A Brief History of Vehicular Violence

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Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

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Speaker 22 On May 15th, 1966,

Speaker 22 The clock ran out in negotiations between local 1234 of the United Auto Workers Union and aerospace manufacturer Pratt Whitney. The contract expired.

Speaker 22 They'd been working around the clock to meet the demand for jet engines for the Vietnam War and the fuel cells needed for the Apollo program.

Speaker 22 The company was producing equipment the United States government desperately needed if they hoped to win the war and the space race.

Speaker 22 No one could afford a strike. So the union didn't authorize one.

Speaker 22 Union leadership agreed to a day-by-day extension of the contract as they continued the mediation process. But the workers weren't satisfied with that answer.

Speaker 22 At midnight that night, workers at the plant walked off the production floor and gathered outside. It was a wildcat strike.

Speaker 22 The workers picketed through the night, and on the morning of Monday, May 16th, the striking workers were there outside the plant.

Speaker 22 Factory workers on first shift stayed away or joined the picket. But a few dozen office workers showed up in their cars at the plant for work.

Speaker 22 Newspaper reports from May of 1966 say only that two cars were damaged.

Speaker 22 But 54 years later, in a memoir written by the son of a man who drove his car to work at Pratt ⁇ Whitney in North Haven, Connecticut on the day of that wildcat strike, a new detail emerged.

Speaker 22 Kelvin Pierce was just six years old in 1966. His father was a jet propulsion researcher at Pratt ⁇ Whitney.
But he remembers this day clearly.

Speaker 22 It was the day his father, William Luther Pierce, decided to give up his career as a physicist and go to work full-time for the American Nazi Party.

Speaker 22 One of the cars that was damaged that Monday morning was his.

Speaker 22 The striking workers kicked his car and snapped off his radio antenna as he attempted to drive his car directly through the picket line.

Speaker 22 That was his last week at Pratt ⁇ Whitney. He quit.

Speaker 22 No one was injured that morning. But the incident was a turning point for Pierce.

Speaker 22 He disappeared for a few weeks, leaving his wife and young sons without any explanation.

Speaker 22 By the time the factory workers had a new contract in June, Pierce had packed up his family and moved to Virginia, be closer to American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, and to focus on his own budding career as a professional Nazi.

Speaker 22 That morning in May, as he sat in his car outside the plant, staring at the picket line, something changed.

Speaker 22 As he shifted his foot off of the brake and onto the gas and drove towards those union workers,

Speaker 22 I think he became the man who would eventually write the Turner Diaries,

Speaker 22 a novel that has inspired the murders of hundreds of people.

Speaker 22 I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 22 This isn't an episode about William Luther Pierce. He's such a key figure in the history of American extremism that as often as he comes up, I just keep putting him off.

Speaker 22 But it is an episode about hitting people with your car.

Speaker 22 Last week, we were talking about James Alex Fields, the young Nazi from Ohio who murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in 2017.

Speaker 22 I wrote about Fields because I felt like I had to.

Speaker 22 I hadn't planned on ever doing an episode about him.

Speaker 22 I kind of felt like I'd said all I have to say about him in my prior coverage of his criminal trial and in the years-long civil litigation brought by the survivors of his crime.

Speaker 22 But in recent weeks, I can't seem to escape the echoes of that crime.

Speaker 22 People are talking about running people over.

Speaker 22 People are giddy. at the very idea of ramming their cars into crowds of protesters.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis says you're allowed to do it. Several sheriffs have voiced their support for it.

Speaker 22 Trump-aligned minor internet celebrities are posting memes and jokes, walking right up to and often over the line to outright calls to action.

Speaker 22 Run them over.

Speaker 22 Hit the gas.

Speaker 22 All lives splatter.

Speaker 22 Two weeks ago, on June 13th, 2025, a Twitter account called Anti-Left Memes posed a question.

Speaker 22 What should happen to people who block the road?

Speaker 22 The account has more than 125,000 followers, and the post received nearly 30,000 replies.

Speaker 22 One of the top replies, with thousands of likes on the post, is just an image. It's pretty low quality.
the hallmark of a meme that's been screenshotted, saved, and reposted too many times.

Speaker 22 But it's a picture of a white pickup truck.

Speaker 22 Well, it's mostly white. The entire front half of the truck is splattered in red.
And the text over the image reads, the all-new Dodge Ram Protester Edition.

Speaker 22 A day later, as millions of Americans took to the streets in cities across the country to protest the Trump administration, the same meme, that same blood-spattered white truck, was posted on Facebook by James Mueller, the sheriff of Adams County, Pennsylvania.

Speaker 22 I found dozens of posts made that weekend alone with that specific image.

Speaker 22 And thousands of posts that weekend expressing the same sentiment.

Speaker 22 It's morally and legally acceptable to hit protesters with your car.

Speaker 22 Not only that, it's funny. It's good.
And you should do it.

Speaker 22 And they're not just posting, it's happening. I found at least six incidents across the country between June 10th and June 15th of cars driving directly into crowds of protesters.

Speaker 22 A young woman in Los Angeles was left in critical condition. A woman in Chicago has a broken arm.
A driver in Petaluma hit a group of protesters while they were in a crosswalk.

Speaker 22 There's a lot we still don't know about the specific details of these most recent incidents. And every one of these incidents is unique in its specific facts.

Speaker 22 But there's a pattern, and it's not new.

Speaker 22 I remember when Summer Taylor died.

Speaker 22 It was the 4th of July, back in 2020.

Speaker 22 Their killer drove the wrong way up a highway on ramp and around vehicles that had been parked to form a barricade to protect the protest.

Speaker 22 That attack on a Black Lives Matter protest in Seattle is one of the only ones I remember clearly from that summer.

Speaker 22 I didn't know summer, but I know people who did.

Speaker 22 They were just 24 years old.

Speaker 22 I remember a few others. One because it was so close to home, just outside of Richmond, Virginia.

Speaker 22 No one was badly hurt, but the driver, Skip Rogers, is a Klansman that I've seen at some Confederate rallies.

Speaker 22 They all kind of run together, though. There was so much violence that summer.

Speaker 22 Apparently, there were over 100 similar attacks that summer. That's according to Ari Weil, who was at the time a researcher at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago.

Speaker 22 He documented 104 incidents of vehicular assault on protests during a four-month period from May 27th to September 27th, 2020.

Speaker 22 with the majority of those incidents occurring during Black Lives Matter protests after the death of George Floyd.

Speaker 22 According to Weil's analysis, there is evidence of malicious intent in at least 43 of those 104 incidents.

Speaker 22 And in the fall of 2020, 39 of those drivers had been criminally charged.

