With vehicular attacks on protests on the rise and elected officials encouraging the tactic, old conspiracy theories about one vehicular attack in particular are circulating once again. This is the story of what actually happened on Fourth Street in downtown Charlottesville on August 12, 2017.Sources:https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/08/us/la-immigration-protests-photos-map.htmlhttps://files.integrityfirstforamerica.org/14228/1641845853-dillon-hopper-deposition-as-played-at-trial.pdfhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/12/us/politics/florida-desantis-protests-warning.htmlhttps://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6168921/sines-v-kessler/https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7299259/united-states-v-fields/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Marsha P. Johnson is the trans icon of the queer movement, and it's time to listen to her.
I want to be one of the world's biggest drag queens.
Today, you can buy t-shirts with her face on them.
But her death in 1992 was never solved.
I'm dying, dying, dying.
Just get your heart ready.
Listen to Afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Did it occur to you that he'd charmed you in any way?
Yes, it did.
But he was a charming man.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story.
Because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
I often ask myself now, Did I know the true Jan at all?
Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
From iHeart Podcast, before social media, before cable news, there was Alan Bird.
He was the first and the original shock chuck.
That scratchy, irreverent kind of way of talking to people and telling them that you're an idiot and I'm going to hang up on you.
This is Live Wire, the loud life and shocking murder of Alan Berg.
And he pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, there are probably two million suspects.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker.
Away Days is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society all across the world.
Live from the underground, you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, Brazilian favela life, and much more.
All real, completely uncensored.
Listen to the Away Days podcast, reporting from the underbelly, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Call Zone Media Call Zone Media On Friday, June 6, 2025, ICE agents descended on Los Angeles, California.
The agents carried out immigration raids at three separate locations, including a Home Depot in Westlake.
Dozens of men were snatched by masked, armed agents.
Ordinary people, bystanders and shoppers, tried to intervene.
They tried to rescue the agents' targets.
Tried to pull them from the grasp of the masked men.
They put their bodies in front of the unmarked SUVs the detainees were shoved into.
Dozens of people were taken.
As word spread, more crowds began to gather.
Protests sprang up organically.
The people of Los Angeles demanded an end to the immigration raids and the unchecked violence by the ICE agents.
Over 100 people were arrested that first night, including California SEIU President David Huerta.
But the raids continued, and so did the protests.
Nearly a week into the ongoing protests, on June 11, 2025, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appeared on The Rubin Report, a right-wing political talk show hosted by failed comedian-turned-YouTube commentator Dave Rubin.
The pair were discussing the situation in California.
Kind of.
DeSantis mostly used the opportunity to brag about his commitment to preventing people from freely exercising their civil rights, promising that anyone who stepped out of line in Florida would be arrested.
But it's not just the police that protesters in Florida should worry about.
If you're driving on one of those streets and a mob comes and surrounds your vehicle and threatens you, you have a right to flee for your safety.
And so if you drive off and you hit one of these people, that's their fault for impinging on you.
You don't have to sit there and just be a sitting duck and let the mob grab you out of your car and drag you through the streets.
you have a right to defend yourself in Florida.
A day later on June 12th.
Brevard County, Florida Sheriff Wayne Ivey held a press conference.
He echoed many of the governor's warnings that protesters will face violence from both police and civilians.
If you try to mob rule a car in Brevard County, gathering around it, refusing to let the driver leave, in our county you're most likely going to get run over and dragged across the street.
DeSantis' comments came just a day after a hit-and-run at a protest in Chicago injured a 66-year-old woman.
In the days that followed, there were vehicular attacks on protests in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Riverside, California, and Culpeper, Virginia.
By the time you hear this, there may well have been more.
This kind of attack isn't new.
And it isn't rare.
It's become frighteningly common in recent years, and is now being openly encouraged by right-wing commentators and legislators alike.
There are too many stories about angry drivers using a car as a weapon because they're unhappy with a protest.
But there is one in particular that I know all too well.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
Weird Little Guys.
This is the story of James Alex Fields Jr.
I wish it weren't.
I wish his story was irrelevant, that it was over, that he didn't have to tell it again.
On August 12, 2017, James Alex Fields Jr. drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of people on 4th Street in downtown Charlottesville.
The attack took place two hours after police declared an unlawful assembly and dispersed the crowd at nearby Market Street Park.
Both the white supremacists who were gathered there to attend the Unite the Right rally and the counter-protesters who'd shown up to oppose them were cleared from the area.
The day was over.
The group of people on 4th Street that afternoon were marching to celebrate.
The Nazis were gone.
The city was safe again.
They were singing and chanting.
They were peaceful.
They were joyful.
The street they were on was closed to traffic that day.
They had every reason to believe they were safe.
He accelerated as he approached them.
He injured dozens of people.
He murdered one of them.
And he will be in prison for the rest of his life.
And because this is the story of James Alex Fields Jr., that's where I'll focus.
This is the story of a young man who loved Hitler and hated almost everyone else.
He hated black people.
He hated Jewish people.
He hated anyone who wasn't white.
And he hated white people who didn't share the hate that fueled him.
It was hate that drove him as he drove his car into a crowd of people one hot August afternoon.
Eight years ago.
That's what we're talking about.
We won't talk too much about his victims.
The dozens of people who were badly injured and survived.
Many of them are very private people, out of necessity.
They've endured years of harassment from the supporters of the man who tried to kill them.
For those who try to downplay the violence of what happens in this story, fix your hearts.
It's been nearly seven years since Fields' trial, but the testimony of those victims is seared into my soul.
There are pages of my notes where the ink is smeared from tears I couldn't wipe away fast enough as I hunched over the notebook in my lap in that courtroom.
