A.C. Thompson
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Shaunagh talks to A.C. Thompson
This episode features ProPublica's A.C. Thompson. His reporting which often examines the criminal justice system, has helped lead to the exoneration of two innocent San Francisco men sentenced to life in prison and the prosecution of seven New Orleans police officers. As well as reporting for ProPublica, Thompson has worked extensively for the PBS documentary series FRONTLINE. His life was fictionalized on the HBO show “Treme.”
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Credits
Hosted and produced by Shaunagh Connaire and edited by Ryan Ferguson.
Episode transcript
Shaunagh Connaire
This episode is sponsored by Noa, an app I listen to regularly. The first 100 people to visit newsoveraudio.com/mediatribe will get a week free to listen to articles from The Economist, Bloomberg and The Financial Times, plus 50% off.
Shaunagh Connaire
Welcome to Media Tribe, the podcast that's on a mission to restore faith in journalism. I'm Shaunagh Connaire, an award-winning journalist with over 10 years of experience working for some of the biggest news outlets in the industry. Every week I'm going to introduce you to some of the world's most respected journalists, filmmakers and media executives, and you're going to hear the story behind the storyteller. You'll get a sense of the integrity and hard graft that's involved in journalism, and hopefully you'll go away feeling that this graft is worth valuing.
A.C. Thompson
I had a colleague say to me, "Well, you know, it's so good we got through the election without any violence." And I said, "Yeah, that's just actually not true." We had scattered acts of spectacular and horrific violence. In Olympia, Washington two weeks in a row in front of the state house, people were shot in protests between leftist and right groups. And I really do not think that the scale of the political violence that occurred before the election has even been grappled with.
Shaunagh Connaire
My guest today is investigative reporter with ProPublica, A.C. Thompson. A.C, you are so welcome to the Media Tribe podcast.
A.C. ThompsonThanks for having me on.
Shaunagh Connaire
It's great to have you on. You are my first ProPublica journalist, which is an honor. So do you want to tell our audience a little bit about how you got into journalism, A.C.?
A.C. Thompson
Absolutely. So I grew up in the suburbs of Washington D.C. In my first job after high school I went to work as a magazine printer and I got bored of that really quickly and started trying to figure out how to do something else in my life. And that led to, I did work as a security guard. I was a bicycle messenger. I was a laboratory test subject for experimental drugs. I did a lot of different things.
Shaunagh Connaire
Seriously?
A.C. Thompson
Oh, yeah, yeah, seriously.
Shaunagh Connaire
What kinds of experimental drugs?
A.C. Thompson
Yeah. Yeah, so I did one for a bone strengthener for people with osteoporosis. I did one for a sedative, and I did another one, I can't remember the medication. The sedative, like it really made me sleepy, but some of the people in our control group it made them really aggressive. And one guy tried to throw another guy out the window of the hospital and so then the sheriffs had to come take him away.
Shaunagh Connaire
Okay, so this is not the most conventional career path, which I'm obviously loving, A.C. So crack on.
A.C. Thompson
So eventually I wound up in San Francisco. I moved to the Bay area in Northern California, and I had a friend that introduced me. I was in my early, very early 20s. I had a friend who introduced me to a program for people in their teens and 20s who wanted to get into journalism. And it was called Youth Outlook and they published a newspaper and a website and had a radio show and all this stuff. And so I joined that program, it was a non-profit. And the people there taught me how to write and how to punctuate a sentence and how to capitalize a sentence and the basics of grammar. And that was really my introduction. And in a few years I got a staff job at one of the alternative weeklies in San Francisco. That was kind of it. I then went to another weekly, I freelanced, I started making films. I wound up at ProPublica, so a kind of different trajectory, but it was really cool and I wouldn't change anything about it.
