Last week, we talked about one particular incident of vehicular violence on protesters. But where does the tactic come from? Who is doing it? And why? Sources:Miller, Vincent, and Keith J. Hayward. “‘I DID MY BIT’: TERRORISM, TARDE AND THE VEHICLE RAMMING ATTACK AS AN IMITATIVE EVENT.” The British Journal of Criminology, vol. 59, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–23. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26780645. Accessed 16 June 2025.Brian Michael Jenkins and Bruce R. Butterworth, Smashing into Crowds: An Analysis of Vehicle Ramming Attacks. San Jose, CA: Mineta Transportation Institute, 2019https://transweb.sjsu.edu/sites/default/files/SP-1119-Vehicle-Ramming-Attacks.pdfBrian Michael Jenkins and Bruce R. Butterworth, Metal Against Marchers. San Jose, CA: Mineta Transportation Institute, 2020https://transweb.sjsu.edu/sites/default/files/SP1020-Metal-Against-Marchers.pdfGabriel Nowacki & Cezary Krysiuk & Damian Szafranek, 2025. "Vehicle Ramming as a Form of Terrorist Attack Threatening Public Safety," European Research Studies Journal, European Research Studies Journal, vol. 0(1), pages 707-722.Simon Perry, Badi Hasisi & Gali Perry (2018) Who is the Lone Terrorist? A Study of Vehicle-Borne Attackers in Israel and the West Bank, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism,41:11, 899-913, DOI: 10.1080/1057610X.2017.1348101Pierce, Kelvin. Sins of My Father, Growing Up with America's Most Dangerous White Supremacist. Independently Published, 2020https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/Vehicle_Incident_Prevention_and_Mitigation_Security_Guide_508_20240418.pdfhttps://www.al.com/news/2025/06/stand-your-ground-on-steroids-debate-emerges-over-drivers-hitting-protesters-in-alabama.htmlhttps://local21news.com/news/local/adams-county-community-reacts-to-sheriffs-controversial-facebook-post-about-protestorshttps://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/detail/pedestrianshttps://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2331https://cwa-union.org/news/strike-line-remembering-gerry-horganhttps://sfist.com/2025/03/10/truck-seems-to-drive-into-striking-vta-workers-on-picket-line-one-hospitalized/https://komonews.com/amp/news/local/king-county-detective-on-leave-after-alleged-all-lives-splatter-facebook-post https://www.abc12.com/news/crime/flint-man-who-hit-striking-uaw-members-pleads-guilty/article_b007099a-bf9a-11ee-9de4-0bfd68db8786.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/1929/06/16/archives/federal-arms-barred-secretary-good-warns-governor-on-use-of.htmlhttps://money.cnn.com/2017/08/15/media/daily-caller-fox-news-video-car-crashing-liberal-protesters/index.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/world/europe/uk-van-attack-london-mosque.htmlhttps://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/alek-minassian-toronto-van-attack-incels-891678/https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-06-17/man-arrested-hit-and-run-no-kings-protester-riversidehttps://www.courtlistener.com/docket/14915697/united-states-v-henry/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In 2012, 16-year-old Brian Herira was gunned down in broad daylight on his way to do homework.
No suspects, no witnesses, no justice.
I would ask my husband, do you want me to stop?
He's like, no, keep fighting.
After nearly a decade, a breakthrough changed everything.
This is Cold Case Files Miami, stories of families who never stopped fighting.
Listen to Cold Case Files Miami on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Did it occur to you that he 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.
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 Marshall'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.
From iHeart Podcasts, before social media, before cable news, there was Alan Berg.
He was the first and the original shock shock.
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 LiveWire, the loud life and shocking murder of Alan Berg.
And he pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, there are probably 2 million suspects.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On May 15th, 1966, the clock ran out in negotiations between Local 1234 of the United Auto Workers Union and aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney.
The contract expired.
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.
The company was producing equipment the United States government desperately needed if they hoped to win the war and the space race.
No one could afford a strike, so the union didn't authorize one.
Union leadership agreed to a day-by-day extension of the contract as they continued to do it.
the mediation process.
But the workers weren't satisfied with that answer.
At midnight that night, workers at the plant walked off the production floor and gathered outside.
It was a wildcat strike.
The workers picketed through the night, and on the morning of Monday, May 16th, the striking workers were there outside the plant.