So I won't tell you how many surgical screws are in their bones, how many of them still can't run or jump or lift their children into their arms or make a closed fist.
With hands once shattered to dust.
How many of them still have nightmares and panic attacks and can't bear to look in the mirror because the sight of their scars sounds like screeching tires?
Now isn't the time for that.
And we won't talk about Heather Heyer.
Not really.
That was her name.
The woman that he murdered.
I didn't know Heather.
I wasn't there when she died.
But I've met her mother, and I've seen the pain in her eyes when she talks about burying her daughter in secret in an unmarked grave, because conspiracy theorists think she was a crisis actor, and neo-Nazis talk openly about how they'd love to desecrate her final resting place.
And I've seen her smile with tears in her eyes, remembering that one of the last things they said to each other was, I love you.
She's grateful for that.
And I've heard her friends talk about who she was.
She was outspoken and compassionate, and she was very much not a mourning person.
She loved her chihuahua, violet, and her favorite color was purple.
She was loved.
But this is a story about the man who took her life.
And now, with vehicular attacks on protesters on the rise, the story of Heather's murder bears remembering.
Not just because these attacks bear frightening similarities to the one that took her life, but because the discourse surrounding them is full of lies about her death.
Lies used to justify more attacks and to call for the release of her killer.
On August 12, 2017, white supremacists filled the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia.
The event they'd all come to town for is one I've discussed several times already on this show.
The Unite the Right rally.
James Alex Fields Jr. was just one of thousands of people who traveled here that weekend to hear speeches from prominent neo-Nazi and white supremacist activists.
They never got to hear those speeches.
The violence in the streets started hours before the event was scheduled to actually begin, and an unlawful assembly was declared by 11.30 a.m.
State police and riot gear pushed the rally-goers out of the park and into the streets.
Where violent altercations with counter-protesters continued.
Maryland Klansman Richard Preston had been threatening to shoot people all morning, and as he exited the park shortly before noon, he drew his gun, shouted, Die, N-word, and fired a single shot into the dirt at the feet of a young black man.
As the white supremacists begrudgingly began making the two-mile trek back to where they'd parked their cars, They encountered more counter-protesters walking down Market Street.
Alex Ramos, Daniel Borden, Tyler Watkins, and Jacob Goodwin were all eventually convicted for the brutal beating of another young black man.
It was a vicious assault that took place directly outside of the Charlottesville police station.
At least three other men who participated in the attack were never arrested.
Two of them have never been identified.
The third uncharged attacker's identity, He's known, but he can't be charged.
I identified him myself, but I was a little too late.
It's a strange and terrible coincidence that I was going back through the video of that assault in February of 2023, and I finally identified Teddy Von Newcomb as one of the attackers, just two weeks after he died.
Teddy Von Newcomb shot himself in the heart the morning he was scheduled to go on trial for fentanyl trafficking.
But back to the morning of August 12th.
People got hurt that morning.
Members of the neo-Nazi street fighting gang, the Rise Above movement, punched, shoved, and choked counter-protesters standing on the sidewalk outside the park.
A phalanx of uniformed fascists carrying homemade shields shoved their way through a line of peaceful counter-demonstrators.
Members of the clergy were assaulted by Nazis.
The air was thick.
With mace and screams.
But that was the morning.
By noon, they were all retreating to their cars.
They were disappointed.
They were hot and tired and frustrated.
They were angry.
But they were leaving.
James Alex Fields hadn't actually parked his car at McIntyre Park.
Most people had.
But many of them had come with a group of some kind.
Fields came alone.
He left his home in Maumee, Ohio, on the evening of Friday, August 11th.
He hadn't been sure he'd be able to attend.
He only secured the weekend off from work a few days earlier.
But he'd known about the rally for months.
On Twitter, he followed rally organizers Richard Spencer and Augustus Invictus, as well as other prominent white supremacists like David Duke and Brad Griffin.
He replied frequently to Richard Spencer's posts, though there's no indication Spencer ever took any notice of him.
In July, Fields retweeted a post containing a flyer for the rally.
All summer, he enthusiastically posted, retweeted, and commented on posts about violence at right-wing rallies in other cities.
He seemed particularly thrilled by images of the violence at rallies in California, pictures of members of the Rise Above movement, Beating a man in Huntington Beach.
A gif of Nathan D 'Amigo punching a woman in Berkeley.
He tweeted often at Baked Alaska, an alt-right internet celebrity.
On one occasion, he tagged Baked Alaska in a post that contained just 14 words.
A very specific 14 words.
We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.
The white supremacist slogan first penned by David Lane.
While he was in prison for his role in the murder of Jewish talk radio host Alan Berg.
Fields posted pictures of Nazis marching in 1940s Germany, captioning it, He posted often about his belief that black people were genetically inferior, had low IQs, were predisposed to crime, and were more ape than human.
He self-identified as a nationalist and expressed a willingness to kill anyone deemed to be a threat.
Writing things like, violence is our only hope for survival as a people, and violence is the only solution.
Many of the men who attended the Unite the Right rally would later claim that they'd only been there because they love Confederate statues.
Protesting the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee was, allegedly, the purpose of the event.
But Fields is not an outlier here.
He was not alone in the months that he spent watching the violence at other rallies that summer, months posting violent fantasies of killing for the white race.
He was here because he was a Nazi, as were many of the men in the park that day.
On Friday afternoon, he dropped his cat Buddy off at his mother's house for the weekend, and he texted her to let her know.
She replied, as mothers do.
Be careful.
He texted her back a picture of Adolf Hitler.
Along with the image, he typed, We're not the ones who need to be careful.
He didn't get here in time for the torch march that night.
He drove through the night, arriving in Charlottesville around 2 or 3 a.m.
