Speaker 1: Col Zone Media.
Speaker 2: On May fifteenth, nineteen sixty six, the clock ran out
Speaker 2: in negotiations between Local twelve thirty four of the United
Speaker 2: Auto Workers Union, an aerospace manufacturer, Pratt and Whitney. The
Speaker 2: contract expired. They'd been working around the clock to meet
Speaker 2: the demand for jet engines for the Vietnam War and
Speaker 2: the fuel cells needed for the Apollo program. The company
Speaker 2: was producing equipment the United States government desperately needed if
Speaker 2: they hoped to win the war in the space race.
Speaker 2: No one could afford a strike, so the union didn't
Speaker 2: authorize one. Union leadership agreed to a day by day
Speaker 2: extension of the contract as they continued the mediation process,
Speaker 2: but the workers weren't satisfied with that answer. At midnight
Speaker 2: that night, workers at the plant walked off the production
Speaker 2: floor and gathered outside.
Speaker 1: It was a wildcat strike.
Speaker 2: The workers picketed through the night, and on the morning
Speaker 2: of Monday, May sixteenth, the striking workers were there outside
Speaker 2: the plant. Factory workers on first shift stayed away or
Speaker 2: joined the picket, but a few dozen office workers showed
Speaker 2: up in their cars at the plant for work. Newspaper
Speaker 2: reports from May of nineteen sixty six say only that
Speaker 2: two cars were damaged.
Speaker 1: But fifty four years later and.
Speaker 2: A memoir written by the son of a man who
Speaker 2: drove his car to work at Pratt and Whitney in
Speaker 2: North Haven, Connecticut on the day of that wildcat strike,
Speaker 2: a new detail emerged. Kelvin Pierce was just six years
Speaker 2: old in nineteen sixty six. His father was a jet
Speaker 2: propulsion researcher at Pratt and Whitney, but he remembers this
Speaker 2: day clearly. It was the day his father, William Luther Pierce,
Speaker 2: decided to give up his career as a physicist and
Speaker 2: go to work full time for the American Nazi Party.
Speaker 2: One of the cars that was damaged that Monday morning
Speaker 2: was his. The striking workers kicked his car and snapped
Speaker 2: off his radio antenna as he attempted to drive his
Speaker 2: car directly through the picket line. That was his last
Speaker 2: week at Pratt and Whitney.
Speaker 1: He quit.
Speaker 2: No one was injured that morning, but the incident was
Speaker 2: a turning point for Pierce. He disappeared for a few weeks,
Speaker 2: leaving his wife and young sons without any explanation. By
Speaker 2: the time the factory workers had a new contract in June,
Speaker 2: Hears had packed up his family and moved to Virginia
Speaker 2: be closer to American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell
Speaker 2: and to focus on his own budding career as professional Nazi.
Speaker 2: That morning in May, as he sat in his car
Speaker 2: outside the plant, staring at the picket line, something changed
Speaker 2: as he shifted his foot off of the brake and
Speaker 2: onto the gas and drove towards those union workers. I
Speaker 2: think he became the man who would eventually write The
Speaker 2: Turner Diaries, a novel that has inspired the murders of
Speaker 2: hundreds of people. I'm Molly Conger, is weird that Gods,
Speaker 2: this isn't an episode about William Luther Pierce. He's such
Speaker 2: a key figure in the history of American extremism that
Speaker 2: as often as he comes up, I just keep putting
Speaker 2: him off. But it is an episode about hitting people
Speaker 2: with your car. Last week we were talking about James
Speaker 2: Alex Fields, the young Nazi from Ohio who murdered Heather
Speaker 2: Higher and Charlottesville in twenty seventeen. I wrote about Fields
Speaker 2: because I felt like I had to. I hadn't planned
Speaker 2: on ever doing an episode about him. I kind of
Speaker 2: felt like I'd said all I have to say about him.
Speaker 2: In my prior coverage of his criminal trial and in
Speaker 2: the year's long civil litigation brought by the survivors of
Speaker 2: his crime. But in recent weeks, I can't seem to
Speaker 2: escape the echoes of that crime. People are talking about
Speaker 2: running people over. People are giddy at the very idea
Speaker 2: of ramming their cars into crowds of protesters. Florida Governor
Speaker 2: Ron Desanta says you're allowed to do it. Several sheriffs
Speaker 2: have voiced their support for it. Trump aligned minor internet
Speaker 2: celebrities are posting memes and jokes, walking right up to
Speaker 2: and often over the line to outright calls to action.
Speaker 2: Run them over, hit the gas, all lives splatter. Two
Speaker 2: weeks ago, on June thirteenth, twenty twenty five, a Twitter
Speaker 2: account called Anti Left Memes post a question what should
Speaker 2: happen to people who block the road. The account has
Speaker 2: more than one hundred and twenty five thousand followers, and
Speaker 2: the post received nearly thirty thousand replies. Yes, one of
Speaker 2: the top replies with thousands of likes on the post
Speaker 2: is just an image. It's pretty low quality, the hallmark
Speaker 2: of a meme that's been screenshotted, saved, and reposted too
Speaker 2: many times. But it's a picture of a white pickup truck. Well,
Speaker 2: it's mostly white. The entire front half of the truck
Speaker 2: is splattered and red, and the text over the image
Speaker 2: reads the all new Dodge Ram Protester Edition. A day later,
Speaker 2: as millions of Americans took to the streets and cities
Speaker 2: across the country to protest the Trump administration, the same meme,
Speaker 2: that same blood spattered white truck was posted on Facebook
Speaker 2: by James Muller, the Sheriff of Adams County, Pennsylvania. I
Speaker 2: found dozens of posts made that weekend alone with that
Speaker 2: specific image, and thousands of posts that weekend expressing the
Speaker 2: same sentiment, it's morally and legally acceptable to hit protesters
Speaker 2: with your car, not only that it's funny, it's good,
Speaker 2: and you should do it, and they're not just posting
Speaker 2: it's happening. I found at least six incidents across the
Speaker 2: country between June tenth and June fifteenth of cars driving
Speaker 2: directly into crowns of protesters. A young woman in Los
Speaker 2: Angeles was left in critical condition, a woman in Chicago
Speaker 2: has a broken arm. A driver in Petaluma hit a
Speaker 2: group of protesters while they were in a crosswalk. There's
Speaker 2: a lot we still don't know about the specific details
Speaker 2: of these most recent incidents, and every one of these
Speaker 2: incidents is unique in its specific facts, but there's a
Speaker 2: pattern and it's not new. I remember when Summer Taylor died.
Speaker 2: It was the fourth of July back in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Their killer drove the wrong way up a highway on
Speaker 2: ramp and around vehicles that had been parked to form
Speaker 2: a barricade to protect the protest. That attack on a
Speaker 2: Black Lives Matter protest in Seattle is one of the
Speaker 2: only ones I remember clearly from that summer. I didn't
Speaker 2: know Summer, but I know people who did, and they
Speaker 2: were just twenty four years old. I remember a few others,
Speaker 2: one because it was so close to home, just outside
Speaker 2: of Richmond, Virginia. No one was badly hurt, but the
Speaker 2: driver skipped Rogers as a clansman that I've seen at
Speaker 2: some Confederate rallies, they all kind of run together. Though
Speaker 2: there was so much violence that summer, Apparently there were
Speaker 2: over a hundred similar attacks that summer. That's according to
Speaker 2: Ari wyl who was at the time a researcher at
Speaker 2: the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University
Speaker 2: of Chicago. He documented one hundred and four incidents of
Speaker 2: vehicular assault on protests during a four month period from
Speaker 2: May twenty seventh to September twenty seventh, twenty twenty, with
Speaker 2: the majority of those incidents occurring during Black Lives Matter
Speaker 2: protests after the death of George Floyd. According to Wiles analysis,
Speaker 2: there is evidence of malicious intent in at least forty
Speaker 2: three of those one hundred and four incidents, and in
Speaker 2: the fall of twenty twenty thirty nine of those drivers
Speaker 2: had been criminally charged. The question of how often this
Speaker 2: is actually happening, when it started, who's doing it, and
Speaker 2: why it is.
