The Vilification of Bernie Goetz, Redux

S ome high-profile legal cases never lose their ability to fascinate, enrage, galvanize, and inspire fervent discussion and debate. That’s certainly true in the case of Bernhard Goetz, the mild-mannered Greenwich Village resident whose shooting of four young black men who had approached him in a subway car on December 22, 1984 — and the uproar that ensued — became bywords for the racial tensions, urban decay, rampant crime, and general malaise of New York City in that era.

Goetz has always had his share of ardent supporters — who have praised him for defending himself at a time when the police and courts of a liberal city failed miserably to do their job — and equally impassioned foes, who have branded him a racist and vigilante. At the former end of the spectrum, you have Guardian Angels founder and recent New York City mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, whose organization provided protection for Goetz during his trial and demonstrated on his behalf, with members at one point holding a sign that read, “Politicians should try riding the trains before calling people vigilantes.” And at the latter end, there’s radical lawyer Ron Kuby, who in 1996 led a successful civil lawsuit, resulting in an award of $43 million in damages, against the figure he branded “a bigot with a gun.” (Goetz had escaped criminal conviction for attempted murder and first-degree assault, though not for a lesser weapons charge.)

More than four decades after the incident, the passions have not abated. One of the most remarkable phenomena in the publishing world in the early months of 2026 has been a revisiting, or, more exactly, relitigating of the Goetz case, driven by the publication of two highly opinionated new books. Neither of them is sympathetic to Goetz, and all these years after the incident, their widely publicized release has helped make what we might call the Ron Kuby view of the case the mainstream narrative.

One of the new books is Heather Ann Thompson’s Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage. As its title suggests, the book weaves the 1984 incident into a narrative of long-running white anger that Thompson argues has waxed and waned over the decades and has now reached an apogee with the rise of Donald Trump. The other work is Elliot Williams’s Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York’s Explosive ’80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation, whose author sets the tone for the entire book early on with ad hominem attacks on Goetz, calling him “a bigot” and a spewer of “vile racist slurs.” Williams compares the Goetz incident to the more recent case of Daniel Penny, a young former Marine who, on May 1, 2023, put homeless addict and serial offender Jordan Neely in a headlock and wrestled him to the ground after Neely boarded an uptown F train and made loud, explicit threats toward other passengers, including a woman and her small son. Unlike the young men Goetz shot, Neely died. Like Goetz, Penny escaped criminal conviction, infuriating Neely’s family, members of Black Lives Matter, and others who did not accept claims of valid self-defense and who shoehorned Penny into much the same kind of narrative that Goetz’s many detractors have always peddled.

Of the two new books, Thompson’s has been more widely fêted. It quickly became a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and drew acclaim from other newspapers across the globe, from the Irish Examiner to the Sydney Morning Herald. It received lavish praise from author and activist Michelle Alexander, who has called incarceration “a massive system of racial and social control.” Thompson has made the rounds of talk shows and public events.

It is somewhat curious that Thompson’s book should be hailed as a groundbreaking work and become a publishing phenomenon, because so much of what she has to say in Fear and Fury feels like a rote, predictable rehashing of arguments about “root causes” and systemic injustice that have literally been around for decades. Clearly sympathizing more with the four young black men Goetz shot than with the multiethnic victims of crime during the 1980s — a category that, as many of us know, included Goetz himself, the target of a vicious mugging before the December 1984 incident — Thompson tries to evoke the same sort of empathy on the part of readers. She blames the Reagan administration’s pivot away from lavish public spending and emphasis on individual responsibility for fostering a climate in which Darrell Cabey, the black teen paralyzed by two bullets from Goetz’s Smith & Wesson, could not really be blamed for taking part in an attempted mugging. Cabey, you see, had only bad choices, which helped set the stage for the subway incident. Thompson blames “the slashing of funds to public resources such as schools, housing, and health care that harmed families such as the Cabeys.” She contrasts the Reagan-era de-emphasis on social welfare with the tax policies of the time that she believes allowed Donald Trump and other ambitious capitalists to amass and hoard ever greater quantities of liquid and illiquid assets.

Thompson may have done more to vilify Goetz than anyone since Kuby in the 1990s. But, as should be clear by now, she is not thinking small and sees an opportunity to indict someone a bit more powerful. The author of Fear and Fury has Trump in her sights just as much as Goetz, and her aim is to delegitimize the character and motives of Trump by making his rise the latest chapter in a plague of “white rage” that Goetz supposedly epitomized.

In the words of the late Christopher Hitchens, Thompson’s enlistment of the Goetz case in an effort to demonize Trump and his millions of supporters shows “not that people learn from history but that they resolutely decline to do so, and instead plunder it for facile images.” Goetz, and the understandable motives that drove his act of self-defense, have become a facile image in the hands of an unimaginative left-liberal polemicist rehashing arguments about “root causes” as if they were novel theories and as if the objections to them were not obvious.

Skip for now the many questions one could raise about the sociological tropes Thompson uses to try to excuse the four youths’ accosting of Goetz. Leave aside her failure to explain the absence of 1980s-level crime and disorder in a period of U.S. history, the 1930s, when poverty was even more rampant, with fully one-quarter of the workforce out of work in 1933. And let’s not mention the crime wave that followed the Great Society in the 1970s. For those of us who lived through the Hobbesian nightmare that was New York in the 1980s, when almost everyone knew someone who had been a victim of crime, Thompson’s failure even to try imaginatively to walk in Goetz’s shoes, and those of other ordinary New Yorkers, is startling. We remember all too well the breakdown in the justice system that emboldened criminals, the graffiti, the incivility, and the threats, often accompanied by anti-white slurs, directed at us by strangers on the street. Goetz himself, as Thompson well knows, was the victim of a violent robbery at the Canal Street subway station. One of the four teens he shot, James Ramseur, was a vicious, serial criminal who served a 60-day prison sentence for shoplifting before the incident and later went back to prison for a particularly horrific rape in the Bronx.

Yet, in the distorted mirror of Thompson’s strange morality, the thugs were right, and Goetz was wrong. The normal human instinct for self-preservation — through one’s own agency, if the state that takes our money in taxes fails to meet its part of the bargain — becomes something pathological, hateful, and representative of the now-recrudescent “white rage” that propelled Donald Trump twice to the White House and enshrined the basest motives as guiding principles of U.S. policy today, just as they had been under Ronald Reagan.

No amount of post-hoc vilification can alter the fact that Goetz, like millions of other New Yorkers, had plenty of reasons to be angry. No bleeding-heart narrative about his attackers, or impugning of his motives, will erase the sympathy that many felt and feel for a man who took it upon himself to do what a kneecapped court system failed so miserably to accomplish — to protect an innocent citizen from predators.