A Brief History of Vehicular Violence

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
On May fifteenth, nineteen sixty six, the clock ran out
in negotiations between Local twelve thirty four of the United
Auto Workers Union, an aerospace manufacturer, Pratt and 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

(00:30):
was producing equipment the United States government desperately needed if
they hoped to win the war in 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 the mediation process,
but the workers weren't satisfied with that answer. At midnight

(00:50):
that night, workers at the plant walked off the production
floor and gathered outside.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
It was a wildcat strike.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
The workers picketed through the night, and on the morning
of Monday, May sixteenth, 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 nineteen sixty six say only that

(01:19):
two cars were damaged.

Speaker 1 (01:21):
But fifty four years later and.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
A memoir written by the son of a man who
drove his car to work at Pratt and Whitney in
North Haven, Connecticut on the day of that wildcat strike,
a new detail emerged. Kelvin Pierce was just six years
old in nineteen sixty six. His father was a jet
propulsion researcher at Pratt and Whitney, but he remembers this
day clearly. It was the day his father, William Luther Pierce,

(01:46):
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 and Whitney.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
He quit.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
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,
Hears had packed up his family and moved to Virginia
be closer to American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell

(02:28):
and to focus on his own budding career as professional Nazi.
That morning in May, as he sat in his car
outside the plant, staring 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

(02:50):
Turner Diaries, a novel that has inspired the murders of
hundreds of people. I'm Molly Conger, is weird that Gods,

(03:18):
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

(03:39):
Higher and Charlottesville in twenty seventeen. 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 year's long civil litigation brought by the survivors of
his crime. But in recent weeks, I can't seem to

(04:01):
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 Desanta says you're allowed to do it. Several sheriffs
have voiced their support for it. Trump aligned minor internet

(04:23):
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 thirteenth, twenty twenty five, a Twitter

(04:45):
account called Anti Left Memes post a question what should
happen to people who block the road. The account has
more than one hundred and twenty five thousand followers, and
the post received nearly thirty thousand replies. Yes, one of
the top replies with thousands of likes on the post
is just an image. It's pretty low quality, the hallmark

(05:08):
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 and red, and the text over the image
reads the all new Dodge Ram Protester Edition. A day later,

(05:31):
as millions of Americans took to the streets and cities
across the country to protest the Trump administration, the same meme,
that same blood spattered white truck was posted on Facebook
by James Muller, the Sheriff of Adams County, Pennsylvania. I
found dozens of posts made that weekend alone with that

(05:51):
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

(06:15):
it's happening. I found at least six incidents across the
country between June tenth and June fifteenth of cars driving
directly into crowns 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

(06:38):
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 fourth of July back in twenty twenty.

(07:01):
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, and they

(07:21):
were just twenty four 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 skipped Rogers as a clansman that I've seen at
some Confederate rallies, they all kind of run together. Though

(07:41):
there was so much violence that summer, Apparently there were
over a hundred similar attacks that summer. That's according to
Ari wyl who was at the time a researcher at
the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University
of Chicago. He documented one hundred and four incidents of
vehicular assault on protests during a four month period from

(08:04):
May twenty seventh to September twenty seventh, twenty twenty, with
the majority of those incidents occurring during Black Lives Matter
protests after the death of George Floyd. According to Wiles analysis,
there is evidence of malicious intent in at least forty
three of those one hundred and four incidents, and in
the fall of twenty twenty thirty nine of those drivers

(08:26):
had been criminally charged. The question of how often this
is actually happening, when it started, who's doing it, and
why it is.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
Hard to answer. As it turns out.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
While I was researching this episode, I read papers and
analysis and speculation and confident pronouncements from journalists, researchers and nonprofits,
analysts and 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.

(09:03):
Cars are dangerous, people are careless, and about seven thousand
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.

Speaker 1 (09:17):
As a weapon. They're ubiquitous.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
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.

Speaker 1 (09:31):
Don't own one.

Speaker 2 (09:33):
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 nineteen nineties.
The academic papers I read all seem to agree vehicular

(09:53):
ramming attacks didn't really start happening until the early nineties,
and they didn't really catch on until more than two
decades later, starting in around twenty fourteen.

Speaker 1 (10:03):
Some earlier recorded.

Speaker 2 (10:04):
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 nineteen sixty four, but most
researchers seemed to agree that it was Palestinians who invented
the tactic in the early nineties, and there are just
a handful of incidents cited to support this, mostly involving
young men driving into groups of IDF soldiers in the

(10:26):
West Bank. One study published earlier this year in the
European Research Studies Journal incorrectly attributes these attacks in Israel
in 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 twenty eighteen paper

(10:48):
in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism analyzed data about sixty
two vehicular attacks in Israel and the West Bank between
twenty twenty sixteen.