Speaker 1: Hard to answer. As it turns out.
Speaker 2: While I was researching this episode, I read papers and
Speaker 2: analysis and speculation and confident pronouncements from journalists, researchers and nonprofits,
Speaker 2: analysts and think tanks, papers from government agencies and academic journals,
Speaker 2: and it's hard to find a clear picture. Fatal encounters
Speaker 2: between pedestrians and cars are as old as cars themselves.
Speaker 2: Cars are dangerous, people are careless, and about seven thousand
Speaker 2: pedestrians a year are killed by cars in the United States,
Speaker 2: and I'm sure plenty of drivers have independently arrived at
Speaker 2: the conclusion that you could use a car.
Speaker 1: As a weapon. They're ubiquitous.
Speaker 2: Not everyone can go out and buy a gun, and
Speaker 2: most people don't know how to build a bomb, but
Speaker 2: almost anybody can find a way to get behind the
Speaker 2: wheel of a car, even if you.
Speaker 1: Don't own one.
Speaker 2: It's cheap, it's accessible, and it can be extremely deadly.
Speaker 2: So why doesn't vehicular ramming of groups of pedestrians appear
Speaker 2: as an identifiable method of terrorist attack until the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 2: The academic papers I read all seem to agree vehicular
Speaker 2: ramming attacks didn't really start happening until the early nineties,
Speaker 2: and they didn't really catch on until more than two
Speaker 2: decades later, starting in around twenty fourteen.
Speaker 1: Some earlier recorded.
Speaker 2: Incidents are noted in the literature, with one of the
Speaker 2: oft cited studies claiming that the earliest recorded incident they
Speaker 2: found was in Japan in nineteen sixty four, but most
Speaker 2: researchers seemed to agree that it was Palestinians who invented
Speaker 2: the tactic in the early nineties, and there are just
Speaker 2: a handful of incidents cited to support this, mostly involving
Speaker 2: young men driving into groups of IDF soldiers in the
Speaker 2: West Bank. One study published earlier this year in the
Speaker 2: European Research Studies Journal incorrectly attributes these attacks in Israel
Speaker 2: in the West Bank to Hamas, But aside from being inaccurate,
Speaker 2: I think the actual truth here is more illuminating. People
Speaker 2: are doing this on their own. A twenty eighteen paper
Speaker 2: in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism analyzed data about sixty
Speaker 2: two vehicular attacks in Israel and the West Bank between
Speaker 2: twenty twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: The data was provided to.
Speaker 2: The researchers directly by the Israeli Security Agency, and the
Speaker 2: authors also examined court records, media published in both Hebrew
Speaker 2: and Arabic, as well as social media posts made surrounding
Speaker 2: the attacks. And none of those attacks were carried out
Speaker 2: by Hamas. They weren't carried out by a group of
Speaker 2: any kind. Only sixteen percent of the attackers in that
Speaker 2: data set had ever been imprisoned for any reason prior
Speaker 2: to the attack, and less than a quarter of them
Speaker 2: even had a family member with any kind of security
Speaker 2: or criminal record. The attacks in the nineties were sporadic.
Speaker 2: Aside from these couple of incidents in Israel and the
Speaker 2: West Bank. There were a handful of incidents elsewhere in
Speaker 2: the world in the nineties and early two thousands. But
Speaker 2: if you look at the data included in these studies
Speaker 2: and chart it over time, the line shoots off the page,
Speaker 2: starting in about twenty fourteen, and suddenly they're happening all
Speaker 2: over the world. I think it's worth a little sidebar
Speaker 2: here to talk about definitions. What exactly is a vehicle
Speaker 2: ramming attack? Most of the papers I read about the
Speaker 2: tactic use that term, abbreviated as just VR.
Speaker 1: They're sometimes also called.
Speaker 2: VTA's vehicular terrorist attack, and deciding what is or isn't
Speaker 2: a VIRA is something every author seems to decide for himself.
Speaker 2: Two of the papers I'm relying on here both included
Speaker 2: a description of how they built their own data set
Speaker 2: because there was no comprehensive worldwide list to look at.
Speaker 2: A twenty nineteen paper by Keith Hayward and Vincent Miller
Speaker 2: and the British Journal of Criminology analyzed one hundred and
Speaker 2: twenty five incidents between nineteen ninety nine and twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2: The incidents they included in the data had to meet
Speaker 2: these criteria. A vehicle had to be used as a
Speaker 2: weapon on pedestrians or populated vehicles. The vehicle had to
Speaker 2: be the primary weapon. Any other weapons used like knives
Speaker 2: or firearms could only be used once the vehicle was
Speaker 2: disabled and not part of an armed or carbomb. The
Speaker 2: incident was not part of a kidnapping attempt. Pedestrian casualties
Speaker 2: were intended and not part of a chase of aasion
Speaker 2: or accident. The vehicle was not primarily used for demolition,
Speaker 2: and the Hayward and Miller paper is more interested in
Speaker 2: the idea of social contagion, how these attacks appear to
Speaker 2: come in waves clustered together in time, even when the
Speaker 2: attacks themselves have almost nothing else in common aside from
Speaker 2: the similarity of the physical act. A paper that same
Speaker 2: year by Brian Michael Jenkins and Bruce Butterworth from the
Speaker 2: Minetta Transportation Institute is much more focused within the academic
Speaker 2: niche that is terrorism studies.
Speaker 1: And it's written by guys.
Speaker 2: Who've been in the business for so long they can't
Speaker 2: shift their focus beyond Islamic extremism.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of package here. And this paper
Speaker 1: notes that no.
Speaker 2: Two databases of such incidents will ever agree. But the
Speaker 2: authors created a list of one hundred and eighty four
Speaker 2: incidents from nineteen sixty four to twenty nineteen that they
Speaker 2: were able to identify as vehicle attacks on public targets.
Speaker 2: They excluded vehicle ramming incidents that occurred in war zones,
Speaker 2: those that occurred while the driver was fleeing a crime
Speaker 2: scene or evading police, altercations between motorists, incidents where the
Speaker 2: vehicle rammed a government building, accidents, and domestic disputes. And
Speaker 2: while they say they excluded attacks in war zones, they
Speaker 2: do not exclude attacks that occurred in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Speaker 1: And from both of these studies.
Speaker 2: I was unable to find an appendix that actually list
Speaker 2: the events that they included in their data sets, and
Speaker 2: that leads me with a lot of unanswered questions. And
Speaker 2: neither paper really clearly defines what they mean by terrorism either,
Speaker 2: And that's a little.
Speaker 1: Bit sticky too.
Speaker 2: It's a loaded word. In post nine to eleven America,
Speaker 2: it usually means one thing, Islamic extremism, isis al Kaida,
Speaker 2: the Aliban, etc. And in more casual parlance, the word
Speaker 2: gets thrown around a little too casually. It may not
Speaker 2: be worth trying to salvage the word by defining it
Speaker 2: in a way that's useful, but it appears in most
Speaker 2: of the writing about this, so I'll take a stab
Speaker 2: at telling you what it probably means if you're talking legally.