Sitting alone in his car in a McDonald's parking lot, He scrolled through social media.
He saw a tweet from David Duke with pictures of the torch march.
Duke wrote, Our people on the march.
Will you be at Unite the Right tomorrow?
Fields saved the pictures onto his phone, and then he texted them to his mother.
He also asked about his cat.
He napped a little bit in his car in the McDonald's parking lot, drove to Waffle House to eat breakfast alone, And then returned to that McDonald's parking lot downtown early Saturday morning.
As other attendees gathered in McIntyre Park, nearly two miles from the location of the rally, he was already downtown, just a few blocks from his destination.
I know that's a lot of seemingly extraneous information about where people were parking their cars.
And it probably means nothing to you unless you live here and you can picture in your mind how close the McDonald's on Ridge Street is to that park downtown.
But getting back to various parked cars becomes a key piece of this timeline, I promise.
So, Fields' car is downtown, at the McDonald's.
But most of the attendees have parked their cars at a different park, one that was far away from the park where the rally would be.
Fields had probably planned to sit there in his car until closer to noon, when the rally was scheduled to begin.
But from where he was parked, he could see that people were starting to walk in that direction.
So he joined them.
By around 9am, he was among the first attendees to arrive at Market Street Park.
Photos taken that morning show Fields standing with members of Vanguard America.
That's a now-defunct neo-Nazi group that later that year would morph into what we now know as Patriot Front.
There had been an ongoing power struggle within Vanguard America that summer, and the group's official leader, Dylan Hopper, didn't actually attend the event.
In Hopper's absence, the group was commanded on the ground that day by the man who was trying to wrest control of it from Dylan Hopper.
It was an 18-year-old, whose name you might already know.
It was a young Thomas Rousseau, the current leader of Patriot Front.
Everyone involved has always maintained that James Alex Fields was not a member of Vanguard America.
They claimed they'd never met him before.
But there he was, marching in their ranks, dressed identically to their members, and holding a round wooden shield with their logo on it.
According to deposition testimony from Dylan Hopper, it was Thomas Rousseau himself who handed Fields the shield that morning.
From his deposition, he told me that he let James Fields into Vanguard America's formation at Charlottesville when nobody knew who he was.
He didn't come with anybody and they just gave him a shield and said, hey, march with us.
And Thomas Rousseau's reasoning was to make Vanguard look like a larger organization in front of the news media.
Vanguard America's official position was that James Alex Fields was not a member of their organization.
But they also claimed that they didn't actually have any kind of list of their members that they could show that didn't have his name on it, because there was no list.
The organization was one of many named defendants in a lawsuit filed by people who were hurt that day.
And over the years of litigation in that suit, Vanguard America never produced a single document.
They expect us to believe that they didn't have a single text message, email, organizational communication, or internal document that was responsive to the discovery request.
Hopper claimed they kept no records of any kind, and he didn't even know the real names of most of the group's members.
So they're able to swear under oath that they know for sure that Fields wasn't a member.
But they couldn't actually tell you who was.
I do think it's pretty plausible that a teenage Thomas Rousseau was foolish enough to hand a shield to a stranger, purely to make himself look more important, so that it looked like he was commanding a larger group of Nazis in front of a TV camera.
Videos show Fields standing with the Vanguard America shield wall at the perimeter of the park.
He's joining in racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic chants, and he seems to be having a pretty good time.
When the police cleared the park at 11.30, Fields left with everyone else.
There was some hope that the rally would regroup back at McIntyre Park, and they could still hear the scheduled speeches.
So even though he was so close to his parked car, which again was downtown, he walked with the crowd back to McIntyre Park, two miles away.
At trial, an FBI analyst testified about the geolocation data extracted from Fields' cell phone.
This shouldn't matter.
This is tedious, and it's boring, and it's nitpicky, and it shouldn't matter.
It shouldn't matter where he was from minute to minute between 11.30am and 1.40pm.
It should be enough for me to tell you that he left the park around 11.30, and by 1.40pm, he was committing a murder.
The two hours in between are just a long, hot walk.
Why does it matter?
But unfortunately, it matters a great deal.
A conspiracy theory has broken containment, and I feel compelled to try again to set the record straight.
When people like Ron DeSantis or Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey encourage people to run protesters over, they claim they're talking about self-defense.
But the self-defense that exists in their imaginations doesn't really have any relationship with reality.
It's the same self-defense that James Alex Fields would claim after his crime.
The same self-defense his supporters have cooked up elaborate imaginary scenarios to justify.
What Fields did was not self-defense.
He was convicted by a jury.
He eventually pled guilty to similar charges in a federal court.
But the recent popular enthusiasm for murdering protesters It's gone mainstream.
And the conspiracy theories about Fields' crime are spreading now, too.
And I want to give you the facts you might need to combat those lies if you encounter them out there in the world.
Some of those lies are easy to debunk quickly.
There are people who will tell you that Heather Heyer didn't even get hit by the car.
That her death was from a heart attack.
To that, I offer you the testimony of a DNA analyst from the Virginia Department of Forensic Science.
She performed testing that confirmed that a piece of human flesh that was embedded in the car's broken windshield was a DNA match to Heather Heyer.
Testing performed on blood stains found on the vehicle showed at least ten distinct profiles.
Ten people's blood was on that car, including Heather's.
The medical examiner who performed Heather's autopsy showed the jury x-rays of a displaced fracture to Heather's right femur.
Her broken ribs cut her lungs and her liver.
Her aorta was completely transected.
The doctor's exact words, according to my notes, were, It was snapped in half.
The aorta is the largest artery in the human body, taking blood directly from the heart out into the body.
Completely severing the aorta is not a survivable injury.
She bled to death internally very quickly.