Shaunagh Connaire
Well, I think that's actually so awesome to hear, because it's so refreshing I guess to hear that there are people in journalism with non-conventional backgrounds and had these circuitous routes into journalism, which what I've discovered actually most of my guests have. So it's really, really refreshing to hear that. And just in case our audience don't know what ProPublica is. It is an independent non-profit journalism body that makes amazing journalism in public interest.
A.C. Thompson
Right, right. And so I joined in 2008 when the company was just starting. And at that time it was like 40 or 50 of us in an office in the financial district in New York City. And it was sort of a question of, "Well, we are trying to figure out what to do as legacy media disintegrates, what to do as investigative reporting goes away, because that's the most expensive thing to do in journalism. And how can we fill that void?" And all my colleagues and I were basically people who had fled legacy print media, and we're now trying to figure it out.
Now I think we're about at 180 people in said about 13 years later. And we are really still trying to figure it out in some ways, and what comes next and what we should be doing. But it's great to work with such an amazing band of people that don't feel like they have to do what came before in journalism. That they can always try something new and develop something new, and particularly in terms of partnering with other media organizations, doing distributed reporting, doing team reporting, doing multi-platform reporting. And that's been a really exciting thing.
Shaunagh Connaire
Yeah, and I think for me, I always look at ProPublica and think of impact, actually. Everything you guys do genuinely leads to impact, whether it's legislation change or what have you. And that's something that I'm really keen on as well. So it's an amazing outlet. If you don't know what it is, certainly go and follow it and go and follow your work, A.C. And do you want to talk to our audience then about your particular beat? And I'm going to kind of give you the headline Documenting Hate and you can take it from there, A.C. Although I probably should, so I should probably ask you my next question, which is, which project or story you're most proud of? And I'm sure it will fall under that headline at least.
A.C. Thompson
You know, I'm maybe different then other journalists. I'm not proud of anything that I did, honestly. Like to me all I see is the flaws and the problems and the things I could have done better. So that's me. I can think of things that ... I can think of teams that I worked with that I really liked working with those people. And I can think of places that I went and interviews we did that I was really happy with, or research. But yeah, I'm not satisfied. I'm not, I don't like in my work I'm not going to be satisfied. For me this is art as well as compiling of facts and the dispensation of facts, it's art. And I'm never happy with the art that I create, so.
Shaunagh Connaire
Well, I can imagine. That's why you're a perfectionist. But it's so timely for us to talk, A.C. about Documenting Hate and your coverage of white supremacy over years now, which is, it's just so timely the week that's in it. And I should date our interview and say, it's Inauguration Day. So we're kind of post insurrection. But if you could kind of delve into your beat.
A.C. Thompson
Here's the thing, the stories that ... Well, I can say about things that I'm happy about with work that I do is when it has an impact. And there's a clear through line in my work going back 20 years, that it overwhelmingly is about telling stories from street level. It's overwhelmingly telling stories about people who do not have power and about how those empowered stomp on them and what happens as that happens. So one of the early projects I did at ProPublica was about police shootings and a string of hate crimes in New Orleans and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that led to a federal hate crimes prosecution. It led to prosecution, criminal prosecutions against a bunch of New Orleans cops. It led to the complete remaking of the New Orleans Police Department.
A.C. Thompson
And honestly, that was the first time that I really started thinking about the hate crimes framework and thinking about what that body of law really could do or not do. And in more recent years, in the Trump years I've been focused on white supremacist extremist and antigovernment extremists. And that work has led to the prosecution of at least nine white supremacists, either through court martial or federal criminal cases. And it's really been sort of expanding on the earlier work that I had done and sort of turning the earlier tools that I had in a slightly different direction.
Shaunagh Connaire
And did you find come 2016, when now ex-President Trump came to power, did you find that that particular beat changed, or did you ... Is that maybe when you decided to look more closely at white supremacy when Trump came to power?