Speaker 2: The United States Code defines terrorism as activities that involve
Speaker 2: acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of
Speaker 2: criminal laws in the United States, and those acts appear
Speaker 2: to be intended to intimidate orquer civilians, influence government policy
Speaker 2: by intimidation or coercion, or to affect the conduct of
Speaker 2: a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping. The law
Speaker 2: is not the only way to define something. The National
Speaker 2: Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
Speaker 2: at the University of Maryland, which maintains the Global Terrorism Database,
Speaker 2: has a lengthy explanation of the definition that they use
Speaker 2: in deciding what goes in the database. The short answer
Speaker 2: is the threatened or actual use of illegal force and
Speaker 2: violence by a non state actor to attain political, economic, religious,
Speaker 2: or social goals through fear, quertion or intimidation. Pretty straightforward,
Speaker 2: but every paper I read us slightly different. Frameworks seemed
Speaker 2: to rely on slightly different definitions, and they all use
Speaker 2: their own hand picked data sets. Few actually included information
Speaker 2: about what incidents were in those data sets, but for
Speaker 2: the most part, they all agree vras didn't really happen
Speaker 2: until Palestinians started doing them in the nineties and then
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen era surgeon popularity is mostly discussed in terms
Speaker 2: of a handful of very deadly, high profile attacks where
Speaker 2: the perpetrator was inspired by an Islamic extremist group. The
Speaker 2: Meneta Transportation Institute paper focuses heavily on Jihadis motivated attacks,
Speaker 2: as their own data shows that only ten percent of
Speaker 2: the attacks in that data set fit in that category.
Speaker 2: They acknowledge that the vast majority of vehicle ramming attacks
Speaker 2: in the United States have no connection at all to
Speaker 2: Al Qaida or ISIS, but quote in the public's mind,
Speaker 2: they are blended with the jihadist attacks and add to
Speaker 2: the general level of fear. The Jahadas propaganda machine was
Speaker 2: therefore able to brand the tactic and benefit from its occurrence,
Speaker 2: regardless of who was responsible. And now, as much as
Speaker 2: I'm sure ISIS would love to take credit for that
Speaker 2: branding success, it looks to me that its Western researchers
Speaker 2: were too eager to see this tactic as a jihadist
Speaker 2: one that just happens to have leaked out into broader usage.
Speaker 2: I read the literature, I took notes, but I also
Speaker 2: spent two full days combing through newspaper archives going back
Speaker 2: one hundred years, all the way back to the nineteen
Speaker 2: twenties when we started to see widespread car ownership.
Speaker 1: In the United States.
Speaker 2: And I think these studies are missing a really particular
Speaker 2: category of vehicular attack. People driving through union picket lines.
Speaker 2: It happens all the time. Members of the Communications Workers
Speaker 2: of America wear red shirts every Thursday in memory of
Speaker 2: Jerry Horgan. Morgan was a CWA member who was struck
Speaker 2: and killed when a scab worker drove through the picket
Speaker 2: line in nineteen eighty nine. And just weeks after his death,
Speaker 2: out there on the picket line, one of his union
Speaker 2: brothers ended up in the hospital after being hit by
Speaker 2: a company truck. The president of Jerry's local CWA eleven
Speaker 2: oh three told the paper, We're tired of these people
Speaker 2: running us over.
Speaker 1: It was common.
Speaker 2: In March of this year, a member of the Amalgamated
Speaker 2: Transit Union was hospitalized after being intentionally struck by a
Speaker 2: company vehicle during a strike of Santa Clara Valley Transportation
Speaker 2: Authority workers. In twenty twenty three, five members of the
Speaker 2: United Autoworkers Union were hit by a car that plowed
Speaker 2: through the picket line outside the General Motors Splint Processing
Speaker 2: Center in Swartz Creek, Michigan. One of them was hospitalized.
Speaker 2: The driver fled the scene and was later convicted of
Speaker 2: leaving the scene of an accident, but the plea deal
Speaker 2: dropped the charge of assault with a deadly weapon. Even
Speaker 2: with my limited time and ability to search these old records,
Speaker 2: I found multiple examples in every decade for the last
Speaker 2: century of union workers being hit, sometimes killed, when a
Speaker 2: car intentionally drove into their picket line. The earliest of
Speaker 2: these incidents that I could find were in May of
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty nine, during a strike of textile workers at
Speaker 2: the Rayon Manufacturing Plants and Elizabethton, Tennessee. The strike had
Speaker 2: been going on since March and things had gotten pretty violent.
Speaker 2: The National Guard was brought in to beat back the protester,
Speaker 2: most of whom were young women. Many of them were teenagers,
Speaker 2: and there was at least one incident of a non
Speaker 2: union worker driving through the picketers, injuring several of them.
Speaker 1: But there was a second.
Speaker 2: Incident that I don't think you can deny clearly meets
Speaker 2: the criteria of a vehicular ramming attack. On May sixteenth,
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty nine, a bus full of scabs plowed through
Speaker 2: the line of striking workers. One of the workers who
Speaker 2: was hit was a teenage girl named Evelyn Heaton, and
Speaker 2: she was so badly injured that onlookers believed that she
Speaker 2: had died.
Speaker 1: But she didn't die, and.
Speaker 2: When Evelyn Heaton was released from the hospital, she swore
Speaker 2: out a criminal complaint for attempted murder against the driver,
Speaker 2: a man named Joe Calhoun. But she also swore out
Speaker 2: a complaint of aiding in a betting attempted murder, and
Speaker 2: this one was against Tennessee National Guard Adjutant General W. C.
Speaker 1: Boyd.
Speaker 2: Heaton acqus void of ordering the attack, of personally directing
Speaker 2: the bus to drive into the workers, and he didn't
Speaker 2: deny it. He said he'd ordered the path to the
Speaker 2: plant to be cleared. He was arrested, questioned, and released
Speaker 2: on bond, but a grand jury never indicted him. I
Speaker 2: couldn't help get a little lost down this rabbit hole.
Speaker 2: The whole incident looks like a fascinating chapter of labor
Speaker 2: history that I'd never heard of. The same week his
Speaker 2: charges were dropped, Boyd got into a little trouble with
Speaker 2: the Secretary of War. You see, the governor of Tennessee
Speaker 2: hadn't actually deployed the National Guard, at least not correctly.
Speaker 2: He didn't deploy the National Guard. He had the National
Speaker 2: guardsmen sworn in as state troopers before deploying them as
Speaker 2: strike breakers. So as they're tear gassing these teenage girls
Speaker 2: from the textile mill, they're wearing their United States Army uniforms,
Speaker 2: carrying weapons that were federal government property. But that was
Speaker 2: illegal because they were not acting in their capacity as guardsmen.
Speaker 2: From what I can find, violating federal law and ordering
Speaker 2: a bus driver to plow through a crowd of teenage
Speaker 2: girls didn't seem to affect his career. W. C. Boyd
Speaker 2: didn't retire from the Tennessee National Guard until the year
Speaker 2: before he died two decades later. But back to the
Speaker 2: issue at hand, though, I found scores of these incidents
Speaker 2: over the last century in which striking workers are hit
Speaker 2: by cars. These kinds of incidents don't tend to have
Speaker 2: a high fatality rate, and some of them are definitely
Speaker 2: just accidents. Picket Lines are often in close proximity to
Speaker 2: vehicular traffic, and any time a pedestrian is near a.
Speaker 1: Car there's a risk.
Speaker 2: But in the stories where it appears to be intentional,
Speaker 2: of which there are many, it's usually a scab worker
Speaker 2: or a boss driving through the crowd when entering or
Speaker 2: exiting the area around the workplace. You could argue that
Speaker 2: this kind of incident is different. This isn't a driver
Speaker 2: seeking out a confrontation with a pedestrian. This is a
Speaker 2: pedestrian who is in some cases very intentionally blocking the
Speaker 2: path of that vehicle because that is his goal. The
Speaker 2: striking worker does not want the scab to cross the
Speaker 2: picket line and enter the job site. But you can't
Speaker 2: argue that it's not political. Union workers have a right
Speaker 2: to strike. What they're doing is not illegal. Hitting them
Speaker 2: with a car is, and the people hitting them with
Speaker 2: those cars have a motive. Remember those definitions. A vehicle
Speaker 2: ramming attack is just the intentional use of a vehicle
Speaker 2: as a weapon, intending because in to a pedestrian. And
Speaker 2: what's terrorism the threatened or actual use of illegal force
Speaker 2: and violence by a non state actor to attain a political, economic, religious,
Speaker 2: or social goal their fear, coercion, or intimidation. I'm not
Speaker 2: saying we should charge scabs who run over someone's foot
Speaker 2: with terrorism. That doesn't make any sense. That's not the
Speaker 2: point I'm trying to make here. I just think that
Speaker 2: ignoring this entire category of vehicular assaults is missing something important.