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.
Newspaper reports from May of 1966 say only that two cars were damaged.
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.
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.
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.
One of the cars that was damaged that Monday morning was his.
The striking workers kicked his car and snapped off his radio antenna as he attempted to drive his car directly through the picket line.
That was his last week at Pratt & Whitney.
He quit.
No one was injured that morning.
But the incident was a turning point for Pierce.
He disappeared for a few weeks, leaving his wife and young sons without any explanation.
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.
That morning in May, as he sat in his car outside the plant, staring at the camera, he was sitting in the car.
at the picket line, something changed.
As he shifted his foot off of the brake and onto the gas and drove towards those union workers, I think he became the man who would eventually write the Turner Diaries, a novel that has inspired the murders of hundreds of people.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
Weird Little Guys 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.
But it is an episode about hitting people with your car.
Last week, we were talking about James Alex Fields, the young Nazi from Ohio who murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in 2017.
I wrote about Fields because I felt like I had to.
I hadn't planned on ever doing an episode about him.
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.
But in recent weeks, I can't seem to escape the echoes of that crime.
People are talking about running people over.
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.
Trump-aligned minor internet celebrities are posting memes and jokes, walking right up to and often over the line to outright calls to action.
Run them over.
Hit the gas.
All lives splatter.
Two weeks ago, on June 13th, 2025, a Twitter account called Anti-Left Memes posed a question.
What should happen to people who block the road?
The account has more than 125,000 followers, and the post received nearly 30,000 replies.
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.
But it's a picture of a white pickup truck.
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.
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.
I found dozens of posts made that weekend alone with that specific image.
And thousands of posts that weekend expressing the same sentiment.
It's morally and legally acceptable to hit protesters with your car.
Not only that, it's funny.
It's good.
And you should do it.
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.
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.
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.
But there's a pattern.
And it's not new.
I remember when Summer Taylor died.
It was the 4th of July, back in 2020.
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.
That attack on a Black Lives Matter protest in Seattle is one of the only ones I remember clearly from that summer.
I didn't know summer, but I know people who did.
They were just 24 years old.
I remember a few others.
One, because it was so close to home, just outside of Richmond, Virginia.
No one was badly hurt, but the driver, Skip Rogers, is a Klansman that I've seen at some Confederate rallies.
They all kind of run together, though.
There was so much violence that summer.
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.
He documented 104 incidents of vehicular assault on protests during a four-month period from May 27th to September 27th, 2020, with the majority of those incidents occurring during Black Lives Matter protests after the death of George Floyd.
According to Weil's analysis, there is evidence of malicious intent in at least 43 of those 104 incidents.
And in the fall of 2020, 39 of those drivers had been criminally charged.
The question of how often this is actually happening, when it started, who's doing it and why, is hard to answer as it turns out.
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.
Fatal encounters between pedestrians and cars are as old as cars themselves.
Cars are dangerous.
People are careless.
And about 7,000 pedestrians a year are killed by cars in the United States.
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.
Not everyone can go out and buy a gun.
And most people don't know how to build a bomb.
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.
So why doesn't vehicular ramming of groups of pedestrians appear as an identifiable method of terrorist attack until the 1990s?
The academic papers I read all seem to agree.
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.
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.
But most researchers seem to agree that it was Palestinians who invented the tactic in the early 90s.
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.
One study published earlier this year in the European Research Studies Journal incorrectly attributes these attacks in Israel and the West Bank to Hamas.
But aside from being inaccurate, I think the actual truth here is more illuminating.
People are doing this on their own.
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.
The data was provided to the researchers directly by the Israeli Security Agency.
And the authors also examined court records, media published in both Hebrew and Arabic, as well as social media posts made surrounding the attacks.
And none of those attacks were carried out by Hamas.
They weren't carried out by a group of any kind.
Only 16% of the attackers in that data set had ever been imprisoned for any reason prior to the attack.
And less than a quarter of them even had a family member with any kind of security or criminal record.
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.
But if you look at the data included in these studies and charted over time, the line shoots off the page starting in about 2014.
And suddenly they're happening all over the world.
I think it's worth a little sidebar here to talk about definitions.
What exactly is a vehicle ramming attack?
Most of the papers I read about the tactic use that term, abbreviated as just VRA.