The official cause of death was blunt force trauma to the torso.
Anyone who is stuck arguing that the car never struck her or that she died of anything other than being struck by that car is willfully ignorant.
These facts are quite concrete.
Jan Marsalek was a model of German corporate success.
It seemed so damn simple for him.
Also, it turned out, a fraudster.
Where does the money come from?
That was something that I always was questioning myself.
But what if I told you that was the least interesting thing about him?
His secret office was less than 500 meters down the road.
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all?
Certain things in my life since then have gone terrible.
I don't know if they followed me to my home.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story, because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Hot Money I want to be one of the world's biggest drag queens.
You've heard the name Marsha P. Johnson, trans icon, revolutionary, saint.
They called me a legend in my own time.
But who was she, really?
She's strutting up there, waving to the policemen in the cars.
"Pay it no mind.
I'm a woman, a real woman." Marsha also survived homelessness, sex work, and police violence.
And in 1992, her body was found in the Hudson River.
Her death remains unsolved.
Marsha was pulled out of the water, right over the edge here.
After Lives is a podcast about how trans lives we've lost have reshaped our world.
Marsha will tell us who she was in her own words.
At a time when trans rights are under attack, her story is more urgent than ever.
Listen to After Lives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
From iHeart Podcasts.
Before social media, before the internet, before cable news, there was Alan Berg.
You dig what I do.
You have a need.
Unfortunately, you have no sense of humor.
That's why you can't ever enjoy this show, and that's why you're a loser.
He was the first.
Original shock, Chuck.
That scratchy, irreverent kind of way of talking to people.
You're as dumb as the rest.
I can't take anyone.
I don't agree with you all the time.
I don't want you to.
I hope that you pick me apart.
His voice changed media.
His death shocked the nation.
And it makes me so angry that he got himself killed because he had a big mouth.
KOA morning talk show host Alan Berg reportedly was shot and killed tonight in downtown Denver.
He pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, there are probably two million suspects.
This guy aggravated everybody.
From iHeart Podcasts, this is Live Wire, the loud life and shocking murder of Alan Berg.
Listen on the iHeart Radio app.
I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker.
Away Days is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society all across the world.
Live from the underground, you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, Brazilian favela life, and much more.
All real, completely uncensored.
This is unique access with straightforward on-the-ground reporting.
We're taking you deep into the dirt without the usual airs and graces of legacy media.
A way that showcases what the mainstream cannot access.
Real underground reporting with real people, no excuses.
For the past decade I've been going to places I shouldn't be, meeting people I shouldn't know.
Now you can come along too.
Listen to the Away Days podcast, reporting from the underbelly, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Music The other persistent lie is a little more complicated.
I mean, the facts are there.
I don't mean there's actually any lingering confusion.
It's just a more convoluted narrative.
And the average conspiracy theorist isn't going to sit quietly long enough to have it explained to them.
The story goes like this.
He had to do it.
Fields was terrified of Antifa.
He didn't want to hurt those people.
He was trying to escape from a man who was threatening him with a rifle.
He was afraid for his life.
The people who repeat this story often don't know or don't care to know any more than that.
The specifics aren't important, only the feeling.
They feel it must be true because it affirms their existing belief that left-wing protesters are violent and that right-wing white men are persecuted.
The problem is, this never happened.
This was a lie born by accident.
A leftist counter-demonstrator made an understandable mistake.
You see, there were members of left-wing groups in Charlottesville that day who carried guns.
This is Virginia.
It's legal to open-carrier rifle in public.
Regardless of how you feel about that, in terms of gun laws in general, protest tactics specifically, whatever, that's just the situation.
It is legal for people to open-carrier rifle in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Members of an anarchist gun club were in a different downtown park, Court Square Park, which is about two blocks from the Market Street Park where the rally was held.
In the days after that rally, one of those counter-demonstrators who had been legally carrying his rifle that day posted online that he'd seen fields that afternoon before the attack.
He wrote, I used this rifle to chase off James Fields from our block of 4th Street before he attacked the marchers to the south.
And when he posted that, he believed it to be true.
He was traumatized.
He had survivor's guilt.
He truly believed that he had seen James Fields driving around hunting for victims in the hour before the attack happened.
But he was wrong.
After his Facebook post, a Charlottesville police detective drove to his home to interview him.
And I've obtained a copy of that police interview.
He said that around 1pm that afternoon, he saw a dark grey muscle car with very dark tinted windows circling Court Square Park.
The car was driving slowly, as though the driver were trying to observe the people in the park.
The third time the car drove past, it came to a complete stop, level with where he was standing inside the park.
And at that point, he says he stepped down off the curb, Standing between two parked cars, so not all the way out into the road, but off the curb.
And he yelled at the car.
Something like, get out of here.
And he says the interaction was brief.
The driver did not roll down the window.
They didn't exchange words.
His rifle remained slung across his body, muzzle pointing at the ground.
And he never put his hand on the pistol grip.
He did not raise his weapon.
He didn't step all the way out into the road, and he was the only person who moved in the direction of the car at all.
There was no mob.
There was no threat.
There was no rifle pointing.
But more importantly, there was no James Alex Fields.
He was mistaken.
After the attack, he saw photos of Fields' dark grey Dodge Challenger, and he believed it was the same car he'd seen earlier that day.
But it absolutely could not have been.
It is not possible.
At the time of the attack, 1.40pm, this man was in the middle of an interview with a reporter.
The reporter took photographs of him for the story, and those photographs are time-stamped at 1.30pm.
He estimates they'd been talking for about 15 minutes before they started taking the pictures, and the incident with the mysterious car had occurred A little bit prior to this.
So if he's been talking to a reporter since 1.15, his best guess is that he saw this car sometime between 12.45 and 1.15.