Speaker 2: Because people are using cars as weapons to intimidate, harass,
Speaker 2: and injure workers who are exercising their right to engage
Speaker 2: in strikes. They're threatening and carrying out violence against a
Speaker 2: particular group of people, and there is an identifiable political
Speaker 2: and economic motivation to frighten these people off the picket line.
Speaker 2: And after all that time searching all those old newspapers,
Speaker 2: it's not just picket lines that I feel like the
Speaker 2: researchers overlooked. The narrative in these studies seems to be
Speaker 2: that the tactic originated with Palestinians was popularized by jihadas
Speaker 2: groups from twenty fourteen to twenty seventeen, and around that
Speaker 2: same time period, the idea spread rapidly online getting picked
Speaker 2: up by people with other motivations and backgrounds. But I
Speaker 2: don't think that's true either. I don't think white Westerners
Speaker 2: learned about this online from isis and in looking through
Speaker 2: the historical record, I admit I ran into some of
Speaker 2: the same problems the researchers did. It's hard to find
Speaker 2: information about this that goes further back than a few
Speaker 2: decades before this was a named phenomenon. It wasn't really
Speaker 2: something that earned more than a passing mention in the newspaper.
Speaker 2: It seems no one particularly cared when a union member,
Speaker 2: a civil rights activist, an environmentalist, a communist, a hippie,
Speaker 2: an anti war protester, or some other nasty undesirable got
Speaker 2: they deserved, And when it is mentioned, the tone is nasty.
Speaker 2: So nothing's really changed, I guess, but it does impact
Speaker 2: my ability to find these historical vehicular attacks.
Speaker 1: Here's some I did find.
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty three, the Congress of Racial Equality staged
Speaker 2: a sit in at Jones Beach State Park on Long Island.
Speaker 2: They wanted the Long Island Park Commission to hire more
Speaker 2: black and Puerto Rican workers. As part of their demonstration,
Speaker 2: they blocked the road leading to the parking area at
Speaker 2: the beach. People get so in their feelings about blocking
Speaker 2: a roadway. Yeah, it probably is annoying to you, but
Speaker 2: that's the point of the protest. They are making themselves unignorable.
Speaker 2: You know, you might say you've blocked the road, what
Speaker 2: do you expect? But a car is a deadly weapon.
Speaker 2: Think of it like a gun. It's legal to a gun,
Speaker 2: and if you're in fear for your life, it self
Speaker 2: defense to fire that gun. But if you are being
Speaker 2: prevented from conveniently accessing the beach on Long Island, you
Speaker 2: don't have grounds for the use of deadly force. You
Speaker 2: might be inconvenienced, and you might be annoyed. You know,
Speaker 2: I guess it might be annoying that the fight for
Speaker 2: civil rights ruined your beach day. But you cannot hurt
Speaker 2: people with a deadly weapon because they're in your way,
Speaker 2: because you're impatient, because you don't like what they're doing,
Speaker 2: because you think what they're doing is wrong. That is
Speaker 2: a disproportionate escalation and it's not healthy. Photos of that
Speaker 2: demonstration clearly show the protesters sitting cross legged, side by
Speaker 2: side across the road. One newspaper article I found that
Speaker 2: didn't include the picture. Describe the scene with these words,
Speaker 2: Negro and white members of the Congress of Racial Quality
Speaker 2: through themselves and their children in front of moving cars
Speaker 2: here Thursday to draw attention to a campaign to get
Speaker 2: jobs for Negroes with the Long Island State Park Commission.
Speaker 2: A number of demonstrators were struck by cars, whose operators
Speaker 2: were forced to halt abruptly. Another newspaper wrote that twenty
Speaker 2: demonstrators were quote bumped or brushed by cars, with another
Speaker 2: paper mentioning just in passing that three people were injured.
Speaker 2: On the night of April fourth, nineteen sixty eight, there
Speaker 2: were hundreds of people marching in the streets of Battle Creek, Michigan.
Speaker 2: That date might feel a little familiar to you.
Speaker 1: Martin Luther King.
Speaker 2: Junior had been assassinated just hours earlier. Battle Creek Police
Speaker 2: Chief Clifford Barney was later quoted in the local paper
Speaker 2: describing the all night march as quote mostly orderly, but
Speaker 2: the headline that ran in wire stories nationwide was Negro
Speaker 2: violence in Battle Creek. In the early morning hours of
Speaker 2: April fifth, as the march continued through the night, the
Speaker 2: vice president of the local NAACP Young Adult council was
Speaker 2: hit by a car that drove through the march. Demonstrators
Speaker 2: claimed police who witnessed this incident refused to call an ambulance,
Speaker 2: and Stanley Morrow was taken to the hospital by another marcher.
Speaker 2: At a community meeting about the event a few days later,
Speaker 2: the NAACP demanded to know why the driver hadn't been
Speaker 2: arrested for leaving the scene of an accident. Chief Barney
Speaker 2: said the driver had quote exercised good judgment and that
Speaker 2: they shouldn't have been in the road. Nothing's changed. In
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty nine, Canadian college students staged a demonstration on
Speaker 2: the Blue Water Bridge between Michigan and Ontario. They were
Speaker 2: protesting the nuclear testing the United States was carrying out
Speaker 2: on the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska. According
Speaker 2: to the Port Huron Times Herald, a car with Michigan
Speaker 2: plates gunned it through the crowd on the bridge. Twenty
Speaker 2: year old David Pettinger was one of the students who
Speaker 2: was hit, and while another student was slightly injured, his
Speaker 2: leg got stuck in the car's wheel well, causing him
Speaker 2: to be dragged for nearly four hundred feet as the
Speaker 2: driver attempted to flee the scene. Pettinger was described in
Speaker 2: one newspaper as quote not seriously injured, but according to
Speaker 2: his later lawsuit, he lost most of the skin on
Speaker 2: both of his legs and spent seven weeks in the
Speaker 2: hospital with David's legs stuck in her wheel. The driver
Speaker 2: was unable to flee and was arrested on scene, but
Speaker 2: she was never charged with a crime. He was awarded
Speaker 2: less than seven thousand dollars in his lawsuit against the driver.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy, just days after the Kent State shooting,
Speaker 2: students were protesting at Eastern Michigan University, and five of
Speaker 2: them were injured when a man rammed his car into
Speaker 2: a crowd on campus. There's no exports a nation offered
Speaker 2: in any of the newspaper articles I can find about
Speaker 2: why he did this or who he was, but the
Speaker 2: description is very intentional. He was driving slowly as he
Speaker 2: approached the crowd of students, sort of inching towards them,
Speaker 2: and then he suddenly accelerated directly into them before fleeing
Speaker 2: the scene. And in nineteen seventy one, Margaret Ann Knott
Speaker 2: was killed in Butler, Alabama, after a man drove his
Speaker 2: car through a sit in. The group had a permit.
