[music]

ICE Agent: You have about two seconds before you're arrested for hindering a federal investigation.

News clip: I'm not even a---

Micah Loewinger: People are using apps like Eyes Up and Red Dot to document ICE activities. Meanwhile, the government is playing whack-a-mole to get them taken down.

Joseph Cox: Apple complied, and that sets off this domino effect where Google then removes Red Dot.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Also this week, after Trump declared Antifa a domestic terrorist organization, conspiracy theorists targeted a professor who studies Antifa.

Mark Bray: Then the death threats started. I got an email from some random person saying they were going to kill me in front of my students.

Micah Loewinger: Plus, an incarcerated journalist on how true crime flattens reality.

John J. Lennon: Many of these people going to sleep to murder, they wake up grateful for all the prisons. We don't see the humanity.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. What happens when you pour nearly $29 billion into a militarized law enforcement agency with little to no oversight or accountability?

News clip:: Authorities in Los Angeles County declaring a state of emergency over federal immigration raids.

News clip: There are concerns about the amount of force that federal agents are using against protesters. South Portland.

News clip: 1,500 arrests and more to come. That's the promise made by border chief Greg Bovino telling--

Micah Loewinger: Videos of these arrests are now flooding our social media feeds, racking up millions and millions of views.

News clip: In Chicago, there's new video of a deliberate collision as agents chase down two suspects.

News clip: This video was taken outside of an elementary school in Chicago.

News clip: Wait, you guys came to the school to do this?

News clip: Do you have a warrant? They haven't asked for a warrant.

News clip: On Friday in Chicago, a journalist by the name of Debbie Brockman was forced to the ground and cuffed by three big federal agents while she was out reporting.

ICE Agent: What's your name? What's your name?

Debbie Brockman: Debbie Brockman. I work for WGN. Please, let them know.

ICE Agent: I got you.

Micah Loewinger: Joseph Cox, a reporter at 404 Media, has been covering the government's attempts to silence community efforts to archive these types of videos, including the project Eyes Up.

Joseph Cox: Eyes Up provided a simple map interface where users could just find those videos.

ICE Agent: Go, go, go, go, go.

Joseph Cox: I'm zooming on New York. There's videos here of ICE officials violently pulling someone down the corridor through a courthouse.

ICE Agent: What country are you from?

Male Speaker 6: I'm from Winston.

Joseph Cox: There's Chicago.

[indistinct conversation]

Joseph Cox: Detroit, Kansas.

ICE Agent: Two seconds before you're arrested for hindering a federal investigation.

[indistinct conversation]

Joseph Cox: Los Angeles.

[indistinct conversation]

ICE Agent: We're going to check, and if he's good, we'll bring him back.

Joseph Cox: And San Diego as well.

[indistinct conversation]

Joseph Cox: It's not all-encompassing, but it does give you a pretty vibrant snapshot of what ICE looks like in the US today.

Micah Loewinger: You interviewed the administrator of Eyes Up. What did he tell you about what he's trying to do with this?

Joseph Cox: Yes, so I spoke to the administrator who goes by the name Mark. They said that the purpose of Eyes Up is quite simply to document and preserve evidence of abuses of power by law enforcement, which they think is an important part of being in a free society. This is not about tracking the real-time location of ICE officials, which some other apps have done. Everything is manually verified, manually added to the service by Mark. The speed and the dynamic of this is really different to some of these other, I call them ICE spotting apps that we've seen in which the US Government has taken action against.

Micah Loewinger: Tell me about why Apple took the app down.

Joseph Cox: In emails to Mark, which Mark then shared with me, Apple said that this app violates its guidelines around objectionable content, and that can include defamatory, discriminatory material, traditionally about someone's religion, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or, crucially, in these emails from Apple, they said, "Or other targeted groups," which in this case appears to be a reference to ICE officials.

Micah Loewinger: So Apple's basically saying by our terms of service, ICE is like a protected group. That's what it is?

Joseph Cox: Yes. They say targeted group. Then they also add that they have received information from the Department of Justice that this app is used or could be used to harm officers individually or a group. I don't know what that evidence may be, but again, in this case, it's not a real-time location data app. It's a news aggregation service. There's stuff from NBC News on this map. I don't think anybody would say NBC News is revealing the real-time location of ICE officials. It's just another way to access publicly and mostly verified information.

Micah Loewinger: On the app, I saw a video that appears to have been recorded in Key West, Florida, where a federal agent ends up arresting a guy who's asking him questions while he's filming the officer arrest another man.

News clip: You took a video of me. I'll let you know I'm taking a video of you.

News clip: What's the threat?

News clip: What's the threat?

Joseph Cox: ICE officials and other law enforcement officials, as well, have been arresting or temporarily detaining people simply for exercising their First Amendment right to be able to film the police in a public place. We just saw one where in Portland, someone dressed up in a giraffe suit singing a song that was calling ICE Nazis and that they hate brown people.

News clip: If you hate brown people, you are a Nazi. Come on, ICE, leave Portland.

Joseph Cox: Was then grabbed and then was then pulled into the ICE facility.