A.C. Thompson
Yeah. I mean, I had done reporting from Europe about Neo-Nazis back in the 90s, right? And I had done the hate crimes reporting, but I hadn't been deep on this beat. And in the fall of 2016 I was working on an epic project about court marshals. And myself and a colleague of mine were going to do this really great project and series about the military justice system. And it was going to be awesome. And we were very excited about it and we had amazing data. And when the election happened, people that I worked with said, "That feels somewhat irrelevant now. And somewhat, it seems like a kind of boutique investigative journalism project at a moment when there's a lot of other concerns and a lot of other issues at the fore." And I said, "Yeah, you're absolutely right." This was my boss. And he was very, very gentle about it.
This was Joe Saxton and he said, "I'm not telling you to do this, but if you want to, what would you do in the stead of that project that you've devoted many months to?" And I said, "Well, I've been monitoring social media and looking at what's out there for months and months now. And there's this whole resurgence of activism that's so much like what was happening in the late 80s and early 90s. This white supremacist, white extremist activism. And I see all the same tropes and all the same sort of characters and the same books and texts coming up. And I feel like we should be doing something about that." And I said, "I don't know that we can prove it at this moment, but it seems that we are seeing an increase in hate violence and bias incidents, and that's something we should be tracking."
And so that's really what happened. And it turned out that sort of hunch wasn't that correct. Those, and the data did end up proving that out, that those sorts of incidents were increasing and it turned out for sure that Trump had been a catalyst for all these white extremist groups that had disappeared. And this white extremist movement that had basically gone away.
Shaunagh Connaire
So again, for context, this would have been pre-Charlottesville and pre the attack in Pittsburgh on the Jewish synagogue as well. So you did come to this beat quite early in some ways I would say, A.C.?
A.C. Thompson
Right, right. And you didn't have to be an oracle to see that there was this current and this sort of subculture that was rising up out there. But I think it was helpful if you had maybe some background in this kind of thinking, in this kind of world to make some sense of it. And to be sure the white supremacist and extremist movements of the Trump era deeply different then the ones that I had been more familiar with that preceded them. But there were a lot of commonalities.
One of the things that was massively different is that if you were to look back to the Tim McVeigh time period, the 90s, or if you were to look back to that height of sort of David Duke's influence in the late 80s into the 90s, it was really hard to circulate information and to disseminate information if you were a white supremacist or a militia member or an antigovernment extremist. And when you flash forward to 2015, 2016 to the Trump era, it was incredibly easy. It was incredibly easy. And the most extreme organizations in the world were taking advantage of the biggest media platforms out there run by the biggest companies to generate massive audiences that their predecessors would have been totally jealous of.
Shaunagh Connaire
Yeah. So is there, do you feel then, A.C., I mean, back in the 90s, you referred to Tim McVeigh and of course, David Duke, was there a sense that back then it was very much kind of lone wolf behavior and kind of these cells that existed across the country, but maybe wasn't too organized and now it certainly changed? Well, it feels and like that from what we saw in the last few weeks?
A.C. Thompson
I think it's always been organized. It's always been thoughtful in many ways, honestly like that a lot of the people that have been involved in these movements, they get stereotyped as idiots, they get stereotyped as backward rednecks. And I think that's generally not right. I think they're generally quite often quite thoughtful, quite smart people, if massively misguided. But I would say like the 80s and 90s you had very tight and very organized networks of people and organizations that met with each other, that supported each other, that there was a terrorist organization called The Order that robbed banks and armored cars, and then distributed that money to their allies throughout the white power movement.
There was the use of something called Liberty Net, which was an early BBS, and an early sort of incarnation of the internet. And so there was a lot of organization I would say at that time. At the same time there was a sort of intelligence to the movement that they developed these ideas that came out of guerrilla struggle, came out of urban terrorism, came out of a lot of different political currents and they said, "Hey, this is our movement. This is our subculture. This is our community. You don't have to do an action as a member of a big militia, or as a member of an organized group, or at the command of somebody in a group. You can go out as an individual or in coordination with two or three trusted allies and do acts of significant terrorism. And we, in fact we encourage you to," and that's the whole theory of leaderless resistance or small cell terrorism.