Speaker 22 The question of how often this is actually happening, when it started, who's doing it, and why,

Speaker 22 is hard to answer as it turns out.

Speaker 22 While I was researching this episode, I read papers and analysis and speculation and confident pronouncements from journalists, researchers at nonprofits, analysts at think tanks, papers from government agencies and academic journals, and it's hard to find a clear picture.

Speaker 22 Fatal encounters between pedestrians and cars are as old as cars themselves.

Speaker 23 Cars are dangerous.

Speaker 22 People are careless. And about 7,000 pedestrians a year are killed by cars in the United States.

Speaker 22 And I'm sure plenty of drivers have independently arrived at the conclusion that you could use a car as a weapon. They're ubiquitous.

Speaker 22 Not everyone can go out and buy a gun, and most people don't know how to build a bomb.

Speaker 22 But almost anybody can find a way to get behind the wheel of a car, even if you don't own one. It's cheap, it's accessible, and it can be extremely deadly.

Speaker 22 So why doesn't vehicular ramming of groups of pedestrians appear as an identifiable method of terrorist attack until the 1990s.

Speaker 22 The academic papers I read all seemed to agree.

Speaker 22 Vehicular ramming attacks didn't really start happening until the early 90s, and they didn't really catch on until more than two decades later, starting in around 2014.

Speaker 22 Some earlier recorded incidents are noted in the literature, with one of the oft-cited studies claiming that the earliest recorded incident they found was in Japan in 1964.

Speaker 22 But most researchers seem to agree that it was Palestinians who invented the tactic in the early 90s.

Speaker 22 And there are just a handful of incidents cited to support this, mostly involving young men driving into groups of IDF soldiers in the West Bank.

Speaker 22 One study published earlier this year in the European Research Studies Journal incorrectly attributes these attacks in Israel and the West Bank to Hamas.

Speaker 22 But aside from being inaccurate, I think the actual truth here is more illuminating.

Speaker 22 People are doing this on their own.

Speaker 22 A 2018 paper in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism analyzed data about 62 vehicular attacks in Israel and the West Bank between 2000 and 2016.

Speaker 22 The data was provided to the researchers directly by the Israeli Security Agency.

Speaker 22 And the authors also examined court records, media published in both Hebrew and Arabic, as well as social media posts made surrounding the attacks.

Speaker 22 And none of those attacks were carried out by Hamas.

Speaker 22 They weren't carried carried out by a group of any kind.

Speaker 22 Only 16% of the attackers in that data set had ever been imprisoned for any reason prior to the attack.

Speaker 22 And less than a quarter of them even had a family member with any kind of security or criminal record.

Speaker 22 The attacks in the 90s were sporadic. Aside from these couple of incidents in Israel and the West Bank, There were a handful of incidents elsewhere in the world in the 90s and early 2000s.

Speaker 22 But if you look at the data included in these studies and charted over time,

Speaker 22 the line shoots off the page starting in about 2014.

Speaker 22 And suddenly they're happening all over the world.

Speaker 22 I think it's worth a little sidebar here to talk about definitions.

Speaker 22 What exactly is a vehicle ramming attack?

Speaker 22 Most of the papers I read about the tactic use that term, abbreviated as just VRA.

Speaker 22 They're sometimes also called VTA's vehicular terrorist attack.

Speaker 22 And deciding what is or isn't a VRA is something every author seems to decide for himself.

Speaker 22 Two of the papers I'm relying on here both include a description of how they built their own data set because there was no comprehensive worldwide list to look at.

Speaker 22 A 2019 paper by Keith Hayward and Vincent Miller in the British Journal of Criminology analyzed 125 incidents between 1999 and 2017.

Speaker 22 The incidents they included in the data had to meet these criteria. A vehicle had to be used as a weapon on pedestrians or populated vehicles.
The vehicle had to be the primary weapon.

Speaker 22 Any other weapons used, like knives or firearms, could only be used once the vehicle was disabled and not part of an armed assault or car bomb.

Speaker 22 The incident was not part of a kidnapping attempt.

Speaker 22 Pedestrian casualties were intended and not part of a chase, evasion, or accident. The vehicle was not primarily used for demolition.

Speaker 22 And the Hayward and Miller paper is more interested in the idea of social contagion, how these attacks appear to come in waves, clustered together in time, even when the attacks themselves have almost nothing else in common aside from the similarity of the physical act.

Speaker 22 A paper that same year by Brian Michael Jenkins and Bruce Butterworth from the Moneta Transportation Institute is much more focused within the academic niche that is terrorism studies.

Speaker 22 And it's written by guys who've been in the business for so long, they can't shift their focus beyond Islamic extremism. So there's a lot of baggage here.

Speaker 22 And this paper notes that no two databases of such incidents will ever agree.

Speaker 22 The authors created a list of 184 incidents from 1964 to 2019 that they were able to identify as vehicle attacks on public targets.

Speaker 22 They excluded vehicle ramming incidents that occurred in war zones, those that occurred while the driver was fleeing a crime scene or evading police, altercations between between motorists, incidents where the vehicle rammed a government building, accidents, and domestic disputes.

Speaker 22 And while they say they excluded attacks in war zones, they do not exclude attacks that occurred in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Speaker 22 And for both of these studies, I was unable to find an appendix that actually lists the events that they included in their data sets. And that leaves me with a lot of unanswered questions.

Speaker 22 And neither paper really clearly defines what they mean by terrorism either.

Speaker 22 And that's a little bit sticky too.

Speaker 22 It's a loaded word.

Speaker 22 In post-9-11 America, it usually means one thing, Islamic extremism. ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, etc.

Speaker 22 And in more casual parlance, the word gets thrown around a little too casually.

Speaker 22 It may not be worth trying to salvage the word by defining it in a way that's useful.

Speaker 22 But it appears in most of the writing about this, so I'll I'll take a stab at telling you what it probably means.

Speaker 22 If you're talking legally, the United States Code defines terrorism as activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of criminal laws in the United States.

Speaker 22 And those acts appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce civilians, influence government policy by intimidation or coercion, or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.

Speaker 22 But the law is not the only way to define something.

Speaker 22 The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, which maintains the Global Terrorism Database, has a lengthy explanation of the definition that they use in deciding what goes in the database.

Speaker 22 The short answer is the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain political, economic, religious, or social goals through fear, coercion, or intimidation.

Speaker 22 Pretty straightforward.

Speaker 22 But every paper I read used slightly different frameworks, seemed to rely on slightly different definitions, and they all used their own handpicked data sets.

Speaker 22 Few actually included information about what incidents were in those data sets, but for the most part, they all agree.

Speaker 22 VRAs didn't really happen until Palestinians started doing them in the 90s.