News clip: Hello. What are you doing? He's talking.

Joseph Cox: They were singing a song that sure may get under your skin, but that's not illegal. It can be a crime to interfere with a law enforcement investigation, but in most videos I’ve seen, especially on this app, it's people just documenting passively what it happening. They're not actively involved, and that's legal, and you're allowed to do that.

Micah Loewinger: You mentioned some ICE spotting apps, which is a different genre of ICE documentation that we've seen on Apple and Google, some of which have also been removed. Can you tell me about some of them?

Joseph Cox: Yes. The most prominent ICE spotting app is one called ICEBlock that was launched earlier this year, but it really became popular when CNN covered it in June.

CNN Reporter: Joshua Aaron developed ICEBlock. It's a free crowdsourced app that alerts users when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are spotted within a 5-mile radius of their location.

Joseph Cox: Even though ICEBlock is definitely the most prominent, copycats or slight variations have launched. There's Red Dot on the Google Play Store, another one called DEICER.

Micah Loewinger: These apps were removed from the App Store because the Department of Justice asked Apple to take the apps down?

Joseph Cox: Yes, so for some context, in September, there was a shooting at a ICE facility. Two detainees died. I believe one more was injured. Authorities say that after the shooting, they found bullet casings from the suspect with anti-ICE messages written on them. Authorities say this person used their phone to search for ICE spotting apps, including specifically ICEBlock. After that, the Attorney General Pam Bondi and DOJ officials contact Apple and demand that they remove ICEBlock. Apple complied. That sets off this domino effect, where Google then removes Red Dot, and then, eventually, Eyes Up was removed as well.

Micah Loewinger: Attorney General Pam Bondi last week posted on X saying that DOJ had successfully gotten Facebook to take down a group page that she said was "being used to dox and target ICEgov agents in Chicago."

Joseph Cox: I have seen a limited archive of that Facebook page. It's difficult to access now, of course, because it has been taken offline. But the section that I scrolled through, I did not see any evidence of ICE officials being doxxed or specifically targeted. It was more just reporting, "Hey, there are ICE officials at this location," very much in the same way that apps like ICEBlock were doing.

Micah Loewinger: Is there not a First Amendment issue here?

Joseph Cox: Even if there was some sort of legal mechanism that the US Department of Justice could do to force Apple to remove something, it clearly is not using that legal mechanism. All this is doing is Pam Bondi is demanding or else. To be fair, Apple and Google remove apps from their platforms all of the time for violating various terms of use, whatever they may be. It's just that usually that's not in response to direct pressure from the Department of Justice.

Micah Loewinger: How impactful are these apps, really? Were people using them? Was there some sort of proven effect that they were having before they were targeted by the DOJ?

Joseph Cox: I did speak to people on the ground in Chicago when Google removed Red Dot, and they said, "Members of our immigration and refugee rights support group they were using this app." That said, they did stress the importance of a hotline that people can ring if they need assistance, if they see ICE, if they need to get legal advice, or whatever it may be. That's something that the apps don't have because it's not a technological solution. It is about the trust of local communities. The apps could be a useful tool to them, but it's a multifaceted problem with technological and non-technological solutions as well. I imagine more people are going to end up potentially going to a web browser version if they know that exists, or many may end up using the hotlines that already exist.

Micah Loewinger: What about the videos recorded of ICE arrests? Have you seen any evidence that archiving these videos is having a real-world effect?

Joseph Cox: I don't think there's going to be accountability for ICE, the agency, or any officials in ICE doing abuse in the near term. There was one case in New York in the courtrooms where an ICE official aggressively pushed a mother to the floor.

[indistinct conversation]

Joseph Cox: DHS temporarily suspended that person, and then, within a couple of days, they were back. That was somebody who did not have a mask on. While we have ICE officials in masks, not carrying badge numbers, not identifying themselves by name, sometimes not even saying the agency, accountability is something that's going to be very, very hard to get. That's the whole point of Eyes Up, in that it's not trying to provide immediate accountability. It's trying to create and preserve a historical record of evidence, so in the future, maybe there can be accountability.

Micah Loewinger: All of us, if you spend any time on social media, if you turn on the nightly news, we've all just been inundated with these videos of what ICE is doing, chasing people in the streets, tackling them, handcuffing them. If this imagery is not enough to awaken people to something frightening that's taking place in our country, I'm not sure what will.

Joseph Cox: Yes. To be perfectly honest, even though as a journalist who covers this every single day, even I'm forgetting some of the clips I saw two weeks ago or a week ago, and I'm remembering, whoa, was that Portland? Was that Chicago? It's overwhelming. It's disorientating. Of course, that's part of the point as well. You see, on the flip side, DHS and ICE going out, when they perform operations, they are going with a film crew. We've reported that some DHS officials are wearing Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. We don't know if they're recording or not, but they're wearing that sort of thing.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. This is fascinating to me. Mark, the creator of Eyes Up, told you that, "I think the Trump administration is just embarrassed by how many incriminating videos we have." Then we have the Department of Homeland Security posting their own videos on X showing ICE officers chasing and tackling people set to action movie music.

