Big Tech is Silencing the ICE Watchers. Plus, Why a Scholar of Antifa Fled the Country.

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.

Apple complied, and that sort of sets off this domino effect, where Google then removes Red Dot.

From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

I'm Michael Lellinger.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Also, this week, after Trump declared Antifa a domestic terrorist organization, conspiracy theorists targeted a professor who studies Antifa.

Then the death threat started.

I got an email from some random person stating they were going to kill me in front of my students.

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

Many of these people don't sleep to murder.

They wake up grateful for all the prisons.

We don't see the humanity.

It's all coming up after this.

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From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Michael Lewinger.

What happens when you pour nearly $29 billion into a militarized law enforcement agency with little to no oversight or accountability?

Authorities in Los Angeles County declaring a state of emergency over federal immigration rates.

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

1,500 arrests and more to come.

That's the promise made by Border Chief Greg Bolvino.

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

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

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

Wait, you guys came to the school to do this?

You have a warrant?

They have an astrologer.

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.

What's your name?

What's your name?

Debbie Brockman, I work for WGN.

Yep.

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.

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

I'm zooming in on New York.

There's videos here of ICE officials violently pulling someone down a corridor through a courthouse.

What country are you from?

I'm from Winston South.

There's Chicago.

Do you have a sign to do so what?

Detroit, Kansas.

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

Los Angeles.

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

And San Diego as well.

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

And you interviewed the administrator of ISEUP.

What did he tell you about what he's trying to do with this?

Yeah, so I spoke to the administrator who goes by the name Mark.

They said that the purpose of ISEUP 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.

It is not about tracking the real-time location of ICE officials, which some of our 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 and which the US government has taken action against.

Tell me about why Apple took the app down.

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, quote, or other targeted groups, which in this case appears to be a reference to ICE officials.

So Apple is basically saying, by our terms of service, ICE is like a protected group.

That's what it is?

Yeah, so they say targeted group, and 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.

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.

What's the threat?

ICE officials and 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.

If you hate brown people and you are a Nazi, come on, ICE and leave Portland.

Was then grabbed and then was then pulled into the ICE facility.

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 of the videos I've seen, especially on this app, it's people just documenting passively what is happening.

They're not actively getting involved, and that's legal, and you're allowed to do that.

You mentioned some ICE spotting apps, which is a kind of a different genre of ICE documentation applications that we've seen on Apple and Google, some of which have also been removed.

Can you tell me about some of them?

Yeah, so 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.

Joshua Aaron developed IceBlock.

It's a free, crowdsourced app that alerts users when immigration and customs enforcement agents are spotted within a five-mile radius of their location.

Even though Ice Block is definitely the most prominent, copycats or slight variations have launched.

There's red dot on the Google Play Store, another one called Deicer.

These apps were removed from the app store because the Department of Justice asked Apple to take the apps down?

Yeah, 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.

And 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, and that sort of sets off this domino effect where Google then removes red dot and then eventually Eyes Up was removed as well.

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 quote being used to dox and target IceGov agents in Chicago.

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 sort of way that apps like ICEBlog were doing.

Is there not a First Amendment issue here?

Even if there was some sort of legal mechanism that the U.S.

Department of Justice could do to force force Apple to remove something.

It clearly is not using that legal mechanism.

All this is doing is Pambondi is demanding or else.

And 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.

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?

I did speak to people on the ground in Chicago when Google removed Red Dot, and they said members of our group, 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.

And 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.

And 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.

What about the videos recorded of ICE arrests?

Have you seen any evidence that archiving these videos is having a real-world effect?

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 her mother to the floor.

DHS temporarily suspended that person, and then within a couple of days, they were back.

And 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.

But that's kind of 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.

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.

Yeah, 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, well, was that Portland?

Was that Chicago?

It's overwhelming.

It's disorientating.

And 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.

Yeah, this is fascinating to me.

Mark, the creator of Eyes Up, told you that, quote, I think the Trump administration is just embarrassed by how many incriminating videos we have.

But 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.

What's going on?

What's going on?

Hey, if you're up to the last 15, I will arrest you.

It doesn't really seem like the Trump administration is embarrassed.

They just want control over how these videos are packaged and presented.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

Because in those videos that they post to the official DHSX 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.

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

They desperately need

more people to carry out this mass deportation effort.

It is offering massive sign-up bonuses.