Speaker 22 And the 2014 era surge in popularity is mostly discussed in terms of a handful of very deadly, high-profile attacks where the perpetrator was inspired by an Islamic extremist group.

Speaker 22 The Maneta Transportation Institute paper focuses heavily on jihadist-motivated attacks. But their own data shows that only 10% of the attacks in that data set fit in that category.

Speaker 22 They acknowledge that the vast majority of vehicle ramming attacks in the United States have no connection at all to al-Qaeda or ISIS.

Speaker 22 But quote, in the public's mind, they are blended with the jihadist attacks and add to the general level of fear.

Speaker 22 The jihadist propaganda machine was therefore able to brand the tactic and benefit from its occurrence regardless of who was responsible.

Speaker 22 And now, as much as I'm sure ISIS would love to take credit for that branding success, it looks to me that its Western researchers were too eager to see this tactic as a jihadist one that just happens to have leaked out into broader usage.

Speaker 22 I read the literature. I took notes,

Speaker 22 but I also spent two full days combing through newspaper archives going back 100 years, all the way back to the 1920s, when we started to see widespread car ownership in the United States.

Speaker 22 And I think these studies are missing a really particular category of vehicular attack.

Speaker 22 People driving through union picket lines. It happens all the time.
Members of the Communications Workers of America wear red shirts every Thursday in memory of Jerry Horgan.

Speaker 22 Horgan was a CWA member who was struck and killed when a scab worker drove through the picket line in 1989.

Speaker 22 And just weeks after his death, out there on the picket line, one of his union brothers ended up in the hospital after being hit by a company truck.

Speaker 22 The president of Jerry's local, CWA 1103, told the paper, we're tired of these people running us over.

Speaker 22 It was common.

Speaker 22 In March of this year, a member of the Amalgamated Transit Union was hospitalized after being intentionally struck by a company vehicle during a strike of Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority workers.

Speaker 22 In 2023, five members of the United Auto Workers Union were hit by a car that plowed through the picket line outside the General Motors Flint Processing Center in Swartz Creek, Michigan.

Speaker 22 One of them was hospitalized.

Speaker 22 The driver fled the scene and was later convicted of leaving the scene of an accident, but the plea deal dropped the charge of assault with a deadly weapon.

Speaker 22 Even with my limited time and ability to search these old records, I found multiple examples in every decade for the last century of union workers being hit, sometimes killed when a car intentionally drove into their picket line.

Speaker 22 The earliest of these incidents that I could find were in May of 1929, during a strike of textile workers at the Rayon manufacturing plants in Elizabethton, Tennessee.

Speaker 22 The strike had been going on since March, and things had gotten pretty violent.

Speaker 22 The National Guard was brought in to beat back the protesters, most of whom were young women, many of them were teenagers.

Speaker 22 And there was at least one incident of a non-union worker driving through the picketers, injuring several of them.

Speaker 22 But there was a second incident that I don't think you can deny clearly meets the criteria of a vehicular ramming attack.

Speaker 22 On May 16th, 1929, a bus full of scabs plowed through the line of striking workers.

Speaker 22 One of the workers who was hit was a teenage girl named Evelyn Heaton, and she was so badly injured that onlookers believed that she had died.

Speaker 22 But she didn't die. And when Evelyn Heaton was released from the hospital, she swore out a criminal complaint for attempted murder against the driver, a man named Joe Calhoun.

Speaker 22 But she also swore out a complaint of aiding and abetting attempted murder. And this one was against Tennessee National Guard Adjutant General W.C.
Boyd.

Speaker 22 Heaton accused Boyd of ordering the attack, of personally directing the bus to drive into the workers.

Speaker 22 And he didn't deny it.

Speaker 22 He said he'd ordered the path to the plant to be cleared. He was arrested, questioned, and released on bond, but a grand jury never indicted him.

Speaker 22 I couldn't help but get a little lost down this rabbit hole. The whole incident looks like a fascinating chapter of labor history that I'd never heard of.

Speaker 22 The same week his charges were dropped, Boyd got into a little trouble with the Secretary of War.

Speaker 22 You see, the governor of Tennessee hadn't actually deployed the National Guard, at least not correctly. He didn't deploy the National Guard.

Speaker 22 He had the National Guardsmen sworn in as state troopers before deploying them as strikebreakers.

Speaker 22 So as they're tear gassing these teenage girls from the textile mill, they're wearing their United States Army uniforms and carrying weapons that were federal government property.

Speaker 22 But that was illegal because they were not acting in their capacity as guardsmen.

Speaker 22 From what I can find, violating federal law and ordering a bus driver to plow through a crowd of teenage girls didn't seem to affect his career.

Speaker 22 W.C. Boyd didn't retire from the Tennessee National Guard until the year before he died, two decades later.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

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Speaker 22 But back to the issue at hand, though.

Speaker 22 I found scores of these incidents over the last century in which striking workers are hit by cars.

Speaker 22 These kinds of incidents don't tend to have a high fatality rate, and some of them are definitely just accidents.

Speaker 22 Picket lines are often in close proximity to vehicular traffic, and anytime a pedestrian is near a car, there's risk.

Speaker 22 But in the stories where it appears to be intentional, of which there are many, it's usually a scab worker or a boss driving through the crowd when entering or exiting the area around the workplace.

Speaker 22 You could argue that this kind of incident is different.

Speaker 22 This isn't a driver seeking out a confrontation with a pedestrian. This is a pedestrian who is, in some cases, very intentionally blocking the path of that vehicle because that is his goal.

Speaker 22 The striking worker does not want the scab to cross the picket line and enter the job site.

Speaker 22 But you can't argue that it's not political.

Speaker 22 Union workers have a right to strike.

Speaker 22 What they're doing is not illegal. Hitting them with a car is.

Speaker 22 And the people hitting them with those cars have a motive. Remember those definitions.

Speaker 22 A vehicle ramming attack is just the intentional use of a vehicle as a weapon intending to cause injury to a pedestrian. And what's terrorism?

Speaker 22 The threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation.

Speaker 22 I'm not saying we should charge scabs who run over someone's foot with terrorism. That doesn't make any sense.
That's not the point I'm trying to make here.

Speaker 22 I just think that ignoring this entire category of vehicular assaults is missing something important.

Speaker 22 Because people are using cars as weapons to intimidate, harass, and injure workers who are exercising their right to engage in strikes.

Speaker 22 They're threatening and carrying out violence against a particular group of people. And there is an identifiable political and economic motivation to frighten these people off the picket line.

Speaker 22 And after all that time searching all those old newspapers, it's not just picket lines that I feel like the researchers overlooked.