[video playing]

ICE Agent: What's going on? Why are you recording us? Hey, you're interrupting us. [unintelligible 00:13:13] I will arrest you.

[end of video]

Micah Loewinger: It doesn't really seem like the Trump administration is embarrassed. They just want control over how these videos are packaged and presented.

Joseph Cox: Yes, I think that's exactly right. Because in those videos that they post to the official DHS X account or whatever it is, they control the music, the pacing, the edit, the narrative that goes around it. They can say this was an illegal immigrant with a criminal conviction or whatever it may be, and in some cases, that may be true. I think DHS has shown itself repeatedly over the past few weeks that you actually cannot take their statements at face value, but they control that entire narrative when they decide to put something out.

Micah Loewinger: Why do you think controlling the narrative, curating the image of ICE, is such a huge priority for the DHS right now?

Joseph Cox: They desperately need more people to carry out this mass deportation effort. It is offering massive signup bonuses, there are some student loan benefits as well. It's probably in their best interest to put out these highly polished videos, which claim the ICE is targeting the worst of the worst, when in reality they're targeting a bunch of nonviolent people with civil immigration violations. It's not helpful for them to focus on that when they're trying to attract people who want to catch criminals.

Micah Loewinger: So it really is about sending a message about the efficacy of their deportation campaign while along the way withholding crucial information about what they're actually doing.

Joseph Cox: Yes. That crucial information, that void can be filled if people are allowed to film ICE, film the police, and upload it to a website or an app without fear of Apple or Google or whoever taking it down and bottlenecking access to their information.

Micah Loewinger: Joseph, thank you very much.

Joseph Cox: Thank you so much for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Joseph Cox is the co-founder of 404 Media and host of the 404 Media podcast. This is On the Media.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. Now to a tale of two Portlands, the one made up by Republican leaders and the real one in all its bizarre glory.

News clip: This past weekend, people bared it all to protest President Trump's plan to send the National Guard to Portland. They joined an emergency naked bike ride in the rain. The event got the attention of US House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Mike Johnson: The most threatening thing I've seen yet was the naked bicyclers in Portland who are protesting ICE down there. It's getting really ugly.

News clip: Donald Trump is trying to say that this is a war zone, that he wants to invoke the Insurrection Act. He's going to have to point at people in inflatable chickens, inflatable frogs, and inflatable unicorns.

Micah Loewinger: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem faced off with the animal army last week during her Portland visit, a city that turned out to be suspiciously calm.

Kristi Noem: I was in Portland yesterday and had the chance to visit with the governor of Oregon and also the mayor, and they are absolutely covering up the terrorism that is hitting their streets.

Micah Loewinger: That clip comes from a roundtable held at the White House last Wednesday dedicated to the administration's domestic boogeyman.

Kristi Noem: This network of Antifa is just as sophisticated as MS-13, as ISIS, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them.

Micah Loewinger: Also in attendance at the roundtable, a group of MAGA influencers, people like Andy Ngo, who spent years filming protests around the country, helping build the narrative we hear today.

Andy Ngo: Thank you so much for acknowledging Antifa. How they organize is that they are decentralized, autonomous, and they operate on deception. We're still to this day told that they don't exist.

Jack Posobiec: Antifa is real. Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost 100 years, in some instances going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany.

Micah Loewinger: That's Jack Posobiec, one of the big promoters of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, who now works for Turning Point USA. Shortly before their visit to the White House. Jack Posobiec and Andy Ngo helped stoke a doxing campaign against an academic they claimed is financing and inspiring domestic terrorism. Rutgers historian Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. Bray, who is an expert on terrorism and anti-fascist movements across the world, is not himself a member of an Antifa group. Nevertheless, the Rutgers Turning Point chapter began circulating a petition to have him fired. I asked him when he made the decision to leave the country.

Mark Bray: I was watching Yankees-Blue Jays game one, bottom of the first, and I got a threatening email with my home address in it.

Micah Loewinger: Oh, God.

Mark Bray: That's shortly after Fox News published a very critical article about me. Then, the death threats started. The first one came in the next day. I got an email from some random person stating they were going to kill me in front of my students.

Micah Loewinger: The Fox News article was about a Turning Point USA petition started by students at Rutgers to get you fired. If I have this right, at the time that Fox wrote about it, it had just over 100 signatures.

Mark Bray: Most of those signatories weren't even affiliated with Rutgers. Those students had never taken any of my classes. Some of them weren't even on my campus. Some of them were graduate students, but I've had to pay the consequences for that.

Micah Loewinger: You and your family decided to leave the country. Last Wednesday, October 8th, you're at the airport and you don't get on your plane?

Mark Bray: We were at Newark airport, had our boarding passes in our hands at the gate, when the United Airlines personnel basically said that someone at the last second had canceled, not the whole flight, of course, just the reservation for me, my wife, and our two children.

Micah Loewinger: I didn't know it was possible for someone else to cancel your check-in.

Mark Bray: I did not either, but it felt very ominous to me. Not only were we denied that flight, but the next day, before we were allowed to leave, I was searched and interrogated by federal customs agents for an hour, despite not being accused of any crimes by any law enforcement agency.