It couldn't have been any later than 1.15.
And we know exactly where James Alex Fields was at 1.13 p.m. because there is security camera footage from a Shell gas station showing him purchasing a Blue Powerade.
Fields left his car in the McDonald's parking lot around 9 a.m., and he didn't return to it again until around 1.20 p.m.
Neither Fields nor his car were anywhere near Court Square Park when this man saw a dark gray muscle car slowly circling the park.
The police have never weighed in on this.
I wish they would, because I think they know the answer.
I think they could put this to bed if they felt like it.
It is my very firmly held belief that the car that man saw that day was an unmarked police car.
The Charlottesville Police Department did have an unmarked dark grey Dodge Charger with dark tinted windows.
Mistaking a Charger for a Challenger isn't hard to believe if you saw it only briefly.
And it's very easy to imagine why a cop might make several laps around the park to try to get a better look at the guys with the guns.
I don't think we'll ever get an answer to the question of who exactly it was, driving around the park at 1pm.
But I can promise you, it was not James Alex Fields.
Fields left downtown around 11:30 a.m.
with the other rally attendees.
According to GPS data from his cell phone, Fields was in McIntyre Park shortly after noon.
He milled around a little, but it quickly became clear that nothing was going to happen there.
He needed to walk back downtown to get to his car, but he didn't really want to walk there alone.
He met another man in the same situation, Joshua Matthews.
The pair soon met Sarah Bolstad and her boyfriend Hayden Calhoun, two other rally attendees who needed to get back downtown.
And they all decided to walk there together.
Fields' cell phone pings show a minute-by-minute progression of this walk.
And at 1.13pm, he's on camera buying that Powerade.
Joshua Matthews testified that he bought a bottle of wine at the gas station to celebrate getting through the day safely.
It took another five minutes from there to walk back to Fields' car at the McDonald's.
All four of them got into his car, and he drove Bolstad and Calhoun to their car, which turned out to be right across the street.
Matthews had parked in the garage downtown, which was another couple of minutes away by car.
By 1:35 p.m., He typed Mommy Ohio into the search bar on the Maps app on his phone to get directions home.
The streets were empty at that point.
Everyone had gone home, even the police.
There were extensive road closures downtown that day for the scheduled rally.
And officers had been stationed in the intersections around the roadblocks.
The officers were gone now, but the streets were still blocked off.
In hindsight, maybe they should have closed the Market Street parking garage too?
That part of downtown has a lot of narrow, one-way streets, and it can be confusing for out-of-towners even without the added complication of the roadblocks.
But there are a lot of things I think the city would have done differently with the benefit of hindsight.
And even locals were a little bit puzzled about how to navigate this situation.
Two other drivers had run into the same problem, ending up on 4th Street just before Fields did.
The first driver was a woman I'll just call Elle.
She was driving home from running an errand, and she got mixed up with the roadblocks.
4th Street was technically closed to traffic too, but the tiny wooden sawhorse still standing in the road didn't block it completely.
So she turned down that street.
At the intersection of 4th and Water Street, there is a stop sign.
And as she stopped at the bottom of 4th Street, the crowd of marchers is coming up water towards that intersection.
They're chanting and singing and they're joyfully reclaiming their city streets from the Nazi invasion.
And as they approach the intersection, they turn left, up 4th Street, towards the pedestrian mall.
They were singing.
They were laughing, she said.
The crowd just felt so positive, so happy, that she got out of her car.
I wanted to get this on film, she testified at Fields' trial.
This was a moment in history.
One of the marchers recognized her and ran over to say hi and smile for the Snapchat video she was recording.
It was a joyful moment.
As this is happening, a second car pulled in behind Elle's van as she stopped at this intersection.
This car, driven by a woman I'll just call T, stopped too.
She hadn't attended any of the protests that morning.
But when she heard that everything was over, she left her house to go visit a friend who lived near downtown.
She was on her way home when she got caught up trying to navigate the roadblocks.
T testified that as she wound her way around downtown, trying to figure out which streets weren't closed, there was another car behind her the entire time.
He seemed to be in the same boat.
He followed her at a safe distance, driving calmly and safely, making the same turns she made and stopping behind her at a red light.
Like Elle, she drove past the little sawhorse on 4th Street, and the gray Dodge Challenger was still right behind her.
She saw the crowd at the end of the street as she approached, so she was driving really slowly, and she came to a stop behind Elle's van.
It was amazing, she said.
I've never seen so many people standing up for black people.
So many people of another color standing up for us.
She testified that a passing marcher leaned in toward her open car window and thanked her for being so patient.
As the group moved up the street around her idling car.
The Challenger was still behind her.
In her rearview mirror, she saw the car start to back up.
That made sense to her.
He saw the crowd and changed his mind.
Maybe he didn't want to wait down there at the bottom of 4th Street for the crowd to pass.
Who knows how long it might take.
So, he's probably going to back all the way back out onto Market Street and try a different path.
She remembered thinking she might be there for a while, but there was no way she would be able to maneuver her car all the way back out to Market Street in reverse.
So she stayed put.
If you're not familiar with downtown Charlottesville, we have a pedestrian mall.
It's just an outdoor area, a few blocks of shops and restaurants, and it's just for pedestrians.
But for some uncomfortable.
Our pedestrian-only mall has two vehicular crossings.
And 4th Street is one of them.
So these three cars turned onto 4th Street from Market Street, where it crosses the mall.
And as you pass onto and then back off of the pedestrian-only area as you proceed down 4th Street, there are speed bumps.
Security camera footage from a nearby business shows each car as it drove down 4th Street.
L's red van.
Then T's silver sedan.
Then the Challenger.
The angle of this camera was only meant to capture the area just outside the restaurant's door.