Speaker 2: Local black leaders had met with the mayor and the
Speaker 2: sheriff ahead of the march. They were allowed to march
Speaker 2: in the street. The police were there, and as the
Speaker 2: march proceeded through the center of town, they were granted
Speaker 2: permission by the captain of the state troopers who were
Speaker 2: there on the scene, to stop in an intersection outside
Speaker 2: the courthouse just for a few minutes, for a five
Speaker 2: minute silent prayer of it Chun Margaret was sitting on the
Speaker 2: ground and praying when the car came. She was just
Speaker 2: nineteen years old. Her mother was one of the black
Speaker 2: teachers whose unfair firing the march was protesting. The young
Speaker 2: man had been sitting right beside her there in the square,
Speaker 2: managed to get up and run away as the car approached,
Speaker 2: but Margaret was sitting with her back turned to it,
Speaker 2: and she didn't react fast enough. After she was hit,
Speaker 2: he says, she just kept saying, I died for freedom,
Speaker 2: I died for freedom. Her killer was arrested, but a
Speaker 2: grand jury didn't indict. He claimed he was attacked, that
Speaker 2: he feared for his life, and according to newspaper accounts,
Speaker 2: from the time. White eyewitnesses backed his story. Margaret's fellow
Speaker 2: demonstrates told a different one. He says they were rocking
Speaker 2: his car and trying to turn it over. That's why
Speaker 2: he got scared. They say they didn't put their hands
Speaker 2: on that car until after Margaret was under it. And
Speaker 2: if you listened to last week's episode about James Alex Fields,
Speaker 2: that might actually sound kind of familiar. He was afraid,
Speaker 2: he was afraid for his life. He had to do it.
Speaker 2: They were attacking him, but nobody put their hands on
Speaker 2: Fields's car until after a woman was dead. Margaret's mother
Speaker 2: raised money for a granite marker to be placed at
Speaker 2: the courthouse square to memorialize Margaret's death as a martyr
Speaker 2: in the civil rights movement, and the county refused.
Speaker 1: To allow it.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety nine, twenty eight years after her daughter's murder,
Speaker 2: Harry May Johnson got up to speak during public comment
Speaker 2: at a Chalktaw County Commission meeting. She asked again, please,
Speaker 2: could we place the marker in the square, and they
Speaker 2: said no, no, that's very racially divisive. Margaret Ann Knott
Speaker 2: was finally memorialized with a public marker in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2: I found a number of incidents in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 2: mostly involving anti war protesters hit by cars. During the
Speaker 2: Republican National Convention in Miami that summer, there were two
Speaker 2: separate instances of limousines carrying convention delegates driving into crowds
Speaker 2: of protesters and injuring people, one leaving a Vietnam veteran
Speaker 2: with a fractured skull and another breaking a woman's leg.
Speaker 2: The Democratic National Convention was inexplicably also in Miami that year,
Speaker 2: just a week earlier, and during that event, protesters occupied
Speaker 2: an intersection to demand answers over an alleged hit and
Speaker 2: run incident involving a staffer for Senator Hubert Humphrey who
Speaker 2: ran a woman over. The official DOJ report on policing
Speaker 2: during the conventions that summer mentions what appeared to be
Speaker 2: at least half a dozen incidents of cars intentionally striking protesters.
Speaker 2: I could go on, like in nineteen seventy nine, when
Speaker 2: a Los Angeles sheriff's deputy drove into a crowd protesting
Speaker 2: outside the Beverly Hills mansion owned by the Shah of
Speaker 2: Iran's mother, or the National guardsmen who drove a troop
Speaker 2: carrier directly at a crowd of anti nuclear protesters in
Speaker 2: California in nineteen eighty one. In nineteen ninety, the president
Speaker 2: of a timber company struck an environmental activist with his
Speaker 2: vehicle and sped away from the scene with the woman
Speaker 2: still on the hood.
Speaker 1: Of his car.
Speaker 2: None of these people were charged with a crime. My
Speaker 2: point is not just that I have a methodological disagreement
Speaker 2: with the study I read. I don't think they simply
Speaker 2: failed to look in the right place to find additional
Speaker 2: incidents to add to their data set. I think the
Speaker 2: disagreement is cheaper than that.
Speaker 1: We disagree about.
Speaker 2: What kind of violence matters, who we think of as violent,
Speaker 2: who we think of as victims, what's normal, what's acceptable,
Speaker 2: what's politically beneficial, and who deserves it. By their reasoning,
Speaker 2: it was a series of high profile attacks motivated by
Speaker 2: Islamic extremism that started a worldwide wave of vehicle ramming attacks,
Speaker 2: and it wasn't until then that researchers identify and name
Speaker 2: this phenomenon that I'm arguing has always been here. The
Speaker 2: two papers I'm pulling from primarily were both written in
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen, and they both open with a little vignette
Speaker 2: about a vehicle ramming attack. The paper called Smashing into Crowds,
Speaker 2: an Analysis of Vehicle ramming Attacks, published by the Meneta
Speaker 2: Transportation Institute, opens with this paragraph. On April third, twenty nineteen,
Speaker 2: police in Maryland arrested a man for plotting to drive
Speaker 2: a stolen rental van into crowds of people at National Harbor,
Speaker 2: a popular tourist site along the Potomac River. A convert
Speaker 2: to Islam, he claimed to have been inspired by the
Speaker 2: Islamic state of Iraq and Syria. The defendant had stolen
Speaker 2: the rental van several days before in Virginia and originally
Speaker 2: contemplated driving into passengers at Dulla's Airport, but found the
Speaker 2: crowds there were two spars for his purpose. He then
Speaker 2: changed the target to National Harbor, just under ten miles
Speaker 2: from the Capitol in Washington, d C. The incident was
Speaker 2: one of nearly thirteen to occur in the first three
Speaker 2: quarters of twenty nineteen across the world. And again, this
Speaker 2: paper selected one hundred and eighty four incidents from the
Speaker 2: sixties through twenty nineteen that they feel fit the criteria,
Speaker 2: and in the paper, they classified the perpetrators of these
Speaker 2: attacks into four primary categories, Palestinian gee, hottest, right wing extremist,
Speaker 2: and mentally disturbed. The authors made these determinations based on
Speaker 2: available media recording. Based on that paragraph I just read you,
Speaker 2: I assumed that they would place this incident into the
Speaker 2: jahattist category. I don't actually know, because they don't include
Speaker 2: the incidents in an appendix, But honestly, I'm actually curious
Speaker 2: why they would include it at all. They clearly say
Speaker 2: the incident was one of nearly thirteen to occur. First
Speaker 2: of all, what is nearly thirteen? But this incident didn't occur.
Speaker 2: There was no incident. This didn't happen. They don't name
Speaker 2: this man in the paper, but I recognize the description
Speaker 2: of it. His name is Rondel Henry, and he was
Speaker 2: originally indicted on a single count of driving a stolen
Speaker 2: vehicle across state lines. He ended up pleading guilty to
Speaker 2: the charge of attempting to perform an act of violence
Speaker 2: at an international airport, even though by their own admission,
Speaker 2: he decided not.
Speaker 1: To do that.
Speaker 2: But he was arrested after stealing the U haul van
Speaker 2: and before he did anything else. He has also been
Speaker 2: diagnosed with schizophrenia. Yes, Rondel Henry did make statements to
Speaker 2: the police after his arrest that he wanted to create
Speaker 2: a panic quote like what happened in France, likely referring
Speaker 2: to a twenty sixteen attack in Nice, France that killed
Speaker 2: eighty six people when a man drove a truck through
Speaker 2: a crowd gathered for bestial day. I'm not disputing rondel
Speaker 2: Henry's own stated intent or the fact that he'd viewed
Speaker 2: ISS propaganda on his cell phone. I just wish I
Speaker 2: could see the author's data set. First of all, how
Speaker 2: do they decide to include an incident that didn't actually happen.