Micah Loewinger: What were they asking you?

Mark Bray: They asked to search my phone. They started asking me questions about money pertaining to my work, which is, of course, one of the accusations made by these far-right trolls. At which point I said, I am not comfortable continuing this conversation without a lawyer and they both backed off.

Micah Loewinger: You're no stranger to this kind of harassment. You received similar treatment eight years ago when you wrote Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, which is a history of militant anti-fascist movements.

Mark Bray: Yes, I was added to the infamous Turning Point professor watchlist in 2017 or 2018, a watchlist that has incited harassment against countless professors. Since about 2019, 2020, Antifa's been out of the news largely, and I've been left alone. This kind of concern that the local Turning Point USA group had in me teaching at Rutgers; I had been there six years already without hearing a peep from anyone. It was obviously a response to Trump's executive order and really very manufactured.

Micah Loewinger: If I have this right, you got the book deal in part because of your 2017 interview with my co-host Brooke Gladstone on this very show.

Mark Bray: The basic story was I was invited on your show, and then Dennis Johnson, who is one of the founders of Melville House Publishing, heard the interview and asked me to write a book version of that interview. It really was one of those really sharp left turns in one's life that has had obviously rippling consequences for years to come. Very appreciative of the show, although of course at the moment I'm dealing with some unintended consequences.

Micah Loewinger: We ruined your life, Mark.

Mark Bray: [laughs] No, no, it's all good.

Micah Loewinger: Let's talk about some of the basics of your research. What's the difference between Antifa and anti-fascist? Because they're not the same thing.

Mark Bray: Anti-fascism is like an umbrella term for all different forms of resistance to fascism, but I think came to be crystallized as its own kind of specific tendency, particularly after World War II, in the context of European debates in the left about how to respond to the potential resurgence of fascism or Nazism. The tradition that came to be known in English as militant anti-fascism was more of a kind of grassroots radical left movement to stop the fascists and Nazis in their communities at football stadiums, at punk shows. That specific European-inspired anti-fascism made its main influence with the creation of the Anti-Racist Action network in the US from the late '80s into the '90s. But the US has other anti-fascist traditions. For example, there's a really good book called The Black Antifascist Tradition that talks through the role of anti-fascism in different kinds of African American liberation movements, Black Panthers, and so forth. Short answer is that Antifa's like this specific tendency within a broader history of resistance to fascism.

Micah Loewinger: Part of the theory of militant anti-fascism is to not let them speak, to chase people off the street. This kind of thing?

Mark Bray: It's a kind of a preventative anti-fascism that says the way you stop fascism and Nazism from growing is you stop it while it's small because it's easier than when it's larger, based on the historical notion that right when Hitler and Mussolini started out, initially, they had very small groups of followers.

Micah Loewinger: I was recently reading a piece by Cathy Young in The Bulwark, and she says, "Antifa in 1930s Germany were emphatically not the good guys. They arguably facilitated the Nazis' rise to power not only by helping create a culture of political violence, but by directing a lot of their energy towards undermining anti-Nazi moderates and centrists, whom they regarded as fascist light."

Mark Bray: She's right that the German Communist Party pursued a strategy of actually demonizing other left formations like the socialists more than attacking the Nazis. Anti-fascist action which was basically the antithesis of the antifascist unity that would come after when Hitler came to power. The German communist strategy then was deeply flawed and misguided. The post war argument that I'm explaining is that after World War II, what activists concluded was the opposite of what the German Antifa did in the '20s and '30s, instead of attacking each other, let's be unified and instead of doing what the German Communist Party did, which is basically assuming that they could just beat the Nazis at the ballot box, let's organize and stop them before they become big enough and powerful enough to create a mass movement.

Micah Loewinger: What is it specifically about your work that Jack Posobiec and Turning Point USA find so objectionable?

Mark Bray: A lot of the kinds of things they've plucked to criticize me are from the introduction of my book, and certainly, a professor can tell when a student has not read the whole book. If they're trying to go after the, quote-unquote, "Antifa," and this is at the same time that they consider universities and professors to be dangerous purveyors of ideas they don't like. I kind of fit at the crossroads of that as the person that's explicitly identified with this term in my research. The problem is I have never, despite what these people say, been part of an Antifa group. Not in the past, the present, or the future. I identify as an anti-fascist. I greatly oppose fascism.

Micah Loewinger: You have a certain set of politics, but that doesn't mean that you are like doing black bloc-

Mark Bray: No, I am not.

Micah Loewinger: -fighting Proud Boys in the streets.

Mark Bray: No, I'm a boring professor dad who has read way too many books and would like to see society be completely different through movement building, mass protests, labor organizing. I was part of Occupy Wall Street in 2011 in New York City, which I wrote another book called Translating Anarchy about how there were very strong anarchist politics in this in favor of direct democracy of egalitarian forms of social organizing. If Jack wants to call me an anarchist, I am, but I'm not Antifa. I've never been part of one of those groups.

Micah Loewinger: As a historian, how would you write about, analyze the harassment campaign that you've been subjected to?