And in that way you can commit acts of spectacular violence and you're much more likely to get away with it. So this was a sort of idea that circulated through the community, through the broader movement and was widely adopted. So when we think about the so-called lone wolves, they may act individually. They may act with a couple of allies, but really they're part of this much broader community and movement. And if those ideas hadn't circulated to them from that broader community and movement, they would not have done the things they did, you know?
Shaunagh Connaire
And so, what we're seeing today, let's say, A.C., with the various groups, Pride Boys, Oath Keepers, and what have you, what we saw during the insurrection, do you feel that that again is all quite organized? I feel like they are all different groups, but I'm assuming they're all kind of aligned with the same ideology that the white race is in danger and that President Trump of course gave them hope. Or at least maybe gave them a sense that white supremacy could enter the mainstream. Is that your sense too?
A.C. Thompson
My belief is that in the Trump era, even more so than in previous eras, what you have is a spectrum of extremist ideology and extremist organizing tactics. And that you could make a spectrum and it would go something like this, on one side of the spectrum you have full-on Neo-Nazi terrorists. And we've seen them in recent years who say, "We're not going to do political struggle. We're not going to do political organizing. We're just going to bomb stuff and kill people". And many of them have been wrapped up by the Feds.
You would move over to sort of open white nationalists, open white supremacist groups who are organizing publicly. You would move from there to extreme anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim groups. You would move from there to the conspiracy theorists. You would move from there to militia members and street fighting, ultra nationalists like the Proud Boys. And then perhaps you keep moving and you would get to the Boogaloo Boys who are generally libertarians, generally not Trumpest, but believe absolutely in basically overthrow the government in the very near future and are happy to work with Trumpests or anyone else to advance that agenda.
So I think there's a lot of different ideological niches. Some of these people overlap. So you may have somebody who's an ultra nationalist street fighter who is also a QAnon conspiracy theorist buff, who also sometimes hangs out with militia people. But there's definitely a lot of different factions. And I think what's happened since Charlottesville, that Charlottesville ends up sort of being the apotheosis or the apex of the open white supremacist movement. And what happens in the aftermath is you get a lot of those people reconstituting themselves as not quite so obviously racist, organizers and activists. And a lot of them join groups that you could call multi-ethnic or multi-cultural fascist type groups or ultra-nationalists groups.
So the organizing principle moves away from being about the white race, and it ends up being about nativism, so-called traditional male, female roles, anti-LGBTQ values, and all this sort of other stuff. And these are the kinds of people that will call themselves the right wing death squads, or they'll wear T-shirts that celebrate Pinochet, the fascist dictator of Chile. And in these sorts of cases the main scapegoat is not necessarily people of color, but people perceived to be sympathetic to communists or to be communists dupes. And that would basically include the entire Democratic Party and anybody with mildly progressive values.
So I think that's what's changed in a lot of ways too. It's this sort of the scapegoat moving from being any people of color to being ideological and being people who are perceived to be pro-communist socialist leftist. These are the kinds of people that play songs on their parlor channel that'll talk about going up in a helicopter and throwing the Democrats and the socialists out of the helicopter.
Shaunagh Connaire
Wow. Well, I mean, it's complex, isn't it? And just to add more complexity to the equation, I'm very interested in the reporting you did about how some of these people were formerly in the military or as some, even just as of a few weeks ago I believe police officers were involved in the insurrection. Can you kind of talk to us, A.C. about that and why that is? Where is the crossover, I guess?
A.C. Thompson
Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. You know, in the past, I think a couple of years ago I would say that my bigger concern would be with the military and with sort of the infiltration of the military by white supremacist and anti-government and white extremist groups. Recent things have made me rethink that. And so honestly, there's very little scholarship and research done on the penetration of law enforcement in modern times by white extremist ideology and white extremist groups, very little. But I think what we have found from the anecdotal reports and the spot news reports, and what's come out after the capital is there should be a lot of concern about the compromise of law enforcement from those groups.