So it just catches a fleeting glimpse of each vehicle as they cross onto the pedestrian mall.
One minute and ten seconds.
After Fields' car first appeared driving down Fourth Street, it reappears in frame, driving in reverse.
And then suddenly, it accelerates forward.
There was no one around him.
The security camera footage shows that.
Witnesses testified to that.
The state police helicopter, hovering overhead, recording video of the entire scene, clearly shows it.
L and T had made the same mistake he did, turning down a closed road, and they were waiting patiently for the peaceful crowd to make their way onto the pedestrian mall.
But he was behind them, idling, alone, watching.
When T saw him start to reverse, she assumed he was leaving, but he was just giving himself more room to accelerate.
A photojournalist from the local newspaper was on the mall that afternoon.
He'd worked all morning, taking pictures of the violent scenes on Market Street, but he'd come back out that afternoon, now that everything was over, to look around.
He wasn't with the crowd, but he heard them and walked over to see.
He saw the Grey Challenger just as it started reversing, and he too assumed the car was trying to back out onto Market Street.
But then he heard the engine revving.
He raised his camera and captured 74 frames.
A rapid burst of photos.
Sort of a grisly flipbook.
Here, too, we can lay to rest another persistent lie.
While the helicopter footage provides a clear view of the entire scene, it's a bird's eye view.
You can only see the tops of things, only the top of the car.
I've seen the video.
It's clear enough to me that the driver was accelerating, that he made no attempt to slow down as he plowed into the crowd.
But both his attorneys at trial and his supporters online will tell you that he hit the brakes.
He tried to slow down.
These photos prove otherwise.
On the stand, the photographer was shown his own pictures in one frame.
The brake lights are illuminated, indicating that the driver tapped his brakes.
But this wasn't as he neared the crowd.
It was the moment his car bottomed out over a speed bump.
Several witnesses testified that they heard the car's undercarriage scrape the speed bump as he crossed the pedestrian mall.
Several testified that it looked like the car was briefly airborne because it hit the speed bump so fast.
But once he cleared that barrier, The brake lights never came on again.
As he approached the crowd, he was accelerating.
It sounded like a gunshot.
I just remember screaming.
I think I was saying, where are my kids?
Where are my kids?
I thought a bomb went off.
I thought more cars might be coming.
I tried to get out of the street, but I didn't know why my legs wouldn't work.
When I came to, my leg was broken and I couldn't find my child.
The only thing I could think about was getting my wife out of the way.
These are the words of the people whose bones he broke.
He drove right through that crowd, ramming into the back of T's car, pushing it forward into Elle's van.
Elle was actually hit by her own parked car.
She'd gotten out to greet a friend in the crowd and was standing in front of the van when it was pushed forward in the crash.
The street was too narrow for Fields to continue on this path.
The two cars he'd crashed into were blocking the intersection.
And here again we have a moment in time that has become distorted in the retelling.
Conspiracy theorists will tell you that the crowd attacked his car unprovoked.
That the damage to his vehicle occurred before the attack.
That he feared for his life because this mob attacked him.
And there certainly was some damage to his car that wasn't from the crash.
But that didn't happen until after the crash.
Dozens of people were lying on the ground, bleeding and broken.
Many people ran, not knowing what horrors might come next.
Was he going to get out of the car with a gun?
And for every person who was lying injured on the pavement, half a dozen others stepped up to render aid, moving victims out of the street, tearing off their own clothes to try to stop bleeding, stabilizing possibly broken necks.
But some people in that crowd identified a threat, and they did what they felt was necessary, striking the vehicle and putting a few good dents in it.
He had just killed someone, I think that's fair.
With no path forward, Fields really was surrounded by an angry crowd now.
In the collective imaginations of aggrieved white supremacists, this angry crowd has existed throughout the story.
But the evidence is clear.
No one had an issue with the Grey Challenger until after it was a clear and present danger.
He threw the car into reverse, hitting several more people in the process.
And backed all the way back up 4th Street, back onto Market Street, and he drove toward the highway.
He still had the GPS directions for his trip back home pulled up on his phone.
The footage captured by the state police helicopter tracked his flight from the scene.
The officers who filmed it never actually testified.
They couldn't.
A few hours later, miles from downtown, they lost control of their helicopter and both troopers died in the crash.
Fields drove for a little over a mile, with an officer in pursuit for much of that drive, before surrendering, just blocks from the on-ramp to the interstate.
The officer who pulled him over actually had no idea what Fields had done.
He just happened to hear the radio call just as Fields was passing by where he was sitting in his parked car.
So when Fields saw the officer and asked, Are the people okay?
He didn't know the answer.
The End.
Jan Marsalek was a model of German corporate success.
It seemed so damn simple for him.
Also, it turned out, a fraudster.
Where does the money come from?
That was something that I always was questioning myself.
But what if I told you that was the least interesting thing about him?
His secret office was less than 500 metres down the road.
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all?
Certain things in my life since then have gone terribly wrong.
I don't know if they followed me to my home.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I want to be one of the world's biggest drag queens.
You've heard the name Marsha P. Johnson, trans icon, revolutionary, saint.
They called me a legend in my own time.
But who was she, really?
She's strutting up there, waving to the policemen in the cars.
They had no mind.
I'm a woman.
A real woman.
Marsha also survived homelessness, sex work, and police violence.
And in 1992, her body was found in the Hudson River.
Her death remains unsolved.
Marsha was pulled out of the water, right over the edge here.
After Lives is a podcast about how trans lives we've lost have reshaped our world.
Marsha will tell us who she was in her own words.
You're going to be gagging.
Just get your heart ready for heart failure.
At a time when trans rights are under attack.