Mark Bray: Oh, I like that question. Although, of course, the difficulty in writing a history of something that just happened is we missed some of the broader dynamics, but authoritarian and fascist leaders always look for a crisis or an emergency to take advantage of. If there is no real one, they'll try to make it up themselves. The killing of Charlie Kirk presented such an opportunity even before we had any idea who did it. Trump was blaming the left. There have been so many cases in history of authoritarians taking advantage of the killing of specific figures. Horst Wessel in Germany was a stormtrooper who was killed by a communist, and he became a symbol for the Nazis.

Micah Loewinger: Wessel was the subject of a song that was the co-national anthem of the Nazi party between 1930 and 1945.

[anthem of the Nazi party]

Mark Bray: So I would start there and look at how the executive order on Antifa came not that long after.

Micah Loewinger: Not that long after Charlie Kirk's assassination.

Mark Bray: Exactly.

Micah Loewinger: I just want to add that there is no evidence that Tyler Robinson, the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk, was a member of Antifa.

Mark Bray: Right. I mean, the Department of Homeland Security memo that called Tyler Robinson Antifa-aligned, also called Luigi Mangione Antifa-aligned, and neither of them have any really easily classifiable politics.

Micah Loewinger: The writer and organizer Matthew Whitley recently wrote a piece in the Intercept arguing that mainstream media and liberals dismiss Antifa as just an idea instead of acting to defend the anti-fascist activists and researchers who are currently facing persecution.

Jimmy Kimmel: There is not an Antifa.

Micah Loewinger: We heard something similar from Jimmy Kimmel.

Jimmy Kimmel: This is no different than if they announced they rounded up a dozen Decepticons.

Mark Bray: Well, that's not true either. We're stuck between two extremes. On the one hand, Trump is saying that it's basically like a Fortune 500 company with its own private army, which is not true. On the other end, there are some liberal pundits who are so eager to dismiss Trump's depiction that they say it doesn't exist. There are actually Antifa groups. The Trump administration doesn't seem to care too much about them, in part because they're not major players in national politics. They're less interested in what Antifa really is than what it could be for them. They keep saying these things like, "We'll have to look into the funding." Well, presumably the FBI has been investigating this for at least 10 years, and they actually know.

Micah Loewinger: I was listening to your interview with Brooke from 2017 about this idea of not giving white supremacists and far-right groups a platform. I heard in your interview a frustration with how quickly a notion of free speech can give rise to extremist politics. I wonder, given what you've gone through, being run out of the country, whether your perspective on free speech has changed.

Mark Bray: No, but I think this is a very good question. The American view on free speech is not held by every country. Countries like Germany or the Netherlands, or whatever will allow the vast majority of speech. For example, they have prohibitions against creating explicitly Nazi parties, and so forth and so on. While I'm not advocating that the US do that same thing, we can look at free speech as something where anyone can say whatever they want, or we can kind of have a view of speech that looks at what are the actual implications of certain kind of speech being allowed to happen.

Having white supremacist groups operating on a college campus, for example, does not actually promote free speech because it makes it so that their victims are scared to articulate themselves. So the net total is actually a reduction in speech. I do think that we should, as a society, have some basic sense of decency. That having been said, the purpose of my research is not to say that there's any one way to deal with that so much as it is to present how historical actors have gone about addressing it.

Micah Loewinger: It's always fascinating to me when somebody is experiencing harassment because by doing all these interviews, you're also potentially reaching more people who might come to harass you. What was your calculus there?

Mark Bray: When I received the threatening email with my home address, I texted a friend of mine, and he said, "Do you want to go loud or do you want to go quiet?" I said, "I'm overwhelmed. What are you talking about?" He said, "You can obviously try to just get out of the spotlight and disappear, or if you go loud, you're going to basically bring thousands more eyeballs onto your situation in such a way that someone who might actually consider targeting you might feel like, this is just getting too hot."

I went that way, not only for the reason that he mentioned but also because I was angry and I wanted to fight back in the way that I know how to fight back. Just speaking and bringing my research to bear on the public discourse. It gave me a sense of agency. This has become an important story, not really about me per se, so much as it is about what could potentially happen if we don't change course.

Micah Loewinger: How has this ordeal impacted your family?

Mark Bray: It's been very difficult. My kids don't know what's happening, but they also know that something's wrong. The other day, my oldest had a nightmare that people were attacking our house. At one point, my youngest gave me this little toy monkey and said, "Here, Daddy, this will make you feel safe." He didn't know what was happening, but he knew something was wrong. This has been a nightmare. My hope, if there is a silver lining to this, is that it's showed people the kind of threats that academic freedom is under in this country and hopefully encourage people to take it to the streets to protest on No Kings Day and every other day to try and make our country a better place.

Micah Loewinger: Mark, best of luck to you and your family. Thanks for coming on the show.

Mark Bray: Thank you very much.