They're sometimes also called VTA's vehicular terrorist attack.
And deciding what is or isn't a VRA is something every author seems to decide for himself.
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.
A 2019 paper by Keith Hayward and Vincent Miller in the British Journal of Criminology analyzed 125 incidents between 1999 and 2017.
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.
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.
The incident was not part of a kidnapping attempt.
Pedestrian casualties were intended and not part of a chase, evasion, or accident.
The vehicle was not primarily used for demolition.
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.
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.
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 package here.
And this paper notes that no two databases of such incidents will ever agree.
The authors created a list of 184 incidents from 1964 to 2019 that they were able to identify as vehicle attacks on public targets.
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 motorists, incidents where the vehicle rammed a government building, accidents, and domestic disputes.
And while they say they excluded attacks in war zones, they do not exclude attacks that occurred in the occupied Palestinian territories.
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.
And neither paper really clearly defines what they mean by terrorism either.
And that's a little bit sticky too.
It's a loaded word.
In post-9-11 America, it usually means one thing, Islamic extremism.
ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, etc.
And in more casual parlance, the word gets thrown around a little too casually.
It may not be worth trying to salvage the word by defining it in a way that's useful, but it appears in most of the writing about this, so I'll take a stab at telling you what it probably means.
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.
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.
But the law is not the only way to define something.
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.
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.
Pretty straightforward.
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.
Few actually included information about what incidents were in those data sets, but for the most part, they all agree.
VRAs didn't really happen until Palestinians started doing them in the 90s.
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.
The Manetta 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.
They acknowledge that the vast majority of vehicle ramming attacks in the United States have no connection at all to al-Qaeda or ISIS.
But quote, in the public's mind, they are blended with the jihadist attacks and add to the general level of fear.
The jihadist propaganda machine was therefore able to brand the tactic and benefit from its occurrence regardless of who was responsible.
And now, as much as I'm sure ISIS would love to take credit for that branding success, it looks to me that it's Western researchers who are too eager to see this tactic as a jihadist one that just happens to have leaked out into broader usage.
I read the literature.
I took notes.
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.
And I think these studies are missing a really particular category of vehicular attack.
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.
Horgan was a CWA member who was struck and killed when a scab worker drove through the picket line in 1989.
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.
The president of Jerry's local, CWA 1103, told the paper, we're tired of these people running us over.
It was common.
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.
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 Clint Processing Center in Swartz Creek, Michigan.
One of them was hospitalized.
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.
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.
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.
The strike had been going on since March, and things had gotten pretty violent.
The National Guard was brought in to beat back the protesters, most of whom were young women.
Many of them were teenagers.
And there was at least one incident of a non-union worker driving through the picketers, injuring several of them.
But there was a second incident that I don't think you can deny clearly meets the criteria of a vehicular ramming attack.
On May 16th, 1929, a bus full of scabs plowed through the line of striking workers.
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.
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.
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.
Heaton accused Boyd of ordering the attack, of personally directing the bus to drive into the workers.
And he didn't deny it.
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.
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.
The same week his charges were dropped, Boyd got into a little trouble with the Secretary of War.
You see, the governor of Tennessee hadn't actually deployed the National Guard, at least not correctly.
He didn't deploy the National Guard.
He had the National Guardsmen sworn in as state troopers before deploying them as strikebreakers.
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.
But that was illegal because they were not acting in their capacity as guardsmen.
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.
W.C. Boyd didn't retire from the Tennessee National Guard until the year before he died, two decades later.
W.C. Boyd.
In 2012, 16-year-old Brian Hreira was gunned down in broad daylight on his way to do homework.
No suspects, no witnesses, no justice.
The call was horrible.
I replay it over in my head all the time.
For years, Brian's family kept asking questions while a culture of silence kept the case cold.
Snitches get stitches.
Everybody knows it.
Still, they refused to give up.
I would ask my husband, do you want me to let this go?
He's like, no, keep fighting.
I told her I would never give up on this case.
And then, after a decade of waiting, a breakthrough.
We received a phone call that was bittersweet because it's a call that we've been waiting for for a very long time.
I'm Enrique Santos.
This is Cold Case Files Miami, a podcast about justice, persistence, and the families who never stopped fighting.
Listen to Cold Case Files Miami as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available 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 call me a legend in my own time.