Now, I still think we're going to see a lot more military people implicated in those movements, in those scenes. And I'm working on a story about just that. And I think the problem is larger than people imagine. But also the stakes in both cases are higher than with the average person. Because if you're dealing with someone with combat training, Tim McVeigh was a combat soldier who left the military. If you're dealing with someone who wields a gun for their job and is a public safety officer, a police officer, a corrections officer who is responsible for people, has people's lives literally in their hands and they're a subscriber to one of these ideologies, the stakes are just a lot higher.
Shaunagh Connaire
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Shaunagh Connaire
Right, back to A.C. So these people then, I mean they're anti-government, and as you say, have a military background. And it feels like that's where we are right now, especially again in light of recent events after a good portion of the GOP have kind of turned their backs on backing Trump and everything he stood for. Do you feel like it's potentially even we're entering even a more dangerous period?
A.C. Thompson
Right. There's a couple of things to consider I think, and one is I had a colleague say to me, "Well, it's so good we got through the election without any violence." And I said, "Yeah, that's just actually not true. That's just not true." What it is, is that we had low level scattered acts of spectacular and horrific violence that occurred for weeks and weeks and weeks leading up to the election. And I don't think people really understood the significance of that. And I'm talking about in Olympia, Washington, two weeks in a row in front of the state house people were shot in protests between leftist and right groups. I'm talking about these incidents where people are driving cars into one another, where people are attacking each other with bats and boards and flagpoles in major American cities. And I really do not think that the scale of the political violence that occurred before the election has even been grappled with.
And I think that's part of why you saw the Capitol police completely surprised by what happened on January six. I think it's this lack of knowledge of the broader picture. But looking forward, the concern that I had is, when we were on the campaign trail, interviewing Trump supporters at Trump rallies, where he was coming to speak, there was some very widespread feeling that the only way Trump could possibly lose the election is if there was some kind of fraud, if there was some kind of corruption. 75 million people voted for Donald Trump. When you look at the polls, there's a very significant number of them who are absolutely convinced that the election was fraudulent. That very bad things happened that led to the ouster of their leader. That there was just, there was rampant corruption and misconduct.
And so many of these people are acting out of what they see as great selflessness and great heroism with the facts that they have and the beliefs that they have that have been propped up by One America News, they've been propped up by Newsmax. They've been propped up at times by Fox and they've been propped up by a whole constellation of far right websites, blogs, and social media posts. You know, I was interviewing a Proud Boy a few days ago and he said, "No, I don't listen to Fox. I get my news from Newsmax. That's the only source I trust now." And that was basically because Newsmax was one of the news outlets that had continued to parrot these insane claims about voter fraud and corruption in the election. That's the sort of population that you have to be concerned about taking dramatic violent action that can lead to mass casualties. And you have to be worried about those acts of terrorism, not today, not tomorrow, but going forward for quite some time.
And I don't want to be paranoid. I don't want to be a Cassandra and tell everyone that the sky is falling and bad, bad things are going to happen forever. But I think you have to just be thoughtful, like do the math. It's pretty simple, 75 million people that to think that a significant number of them may have been radicalized by the events of the past year. That's not crazy talk. That's just pure logic.
Shaunagh Connaire
Well, I think you're so right. This story is certainly not going away. And even back to Charlottesville and obviously 2017, I remember reading at the time that off the back of that attack, when that poor girl Heather was killed by the driver, that they were able to recruit more people off the back of that attack. I mean, that just blew my mind. I mean, it's incredibly depressing, isn't it, A.C.? And as you say, again, that's why we need to keep doing the journalism, so well done you.