There's some student loan benefits as well.

So it's probably in their best interest to put out these highly polished videos which claim that ICE is targeting the worst of the worst when in reality they're targeting a bunch of non-violent 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.

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.

Yeah, and that crucial information, that void can be filled if people are allowed to film ICE, film with 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 that information.

Joseph, thank you very much.

Thank you so much for having me.

Joseph Cox is the co-founder of 404 Media and host of the 404 Media Podcast.

This is on the media.

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Here at LifeKit, we take advice seriously.

We bring you evidence-based recommendations.

And to do that, we talk with researchers and experts on all sorts of topics.

Because we have the same questions you do.

Like, what's really in my shampoo?

Or should I let my kid quit soccer?

Or what should I do with my savings in uncertain economic times?

You can listen to NPR's Life Kit in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Michael Lowinger.

And now to a tale of two Portlands, the one made up by Republican leaders and the real one in all its bizarre glory.

This past weekend, people bared it all to protest President Trump's plan to send the National Guard to Portland.

They joined in an emergency naked bike ride in the rain.

The event even got the attention of U.S.

House Speaker Mike Johnson.

The most threatening thing I've seen yet was the naked bicyclers in Portland who were protesting ice down there.

I mean, it's getting really ugly.

Right.

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.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam faced off with the Animal Army last week during her visit to Portland, a city that turned out to be suspiciously calm.

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.

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

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

Also in attendance at the roundtable, a group of MAGA influencers, people like Andy No, who spent years filming protests around the country, helping build the narrative we hear today.

Thank you so much for acknowledging Antifa.

How they organize is that they are decentralized, autonomous, and they operate on deception.

And we're still to this day told that they don't exist.

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.

That's Jack Pasobic, 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 Pasobic and Andy No 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.

I was watching Yankees Blue Jays, Game One, Bottom the First, and I got a threatening email with my home address in it.

Oh, God.

And 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.

The Fox News article was about a turning point USA petition started by students at Rutgers to get you fired.

And if I have this right, at the time that Fox wrote about it, it had like just over 100 signatures.

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, you know, I've had to pay the consequences for that.

You and your family decide to leave the country.

Last Wednesday, October 8th, you're at the airport and you don't get on your plane.

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.

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

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.

What were they asking you?

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'm not comfortable continuing this conversation without a lawyer and they backed off.

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.

Yeah, well, I was added to the infamous Turning Point Professor watch list in 2017 or 2018, a watch list that has incited harassment against countless professors.

But since about 2019, 2020, Antifa has been out of the news largely, and I've been left alone.

So this kind of concern that the local turning point USA group had in me teaching at Rutgers, I had been there at six years already without hearing a peep from anyone.

So it was obviously a response to Trump's executive order, really very manufactured.

And 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.

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.

So it really was one of those really sharp left turns in one's life that has had obviously rippling consequences for years to come.

So very appreciative of the show.

Although, of course, at the moment, I'm dealing with some unintended consequences.

We ruined your life, Mark.

No, no, it's all good.

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.

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 U.S.

from the late 80s into the 90s.

But the U.S.

has other anti-fascist traditions.

For example, there's a really good book called The Black Anti-Fascist Tradition that talks through the role of anti-fascism in different kinds of African-American liberation movements, Black Panthers, and so forth.

So, short answer, right, is that Antifa is like this specific tendency within a broader history of resistance to fascism.

And part of the theory of militant anti-fascism is to not let them speak, to chase people off the street, this kind of thing?

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.

You know, based on the historical notion that, right, when Hitler and Mussolini started out, initially they had very small groups of followers.

I was recently reading a piece by Kathy 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.

She's right that the German Communist Party pursued a strategy of actually demonizing other left formations like the socialists more than than attacking the Nazis.

Anti-fascist action, which was basically the antithesis of the anti-fascist 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 kind of 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 to stop them before they become big enough and powerful enough to create a mass movement.

What is it specifically about your work that Jack Pasobic and Turning Point USA find so objectionable?

Aaron Powell, 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.

So 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.

You have a certain set of politics, but that doesn't mean that you are like doing black blocks.

No, I'm not.

Fighting proud boys in the streets.

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.

You know, if Jack wants to call me an anarchist, I am, but I'm not Antifa.

I've never been part of one of of those groups.