But who was she, really?
She's strutting up there, waving to the policemen in the cars.
Hey, it don't mind.
I'm a woman, a real woman.
Marcia also survived homelessness, sex work, and police violence.
And in 1992, her body was found in the Hudson River.
Her death remains unsolved.
Marcia was pulled out of the water, right over the edge here.
Afterlives 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 gagged.
Just get your heart ready.
A heart's 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 Bird.
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 and the original shock shot.
That scratchy, irreverent kind of way of talking to people.
You're as dumb as the rest.
I can't take it anyway.
I don't agree with you all the time.
I don't want you to.
I hope that you pick me a bird.
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, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Jan Marselek 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 terribly wrong.
I don't know if they followed me to my home.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story here, 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.
But back to the issue at hand, though.
I found scores of these incidents over the last century in which striking workers are hit by cars.
These kinds of incidents don't tend to have a high fatality rate, and some of them are definitely just accidents.
Picket lines are often in close proximity to vehicular traffic, and anytime a pedestrian is near a car, there's a risk.
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.
You could argue that this kind of incident is different.
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.
The striking worker does not want the scab to cross the picket line and enter the job site.
But you can't argue that it's not political.
Union workers have a right to strike.
What they're doing is not illegal.
Hitting them with a car is.
And the people hitting them with those cars have a motive.
Remember those definitions.
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?
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.
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.
I just think that ignoring this entire category of vehicular assaults is missing something important.
Because people are using cars as weapons to intimidate, harass, and injure workers who are exercising their right to engage in strikes.
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.
And after all that time searching all those old newspapers, it's not just picket lines that I feel like the researchers overlooked.
The narrative in these studies seems to be that the tactic originated with Palestinians, was popularized by jihadist groups from 2014 to 2017.
And around that same time period, the idea spread rapidly online, getting picked up by people with other motivations and backgrounds.
I don't think that's true either.
I don't think white Westerners learned about this online from ISIS.
And in looking through the historical record, I admit I ran into some of the same problems the researchers did.
It's hard to find information about this that goes further back than a few decades.
Before this was a named phenomenon, it wasn't really something that earned more than a passing mention in the newspaper.
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.
And when it is mentioned, the tone is nasty.
So nothing's really changed, I guess.
But it does impact my ability to find these historical vehicular attacks.
Here are some I did find.
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.
As part of their demonstration, they blocked the road leading to the parking area at the beach.
People get so in their feelings about blocking a roadway.
Yeah, 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
That is a disproportionate escalation and it's not healthy.
Photos of that demonstration clearly show the protesters sitting cross-legged side by side across the road.
One newspaper article I found that didn't include the picture described the scene with these words.
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.
A number of demonstrators were struck by cars whose operators were forced to halt abruptly.
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.
On the night of April 4th, 1968, there were hundreds of people marching in the streets of Battle Creek, Michigan.
That date might feel a little familiar to you.
Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated just hours earlier.
Battle Creek Police Chief Clifford Barney was later quoted in the local paper describing the all-night march as, quote, mostly orderly.
But the headline that ran in wire stories nationwide was, Negro violence in Battle Creek.
In the early morning hours of April 5th, as the march continued through the night, the vice president of the local NAACP Young Adult Council was hit by a car that drove through the march.
Demonstrators claim police who witnessed this incident refused to call an ambulance, and Stanley Morrow was taken to the hospital by another marcher.
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.
Chief Barney said the driver had, quote, exercised good judgment and that they shouldn't have been in the road.
Nothing's changed.
In 1969, Canadian college students staged a demonstration on the Blue Water Bridge between Michigan and Ontario.
They were protesting the nuclear testing the United States was carrying out in the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska.
According to the Port Huron Times-Herald, a car with Michigan plates gunned it through the crowd on the bridge.
20-year-old David Pettinger was one of the students who was hit.
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.
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.
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.
In 1970, just days after the Kent State shooting, students were protesting in Eastern Michigan University, and five of them were injured when a man rammed his car into a crowd on campus.
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.
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.
And in 1971, Margaret Ann Knott was killed in Butler, Alabama, after a man drove his car through a sit-in.
The group had a permit.
Local black leaders had met with the mayor and the sheriff ahead of the march.
They were allowed to march in the street.
The police were there.
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.
Margaret was sitting on the ground and praying when the car came.