Speaker 2: But in a larger sense, how are they deciding based
Speaker 2: largely just on media reporting, which attacks are attributable solely
Speaker 2: to the perpetrator's mental disturbance, and that category makes up
Speaker 2: the bulk of their data. Media sources are very quick
Speaker 2: to assume gee hottest intent if the perpetrator is Muslim,
Speaker 2: and they're very quick to ignore the possibility of political
Speaker 2: motivations if the attacker is anyone else. So I just
Speaker 2: wonder how they're making these determinations, because, again, this paper,
Speaker 2: with its hand selected data set of one hundred and
Speaker 2: eighty four vehicle ramming incidents. They categorized just ten of
Speaker 2: those as right wing extremism, and according to one of
Speaker 2: the tables, six of those occurred between twenty fourteen and
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen, the time period when these attacks are really
Speaker 2: starting to spike worldwide. And again, the paper doesn't include
Speaker 2: a list of incidents, so I can only guess which
Speaker 2: six right wing attacks they included and categorized as such.
Speaker 2: But the table indicates that of those six attacks during
Speaker 2: that five year time period, there was only one fatality.
Speaker 2: And I know that's not right by any definition of
Speaker 2: a right wing vehicle ramming attack. More than one person
Speaker 2: died during that five year period, because we know there
Speaker 2: was James alex Fields and Charlottesville in twenty seventeen. That's
Speaker 2: one attack, one fatality had their hire died. James Alex
Speaker 2: Fields was a Nazi. He had a framed picture of
Speaker 2: Hitler on his bedside table. So what else are they
Speaker 2: categorizing as a right wing vehicle ramming attack during that
Speaker 2: time period. Now I could accept the explanation that Elliott
Speaker 2: Roger may not count. Roger was an Inceel, I'm not
Speaker 2: conceding that his murders free wasn't right wing extremism. That's
Speaker 2: non negotiable. He hated women, he was racist, he was
Speaker 2: pretty into Hitler. I'm not going to do an episode
Speaker 2: about him. But if you don't remember the twenty fourteen
Speaker 2: ile Vista killings, you can look it up. That's what
Speaker 2: they were called. There's plenty of information about it online.
Speaker 2: But no, I would accept it if the researchers said
Speaker 2: that they chose to exclude this attack altogether because the
Speaker 2: vehicle ramming of random pedestrians wasn't the primary or central attack.
Speaker 2: Right I would argue that the vehicular assaults carried out
Speaker 2: after he left the scene of the sorority house shootings
Speaker 2: do count as their own independent assaults. But like I said,
Speaker 2: i'd hear them out if they wanted to say that
Speaker 2: that doesn't fit their criteria because it occurred as he
Speaker 2: was leaving the scene of the shooting, or that the
Speaker 2: vehicle was a secondary weapon in an attack that was
Speaker 2: primarily a shooting and stabbing spree.
Speaker 1: Whatever.
Speaker 2: Okay, I will accept that maybe Elliott Roger is not
Speaker 2: included in this data, but surely their list of right
Speaker 2: wing vehicle attacks from twenty fourteen to twenty nineteen. Surely
Speaker 2: that includes the Finsbury Park van attack. That attack was
Speaker 2: in June of twenty seventeen outside of a mosque in London,
Speaker 2: a little after midnight. People were leaving them off after Tarawi,
Speaker 2: the nighttime prayer said during Ramadan. As they walked outside,
Speaker 2: they saw a man at a nearby bus stop who
Speaker 2: seemed to be in some medical distress, so a group
Speaker 2: of men from the mosque walked over to offer aid.
Speaker 2: It was there that Darren Osborne rammed his van into
Speaker 2: the group. After driving up onto the curb and into
Speaker 2: the group of men, Darren Osborne jumped out of the
Speaker 2: van shouting I want to kill all Muslims. I did
Speaker 2: my bit before the men wrestled him to the ground
Speaker 2: as he was attempting to flee the scene. All this
Speaker 2: noise must have drawn the AmAm out onto the street,
Speaker 2: because the AmAm arrived on the scene just in time
Speaker 2: to stop the men from beating Osborne pretty badly. And
Speaker 2: I know the author of this paper knows about this attack,
Speaker 2: which left one man dead, so it can't possibly be
Speaker 2: in this data set because their paper cites heavily from
Speaker 2: another paper One that I also read that is called
Speaker 2: I did my bit terrorism car and the vehicle ramming
Speaker 2: attack as imitative event. And why then, does this data
Speaker 2: set also appear to misclassify the twenty eighteen Toronto van attack.
Speaker 2: That attacker Alec Manassian is mentioned by name in the paper,
Speaker 2: and one of the tables listing fatalities by country does
Speaker 2: appear to include the ten people who died in that attack.
Speaker 2: An eleventh victim passed away from their injuries in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one, but that was after the paper was published,
Speaker 2: so I can only assume the author included it as
Speaker 2: a data point, but they didn't classify it as right
Speaker 2: wing extremism. And with only four categories, that must mean
Speaker 2: that they're classifying the obsessively violent racism and misogyny of
Speaker 2: the Inceell movement as mental disturbance. I know it sounds
Speaker 2: like I'm being too hard on this paper. Why am
Speaker 2: I even telling you about it? If it's so flawed?
Speaker 2: Why did I use it? Because as I was reading
Speaker 2: through reports prepared by federal government agencies, internal memos, training materials,
Speaker 2: public bulletins from the DHS, the FBI, the TSA, this
Speaker 2: is the study that's always in the footnotes, so I
Speaker 2: think it bears dissecting because it's the one the government
Speaker 2: is reading. And these flaws become even more apparent when
Speaker 2: you read the follow up paper written by the same
Speaker 2: authors a year later in the fall of twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: That paper is called Metal against Marchers, an Analysis of
Speaker 2: recent incidents involving vehicle assaults at US political protests and rallies,
Speaker 2: and it is dismissive of the one hundred and four
Speaker 2: vehicle ramming incidents on protests during the summer of twenty
Speaker 2: twenty that were cataloged by Ari wil. The paper says,
Speaker 2: these encounters are being described as quote attacks or quote
Speaker 2: domestic terrorism, but as this report indicates, the events taking
Speaker 2: place at the protests differ in a number of ways
Speaker 2: from the vehicle ramming attacks previously carried out by terrorist
Speaker 2: organizations and reviewed in our earlier report Smashing into Crowds
Speaker 2: and Analysis of Vehicle Ramming Attacks. And in their analysis,
Speaker 2: they looked at just fifty two of those incidents, and
Speaker 2: they immediately discard nine of them as obvious accidents. And
Speaker 2: I don't doubt that some of them were. Of the
Speaker 2: forty three incidents that they examined more closely, they determined
Speaker 2: that there was clear evidence of malicious intent nineteen of
Speaker 2: them and another sixteen were possibly malicious. So, by their
Speaker 2: own analysis, eighty one percent of the incidents that they
Speaker 2: decided met their own criteria for being examined as vehicle
Speaker 2: ramming attacks. Eighty one percent of them looked intentional and malicious.
Speaker 2: And even if you just look at the ones where
Speaker 2: they say it's definitely malicious, forty four percent, and that's
Speaker 2: right in line with the forty five percent of attacks
Speaker 2: that were deemed malicious in Ari Wil's original analysis. So
Speaker 2: it sounds like they agree, right, But the next ten
Speaker 2: pages are devoted to downplaying, excusing, writing off, and ignoring
Speaker 2: the danger that this data suggests when particularly appalling passage reads.
Speaker 2: In a number of cases, it appears that drivers found
Speaker 2: themselves in a crowd, which led to a heated exchange
Speaker 2: during which the driver pushed.
Speaker 1: Through the pedestrians.
Speaker 2: It could be described as the vehicle pedestrian equivalent of
Speaker 2: road rage. In still others, drivers deliberately drove to a
Speaker 2: demonstration and then plowed through a crowd to display belligerents
Speaker 2: and intimidate the protesters. This would be the vehicular equivalent
Speaker 2: of brandishing a weapon. Now, first of all, what they're
Speaker 2: talking about here is a premeditated confrontation that the driver
Speaker 2: escalated to an assault with a deadly weapon. Brandishing a
Speaker 2: weapon just means like pulling your gun out and showing
Speaker 2: it in a way that could be perceived as threatening.