Speaker 1 (10:57):
The data was provided to.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
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 sixteen percent of the attackers in that

(11:21):
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 nineties 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 nineties and early two thousands. But

(11:42):
if you look at the data included in these studies
and chart it over time, the line shoots off the page,
starting in about twenty fourteen, 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

(12:06):
tactic use that term, abbreviated as just VR.

Speaker 1 (12:10):
They're sometimes also called.

Speaker 2 (12:11):
VTA's vehicular terrorist attack, and deciding what is or isn't
a VIRA is something every author seems to decide for himself.
Two of the papers I'm relying on here both included
a description of how they built their own data set
because there was no comprehensive worldwide list to look at.
A twenty nineteen paper by Keith Hayward and Vincent Miller

(12:33):
and the British Journal of Criminology analyzed one hundred and
twenty five incidents between nineteen ninety nine and twenty seventeen.
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

(12:54):
or firearms could only be used once the vehicle was
disabled and not part of an armed or carbomb. The
incident was not part of a kidnapping attempt. Pedestrian casualties
were intended and not part of a chase of aasion
or accident. The vehicle was not primarily used for demolition,

(13:16):
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
Minetta Transportation Institute is much more focused within the academic

(13:40):
niche that is terrorism studies.

Speaker 1 (13:43):
And it's written by guys.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
Who've been in the business for so long they can't
shift their focus beyond Islamic extremism.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
So there's a lot of package here. And this paper
notes that no.

Speaker 2 (13:54):
Two databases of such incidents will ever agree. But the
authors created a list of one hundred and eighty four
incidents from nineteen sixty four to twenty nineteen 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

(14:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (14:30):
And from both of these studies.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
I was unable to find an appendix that actually list
the events that they included in their data sets, and
that leads me with a lot of unanswered questions. And
neither paper really clearly defines what they mean by terrorism either,
And that's a little.

Speaker 1 (14:48):
Bit sticky too.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
It's a loaded word. In post nine to eleven America,
it usually means one thing, Islamic extremism, isis al Kaida,
the Aliban, 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

(15:10):
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

(15:33):
to be intended to intimidate orquer civilians, influence government policy
by intimidation or coercion, or to affect the conduct of
a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping. 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,

(15:56):
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, quertion or intimidation. Pretty straightforward,

(16:19):
but every paper I read us slightly different. Frameworks seemed
to rely on slightly different definitions, and they all use
their own hand picked 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 nineties and then

(16:42):
twenty fourteen era surgeon 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
Meneta Transportation Institute paper focuses heavily on Jihadis motivated attacks,
as their own data shows that only ten percent of

(17:02):
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 Qaida 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 Jahadas propaganda machine was

(17:25):
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 its Western researchers
were too eager to see this tactic as a jihadist
one that just happens to have leaked out into broader usage.

(17:49):
I read the literature, I took notes, but I also
spent two full days combing through newspaper archives going back
one hundred years, all the way back to the nineteen
twenties when we started to see widespread car ownership.

Speaker 1 (18:04):
In the United States.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
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. Morgan was a CWA member who was struck

(18:28):
and killed when a scab worker drove through the picket
line in nineteen eighty nine. 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 eleven
oh three told the paper, We're tired of these people
running us over.

Speaker 1 (18:49):
It was common.

Speaker 2 (18:52):
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 twenty twenty three, five members of the
United Autoworkers Union were hit by a car that plowed
through the picket line outside the General Motors Splint Processing
Center in Swartz Creek, Michigan. One of them was hospitalized.

(19:14):
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

(19:35):
car intentionally drove into their picket line. The earliest of
these incidents that I could find were in May of
nineteen twenty nine, during a strike of textile workers at
the Rayon Manufacturing Plants and Elizabethton, Tennessee. The strike had
been going on since March and things had gotten pretty violent.

(19:57):
The National Guard was brought in to beat back the protester,
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.

Speaker 1 (20:11):
But there was a second.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
Incident that I don't think you can deny clearly meets
the criteria of a vehicular ramming attack. On May sixteenth,
nineteen twenty nine, 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

(20:33):
she was so badly injured that onlookers believed that she
had died.

Speaker 1 (20:38):
But she didn't die, and.

Speaker 2 (20:40):
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 in a betting attempted murder, and
this one was against Tennessee National Guard Adjutant General W. C.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
Boyd.

Speaker 2 (20:59):
Heaton acqus void 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

(21:22):
couldn't help 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.