She was just 19 years old.
Her mother was one of the black teachers whose unfair firing the march was protesting.
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.
But Margaret was sitting with her back turned to it, and she didn't react fast enough.
After she was hit, he says she just kept saying, I died for freedom.
I died for freedom.
Her killer was arrested, but a grand jury didn't indict.
He claimed he was attacked, that he feared for his life.
And according to newspaper accounts from the time, white eyewitnesses backed his story.
Margaret's fellow demonstrators told a different one.
He says they were rocking his car and trying to turn it over.
That's why he got scared.
They say they didn't put their hands on that car until after Margaret was under it.
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.
But nobody put their hands on Fields' car until after a woman was dead.
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.
And the county refused to allow it.
In 1999, 28 years after her daughter's murder, Harry Mae Johnson got up to speak during public comment at a Choctaw County Commission meeting.
She asked again, please, could we place the marker in the square?
And they said, no.
No, that's very racially divisive.
Margaret Ann Knott was finally memorialized with a public marker in 2019.
I found a number of incidents in 1972, mostly involving anti-war protesters hit by cars.
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.
One leaving a Vietnam veteran with a fractured skull and another breaking a woman's leg.
The Democratic National Convention was inexplicably also in Miami that year, just a week earlier.
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.
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.
I could go on.
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.
Or the National Guardsman who drove a troop carrier directly at a crowd of anti-nuclear protesters in California in 1981.
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.
None of these people were charged with a crime.
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.
I think the disagreement is deeper than that.
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.
By their reasoning, it was a series of high-profile attacks motivated by Islamic extremism that started a worldwide wave of vehicle ramming attacks.
And it wasn't until then that researchers identify and name this phenomenon that I'm arguing has always been here.
The two papers I'm pulling from primarily were both written in 2019.
And they both open with a little vignette about a vehicle ramming attack.
The paper called Smashing into Crowds, an Analysis of Vehicle Ramming Attacks, published by the Moneta Transportation Institute, opens with this paragraph.
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.
A convert to Islam, he claimed to have been inspired by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
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.
He then changed the target to National Harbor, just under 10 miles from the capital in Washington, D.C. The incident was one of nearly 13 to occur in the first three quarters of 2019 across the world.
And again, this paper selected 184 incidents from the 60s through 2019 that they feel fit the criteria.
And in the paper, they classified the perpetrators of these attacks into four primary categories.
Palestinian, jihadist, right-wing extremist, and mentally disturbed.
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.
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.
They clearly say the incident was one of nearly 13 to occur.
First of all, what is nearly 13?
But this incident didn't occur.
There was no incident.
This didn't happen.
They don't name this man in the paper, but I recognize the description of it.
His name is Rondell Henry, and he was originally indicted on a single count of driving a stolen vehicle across state lines.
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.
But he was arrested after stealing the U-Haul van and before he did anything else.
He has also been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
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.
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.
I'm not disputing Rondell Henry's own stated intent or the fact that he'd viewed ISIS propaganda on his cell phone.
I just wish I could see the author's data set.
First of all, how do they decide to include an incident that didn't actually happen?
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?
And that category makes up the bulk of their data.
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.
So I just wonder how they're making these determinations.
Because again, this paper, with its hand-selected data set of 184 vehicle ramming incidents, they categorize just 10 of those as right-wing extremism.
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.
And again, the paper doesn't include a list of incidents.
So I could only guess which six right-wing attacks they included and categorized as such.
But the table indicates that of those six attacks during that five-year time period, there was only one fatality.
And I know that's not right.
By any definition of a right-wing vehicle ramming attack, more than one person died during that five-year period.
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.
He had a framed picture of Hitler on his bedside table.
So what else are they categorizing as a right-wing vehicle ramming attack during that time period?
Now, I could accept the explanation that Elliot Roger may not count.
Roger was an incel.
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.
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.
That's what they were called.
There's plenty of information about it online.
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?
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.
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.
Whatever.
Okay, I will accept that maybe Elliot Roger is not included in this data.
But surely their list of right-wing vehicle attacks from 2014 to 2019, surely that includes the Finsbury Park van attack.
That attack was in June of 2017 outside of a mosque in London.
A little after midnight, people were leaving the mosque after Tarawi, the nighttime prayer said during Ramadan.