Speaker 2: Hitting someone with your car even a little bit is
Speaker 2: more akin to I don't know, pulling out your gun
Speaker 2: during a disagreement, taking the safety off, chambering around, holding
Speaker 2: it to someone's temple, and then pistol whipping them with it.
Speaker 2: You're not just demonstrating that you have a weapon, which
Speaker 2: would be I don't know, parking across the street and
Speaker 2: revving the engine a little bit.
Speaker 1: You're using it. You're using the weapon.
Speaker 2: The extremely low fatality rate of those attacks from twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: as well as the general apparent lack of intent to kill,
Speaker 2: even among those attackers who clearly demonstrate malicious intent and
Speaker 2: intent to harm, are both cited as evidence that these
Speaker 2: incidents aren't the same as the vehicular ramming attacks in
Speaker 2: the earlier paper. But nowhere in that paper did they
Speaker 2: claim that intent to kill was a requirement, and terrorism
Speaker 2: itself broadly defined both in the law and in general
Speaker 2: research doesn't require intent to kill. Remember, the definition used
Speaker 2: by the researchers that this author cites in his own
Speaker 2: work is just the threatened or actual use of illegal
Speaker 2: force and violence by a nonstate actor to attaining political, economic, religious,
Speaker 2: or social goal through fear, querition, or intimidation.
Speaker 1: And what is that.
Speaker 2: If you bump somebody a little bit with your car,
Speaker 2: that is actual use of force as well as the
Speaker 2: threat of lethal force. If these people who are engaging
Speaker 2: in political activity that you disagree with, don't go home,
Speaker 2: that's what it is. And then there are claims in
Speaker 2: the paper that just outright contradict their own prior work quote. However,
Speaker 2: more of the earlier cases could be connected with ongoing
Speaker 2: campaigns of terrorist violence jihadists, wigers Palestinians, even if they
Speaker 2: were carried out by individual perpetrators who were inspired, as
Speaker 2: opposed to being directed to take action. Only two of
Speaker 2: the twenty twenty cases can be connected with an identifiable group.
Speaker 2: None of the twenty twenty cases thus far show evidence
Speaker 2: of being ordered or assisted by an organization. And you
Speaker 2: might think that sounds like it makes sense, right, but
Speaker 2: it doesn't. It doesn't hold water. When Palestinians were carrying
Speaker 2: out car attacks in the nineties, there was no group
Speaker 2: calling for that as a tactic. In later years, people
Speaker 2: are talking about it, people are calling for it. But
Speaker 2: a study of Palestinian vehicle attacks from two thousand to
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen shows no group affiliation for any perpetrator in
Speaker 2: the data set. The vast majority of jihadist inspired vehicle
Speaker 2: tax in the United States and Europe in the last
Speaker 2: ten years were carried out by perpetrators with no known
Speaker 2: actual contact with any group. They weren't members, they never
Speaker 2: talked to anybody. They just saw it online. And if
Speaker 2: seeing political propaganda online is sufficient to connect an attacker
Speaker 2: to a group or ideology, you can't exclude the attacks
Speaker 2: on protests in the United States. The American drivers plowing
Speaker 2: through protests aren't doing it in a vacuum.
Speaker 1: They're right.
Speaker 2: Most of these attackers aren't affiliated with what they're thinking
Speaker 2: of as official groups, terrorist organizations, hate groups. Skip was
Speaker 2: definitely a klansman, but that was an outlier. Most of
Speaker 2: them aren't moo cases. We do know what they believe
Speaker 2: and what kind of media environment they're existing in. I'm
Speaker 2: not talking about going on the dark corners of the
Speaker 2: Internet to download copies of al Qaeda magazines and isis videos.
Speaker 1: There's always a lot.
Speaker 2: Of airtime for discussion about Islamic extremist content and couraging
Speaker 2: these kinds of attacks, and that is out there. Don't
Speaker 2: get me wrong, I'm not saying it's not out there.
Speaker 2: In the fall of twenty ten, Inspire magazine, the English
Speaker 2: language publication by an al Qaida group in Yemen, published
Speaker 2: an article called the Ultimate Mowing Machine. Most of the
Speaker 2: first page of the article is taken up by a
Speaker 2: gigantic image of a Ford F two fifty, but the
Speaker 2: text of the article encourages adherents to carry out these
Speaker 2: kinds of attacks.
Speaker 1: Quote.
Speaker 2: The idea is to use a pickup truck as a
Speaker 2: mowing machine, not to mow grass, but to mow down
Speaker 2: the enemies of a law, the magazine says.
Speaker 1: Quote. The ideal location.
Speaker 2: Is a place where there are a maximum number of
Speaker 2: pedestrians and the least number of vehicles. In fact, if
Speaker 2: you can get through to pedestrian only locations that exist
Speaker 2: in some downtown city center areas, that would be fabulous.
Speaker 2: There are some places that are closed down for vehicles
Speaker 2: at certain times due to the swarms of people. That
Speaker 2: magazine article did exist, and there was another article in
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen published by an ISIS affiliated group that had
Speaker 2: a similar message. Notably, though, most researchers go out of
Speaker 2: their way to explain that there was actually no measurable
Speaker 2: increase in this type of attack after either of those
Speaker 2: articles were published, and in fact, both of those articles
Speaker 2: were published immediately after a relatively high profile attack of
Speaker 2: this kind, so rather than inspiring future attacks, they seem
Speaker 2: to be trying to capitalize on the publicity surrounding an
Speaker 2: attack that had just happened. But yes, there are, of
Speaker 2: course Islamic extremist groups that do put out explicit calls
Speaker 2: for this kind of attack.
Speaker 1: I'm not hiding that from you. But they're not alone.
Speaker 2: In January twenty seventeen, The Daily Caller, a right wing
Speaker 2: news website founded by Tucker Carlson, posted a video online
Speaker 2: with the headline, here's a reel of cars flowing through
Speaker 2: protesters trying to block the road.
Speaker 1: And the video was just that.
Speaker 2: It's a ninety second compilation of clips of vehicular ramming
Speaker 2: attacks on protesters.
Speaker 1: It's set to a.
Speaker 2: Bizarre I don't know sort of a pop rock soft
Speaker 2: piano cover of Ludacris's song Move Bitch, and before the
Speaker 2: violence starts on the screen, the Daily Caller helpfully warns
Speaker 2: viewers that the song has a lot of profanity in it,
Speaker 2: you know, in case you don't like to hear bad
Speaker 2: words and might want to mute it before viewing people
Speaker 2: get thrown into the air by speeding cars. There's no
Speaker 2: mention or warning that there will be graphic violence, although
Speaker 2: I guess you can assume that from the title. The
Speaker 2: site's video editor, Mike Roused wrote on the post, here's
Speaker 2: a compilation of liberal protesters getting pushed out of the
Speaker 2: way by cars and trucks. Study the technique. It may
Speaker 2: prove useful in the next four years. None of these
Speaker 2: clips are new, but that doesn't mean they're not still fresh.
Speaker 2: And that post stayed up for eight months after James
Speaker 2: alex Field's murdered Heather Higher and August of that year,
Speaker 2: the Daily Caller quietly deleted the post and didn't respond to.
Speaker 1: Requests for comment about it.
Speaker 2: Fox News did issue an official statement saying that they
Speaker 2: regretted reposting the video to Fox Nation, which at the
Speaker 2: time was an official Fox news companion site focused on
Speaker 2: opinion and commentary.
Speaker 1: But the video was there all year, was there.
Speaker 2: All summer twenty seventeen. It wasn't just James alex Field's
Speaker 2: and the other Unite the Right attendees posting memes about
Speaker 2: running people over. And as if that weren't enough, that
Speaker 2: twenty twenty paper from the Minetta Transportation Institute concludes with
Speaker 2: one final handwaving dismissal of the very idea quote the
Speaker 2: numbers cited in this review of meaning in the more
Speaker 2: than ten thousand demonstrations during the late spring and summer
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty, there was something on the order of
Speaker 2: one hundred incidents. Ari Wyle assigned malicious intent to forty
Speaker 2: three of these events, while we discern malicious intent in
Speaker 2: thirty five of them. In either case, it is a
Speaker 2: very small number.