(21:43):
He didn't deploy the National Guard. He had the National
guardsmen sworn in as state troopers before deploying them as
strike breakers. So as they're tear gassing these teenage girls
from the textile mill, they're wearing their United States Army uniforms,
carrying weapons that were federal government property. But that was

(22:04):
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. But back to the

(22:39):
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 any time a pedestrian is near a.

Speaker 1 (22:59):
Car there's a risk.

Speaker 2 (23:02):
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

(23:23):
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

(23:46):
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 because in 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,

(24:10):
or social goal their 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,

(24:34):
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,

(24:56):
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 jihadas
groups from twenty fourteen to twenty seventeen, and around that
same time period, the idea spread rapidly online getting picked
up by people with other motivations and backgrounds. But I

(25:20):
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

(25:43):
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
they deserved, And when it is mentioned, the tone is nasty.

(26:06):
So nothing's really changed, I guess, but it does impact
my ability to find these historical vehicular attacks.

Speaker 1 (26:17):
Here's some I did find.

Speaker 2 (26:20):
In nineteen sixty three, 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

(26:40):
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 a gun,

(27:01):
and if you're in fear for your life, it 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

(27:22):
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

(27:43):
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. Describe the scene with these words,
Negro and white members of the Congress of Racial Quality
through themselves and their children in front of moving cars
here Thursday to draw attention to a campaign to get

(28:06):
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 twenty
demonstrators were quote bumped or brushed by cars, with another
paper mentioning just in passing that three people were injured.

(28:26):
On the night of April fourth, nineteen sixty eight, there
were hundreds of people marching in the streets of Battle Creek, Michigan.
That date might feel a little familiar to you.

Speaker 1 (28:38):
Martin Luther King.

Speaker 2 (28:38):
Junior 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

(29:00):
April fifth, 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
claimed 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,

(29:22):
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
nineteen sixty nine, Canadian college students staged a demonstration on

(29:44):
the Blue Water Bridge between Michigan and Ontario. They were
protesting the nuclear testing the United States was carrying out
on 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. Twenty
year old David Pettinger was one of the students who

(30:05):
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 four hundred 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

(30:27):
both of his legs and spent seven weeks in the
hospital with David's legs 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 seven thousand dollars in his lawsuit against the driver.
In nineteen seventy, just days after the Kent State shooting,

(30:50):
students were protesting at Eastern Michigan University, and five of
them were injured when a man rammed his car into
a crowd on campus. There's no exports a nation 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

(31:11):
approached the crowd of students, sort of inching towards them,
and then he suddenly accelerated directly into them before fleeing
the scene. And in nineteen seventy one, Margaret Ann Knott
was killed in Butler, Alabama, after a man drove his
car through a sit in. The group had a permit.

(31:33):
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

(31:53):
the courthouse just for a few minutes, for a five
minute silent prayer of it Chun Margaret was sitting on the
ground and praying when the car came. She was just
nineteen years old. Her mother was one of the black
teachers whose unfair firing the march was protesting. The young

(32:18):
man had 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,

(32:38):
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

(32:59):
demonstrates 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 listened to last week's episode about James Alex Fields,

(33:20):
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's 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

(33:42):
in the civil rights movement, and the county refused.

Speaker 1 (33:45):
To allow it.

Speaker 2 (33:47):
In nineteen ninety nine, twenty eight years after her daughter's murder,
Harry May Johnson got up to speak during public comment
at a Chalktaw 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

(34:12):
was finally memorialized with a public marker in twenty nineteen.
I found a number of incidents in nineteen seventy two,
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

(34:35):
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

(34:56):
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 appeared to be
at least half a dozen incidents of cars intentionally striking protesters.
I could go on, like in nineteen seventy nine, when

(35:18):
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 guardsmen who drove a troop
carrier directly at a crowd of anti nuclear protesters in
California in nineteen eighty one. In nineteen ninety, the president
of a timber company struck an environmental activist with his
vehicle and sped away from the scene with the woman

(35:39):
still on the hood.

Speaker 1 (35:40):
Of his car.

Speaker 2 (35:43):
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 cheaper than that.

Speaker 1 (36:02):
We disagree about.