Micah Loewinger: Mark Bray is an assistant teaching professor at Rutgers University, now based in Spain, and the author of the Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. This is On the Media.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Following its debut earlier this month, Monster: The Ed Gein Story became the most-watched show on Netflix. It's a dramatized retelling of the serial killer who inspired Psycho in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

[Monster: The Ed Gein Story trailer]

Adeline: There's something real dark about you, Eddie Gein.

Male Speaker: What did you do?

[end of the trailer]

Brooke Gladstone: People love this stuff, and the obsession only grows each year. On Netflix last year, 15 of the top 20 documentaries were true crime docs, compared to just six in 2020. What does it mean for the subject of these documentaries that Americans endlessly crave stories about murder and bloodshed? John J. Lennon is a contributing editor for Esquire and writes frequently for the New York Review of Books and the New York Times. A couple of weeks ago, he called me from Sing Sing Correctional Facility, where he's serving the 24th year of his 28-year-to-life sentence for murder, drug sales, and gun possession. He recently wrote the book The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us. How is it that he himself ended up being the focus of a true crime documentary in 2018 called Inside Evil with Chris Cuomo?

John J. Lennon: Well, actually, I had gotten a letter from the woman I knew at CNN, and she had introduced me to her colleagues. I was telling my brother about this. He's like, "Cuomo, he's got that show on CNN, and it's called Inside Evil." I was like, "What?" When I went down to the visit, they were like, "No, no, no. First season, it was just called Inside. The second season is called Inside Evil. We're going a different route. We're telling stories of redemption." A couple weeks after that, when they came up for the filming, that's not what it was. To be fair to Chris Cuomo, he did level with me. This is the show. I had the governor's brother in front of me. What am I going to just like give him my back? I told him my story, and I was introduced to the dark side of the media.

Brooke Gladstone: You saw your crime being reenacted.

[Inside Evil trailer]

[music]

Female Speaker: There was definitely a dark side, another side to him. He blew parts of his body off. He's a killer.

[end of trailer]

John J. Lennon: You have this idea in your head of how the interview went. Then, watching the show almost a year later, it would cut to these reenactments of somebody playing me killing my friend, and slow motion of the AR15, the bullets coming out of it. It was a lot to process because it was quite different from the context of the conversation I had, which was a vulnerable one I'd like to thank at times.

[Inside Evil trailer]

Chris Cuomo: Were you able to process it with regret?

John J. Lennon: No, it wasn't regret yet. Regret comes when there's a possibility of getting caught.

[Inside Evil trailer]

John J. Lennon: Then the tone, with certain answers that I would give, how proud I was of who I'd become, and see those sort of juxtaposed to the sister of the man I killed. She was understandably emotional. I just thought the editing was just wow about what I'd done, the harm that I caused, thinking I was perhaps not as insightful about what I had done, at least in the context in which it was rendered. The identity of who I was as a writer was put up against who I was as the killer 18 years before. That conflict was constant in that 40-minute show.

Brooke Gladstone: How did this experience lead you to this book?

John J. Lennon: I had an idea in my head that true crime just corrupts our cultural understanding of crime and punishment. I wondered what I could bring to the genre. So I started getting the stories of the men around me. Not everyone is introspective about their crime, but some people are. There's not always this grappling with remorse, but some people do. What about them? I knew on one level I could tell a narrative story different from the stories that were told by traditional true crime tellers, and I knew I could be a trusted narrator for the reader because I was already doing that with my magazine writing.

Brooke Gladstone: There's a YouGov poll from last year that found 57% of Americans consume true crime content. If 57% go to sleep watching it on TV, you were convinced that more than anything you wrote, "This is what's keeping me, and not just you, in prison, true crime." How so?

John J. Lennon: I have a hunch that many of these people going to sleep to murder, they wake up grateful for all the prisons.

Brooke Gladstone: This is from the book. The stories we tell about the worst of humanity are a reflection on all of us. True crime is the antithesis of the notion that we're more than our crimes. It turns back the clock, reenacts it all for entertainment, usually by exploiting the people most affected by the violence. Victims whose wounds haven't healed, perpetrators who haven't reckoned with their guilt. This is the tragedy of true crime.

John J. Lennon: I was trying to do something different than what traditional true crime does. Most true crime stories start in medias res, in the middle of things, usually at the crime nine, 911 calls. It's police tape. When I start getting into the three men, first Michael Shane Hale, then Milton E. Jones, and then Robert Chambers. I do it as I meet them in prison instead of just learning about them through their crime.

Brooke Gladstone: You write with a great directness and clarity, and your engagement with these people doesn't lead you to excuse or in any way whitewash what they did. It can be quite graphic in places. Let's start with Michael Shane Hale and Milton E. Jones.

John J. Lennon: Sure. I first meet Michael Shane Hale in 2017. I used to run the yard with him. Shane was the kindest man I've ever met in prison. I call Michael Shane Hale Shane. I didn't know what he was in prison for. Eventually, you get sort of drips. I remember a guy in my ear said, "He killed his lover. He dismembered his lover. He's gay. He's this, he's that." The prison rumor mill is a lot like internet; it has some truths and some untruths. I used to work with him in a building. We used to prep guys for getting out. I remember sitting in his classes. He's showing guys how to use Narcan, and he's serving 50 to life. I was like, "Wow, that's an interesting job for a guy to do, that's probably dying in prison." That shows character.