Speaker 22 The narrative in these studies seems to be that the tactic originated with Palestinians, was popularized by jihadist groups from 2014 to 2017.

Speaker 22 And around that same time period, the idea spread rapidly online, getting picked up by people with other motivations and backgrounds.

Speaker 22 But I don't think that's true either. I don't think white Westerners learned about this online from ISIS.

Speaker 22 And in looking through the historical record, I admit I ran into some of the same problems the researchers did.

Speaker 22 It's hard to find information about this that goes further back than a few decades.

Speaker 22 Before this was a named phenomenon, it wasn't really something that earned more than a passing mention in the newspaper.

Speaker 22 It seems no one particularly cared when a union member, a civil rights activist, an environmentalist, a communist, a hippie, an anti-war protester, or some other nasty, undesirable got what they deserved.

Speaker 22 And when it is mentioned, the tone is nasty.

Speaker 22 So nothing's really changed, I guess.

Speaker 22 But it does impact my ability to find these historical vehicular attacks.

Speaker 22 Here are some I did find.

Speaker 22 In 1963, the Congress of Racial Equality staged a sit-in at Jones Beach State Park on Long Island. They wanted the Long Island Park Commission to hire more Black and Puerto Rican workers.

Speaker 22 As part of their demonstration, they blocked the road leading to the parking area at the beach.

Speaker 22 People get so in their feelings about blocking a roadway.

Speaker 22 Yeah,

Speaker 22 it probably is annoying to you. But that's the point of the protest.
They are making themselves unignorable. You know, you might say you've blocked the road.
What do you expect?

Speaker 22 But a car is a deadly weapon. Think of it like a gun.
It's legal to own a gun. And if you're in fear for your life, it's self-defense to fire that gun.

Speaker 22 But if you are being prevented from conveniently accessing the beach on Long Island, you don't have grounds for the use of deadly force.

Speaker 22 You might be inconvenienced and you might be annoyed. You know, I guess it might be annoying that the fight for civil rights ruined your beach day.

Speaker 22 But you cannot hurt people with a deadly weapon because they're in your way. Because you're impatient.
Because you don't like what they're doing. Because you think what they're doing is wrong.

Speaker 22 That is a disproportionate escalation and it's not healthy.

Speaker 22 Photos of that demonstration clearly show the protesters sitting cross-legged, side by side across the road.

Speaker 22 One newspaper article I found that didn't include the picture described the scene with these words.

Speaker 22 Negro and white members of the Congress of Racial Equality threw themselves and their children in front of moving cars here Thursday to draw attention to a campaign to get jobs for Negroes with the Long Island State Park Commission.

Speaker 22 A number of demonstrators were struck by cars whose operators were forced to halt abruptly.

Speaker 22 Another newspaper wrote that 20 demonstrators were, quote, bumped or brushed by cars, with another paper mentioning just in passing that three people were injured.

Speaker 22 On the night of April 4th, 1968, there were hundreds of people marching in the streets of Battle Creek, Michigan.

Speaker 22 That date might feel a little familiar to you.

Speaker 22 Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated just hours earlier.

Speaker 22 Battle Creek Police Chief Clifford Barney was later quoted in the local paper describing the all-night march as, quote,

Speaker 22 mostly orderly.

Speaker 22 But the headline that ran in wire stories nationwide was negro violence in battle creek

Speaker 22 in the early morning hours of april 5th as the march continued through the night the vice president of the local nacip young adult council was hit by a car that drove through the march

Speaker 22 demonstrators claim police who witnessed this incident refused to call an ambulance and Stanley Morrow was taken to the hospital by another marcher.

Speaker 22 At a community meeting about the event a few days later, the NAACP demanded to know why the driver hadn't been arrested for leaving the scene of an accident.

Speaker 22 Chief Barney said the driver had, quote, exercised good judgment and that they shouldn't have been in the road.

Speaker 22 Nothing's changed.

Speaker 22 In 1969, Canadian college students staged a demonstration on the Blue Water Bridge between Michigan and Ontario.

Speaker 22 They were protesting the nuclear testing the United States was carrying out in the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska.

Speaker 22 According to the Port Huron Times-Herald, a car with Michigan plates gunned it through the crowd on the bridge.

Speaker 22 20-year-old David Pettinger was one of the students who was hit.

Speaker 22 And while another student was slightly injured, his leg got stuck in the car's wheel well, causing him to be dragged for nearly 400 feet. as the driver attempted to flee the scene.

Speaker 22 Pettinger was described in one newspaper as, quote, not seriously injured, but according to his later lawsuit, he lost most of the skin on both of his legs and spent seven weeks in the hospital.

Speaker 22 With David's leg stuck in her wheel, the driver was unable to flee and was arrested on scene, but she was never charged with a crime. He was awarded less than $7,000 in his lawsuit against the driver.

Speaker 22 In 1970, just days after the Kent State shooting, students were protesting at Eastern Michigan University, and five of them were injured when a man rammed his car into a crowd on campus.

Speaker 22 There's no explanation offered in any of the newspaper articles I can find about why he did this or who he was, but the description is very intentional.

Speaker 22 He was driving slowly as he approached the crowd of students, sort of inching towards them. And then he suddenly accelerated directly into them before fleeing the scene.

Speaker 22 And in 1971, Margaret Ann Knott was killed in Butler, Alabama, after a man drove his car through a sit-in.

Speaker 22 The group had a permit.

Speaker 22 Local black leaders had met with the mayor and the sheriff ahead of the march.

Speaker 22 They were allowed to march in the street.

Speaker 22 The police were there.

Speaker 22 And as the march proceeded through the center of town, They were granted permission by the captain of the state troopers who were there on the scene to stop in an intersection outside the courthouse just for a few minutes, for a five-minute silent prayer vigil.

Speaker 22 Margaret was sitting on the ground and praying when the car came.

Speaker 22 She was just 19 years old.

Speaker 22 Her mother was one of the black teachers whose unfair firing the march was protesting.

Speaker 22 The young man who'd been sitting right beside her there in the square managed to get up and run away as the car approached.

Speaker 22 But Margaret was sitting with her back turned to it, and she didn't react fast enough.

Speaker 22 After she was hit, he says she just kept saying, I died for freedom.

Speaker 22 I died for freedom.

Speaker 22 Her killer was arrested, but a grand jury didn't indict.

Speaker 22 He claimed he was attacked, that he feared for his life.

Speaker 22 And according to newspaper accounts from the time,

Speaker 22 white eyewitnesses backed his story.

Speaker 22 Margaret's fellow demonstrators told a different one.

Speaker 22 He says they were rocking his car and trying to turn it over. That's why he got scared.

Speaker 22 They say they didn't put their hands on that car until after Margaret was under it.