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.
It was there that Darren Osborne rammed his van into the group.
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.
Before the men wrestled him to the ground as he was attempting to flee the scene.
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.
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.
Because their paper cites heavily from another paper, one that I also read, one that is called, I did my bit, terrorism, tar, and the vehicle ramming attack as imitative event.
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.
And one of the tables listing fatalities by country does appear to include the 10 people who died in that attack.
An 11th victim passed away from their injuries in 2021, but that was after the paper was published.
So I can only assume the author included it as a data point, but they didn't classify it as right-wing extremism.
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?
I know it sounds like I'm being too hard on this paper, but why am I even telling you about it if it's so flawed?
Why did I use it?
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, this is the study that's always in the footnotes.
So I think it bears dissecting because it's the one the government is reading.
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.
That paper is called Metal Against Marchers, an analysis of recent incidents involving vehicle assaults at U.S. political protests and rallies.
And it is dismissive.
Of the 104 vehicle ramming incidents on protests during the summer of 2020 that were cataloged by Ari Weil, the paper says, these encounters are being described as quote, attacks or quote, domestic terrorism.
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.
And in their analysis, they looked at just 52 of those incidents.
And they immediately discard nine of them as obvious accidents.
And I don't doubt that some of them were.
Of the 43 incidents that they examined more closely, they determined that there was clear evidence of malicious intent, 19 of them, and another 16 were possibly malicious.
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.
And even if you just look at the ones where they say it's definitely malicious, that's 44%.
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?
But the next 10 pages are devoted to downplaying, excusing, writing off, and ignoring the danger that this data suggests.
One particularly appalling passage reads, 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.
It could be described as the vehicle-pedestrian equivalent of road rage.
In still others, drivers deliberately drove to a demonstration and then plowed through a crowd to display belligerence and intimidate the protesters.
This would be the vehicular equivalent of brandishing a weapon.
you Thank you.
In 2012, 16-year-old Brian Herira was gunned down in broad daylight on his way to do homework.
No suspects, no witnesses, no justice.
The call was horrible.
I replay it over in my head all the time.
For years, Brian's family kept asking questions while a culture of silence kept the case cold.
Snitches get stitches.
Everybody knows it.
Still, they refuse to give up.
I would ask my husband, do you want me to let this go?
He was like, no, keep fighting.
I told her I would never give up on this case.
And then, after a decade of waiting, a breakthrough.
We received a phone call that was bittersweet because it's a call that we've been waiting for for a very long time.
I'm Enrique Santos.
This is Cold Case Files Miami, a podcast about justice, persistence, and the families who never stopped fighting.
Listen to Cold Case Files Miami as part of the Maya Cultura Podcast Network, available 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 Marcia P. Johnson, trans icon revolutionary saint.
They call me a legend in my own time.
But who was she, really?
She's strutting up there, waving to the policemen in the cars.
Hey, it don't 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.
Marcia was pulled out of the water, right over the edge here.
Afterlives 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 gagged.
Just get your heart ready.
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 and the original shock job.
That scratchy, irreverent kind of way of talking to people.
You're as dumb as the rest.
I can't take anyway.
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, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Jan Marcelek 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 Rijan 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.
Music 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.
Brandishing a weapon just means like pulling your gun out and showing it in a way that could be perceived as threatening.
Hitting someone with your car, even a little bit, 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.
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.
You're using it.
You're using the weapon.
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.
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.
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.
And what is that?
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.
That's what it is.
And then there are claims in the paper that just outright contradict their own prior work.
Quote, however, more of the earlier cases could be connected with ongoing campaigns of terrorist violence.
Jihadists, Uyghurs, Palestinians, even if they were carried out by individual perpetrators who were inspired as opposed to being directed to take action.
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.
And you might think that sounds like it makes sense, right?
But it doesn't.
It doesn't hold water.
When Palestinians were carrying out car attacks in the 90s, there was no group calling for that as a tactic.
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.
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.
They weren't members.
They never talked to anybody.
They just saw it online.
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.
The American drivers plowing through protests aren't doing it in a vacuum.
They're right.
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.
Most of them aren't.
But in most cases, we do know what they believe and what kind of media environment they're existing in.
I'm not talking about going on the dark corners of the internet to download copies of al-Qaeda magazines and ISIS videos.
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.
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.