Her story is more urgent than ever.
Listen to Afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
From iHeart Podcasts, before social media, before the internet, before cable news, there was Alan Berg.
You dig what I do.
You have a need.
Unfortunately, you have no sense of humor.
That's why you can't ever enjoy this show, and that's why you're a loser.
He was the first in the original shock shot.
That scratchy, irreverent kind of way of talking to people.
You're as dumb as the rest.
I don't agree with you all the time.
I don't want you to.
I hope that you pick me apart.
His voice changed media.
His death shocked the nation.
And it makes me so angry that he got himself killed because he had a big mouth.
KOA morning talk show host Alan Berg reportedly was shot and killed tonight in downtown Denver.
He pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, there are probably two million suspects.
This guy aggravated everybody.
From iHeart Podcasts, this is Live Wire, the loud life and shocking murder of Alan Berg.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app.
I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker.
Away Days is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society all across the world.
Live from the underground, you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, Brazilian favela life, and much more.
All real, completely uncensored.
This is unique access with straightforward on-the-ground reporting.
We're taking you deep into the dirt without the usual airs and graces of legacy media.
A way that it showcases what the mainstream cannot access.
Real underground reporting with real people, no excuses.
For the past decade I've been going to places I shouldn't be, meeting people I shouldn't know.
Now you can come along too.
Listen to the Away Days podcast, reporting from the underbelly, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It wasn't until he was sitting at the police station that an officer told him that someone had died.
Based on the audio of this interview, It is impossible to know which one of a man's lies he actually believes.
As he was lying face down on the side of the road, he said, I didn't want to hurt people, but they were attacking me.
And later at the magistrate's office, fields can be heard on body cam footage saying, I felt like the people behind me were trying to surround me.
But that just isn't true.
There were no people behind him.
Not until he drove over them, anyway.
The only time his car was ever surrounded by anyone was when he drove into them.
He sat all alone for a minute and ten seconds, looking down that street at the crowd.
He was obviously capable of backing all the way back up 4th Street.
He ended up doing just that after the murder.
But he chose to accelerate forward.
Instead, he chose that.
Because he wanted to hurt them.
He wanted to hurt black people and Jewish people and gay people and liberals and communists.
He saw Black Lives Matter signs and rainbow flags and people in black bandanas.
And he couldn't stand it.
He had other options.
He wasn't defending himself.
And he knows that.
A few months after the attack, while he was awaiting trial in the local jail, he brought up the topic of Heather Heyer's mother in a phone call with his own mother.
Could your mother just like going around doing speeches and shit?
Slandering me?
Would you commies?
Thank you.
I haven't heard anything.
Oh, okay.
The only thing I've seen was that she was on the news and she said that.
No.
It doesn't fucking matter.
She's a communist.
What?
You need to stop talking.
Nobody's in...
I don't know.
Jay.
It's not up for questioning.
She is.
She's the enemy.
Nobody's an enemy.
She is the enemy, mother.
Her death doesn't fucking matter.
Her mother's pain doesn't fucking matter.
They're the enemy.
They're anti-white communists and their lives are worthless and they don't fucking matter.
That's what he believes.
That's the truth.
Not the self-serving, self-pitying tears in the magistrate's office.
Not the lies that he told his lawyers that they repeated for him in court.
None of that.
This is the truth.
Like I said, I didn't know Heather, but I've met her mother on a few occasions.
We've never talked politics, not really.
We talked about her daughter, about the case, about the Nazi who said he was going to use her daughter's grave as a urinal.
She always asks me how my little dogs are.
But I'm willing to stake a claim here and say that neither Heather nor her mother would say that they're communists.
Because that word doesn't mean what you think it means here.
He doesn't mean someone who identifies with the political ideology of communism.
It means someone who doesn't want Nazis around.
It means someone that white nationalists don't like.
In another recorded jail call, Fields explained to his mother that all liberals are communists who hate white people and want to destroy white society.
So when you see a white supremacist talking about his fervent desire to hurt or kill communists, just know he means you too.
The murder was premeditated.
He was convicted of first-degree murder, which in Virginia requires premeditation.
But that doesn't mean you have to make the plan far in advance.
At trial, the prosecutor emphasized that they believed he formulated his intent And ten seconds that he spent idling on 4th Street, staring down at the crowd.
And I think that's almost certainly the truth.
I don't think that he drove here from Ohio intending to do this.
I don't think he knew when he left his cat at his mother's house for the weekend that he would never come home again.
The plan didn't form until the opportunity presented itself.
But the plan was able to form so quickly, Because he'd thought about it before.
And he wasn't the only one.
I think I need to do a follow-up episode about the history of vehicle attacks on protests.
I'd intended to get into it here, but I sort of lost track of things.
It was a subject of interest in certain circles, and several similar attacks in the United States predate this one.
In the Discord server for Unite the Right Rally attendees, the idea came up several times.
I don't believe there's any evidence that Fields was ever an active participant in the chat, but it just goes to show how prevalent the fantasy was.
A month before the rally, a user posting as Tyrone said, Is it legal to run over protesters blocking roadways?
I'm not just shitposting.
I would like clarification.
The same user posted a meme showing a large piece of John Deere farming equipment with the text, Introducing John Deere's new multi-lane protester digester.
Tyrone wrote, Sure would be nice.
A week earlier, another user posted, What is it called when you run over a protester?
Black Lives Splatter.
Shane Duffy, a member of the neo-Nazi group Traditionalist Worker Party, posted, This will be us, alongside an image from the 2004 movie Dawn of the Dead.
Depicting a bus driving into a crowd of zombies.
Two days before the rally, another user posted on the subject of counter-protesters, writing, You're supposed to run them over with your car.
These are jokes.
Probably.