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

Ooh, I like that question, although, of course, the difficulty in writing a history of something that just happened is right, we missed some of the broader dynamics.

But, you know, authoritarian and fascist leaders always look for a crisis or an emergency to take advantage of.

And if there is no real one, they'll try to make it up themselves.

And so the killing of Charlie Kirk presented such an opportunity.

Even before we had any idea who did it, Trump was blaming the left.

And there have been so many cases in history of authoritarians taking advantage of the killing of specific figures.

Orst Vessel in Germany was a stormtrooper who was killed by a communist, and he became a symbol for the Nazis.

Vessel was the subject of a song that was the co-national anthem of the Nazi Party between 1930 and 1945.

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

Not that long after Charlie Kirk's assassination.

Exactly.

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

Right.

And 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.

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.

There is not an Antifa.

We heard something similar from Jimmy Kimmel.

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

Well, that's not true either, right?

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, right?

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.

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?

No, no, but I think this is a very good question.

So 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.

And while I'm not advocating that the U.S.

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.

Like 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.

And so like the net total is actually a reduction in speech.

So 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 kind of present how historical actors have gone about addressing it.

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?

When I received the threatening email with my home address i texted a friend of mine and he said well do you want to go loud or do you want to go quiet and i said i'm overwhelmed what are you talking about and he said well you know you can obviously try to kind of just get out of the spotlight and disappear or if you go loud you're going to basically bring you know thousands more eyeballs onto your situation in such a way that someone who might actually consider targeting you might feel like all right this is just getting too hot and so 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.

And so it gave me a sense of agency.

And this has become an important story, not really about me per se, so much as it about what could potentially happen if we don't change course.

How has this ordeal impacted your family?

It's been very difficult.

My kids don't know what's happening, but they also know that something's wrong.

You know, 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.

But 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 encouraged people to take it to the streets to protest on No King's Day and every other day to try and make our country a better place.

Mark, best of luck to you and your family.

Thanks for coming on the show.

Thank you very much.

Mark Bray is an assistant teaching professor at Rutgers University, now based in Spain, and the author of Antifa, the anti-fascist handbook.

This is on the media.

Here at LifeKit, we take advice seriously.

We bring you evidence-based recommendations.

And to do that, we talk with researchers and experts on all sorts of topics.

Because we have the same questions you do.

Like, what's really in my shampoo?

Or should I let my kid quit soccer?

Or what should I do with my savings in uncertain economic times?

You can listen to NPR's Life Kit in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is on the media.

I'm Michael Loeninger.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Following its debut earlier this month, Monster, the Ed Geins 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.

There's something real dark about you, Eddie Keene.

What did you do?

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.

But what does it mean for 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-old 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.

So how is it that he himself ended up being the focus of a true crime documentary in 2018 called Inside Evil with Chris Cuomo?

Well, actually, I had gotten a letter from the woman I knew at CNN and she had introduced me to her colleagues.

And I was telling my brother about this.

He's like, Cuomo, he's got that show on CNN.

It's called Inside Evil.

I was like, what?

So 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.

So a couple weeks after that, when they came up for the filming, that's not what it was.

And to be fair to Chris Cuomo, he did level with me that this is the show.

I had the governor's brother in front of me.

We're like, I was just like, give him my back.

So I told him my story and I was introduced to the dark side of the media.

You saw your crime being reenacted.

There was definitely a dark side, another side to him.

He blew parts of his body off.

He's a killer.

You had this idea in your head of how the interview went.

And 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 AR-15, 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 think at times.

Were you able to process it with regret?

No, it wasn't regret yet.

Regret comes when there's a possibility of getting caught.

And then the tone with certain answers that I would give, how proud I was of what 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'd 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.

How did this experience lead you to this book?

I had an idea in my head that true crime just corrupts our cultural understanding of crime and punishment.

And I wondered 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.

And 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.

There's a YouGov poll from last year that found 57% of Americans consume true crime content.

So, you know, 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?

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

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.

I was trying to do something different than what traditional true crime does.

Most true crime stories start in medius rays, in the middle of things, usually at the crime.

911 calls, it's police tape.

When I start getting into the three men, first Michael Shinghale, then Milton E.

Jones, and then Robert Chambers, I do it as I meet them in prison, instead of just like learning about them through their crime.

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.

Sure.

So 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 called 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, oh, he killed his lover.

He dismembered his lover.

He's gay.