Speaker 1: No, it's not. No, it's not that's not true.
Speaker 2: That is a lie. I did notice a lot of
Speaker 2: errors in their first paper. They have a lot of tables,
Speaker 2: you know, sort of slicing and dicing their numbers in
Speaker 2: different ways, and I think a lot of the numbers
Speaker 2: are wrong because from one table to the next sort
Speaker 2: of rearranging the same numbers in different configurations than numbers
Speaker 2: don't match.
Speaker 1: So maybe they're just not numbers. Guys.
Speaker 2: Maybe he doesn't know that this isn't a very small number,
Speaker 2: because by their own methodology, they've identified thirty five separate
Speaker 2: incidents of malicious intentional vehicle ramming attacks on political protesters
Speaker 2: during a four month period in the United States. Their
Speaker 2: prior paper, which they're comparing this to and saying this
Speaker 2: isn't like that, this is not a big deal, that
Speaker 2: paper identified twenty four vehicle ramming attacks in the United
Speaker 2: States between twenty fourteen and twenty nineteen twenty four over
Speaker 2: a five year period. Thirty five in four months is
Speaker 2: more than twenty times the frequency of the attacks in
Speaker 2: the earlier data set. That's not a small number. That's
Speaker 2: either an emergency or a sign you need to go
Speaker 2: back to the drawing board and look at your fucking methodology.
Speaker 2: In the paper by Miller and Hayward, they write that
Speaker 2: vehicle ramming attacks have a virus like quality. In twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: they very quickly rose from a fairly rare, isolated event
Speaker 2: to what is now the most deadly form of terror
Speaker 2: attack in the Western world. And this paper takes a
Speaker 2: more sociological approach than the other one, which is again
Speaker 2: firmly entrenched in the problematic world of terrorism studies, inc. So,
Speaker 2: instead of trying to categorize attackers by guessing at their motives,
Speaker 2: this paper looks at the act itself, noting the wide
Speaker 2: ideological diversity among the perpetrators in their data set. Despite
Speaker 2: typically being framed in one of these two ways. Vehicle
Speaker 2: ramming attacks aren't a jihattist tactic that escaped containment, and
Speaker 2: they weren't at Palestinian invention.
Speaker 1: It's a tool.
Speaker 2: The tool itself has no ideology. It's just something that
Speaker 2: is low tech and accessible. You don't need to buy
Speaker 2: special equipment or have particular training or skills. Anyone can
Speaker 2: do it, and they do. Perpetrators of this kind of
Speaker 2: attack run the entire spectrum, but that virus like quality
Speaker 2: means you're more likely to catch it if you're exposed
Speaker 2: to it on a regular basis and in large doses.
Speaker 2: At the risk of being too blunt about it, the
Speaker 2: papers from the Meneta Transportation Institute are.
Speaker 1: Grotesque to me.
Speaker 2: They downplay the violence of right wing actors and over
Speaker 2: emphasize the threat of Islamic extremist attacks by spending most
Speaker 2: of the paper discussing that type of attack, despite it
Speaker 2: representing a very small portion of the TI data. There
Speaker 2: have been a few dozen, very deadly, high profile attacks
Speaker 2: in the last ten years, mostly in Europe, where the
Speaker 2: attacker's motivation was absolutely Islamic extremism. I'm not saying those
Speaker 2: attacks don't happen, that those events don't matter. I'm not
Speaker 2: covering them up or hiding them from you, or making
Speaker 2: excuses for them.
Speaker 1: I don't approve of those but.
Speaker 2: These self selected data sets put the spotlight on those events.
Speaker 2: By excluding a long and bloody history of vehicles as
Speaker 2: a tool of political violence, it is a political choice
Speaker 2: to focus on a particular piece of data, and by
Speaker 2: repeatedly reasserting this claim that the tactic was invented in
Speaker 2: the nineties by Palestinians despite the existence of earlier data points,
Speaker 2: they equate the desperate acts of an oppressed people fighting
Speaker 2: an occupying army with the only tools at their disposal.
Speaker 2: They're equating that with the activity excellent suburban American racist
Speaker 2: and a pickup truck who thinks liberals don't have civil rights.
Speaker 2: The only thing these two types of attacks have in
Speaker 2: common is the attacker's access to a low tech, widely
Speaker 2: available weapon, their intent, their context, their motivation. None of
Speaker 2: these things are the same. These are not the same phenomenon.
Speaker 2: It's just the same tool. The prevalence with which that
Speaker 2: paper is cited in materials written by and for American
Speaker 2: law enforcement agencies should tell you something. They want you
Speaker 2: to be afraid of the people the government already doesn't like,
Speaker 2: and they want you to be afraid to exercise your
Speaker 2: right to protest. Palestinians didn't invent vehicular attacks. You don't
Speaker 2: have to look to the West Bank. Look at our
Speaker 2: own history, look at the relatively recent news. Americans who
Speaker 2: have been victims of politically motive violence at the front
Speaker 2: end of a car are union workers. They were people
Speaker 2: who took to the streets to protest war and nuclear bombs.
Speaker 2: There are people who wanted peace, people who wanted civil rights,
Speaker 2: people who wanted equality, and the United States of America.
Speaker 2: The blood on those bumpers is theirs. There seems to
Speaker 2: be a vested interest in making sure that when you
Speaker 2: think of a violent man driving into a crowd, that
Speaker 2: you are thinking of a racist caricature of a Muslim man,
Speaker 2: when you should be thinking of the bosses and the scabs,
Speaker 2: and the racists and the cops and the people who've
Speaker 2: had their brains rotted out. In the comment section under
Speaker 2: a Twitter post from a meme account that sometimes gets
Speaker 2: a laugh emoji reply from Elon Musk. After James alex
Speaker 2: Field's murdered Heather Hire in twenty seventeen, a police officer
Speaker 2: in Springfield, Massachusetts got on Facebook and he posted a
Speaker 2: news story about the attack, and with that link he wrote, Ahaha,
Speaker 2: love this. In twenty twenty, as Summer Tailor lay dying
Speaker 2: in a hospital in Seattle, a King County Sheriff's detective
Speaker 2: posted a mean depicting a vehicle running someone over and
Speaker 2: the text read all lives splatter. To remove any doubt
Speaker 2: that he was absolutely talking about Summer Taylor, who was
Speaker 2: at that time not yet dead but would be soon,
Speaker 2: he commented on his own post, I see a couple
Speaker 2: of people got infected with COVID nineteen from the hood
Speaker 2: of a car on I five last night, and the
Speaker 2: media landscape today is even worse. Open encouragement to run
Speaker 2: protesters down in your car as being aired on major
Speaker 2: news networks. The governor of Florida says you should do it.
Speaker 2: People in right wing media ecosystems are consuming an incredible
Speaker 2: amount of content that normalizes this extremely specific act of violence.
Speaker 2: They're being desensitized to it. It's a joke, but they
Speaker 2: mean it, and for a tiny fraction of a percentage
Speaker 2: of them, that seed will grow into something hideous. A
Speaker 2: sudden violent urge, a moment's premeditation were not of months
Speaker 2: of encouragement. We're Little Guys is a production of cools
Speaker 2: Home Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by me,
Speaker 2: Molly Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtermann and Robert Evans.
Speaker 2: The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
Speaker 2: The theme music was composed by Brad Dickord. You can
Speaker 2: email me at Worth Little Guy's podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2: I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
Speaker 2: You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
Speaker 2: listeners on the Weird Little Guys subredd. It just don't
Speaker 2: post anything that's going to make you one of my
Speaker 2: rudlute guys.