Kind of.
That's what they'd tell you.
And none of those men actually did it.
So maybe they were kidding.
I think it's instructive here to quote from the style guide written by the editor of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer.
It was intended to be an internal document for the site's authors, and the site was one that many of these men read daily.
In the section about humor, the document's author, Andrew Anglin, wrote, The tone of the site should be light.
Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, non-ironic hatred.
The indoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not.
There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists.
I usually think of this as self-deprecating humor.
I am a racist making fun of stereotypes of racists because I don't take myself super seriously.
This is obviously a ploy, and I actually do want to gas...
But that's neither here nor there.
Serious articles are fine and can be written and published with absolute seriousness.
However, articles which take a serious tone should not include racial slurs or even rude language about other races.
Another section with the heading Violence reads, It's illegal to promote violence on the internet.
At the same time, it's totally important to normalize the acceptance of violence as an eventuality slash inevitability.
I'm extremely careful about never suggesting violence.
I go beyond legal requirements in America.
However, whenever someone does something violent, it should be made light of and laughed at.
For example, Anders Breivik should be forever referred to as a heroic freedom fighter.
This is great because people think you must be joking.
But there is a part of their brain that doesn't think that.
So this is partly an attempt at just plausible deniability.
If someone's offended, it was just a joke, and you haven't lost face.
If you get in trouble, it was just a joke, and maybe you won't be punished.
But if it works, if you tell a racist joke or propose a violent act and it's well-received, then you've made a connection.
You've found a fellow traveler.
But as they say themselves, it's also a recruitment and indoctrination strategy.
You ease people into it.
You let them have an uneasy chuckle at your racist joke.
Give them the internal deniability that they need to hear something like that and not push back.
Erode their boundaries.
Get them comfortable with that kind of talk.
Normalize it.
A now-deceased Daily Stormer writer said it himself.
Here's Robert Ray, the Nazi who called himself Asmodor, greeting a fan.
The audio is a little bit fuzzy.
There's a lot of background noise in this clip.
And that's because it was recorded inside Market Street Park on the morning of August 12th, 2017.
I check that site every day and I always laugh at it.
It's humor.
That's how it gets people.
It's humor, but we need it too.
Absolutely, yeah.
It's humor, but we mean it.
Just moments before this segment of the clip, Asmodore had just finished telling this man about how he'd assaulted several people the night before.
He was laughing and smiling when he said it, but he meant it.
Robert Ray died a fugitive.
He was charged with a felony for pepper-spraying counter-protesters who were trapped by the ring of torch marchers the night before this.
And he never appeared in court.
And while Fields may not have been in the Discord, he posted some jokes of his own about murdering protesters.
In May of 2017, three months before the attack, he posted a meme on Instagram.
The image is...
It looks just like it.
The text on the image reads, You have a right to protest, but I'm late for work.
When he posted that image in May, I don't think he was thinking to himself, I'm going to do this one day.
I don't think he was even thinking about it on his drive here.
But the idea lived in his head.
It was a joke.
But he meant it.
It was normalized.
It was normal to think of people who protest Nazi rallies as subhuman, as enemy combatants.
It was normal to think about hurting them.
It wasn't shocking or upsetting.
It was funny.
It was just a joke.
But they meant it.
Which is why I feel so sick.
Browsing the comments on posts made today by mainstream MAGA influencers.
The rhetoric in these posts is as bad, sometimes worse, than what was posted in the Nazi rally planning chats.
That protester-digester meme?
The one that Tyrone posted and ended up entered into evidence in federal court to demonstrate the casual attitude the rally-goers had towards this kind of violence?
That meme is now being posted by people who probably think of themselves as having pretty normal Republican politics.
And I guess by today's standards, they do.
Accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers have posted it.
People posting under their real names are posting it.
Doctors, tech executives, small business owners, federal employees.
It's not just the radical fringe anymore.
Average suburban conservatives are posting the kinds of things that I'm used to seeing with an exhibit number stamped on them.
There is a lot more to be said about the rise in popularity among American right-wingers of this very particular form of violence.
And I think I'm going to have to revisit that history another day because I think it's important.
This is a relatively recent phenomenon, spiking dramatically in frequency in the last ten years.
Fields' crime is not an isolated one.
He was acting out a fantasy that was common among his peers.
Eight years ago, that peer group was small.
It was just around the radical fringes of society where people felt comfortable talking about this so often that it started to feel acceptable.
And now it's everywhere.
Politicians and law enforcement officials are telling you it's allowed.
They're damn near encouraging you to go out there and do it.
And it's happened at least five times in the last week.
Keep an eye out for each other out there.
Don't ever assume that a driver is going to behave rationally.
because I have a terrible feeling this is going to keep happening.
Thank you.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagin.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
Music Marsha P. Johnson is the trans icon of the queer movement, and it's time to listen to her.
I want to be one of the world's biggest drag queens.
Today, you can buy t-shirts with her face on them, but her death in 1992 was never solved.
I'm dying, dying, dying.
Hear how Marsha's life and legacy reshaped our world.
Just get your heart ready.
Listen to Afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Did it occur to you that he'd charmed you in any way?
Yes, it did.
But he was a charming man.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story.
Because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all?
Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
From iHeart Podcast, before social media, before cable news, there was Alan Bird.
He was the first and the original shock chuck.
That scratchy, irreverent kind of way of talking to people and telling them that you're an idiot and I'm going to hang up on you.
This is Live Wire, the loud life and shocking murder of Alan Berg.
And he pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, there are probably two million suspects.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker.
Away Days is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society all across the world.
Live from the underground, you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, resilient favela life, and much more.
All real, completely uncensored.
Listen to the Away Days podcast, reporting from the underbelly, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