He's He's this, he's that.

The prison rumor mill is kind of a lot like the internet.

You know, it has some truths, has some untruths.

I used to work with him in a building.

He used to sort of prep guys for getting out.

I remember looking at 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.

And 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 co-defendant, Theodore Simmons.

I meet him also in Sing Sing in 2019.

He's a classmate of Shane's.

What do you mean a classmate?

There's a master's degree program in Sing Sing.

It's in theology.

And by 2019, Shane was in it, and so was Biltin.

One of the clerks told me, there's a guy here that killed two priests like years ago.

He's like studying for theology.

I was, really?

I want to know more.

You said he was ostracized too.

Because he suffered from schizophrenia.

It was very difficult in this environment.

And he had already earned, you know, know, 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.

And I was just like, wow, this is an interesting guy.

So I do the same thing with him.

We meet in the cell block, and they get to the scenes of talking to him.

But 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.

And he told me about his incidence.

I told him about an incident of my mom whipping me.

And we both laughed because what do you do?

Because you can't cry in prison.

But the ones closest to us are the ones that introduce us to violence.

Then we get to the killings.

And 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.

So the true crime, it's all about that.

And then the criminal justice is all about the punishment, and 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.

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

Right.

But only it's illuminating these 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.

Can you tell me how they view their crimes now?

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.

When he was in his 20s.

Yeah, at the time.

His lover was also physically abusive as well as mentally abusive.

There's documentation that shows that.

What about Milton Jones?

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.

And Attica has almost an all-white staff.

Well, most of the prisoners are people of color.

I mean, 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 looked into their eyes and apologized for what he did.

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, the 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.

So what kind of narrative did this true crime coverage superimpose on Chambers' life?

Well, just your introduction right there.

You said he murdered, and then you referenced the documentary, Preppy Murder.

He was never convicted of murder.

He was convicted of manslaughter.

Ah, right.

The jury couldn't convict Rob of murder.

I had been convicted of murder because they call it men's rays.

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.

And when I meet him, I moved to Sullivan.

I landed in his cell block, and we started living together.

And eventually, I asked him if he'd be open to sort of 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.

And if you want to tell the same story, then that's just going to be the same thing that's out there.

And 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?

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

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.

You know, may not want to pick Robert Chambers.

Yeah, I mean, he sounds like a journalist's nightmare.

He was both a willing and an unwilling subject, sometimes entirely entirely unresponsive.

Do you think you were able to fill for readers some of the missing pieces of his character?

So 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.

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.

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.

Are you projecting remorse onto him?

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.

You told my producer, Candice, that writing for you is everything.

It's the major conflict of this book and in your life.

It's what brings you pride, brings the family that I heard 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?

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 Murdering a man.

That's not what goes on in here.

But it is what goes on on the page.

It is what goes on between my editors, between men that I mentor.

Tell me about that.

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.

And that helps them come to terms with what they did.

The first thing you put on the page, that may not be how you feel.

No, 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?

Like, 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.

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

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.

And Norman Mailer sort of advocated for him to get out in 81, and six weeks later, Jack Abbott killed a night manager in lower Manhattan.

He stabbed him.

This was like an albatross on the neck of prison writers.

My first draft was just, it was angry.

And I remember my editor saying, John, I want you to rewrite this with poised ambivalence.

Poised ambivalence?

Yeah, like have a little grace with him.

Drop your resentment and just take another whack at it.

You haven't dealt with re-entry.

He made some good points.

It's these back and forths that help me grow.

And in that essay, I get to my own reckoning with my crime, how I feel about it.

These are the back and forth dulets, the men I mentor.

So that's what writing does.

This just occurred to me.

John, you're eligible for parole in 2029.

Correct.

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?

Oh, I hate that question.

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

You know, I want to answer it because the ability to find stories is the most important thing for any journalist.

And I look at the world as a story arc.

I look at my experience, and it's before prison, and I've been in the total institution for much of my life.

Then there's the re-entry part, right?

And there's a lot of conflict.

Look what we just talked about with Fabot.

He couldn't figure it out.

So 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.

John, thank you so much.

Oh, thank you.

John J.

Lennon authored the recent book, The Tragedy of True Crime, Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us.

That's it for this week's show.

On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, and Candice Wong.

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 produced by WNYC.

I'm Broo Gladstone, and I'm Michael Lowinger.