I sat with him, learned his story. He was abused. Growing up in Kentucky, there's a very dysfunctional household. He joins the army at 18, he gets rejected there, and then he runs to New York City and he gets rejected there, too. He's constantly being rejected. There is a lot of domestic abuse, primarily in the relationship that led to the crime. Then we get to the killings, and then we see his life unfold in prison, which is pretty impressive. Milton Jones, at 17 in 1987, he kills two priests with his codefendant, Theodore Simmons. I meet him also in Sing Sing in 2019. He's a classmate of Shane's.

Brooke Gladstone: What do you mean "a classmate"?

John J. Lennon: There's a master's degree program in Sing Sing. It's in theology. By 2019, Shane was in it, and so was Milton. One of the clerks told me, "There's a guy here that killed two priests, like years ago, and he's studying for theology." I want to know more.

Brooke Gladstone: You said he was ostracized, too.

John J. Lennon: He suffered from schizophrenia. It was very difficult in this environment, and he had already earned a bachelor's degree. He was going to classes every day. He had his vices, but he also spoke truth, and his sentences were declarative. I was just like, "Wow, this is an interesting guy." I do the same thing with him. We meet in a cell block and take you to the scenes of talking to him. Then I drop back and I tell the story of his younger, more vulnerable years. He grew up in the rough side of Buffalo. His mother was 14 when she had him. He had some uncles that were criminals. One of his uncles got murdered when he was younger.

I remember talking to him about getting beatings when we were younger. He told me about his incidents. I told him about an incident of my mom whipping me, and we both laughed because what do you do? You can't cry in prison. The ones closest to us are the ones that introduce us to violence. Then we get to the killings. I don't hold back with the killing because I think what happens in a lot of criminal justice writing is it's the opposite of the true crime. The true crime, it's all about that. Then the criminal justice is all about the punishment. It obscures the accountability, and it obscures the harm we do to families. I won't do that. I'm going to go in there and I'm going to explain it, and I use my own crime to do that.

Brooke Gladstone: It is remarkable how you weave what you did in and among the chronicles of what your subjects in the book do.

John J. Lennon: Right, but only illuminating the dark spots that most writers and most storytellers can't go, and sometimes the criminal justice journalists, they won't do that. They don't think it's relevant sometimes to even talk about that. I disagree.

Brooke Gladstone: Can you tell me how they view their crimes now?

John J. Lennon: Michael Shane Hale was remorseful from the gate. He killed somebody he loved, somebody he resented. I'm talking about somebody who was 63 years old, his lover.

Brooke Gladstone: When he was in his 20s.

John J. Lennon: Yes, at the time.

Brooke Gladstone: His lover was also physically abusive as well as mentally abusive.

John J. Lennon: The documentation that shows that.

Brooke Gladstone: What about Milton Jones?

John J. Lennon: Milton served much of his years at the beginning in Attica in the '90s, and that was tough. He killed two white priests, and he's a black man. Attica has almost an all white staff. Most of the prisoners are people of color. Milton had it tough. Milton he was always accountable. He held the hands of Ray, the younger brother of one of the priests that he killed, and his wife, and look into their eyes and apologize for what he did.

Brooke Gladstone: So the person who stands apart from Shane and Jones is Robert Chambers, the famous one. He murdered an 18-year-old, Jennifer Levin, in 1986, was surrounded by an instant media frenzy, was dubbed the Preppy Killer, Central Park Strangler by the press. As recently as 2019, three decades after he killed her, there was a five-part docuseries called The Preppy Murder. What kind of narrative did this true crime coverage superimpose on Chambers' life?

John J. Lennon: Just your introduction right there. You said he murdered, and then you reference the documentary Preppy Murder. He was never convicted of murder. He was convicted of manslaughter.

Brooke Gladstone: Ah, right.

John J. Lennon: The jury couldn't convict Rob of murder. I was convicted of murder because they call it mens rea. It's like I had that on my mind, and I knew what I was going to do when I killed the man I killed. That was unequivocal. I do not believe walking out of the bar that night that Robert Chambers had murder on his mind. He had his coat back at the bar. But something happened. He did strangle her, and it was in the moment.

When I meet him, I moved to Sullivan, I landed in his cell block, and we started living together. Eventually, I asked him if he'd be open to participating in this book. I shared my work with him, and he said I'd rather have you tell my story than whatever is out there. If you want to tell the same story, then that's just going to be the same thing that's out there. What I was looking to tell, what does it mean to live a life with the media telling you who you are? I had one instance with this Inside Evil episode, and I was pretty bent out of shape about it. How do you overcome who people say you are?

Brooke Gladstone: What did you tell the reader about him that true crime would have missed?