Speaker 22 And if you listen to last week's episode about James Alex Fields, that might actually sound kind of familiar. He was afraid.
He was afraid for his life. He had to do it.
They were attacking him.

Speaker 22 But nobody put their hands on Fields' car until after a woman was dead.

Speaker 22 Margaret's mother raised money for a granite marker to be placed at the courthouse square to memorialize Margaret's death as a martyr in the civil rights movement.

Speaker 22 And the county refused to allow it.

Speaker 22 In 1999, 28 years after her daughter's murder, Carrie Mae Johnson got up to speak during public comment at a Choctaw County Commission meeting.

Speaker 22 She asked again, please, could we place the marker in the square?

Speaker 22 And they said no.

Speaker 22 No, that's very racially divisive.

Speaker 22 Margaret Ann Knott was finally memorialized with a public marker in 2019.

Speaker 22 I found a number of incidents in 1972, mostly involving anti-war protesters hit by cars.

Speaker 22 During the Republican National Convention in Miami that summer, there were two separate instances of limousines carrying convention delegates, driving into crowds of protesters and injuring people.

Speaker 22 One leaving a Vietnam veteran with a fractured skull and another breaking a woman's leg.

Speaker 22 The Democratic National Convention was inexplicably also in Miami that year, just a week earlier.

Speaker 22 And during that event, protesters occupied an intersection to demand answers over an alleged hit and run incident involving a staffer for Senator Hubert Humphrey, who ran a woman over.

Speaker 22 The official DOJ report on policing during the conventions that summer mentions what appear to be at least half a dozen incidents of cars intentionally striking protesters.

Speaker 22 I could go on.

Speaker 22 Like in 1979, when a Los Angeles sheriff's deputy drove into a crowd protesting outside the Beverly Hills mansion owned by the Shah of Iran's mother.

Speaker 22 Or the National Guardsman who drove a troop carrier directly at a crowd of anti-nuclear protesters in California in 1981.

Speaker 22 In 1990, the president of a timber company struck an environmental activist with his vehicle and sped away from the scene with the woman still on the hood of his car.

Speaker 22 None of these people were charged with a crime.

Speaker 22 My point is not just that I have a methodological disagreement with the study I read. I don't think they simply failed to look in the right place to find additional incidents to add to their data set.

Speaker 22 I think the disagreement is deeper than that.

Speaker 22 We disagree about what kind of violence matters, who we think of as violent, who we think of as victims, what's normal, what's acceptable, what's politically beneficial, and who deserves it.

Speaker 22 By their reasoning, it was a series of high-profile attacks motivated by Islamic extremism that started a worldwide wave of vehicle ramming attacks.

Speaker 22 And it wasn't until then that researchers identify and name this phenomenon that I'm arguing has always been here.

Speaker 22 The two papers I'm pulling from primarily were both written in 2019.

Speaker 22 And they both open with a little vignette about a vehicle ramming attack.

Speaker 22 The paper called Smashing into Crowds, an Analysis of Vehicle Ramming Attacks, published by the Moneta Transportation Institute, opens with this paragraph.

Speaker 22 On April 3rd, 2019, police in Maryland arrested a man for plotting to drive a stolen rental van into crowds of people at National Harbor, a popular tourist site along the Potomac River.

Speaker 22 A convert to Islam, he claimed to have been inspired by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

Speaker 22 The defendant had stolen the rental van several days before in Virginia and originally contemplated driving into passengers at Dulles Airport, but found the crowds there were too sparse for his purpose.

Speaker 22 He then changed the target to National Harbor, just under 10 miles from the capital in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 22 The incident was one of nearly 13 to occur in the first three quarters of 2019 across the world.

Speaker 22 And again, this paper selected 184 incidents from the 60s through 2019 that they feel fit the criteria.

Speaker 22 And in the paper, they classified the perpetrators of these attacks into four primary categories: Palestinian, jihadist,

Speaker 22 right-wing extremist, and mentally disturbed.

Speaker 22 The authors made these determinations based on available media reporting. Based on that paragraph I just read you, I assume that they would place this incident into the jihadist category.

Speaker 22 I don't actually know because they don't include the incidents in an appendix, but honestly, I'm actually curious why they would include it at all.

Speaker 22 They clearly say the incident was one of nearly 13 to occur.

Speaker 22 First of all, what is nearly 13,

Speaker 21 but this incident didn't occur.

Speaker 22 There was no incident. This didn't happen.

Speaker 22 They don't name this man in the paper, but I recognize the description of it.

Speaker 22 His name is Rondell Henry, and he was originally indicted on a single count of driving a stolen vehicle across state lines.

Speaker 22 He ended up pleading guilty to the charge of attempting to perform an act of violence at an international airport, even though by their own admission, he decided not to do that.

Speaker 22 But he was arrested after stealing the U-Haul van and before he did anything else.

Speaker 22 He has also been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Speaker 22 Yes. Rondell Henry did make statements to the police after his arrest that he wanted to create a panic, quote, like what happened in France.

Speaker 22 Likely referring to a 2016 attack in Nice, France, that killed 86 people when a man drove a truck through a crowd gathered for Bastille Day.

Speaker 22 I'm not disputing Rondell Henry's own stated intent or the fact that he'd viewed ISIS propaganda on his cell phone.

Speaker 22 I just wish I could see the author's data set.

Speaker 22 First of all, how do they decide to include an incident that didn't actually happen?

Speaker 22 But in a larger sense, how are they deciding, based largely just on media reporting, which attacks are attributable solely to the perpetrator's mental disturbance?

Speaker 22 And that category makes up the bulk of their data.

Speaker 22 Media sources are very quick to assume jihadist intent if the perpetrator is Muslim. And they're very quick to ignore the possibility of political motivations if the attacker is anyone else.

Speaker 22 So I just wonder how they're making these determinations.

Speaker 22 Because again, this paper, with its hand-selected data set of 184 vehicle ramming incidents, they categorized just 10 of those as right-wing extremism.

Speaker 22 And according to one of the tables, six of those occurred between 2014 and 2019, the time period when these attacks are really starting to spike worldwide.

Speaker 22 And again, the paper doesn't include a list of incidents. So I can only guess which six right-wing attacks they included and categorized as such.

Speaker 22 But the table indicates that of those six attacks during that five-year time period, there was only one fatality.

Speaker 22 And I know that's not right.

Speaker 22 By any definition of a right-wing vehicle ramming attack, more than one person died during that five-year period.

Speaker 22 Because we know there was James Alex Fields in Charlottesville in 2017. That's one attack.
one fatality. Heather Heyer died.
James Alex Fields was a Nazi.