Most of the first page of the article is taken up by a gigantic image of a Ford F-250.
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, not to mow grass, but to mow down the enemies of Allah, the magazine says.
Quote, the ideal location is a place where there are a maximum number of pedestrians and the least number of vehicles.
In fact, if you can get through to pedestrian-only locations that exist in some downtown city center areas, that would be fabulous.
There are some places that are closed down for vehicles at certain times due to the swarms of people.
That magazine article did exist.
And there was another article in 2016 published by an ISIS-affiliated group that had a similar message.
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.
And in fact, both of those articles were published immediately after a relatively high-profile attack of this kind.
So rather than inspiring future attacks, they seem to be trying to capitalize on the publicity surrounding an attack that had just happened.
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.
But they're not alone.
In January of 2017, the Daily Caller, a right-wing news website founded by Tucker Carlson, posted a video online with the headline, Here's a reel of cars plowing through protesters trying to block the road.
And the video was just that.
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's song, Move Bitch.
And before the violence starts on the screen, the Daily Caller helpfully warns viewers that the song has a lot of profanity in it.
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.
There's no mention or warning that there will be graphic violence.
Although I guess you can assume that from the title.
The site's video editor, Mike Roust, wrote on the post, 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.
None of these clips are new, but that doesn't mean they're not still fresh.
And that post stayed up for eight months.
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.
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.
But the video was there all year.
It was there all summer 2017.
It wasn't just James Alex Fields and the other Unite the Right attendees posting memes about running people over.
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.
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.
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.
No, it's not.
No, it's not.
That's not true.
That is a lie.
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.
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.
So maybe they're just not numbers, guys.
Maybe he doesn't know that this isn't a very small number.
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.
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.
24 over a five-year period.
35 in four months is more than 20 times the frequency of the attacks in their earlier data set.
That's not a small number.
That's either an emergency or a sign you need to go back to the drawing board and look at your fucking methodology.
In the paper by Miller and Hayward, they write that vehicle ramming attacks have a virus-like quality.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And they do.
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.
At the risk of being too blunt about it, the papers from the Moneta Transportation Institute are grotesque to me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is a political choice to focus on a particular piece of data.
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.
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.
The only thing these two types of attacks have in common is the attacker's access to a low-tech, widely available weapon.
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.
The prevalence with which that paper is cited in materials written by and for American law enforcement agencies should tell you something.
They want you to be afraid of the people the government already doesn't like.
And they want you to be afraid to exercise your right to protest.
Palestinians didn't invent vehicular attacks.
You don't have to look to the West Bank.
Look at our own history.
Look at the relatively recent news.
Americans who have been victims of politically motivated violence at the front end of a car are union workers.
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.
In the United States of America, the blood on those bumpers is theirs.
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.
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 comment section under a Twitter post from a meme account that sometimes gets a laugh emoji reply from Elon Musk.
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.
And with that link, he wrote, ha ha ha, love this.
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.
And the text read, all lives splatter.
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, I see a couple of people got infected with COVID-19 from the hood of a car on I-5 last night.
And the media landscape today is even worse.
Open encouragement to run protesters down in your car is being aired on major news networks.
The governor of Florida says you should do it.
People in right-wing media ecosystems are consuming an incredible amount of content that normalizes this extremely specific act of violence.
They're being desensitized to it.
It's a joke, but they mean it.
And for a tiny fraction of a percentage of them, that seed will grow into something hideous.
A sudden, violent urge.
A moment's premeditation worn out of months of encouragement.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool's Home Media and My HeartRadio.
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 bodily talent of Laurie Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard.
You can email me at Weirthiliguyspodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Reverend the Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird guys.
you you you you you you you you you you you you In 2012, 16-year-old Brian Herrera was gunned down in broad daylight on his way to do homework.
No suspects, no witnesses, no justice.
I would ask my husband, do you want me to stop?
He's like, no, keep fighting.
After nearly a decade, a breakthrough changed everything.
This is Cold Case Files Miami, stories of families who never stopped fighting.
Listen to Cold Case Files Miami on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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 Marshall'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 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 Podcasts.
Before social media, before cable news, there was Alan Berg.
He was the first and the original shock shock.
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 LiveWire, the loud life and shocking murder of Alan Berg.
And he pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, there are probably 2 million suspects.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