John J. Lennon: From one addict to another, I understood why he did heroin. Heroin is a big drug in prison. It helps you not feel, kills the fear. Prison is fearful, but what happens is if you don't eventually get sober, you don't grow. Ultimately, that's what Rob's biggest problem was. I was trying to show what this looked like on a day-to-day level with Rob. Look, it's a difficult character. When we think of story, we think of a sympathetic character trying to overcome a complicated situation, which is prison, may not want to pick Robert Chambers.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, he sounds like a journalist's nightmare. He was both a willing and an unwilling subject, sometimes entirely unresponsive. Do you think you were able to fill for readers some of the missing pieces of his character?

John J. Lennon: Along the way, he had learned sign language. I'd see him helping men that were hearing impaired, were deaf. They were always going to Rob. I think that's part of the story. I'm also tough with him with questions when reflecting back on what happened that night with Jennifer, and I wasn't satisfied with his answers.

Brooke Gladstone: He had trouble expressing remorse. You've said that one of the heartbreaking moments in the book is when he goes back to prison with a 19-year sentence for drugs in 2008. He's surrounded by another media frenzy, and he told you, "I guess at that point I felt maybe I'm the guy in the newspapers, maybe they're right. So just leave me alone, let me go back to prison, let me get high and die."

John J. Lennon: That is heartbreaking. You see that exasperation on him. Part of me was like, "Am I doing what everybody else is doing? What is the point of telling this guy's story?" Even right now, as the book comes out, I'm thinking like, "Who am I to drill this guy?" I hoped that he would be vulnerable with me, maybe put some clarity to what happened that night, but that's not what happened. At the end, I see a guy that's broken from some of the themes that I've explored in the book. Maybe in part, this is what happens when the media sort of tells you who you are. I just sort of end in this idea of how Rob hasn't been too kind to himself his whole life.

Brooke Gladstone: Are you projecting remorse onto him?

John J. Lennon: Perhaps, some of us can't put words to remorse. There's not a happy ending to every story. That's not what this book is.

Brooke Gladstone: You told my producer, Candice, that writing for you is everything. It's the major conflict of this book. In your life, it's what brings you pride, brings the family that I hurt pain. It's what brings you shame. "Am I the murderer or am I the writer? Perhaps I'm both." What is the most important thing for you, the writer?

John J. Lennon: I think before you tell the stories of others, as a first-person narrative journalist, you have to figure out yourself, because there's no other way to come to terms with that in here. In 24 years, nobody that's worked for corrections has ever asked me, "John, what do you do with what you did, murdering a man?" That's not what goes on in here. It is what goes on on the page. It is what goes on between my editors, between men that I mentor.

Brooke Gladstone: Tell me about that.

John J. Lennon: Over the years, sometimes you come to people with a story idea, and they don't want to be your subject, but they may want to tell their own story. Last year, I hosted a workshop at Sullivan. Nine guys attended. Seven of the men were published. One of the prerequisites is coming to terms with what you did on the page. Readers are not going to want to read what you have to say about prison if you don't level with them.

Brooke Gladstone: That helps them come to terms with what they did?

John J. Lennon: The first thing you put on the page that may not be how you feel. "Oh, scrap that. That sucks. No, let's go back and forth. Let's talk about this, like I killed a man, too. What do we do with that?" I do this with them because my editor has done this with me. I remember when I was working on my first piece for the New York Review of Books, and I was writing about Jack Henry Abbott.

Brooke Gladstone: He is the man profiled by Norman Mailer, which is said to have helped get him out of prison.

John J. Lennon: Well, he was mentored by Norman Mailer. He had went back and forth writing him letters, and that's what Jack Abbott's book was about. The belly of the beast. Norman Mailer advocated for him to get out in '81. Six weeks later, Jack Abbott killed a night manager in lower Manhattan. He stabbed him. This is like an albatross on the neck of prison writers. My first draft was just. It was angry. I remember my editor saying, "John, I want you to rewrite this with poised ambivalence."

Brooke Gladstone: Poised ambivalence.

John J. Lennon: Yes, like have a little grace with him, drop your resentment, and just take another whack at it. You haven't dealt with reentry. He made some good points. It's these back-and-forths that help me grow. That essay gets to my own reckoning with my crime, how I feel about it. These are the back and forths to do with the men I mentor. That's what writing does.

Brooke Gladstone: This just occurred to me. John, you're eligible for parole in 2029.

John J. Lennon: Correct.

Brooke Gladstone: If you get it. Do you worry that, to use a business word, your value-added special insight will no longer be applicable? What will you write about?

John J. Lennon: Oh, I hate that question.

Brooke Gladstone: Oh, well, you don't have to answer it.

John J. Lennon: No, I want to answer it because the ability to find stories is the most important thing for any journalist. I look at the world as a story arc. I look at experience, and it's before prison, and I've been in the total institution for much of my life. Then there's the reentry part, and there's a lot of conflict. Look what we just talked about with Abbott. He couldn't figure it out. When I get out there, there's so much conflict that's going to come into my life, and I lean into that. What is it like to experience a true crime cruise with CrimeCon? The stories are endless. They don't stop. The story starts within you.

Brooke Gladstone: John, thank you so much.

John J. Lennon: Oh, thank you, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: John J. Lennon authored the recent book The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wong.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, with engineering from Jared Paul and Sam Baer. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is produced by WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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