Speaker 22 He had a framed picture of Hitler on his bedside table.

Speaker 22 So what else are they categorizing as a right-wing vehicle ramming attack during that time period?

Speaker 22 Now, I could accept the explanation that Elliot Roger may not count.

Speaker 22 Roger was an incel.

Speaker 22 I'm not conceding that his murder spree wasn't right-wing extremism. That's non-negotiable.
He hated women. He was racist.
He was pretty into Hitler.

Speaker 22 I'm not going to do an episode about him, but if you don't remember the 2014 Isla Vista killings, you can look it up.

Speaker 22 That's what they were called. There's plenty of information about it online.

Speaker 22 But no, I would accept it if the researchers said that they chose to exclude this attack altogether because the vehicle ramming of random pedestrians wasn't the primary or central attack, right?

Speaker 22 I would argue that the vehicular assaults carried out after he left the scene of the sorority house shootings do count as their own independent assaults.

Speaker 22 But, like I said, I'd hear them out if they wanted to say that that doesn't fit their criteria because it occurred as he was leaving the scene of the shooting, or that the vehicle was a secondary weapon in an attack that was primarily a shooting and stabbing spree.

Speaker 22 Whatever, okay, I will accept that maybe Elliot Roger is not included in this data.

Speaker 22 But surely, their list of right-wing vehicle attacks from 2014 to 2019, surely that includes the Finsbury Park van attack.

Speaker 22 That attack was in June of 2017 outside of a mosque in London.

Speaker 22 A little after midnight, people were leaving the mosque after Tarawi, the nighttime prayer said during Ramadan.

Speaker 22 As they walked outside, they saw a man at a nearby bus stop who seemed to be in some medical distress. So a group of men from the mosque walked over to offer aid.

Speaker 22 It was there. that Darren Osborne rammed his van into the group.

Speaker 22 After driving up onto the curb and into the group of men, Darren Osborne jumped out of the van shouting, I want to kill all Muslims. I did my bit.

Speaker 22 Before the men wrestled him to the ground as he was attempting to flee the scene.

Speaker 22 All this noise must have drawn the Imam out onto the street because the Imam arrived on scene just in time to stop the men from beating Osborne pretty badly.

Speaker 22 And I know the author of this paper knows about this attack, which left one man dead, so it can't possibly be in this data set.

Speaker 22 Because their paper cites heavily from another paper, one that I also read, one that is called, I did my bit, terrorism, car, and the vehicle ramming attack as imitative event.

Speaker 22 And why then does this data set also appear to misclassify the 2018 Toronto van attack? That attacker, Alec Manassian, is mentioned by name in the paper.

Speaker 22 And one of the tables listing fatalities by country does appear to include the 10 people who died in that attack.

Speaker 22 An 11th victim passed away from their injuries in 2021, but that was after the paper was published.

Speaker 22 So I can only assume the author included it as a data point, but they didn't classify it as right-wing extremism.

Speaker 22 And with only four categories, that must mean that they're classifying the obsessively violent racism and misogyny of the incel movement as mental disturbance?

Speaker 22 I know it sounds like I'm being too hard on this paper. Why am I even telling you about it if it's so flawed? Why did I use it?

Speaker 22 Because as I was reading through reports prepared by federal government agencies, internal memos, training materials, public bulletins from the DHS, the FBI, the TSA,

Speaker 22 This is the study that's always in the footnotes.

Speaker 22 So I think it bears dissecting because it's the one the government is reading.

Speaker 22 And these flaws become even more apparent when you read the follow-up paper written by the same authors a year later in the fall of 2020.

Speaker 22 That paper is called Metal Against Marchers, an analysis of recent incidents involving vehicle assaults at U.S. political protests and rallies.

Speaker 22 And it is dismissive.

Speaker 22 Of the 104 vehicle ramming incidents on protests during the summer of 2020 that were cataloged by Ari Weil, the paper says,

Speaker 22 these encounters are being described as quote, attacks or quote, domestic terrorism.

Speaker 22 But as this report indicates, the events taking place at the protests differ in a number of ways from the vehicle ramming attacks previously carried out by terrorist organizations and reviewed in our earlier report, Smashing Into Crowds, an analysis of vehicle ramming attacks.

Speaker 22 And in their analysis, they looked at just 52 of those incidents.

Speaker 22 And they immediately discard nine of them as obvious accidents. And I don't doubt that some of them were.

Speaker 22 Of the 43 incidents that they examined more closely, they determined that there was clear evidence of malicious intent in 19 of them. And another 16 were possibly malicious.

Speaker 22 So by their own analysis, 81% of the incidents that they decided met their own criteria for being examined as vehicle ramming attacks, 81% of them looked intentional and malicious.

Speaker 22 And even if you just look at the ones where they say it's definitely malicious, that's 44%.

Speaker 22 And that's right in line with the 45% of attacks that were deemed malicious in Ari Weil's original analysis. So it sounds like they agree, right?

Speaker 22 But the next 10 pages are devoted to downplaying, excusing, writing off, and ignoring the danger that this data suggests.

Speaker 22 One particularly appalling passage reads,

Speaker 22 In a number of cases, it appears that drivers found themselves in a crowd, which led to a heated exchange during which the driver pushed through the pedestrians.

Speaker 22 It could be described as the vehicle-pedestrian equivalent of road rage.

Speaker 22 In still others, drivers deliberately drove to a demonstration and then plowed through a crowd to display belligerence and intimidate the protesters.

Speaker 22 This would be the vehicular equivalent of brandishing a weapon.

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Speaker 22 Now, first of all, what they're talking about here is a premeditated confrontation that the driver escalated to an assault with a deadly weapon.

Speaker 22 Brandishing a weapon just means like pulling your gun out and showing it in a way that could be perceived as threatening.

Speaker 22 Hitting someone with your car,

Speaker 22 even a little bit,

Speaker 22 is more akin to, I don't know, pulling out your gun during a disagreement, taking the safety off, chambering around, holding it to someone's temple, and then pistol whipping them with it.

Speaker 22 You're not just demonstrating that you have a weapon, which would be, I don't know, parking across the street and revving the engine a little bit.

Speaker 22 You're using it. You're using the weapon.

Speaker 22 The extremely low fatality rate of those attacks from 2020, as well as the general apparent lack of intent to kill, even among those attackers who clearly demonstrate malicious intent and intent to harm, are both cited as evidence that these incidents aren't the same as the vehicular ramming attacks in the earlier paper.

Speaker 22 But nowhere in that paper did they claim that intent to kill was a requirement. And terrorism itself, broadly defined both in the law and in general research, doesn't require intent to kill.

Speaker 22 Remember, the definition used by the researchers that this author cites in his own work is just the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation.

