because Tia changed as well. That was Bernard Getz, during his first interrogation. irrigation after he had turned himself in. And Heather, I'm sure that you have looked at this video many times. What did he mean when he said one of the boys changed his look? So, yeah, the thing about his confession that he will eventually make after being on the lamb for nine days, on the run from the law, is an extraordinary piece of video. He is confessing to everything he did audaciously, aggressively, and it all comes down to for him he didn't like the look in Troy Canty's eyes or has he put it the gleam in his eye. And he ultimately decides not to go over there and gouge his eyes out after he's already shot him in the chest because he had changed the look in his eye.

Well, the look in his eye was terror and bewilderment. And so the confession is this astonishing piece of tape that also really resonated with me in terms of the contemporary moment we are in because we are watching someone tell us exactly who they are, exactly what they did, and it will not matter. Up will become down. Down will become up. And that also felt very, very familiar to where we are today. I mean, what's astounding, Heather? I watch this video. It's on YouTube.

And, you know, like people do, I read the comments. And the comments to this day, comments that were written just a few days ago, so many people still see him as a hero. That goes back to what you're saying about what we hear when we hear this confession. In real time back in the 80s, people wrote fan letters after hearing about what happened. They sent him donations. Joan Rivers even wrote him? First off, how did you find out that detail? You know, just as I do, digging, digging, digging, finding pieces of paper, reading articles, seeing where it might have been reported the first time. One of the extraordinary pieces of paper that I first saw, and then began digging for more, was the hate mail that poured into the teens that were sort of the mirror image of the celebratory, congratulatory messages that Gets was receiving. And both sets of sentiments were passionate and scary, frankly, really scary. And it made me also realize that the moment we are in, just to keep kind of connecting that dot,

is less new than we think. So the question is what is it that just kind of unleashed it in that moment and has been, I think, unleashing it since. You go on in the book in great detail that we continually see this. I mean, we saw it with George Zimmerman after he killed Trayvon Martin. More recently, as you write about Daniel Penny, who killed a homeless man named Jordan Neely. on the New York subway. As a historian, when you look at this kind of public response to this case and then look at these modern examples, that through line, that continuity, what is the thing that strikes you the most? Race. I mean, there is an inescapable story here about the way in which this case and subsequently, cases like it were fueled and animated and legitimated by the sense that the people who had been killed or harmed or damaged had deserved exactly what they got. And all of that is framed in such a way that it is just inescapably racialized. So to me, that is the through line.

And of course, once you normalize public violence to that extent, it will have spill. over, right? You will have, you know, it will also be directed at people that we disagree with politically or that we see as a threat in other ways. But the violence we have unleashed, the lawlessness, the disregard for a rule of law, and the absolute eradication of truth as something that matters, facts as something that matters. When that happens, nobody is safe. It doesn't matter if you live in Minneapolis. It doesn't matter if you live in Denmark. It doesn't matter where you live. If the rule of law doesn't matter anymore, and if truth doesn't matter anymore, and if facts don't matter anymore, we are all in danger. Heather Ann Thompson, thank you so much for this book.

Thank you so much for allowing me to share it with everyone. Heather Ann Thompson's book is Fear and Fury, the Reagan 80s, the Bernie Gets shootings, and the rebirth of white rage. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley. Akela Sherrills remembers the day in 1992 when the Bloods and Crips gangs in his Watts neighborhood

agreed to a ceasefire. We had a barbecue. It was like it became a family reunion. I mean, we had a three-decade war, you know. So the release was just extraordinary. Listen to the TED Radio Hour on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Can a superstar be an actual voice of resistance?

When it comes to the singer Bad Bunny, some say yes. Bad Bunny comes out of a long legacy of Puerto Rican music and Puerto Rican art as resistance. Listen to NPR's Code Switch in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.