A.C. Thompson
Thank you. Thank you. And it's, we may see another evolution. We may see that there's such pushback to what happened at the Capitol that this is far right movements are chopped up and basically disintegrated going forward. Or we may see that there is this underlying current of rage and anger that manifested itself in dramatic, spectacular violence going forward. It's not clear to me, but I think you have to be at least aware of that possibility. And you have to think about this sort of broader issues about how bogus propagandistic information actually does have an impact. And it actually does find an audience and resonate often with people who are somewhat not well to begin with.
Shaunagh Connaire
Well, I couldn't agree more. Moving on to potentially a lighter note and the final question, A.C., something I ask all of my guests, but is there a moment in your career that has been rather crazy that you'd like to delve into that has never been told before? I'm sure you have great tales there that you might want to divulge.
A.C. Thompson
So this was the thing that happened while we were making one of the Documenting Hate films. And we had just gone with a camera crew to the home of a member of this white supremacist gang. And we had footage of this guy participating in the violence in Charlottesville and other white power rallies. And we roll up on him, we have been waiting in the car for like two hours. Everyone had to pee really badly. We thought we might have to drop the stakeout so somebody could go somewhere and go to the bathroom. And finally he shows up and we go up on him with cameras. We're like, "Hey you're a member of this white power gang. You were in Charlottesville, et cetera, et cetera. How do you feel about that? You're on camera. And by the way, you work for Northrop Grumman, the military contractor, do they know you're on a white power gang?"
And the guy gets in his car and he takes off. And my director, Rick Rowley says to me, "Hey, that was great, but it just wasn't enough. Why don't we call him now and see if he'll meet us at this cafe and do a sit down interview? So, can you just call him? You have his number." And I said, "Rick, he is a member of a white power gang that beats people down, that's what they do. Their leaders stabbed somebody six times and went to prison for it. We just lost him his job. Do you think if we call them and say, 'Meet us at the Starbucks on the corner that he's going to show up by himself and we'll have a nice conversation we can videotape?'" I was like, "No, we're going to get our asses kicked. No, we're not doing that. Absolutely not doing that."
I should also say that there have been moments when we've interviewed Nazi types and Rick has said to me, "I'm so disappointed with it, it's like you look scarier than those Nazis. I was really hoping that they would punch you or something, but you looked more intimidating than they did. So I don't know about this scene." And so he's definitely a person who's trying to, no one knows he's trying to get me harmed at every turn.
Shaunagh Connaire
At every turn, that is so funny. I can definitely relate, because when you get back to an edit suite, people would always ask you, "How come you didn't get that scene with the ... Why didn't the Neo-Nazi ascertain for his flat white at Starbucks? I don't understand." But that is classic television. But all of those series, if you're based in the U.S. you can, how many are there in Documenting Hate and PBS Frontline?
A.C. Thompson
We did two hours, and one's called Documenting Hate: Charlottesville. And the other one's called Documenting Hate: New American Nazis. And the sort of the film we're working on now is in some ways a spiritual successor to that, about the current far-right movements.
Shaunagh Connaire
Fantastic. Well, we will link to those in this podcast on social media, A.C. Listen, thanks a million for coming on the show. It's really great to get that level of context about white supremacy here and what's happened. Especially from somebody like you who's been really looking at these people for many as a year. So we really appreciate it, A.C., thank you.
A.C. Thompson
Hey, thank you so much. And I apologize for rambling on like a maniac. But thank you, it's been great chatting.
Shaunagh Connaire
You're most welcome. We only invite maniacs onto the shows, don't feel bad about that. If you like what you heard on this episode of Media Tribe, that's very good news, because I'm going to be dropping new shows every week and every month on my new Media Tribe Spotlight series. Also, if you haven't already, make sure to take a listen to previous shows with some legendary folk in the industry. And as ever, please, please, please do leave me a rating and review as it really does help other people find this podcast. Finally, if you do have any guest suggestions, drop me a note on Twitter. I'm @shaunagh, with a G-H, or @shaunaghconnaire on Instagram. And again, that's with the G-H, right. That's it. See you soon. This episode was edited by Ryan Ferguson.