Speaker 22 And what is that?

Speaker 22 If you bump somebody a little bit with your car, that is actual use of force, as well as the threat of lethal force, if these people who are engaging in political activity that you disagree with don't go home.

Speaker 22 That's what it is.

Speaker 22 And then there are claims in the paper that just outright contradict their own prior work.

Speaker 22 Quote,

Speaker 22 However, more of the earlier cases could be connected with ongoing campaigns of terrorist violence.

Speaker 22 Jihadists, Uyghurs, Palestinians, even if they were carried out by individual perpetrators who were inspired as opposed to being directed to take action.

Speaker 22 Only two of the 2020 cases can be connected with an identifiable group. None of the 2020 cases thus far show evidence of being ordered or assisted by an organization.

Speaker 22 And you might think that sounds like it makes sense, right?

Speaker 22 But it doesn't. It doesn't hold water.

Speaker 22 When Palestinians were carrying out car attacks in the 90s, there was no group calling for that as a tactic.

Speaker 22 In later years, people are talking about it. People are calling for it.
But a study of Palestinian vehicle attacks from 2000 to 2016 shows no group affiliation for any perpetrator in the data set.

Speaker 22 The vast majority of jihadist-inspired vehicle attacks in the United States and Europe in the last 10 years were carried out by perpetrators with no known actual contact with any group.

Speaker 22 They weren't members. They never talked to anybody.
They just saw it online.

Speaker 22 And if seeing political propaganda online is sufficient to connect an attacker to a group or ideology, you can't exclude the attacks on protests in the United States.

Speaker 22 The American drivers plowing through protests aren't doing it in a vacuum.

Speaker 21 They're right.

Speaker 22 Most of these attackers aren't affiliated with what they're thinking of as official groups, terrorist organizations, hate groups. Skip was definitely a Klansman, but that was an outlier.

Speaker 22 Most of them aren't.

Speaker 22 But in most cases, we do know what they believe and what kind of media environment they're existing in.

Speaker 22 I'm not talking about going on the dark corners of the internet to download copies of al-Qaeda magazines and ISIS videos.

Speaker 22 There's always a lot of airtime for discussion about Islamic extremist content encouraging these kinds of attacks. And that is out there.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it's not out there.

Speaker 22 In the fall of 2010, Inspire magazine, the English language publication by an al-Qaeda group in Yemen, published an article called The Ultimate Mowing Machine.

Speaker 22 Most of the first page of the article is taken up by a gigantic image of a Ford F-250.

Speaker 22 But the text of the article encourages adherents to carry out these kinds of attacks. Quote, the idea is to use a pickup truck as a mowing machine.

Speaker 22 Not to mow grass, but to mow down the enemies of Allah, the magazine says.

Speaker 22 Quote, the ideal location is a place where there are a maximum number of pedestrians and the least number of vehicles.

Speaker 22 In fact, if you can get through to pedestrian-only locations that exist in some downtown city center areas, that would be fabulous.

Speaker 22 There are some places that are closed down for vehicles at certain times due to the swarms of people.

Speaker 22 That magazine article did exist.

Speaker 22 And there was another article in 2016 published by an ISIS-affiliated group that had a similar message.

Speaker 22 Notably, though, most researchers go out of their way to explain that there was actually no measurable increase in this type of attack after either of those articles were published.

Speaker 22 And in fact, both of those articles were published immediately after a relatively high-profile attack of this kind.

Speaker 22 So rather than inspiring future attacks, they seem to be trying to capitalize on the publicity surrounding an attack that had just happened.

Speaker 22 But yes, there are, of course, Islamic extremist groups that do put out explicit calls for this kind of attack. I'm not hiding that from you.

Speaker 22 But they're not alone.

Speaker 22 In January of 2017, the Daily Caller, a right-wing news website founded by Tucker Carlson, posted a video online with the headline,

Speaker 22 here's a reel of cars plowing through protesters trying to block the road.

Speaker 22 And the video was just that.

Speaker 22 It's a 90-second compilation of clips of vehicular ramming attacks on protesters. It's set to a bizarre, I don't know, sort of a pop rock, soft piano cover of Ludacris' song, Move Bitch.

Speaker 22 And before the violence starts on the screen, the Daily Caller helpfully warns viewers that the song has a lot of profanity in it.

Speaker 22 You know, in case you don't like to hear bad words and might want to mute it before viewing people get thrown into the air by speeding cars.

Speaker 22 There's no mention or warning that there will be graphic violence. Although I guess you can assume that from the title.

Speaker 22 The site's video editor, Mike Roust, wrote on the post,

Speaker 22 Here's a compilation of liberal protesters getting pushed out of the way by cars and trucks. Study the technique.
It may prove useful in the next four years.

Speaker 22 None of these clips are new, but that doesn't mean they're not still fresh.

Speaker 22 And that post stayed up for eight months.

Speaker 22 After James Alex Fields murdered Heather Heyer in August of that year, the Daily Caller quietly deleted the post and didn't respond to requests for comment about it.

Speaker 22 Fox News did issue an official statement saying that they regretted reposting the video to Fox Nation, which at the time was an official Fox News companion site focused on opinion and commentary.

Speaker 22 But the video was there all year.

Speaker 22 It was there all summer 2017.

Speaker 22 It wasn't just James Alex Fields and the other Unite the Right attendees posting memes about running people over.

Speaker 22 And as if that weren't enough, that 2020 paper from the Moneta Transportation Institute concludes with one final hand-waving dismissal of the very idea.

Speaker 22 Quote, the numbers cited in this review have meaning. In the more than 10,000 demonstrations during the late spring and summer of 2020, there were something on the order of 100 incidents.

Speaker 22 Ari Weil assigned malicious intent to 43 of these events, while we discern malicious intent in 35 of them. In either case, it is a very small number.

Speaker 22 No, it's not. No, it's not.
That's not true. That is a lie.

Speaker 22 I did notice a lot of errors in their first paper. They have a lot of tables, you know, sort of slicing and dicing their numbers in different ways.

Speaker 22 And I think a lot of the numbers are wrong because from one table to the next, sort of rearranging the same numbers in different configurations, the numbers don't match.

Speaker 22 So maybe they're just not numbers, guys. Maybe he doesn't know that this isn't a very small number.

Speaker 22 Because by their own methodology, they've identified 35 separate incidents of malicious, intentional vehicle ramming attacks on political protesters during a four-month period in the United States.

Speaker 22 Their prior paper, which they're comparing this to and saying this isn't like that, this is not a big deal, that paper identified 24 vehicle ramming attacks in the United States between 2014 and 2019.

Speaker 22 24 over a five-year period. 35

Speaker 22 in four months is more than 20 times the frequency of the attacks in their earlier data set.

Speaker 22 That's not a small number.

Speaker 22 That's either an emergency or a sign you need to go back to the drawing board and look at your fucking methodology.

Speaker 22 In the paper by Miller and Hayward, they write that vehicle ramming attacks have a virus-like quality.

Speaker 22 In 2016, they very quickly rose from a fairly rare, isolated event to what is now the most deadly form of terror attack in the Western world.

Speaker 22 And this paper takes a more sociological approach than the other one, which is again firmly entrenched in the problematic world of terrorism studies Inc.

Speaker 22 So instead of trying to categorize attackers by guessing at their motives, this paper looks at the act itself. noting the wide ideological diversity among the perpetrators in their data set.

Speaker 22 Despite typically being framed in one of these two ways, vehicle ramming attacks aren't a jihadist tactic that escaped containment. And they weren't a Palestinian invention.

Speaker 22 It's a tool. The tool itself has no ideology.
It's just something that is low-tech and accessible. You don't need to buy special equipment or have particular training or skills.
Anyone can do it.

Speaker 22 And they do.

Speaker 22 Perpetrators of this kind of attack run the entire spectrum. But that virus-like quality means you're more likely to catch it if you're exposed to it on a regular basis and in large doses.

Speaker 22 At the risk of being too blunt about it, the papers from the Moneta Transportation Institute are grotesque to me.

Speaker 22 They downplay the violence of right-wing actors and overemphasize the threat of Islamic extremist attacks by spending most of the paper discussing that type of attack despite it representing a very small portion of the data.

Speaker 22 There have been a few dozen very deadly, high-profile attacks in the last 10 years, mostly in Europe, where the attacker's motivation was absolutely Islamic extremism.

Speaker 22 I'm not saying those attacks don't happen, that those events don't matter. I'm not covering them up or hiding them from you or making excuses for them.
I don't approve of those.

Speaker 22 But these self-selected data sets put the spotlight on those events by excluding a long and bloody history of vehicles as a tool of political violence.

Speaker 22 It is a political choice to focus on a particular piece of data.

Speaker 22 And by repeatedly reasserting this claim that the tactic was invented in the 90s by Palestinians, despite the existence of earlier data points, They equate the desperate acts of an oppressed people fighting an occupying army with the only tools at their disposal.

Speaker 22 They're equating that with the act of a petulant suburban American racist in a pickup truck who thinks liberals don't have civil rights.

Speaker 22 The only thing these two types of attacks have in common is the attacker's access to a low-tech, widely available weapon.

Speaker 22 Their intent, their context, their motivation, none of these things are the same. These are not the same phenomenon.
It's just the same tool.

Speaker 22 The prevalence with which that paper is cited in materials written by and for American law enforcement agencies should tell you something.

Speaker 22 They want you to be afraid of the people the government already doesn't like.

Speaker 22 And they want you to be afraid to exercise your right to protest.

Speaker 22 Palestinians didn't invent vehicular attacks. You don't have to look to the West Bank.

Speaker 22 Look at our own history. Look at the relatively recent news.

Speaker 22 Americans who have been victims of politically motivated violence at the front end of a car are union workers.

Speaker 22 They were people who took to the streets to protest war and nuclear bombs. They are people who wanted peace, people who wanted civil rights, people who wanted equality.

Speaker 22 In the United States of America, the blood on those bumpers is theirs.

Speaker 22 There seems to be a vested interest in making sure that when you think of a violent man driving into a crowd, that you are thinking of a racist caricature of a Muslim man.

Speaker 22 When you should be thinking of the bosses and the scabs and the racists and the cops and the people who've had their brains rotted out in the comments section under a Twitter post from a meme account that sometimes gets a laugh emoji reply from Elon Musk.

Speaker 22 After James Alex Fields murdered Heather Heyer in 2017, a police officer in Springfield, Massachusetts got on Facebook and he posted a news story about the attack.

Speaker 22 And with that link, he wrote, ha ha ha, love this.

Speaker 22 In 2020, as Summer Taylor lay dying in a hospital in Seattle, a King County Sheriff's Detective posted a meme depicting a vehicle running someone over.

Speaker 22 And the text read, All Lives Splatter.

Speaker 22 To remove any doubt that he was absolutely talking about Summer Taylor, who was at that time not yet dead, but would be soon, he commented on his own post.

Speaker 22 I see a couple of people got infected with COVID-19 from the hood of a car on I-5 last night.

Speaker 22 And the media landscape today is even worse.

Speaker 22 Open encouragement to run protesters down in your car is being aired on major news networks.

Speaker 22 The governor of Florida says you should do it.

Speaker 22 People in right-wing media ecosystems are consuming an incredible amount of content that normalizes this extremely specific act of violence.

Speaker 22 They're being desensitized to it.

Speaker 22 It's a joke, but they mean it.

Speaker 22 And for a tiny fraction of a percentage of them,

Speaker 22 that seed will grow into something hideous.

Speaker 22 A sudden, violent urge,

Speaker 22 a moment's premeditation,

Speaker 22 worn out of months of encouragement.

Speaker 22 Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool's Home Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 22 The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard.

Speaker 22 You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.

Speaker 22 You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the With of the Guys subreddit.

Speaker 22 Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my brutal guys.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

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Speaker 25 Honestly, honestly, honestly, no one wants to think about HIV, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it. Things like PrEP.

Speaker 25 PrEP stands for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, and it means routinely taking prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting it.

Speaker 25 PrEP can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed. It doesn't protect against other STIs, though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices.

Speaker 21 Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead.

Speaker 18 The busiest time of the year, it's here. You've got parties to go to, work to wrap up, and a house to decorate.

Speaker 20 But who has the time?

Speaker 18 With Airtasker, finding help is easy. Host your task, set your budget, and let local taskers handle the rest.

Speaker 19 Party planning?

Speaker 20 Done. Lights? Hung.
Stress?

Speaker 18 Reduced. You can even get someone to build a gingerbread house that doesn't collapse this time.

Speaker 18 Download the Airtasker app or go to Airtasker.com for a season with less stress, less mess, and a lot more fun.

Speaker 19 Airtasker, get anything done.

Speaker 26 Para los grandes, para los chicos, para los vajos y los altos, los pacifistas, los valientes, para los octimistas y los pessimistas, los que valor a lo deventro, para los que están lejos, los que novende lejos, y los que no vende cerca, para los introvertidos, y los extrovertidos, para los que bienzan y los que hacen, para los que nos unostrado en el camino.

Speaker 21 Coca-cola, para todos.

Speaker 26 Combra una Coca-Cola ena tenda cerca lusted.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.