Speaker 2 (36:03):
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

(36:23):
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
twenty nineteen, and they both open with a little vignette

(36:45):
about a vehicle ramming attack. The paper called Smashing into Crowds,
an Analysis of Vehicle ramming Attacks, published by the Meneta
Transportation Institute, opens with this paragraph. On April third, twenty nineteen,
police in Maryland arrested a man for plotting to drive
a stolen rental van into crowds of people at National Harbor,

(37:07):
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 Dulla's Airport, but found the
crowds there were two spars for his purpose. He then
changed the target to National Harbor, just under ten miles

(37:30):
from the Capitol in Washington, d C. The incident was
one of nearly thirteen to occur in the first three
quarters of twenty nineteen across the world. And again, this
paper selected one hundred and eighty four incidents from the
sixties through twenty nineteen that they feel fit the criteria,
and in the paper, they classified the perpetrators of these

(37:51):
attacks into four primary categories, Palestinian gee, hottest, right wing extremist,
and mentally disturbed. The authors made these determinations based on
available media recording. Based on that paragraph I just read you,
I assumed that they would place this incident into the

(38:11):
jahattist 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 thirteen to occur. First
of all, what is nearly thirteen? But this incident didn't occur.

(38:36):
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 Rondel 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

(38:58):
at an international airport, even though by their own admission,
he decided not.

Speaker 1 (39:03):
To do that.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
But he was arrested after stealing the U haul van
and before he did anything else. He has also been
diagnosed with schizophrenia. Yes, Rondel 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

(39:25):
to a twenty sixteen attack in Nice, France that killed
eighty six people when a man drove a truck through
a crowd gathered for bestial day. I'm not disputing rondel
Henry's own stated intent or the fact that he'd viewed
ISS 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.

(39:49):
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 gee hottest intent if the perpetrator is Muslim,

(40:10):
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 one hundred and
eighty four vehicle ramming incidents. They categorized just ten of

(40:30):
those as right wing extremism, and according to one of
the tables, six of those occurred between twenty fourteen and
twenty nineteen, 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 can only guess which
six right wing attacks they included and categorized as such.

(40:53):
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 and Charlottesville in twenty seventeen. That's

(41:15):
one attack, one fatality had their hire 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 Elliott
Roger may not count. Roger was an Inceel, I'm not

(41:40):
conceding that his murders free 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 twenty fourteen
ile Vista killings, you can look it up. That's what
they were called. There's plenty of information about it online.

(42:00):
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,

(42:24):
i'd hear them out if they wanted to say that
that doesn't fit their criteria because it occurred as he
was leaving the scene of the shooting, or that the
vehicle was a secondary weapon in an attack that was
primarily a shooting and stabbing spree.

Speaker 1 (42:36):
Whatever.

Speaker 2 (42:36):
Okay, I will accept that maybe Elliott Roger is not
included in this data, but surely their list of right
wing vehicle attacks from twenty fourteen to twenty nineteen. Surely
that includes the Finsbury Park van attack. That attack was
in June of twenty seventeen outside of a mosque in London,

(42:57):
a little after midnight. People were leaving them off 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

(43:17):
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 AmAm out onto the street,
because the AmAm arrived on the scene just in time

(43:39):
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 that is called

(44:01):
I did my bit terrorism car and the vehicle ramming
attack as imitative event. And why then, does this data
set also appear to misclassify the twenty eighteen Toronto van attack.
That attacker Alec Manassian is mentioned by name in the paper,
and one of the tables listing fatalities by country does

(44:22):
appear to include the ten people who died in that attack.
An eleventh victim passed away from their injuries in twenty
twenty one, 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

(44:44):
that they're classifying the obsessively violent racism and misogyny of
the Inceell movement as mental disturbance. I know it sounds
like I'm being too hard on this paper. Why am
I even telling you about it? If it's so flawed?
Why did I use it? Because as I was reading

(45:05):
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

(45:26):
you read the follow up paper written by the same
authors a year later in the fall of twenty twenty.
That paper is called Metal against Marchers, an Analysis of
recent incidents involving vehicle assaults at US political protests and rallies,
and it is dismissive of the one hundred and four

(45:47):
vehicle ramming incidents on protests during the summer of twenty
twenty that were cataloged by Ari wil. 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

(46:07):
organizations and reviewed in our earlier report Smashing into Crowds
and Analysis of Vehicle Ramming Attacks. And in their analysis,
they looked at just fifty two 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
forty three incidents that they examined more closely, they determined

(46:30):
that there was clear evidence of malicious intent nineteen of
them and another sixteen were possibly malicious. So, by their
own analysis, eighty one percent of the incidents that they
decided met their own criteria for being examined as vehicle
ramming attacks. Eighty one percent of them looked intentional and malicious.

(46:56):
And even if you just look at the ones where
they say it's definitely malicious, forty four percent, and that's
right in line with the forty five percent of attacks
that were deemed malicious in Ari Wil's original analysis. So
it sounds like they agree, right, But the next ten
pages are devoted to downplaying, excusing, writing off, and ignoring

(47:18):
the danger that this data suggests when 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.

Speaker 1 (47:32):
Through the pedestrians.

Speaker 2 (47:34):
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 belligerents
and intimidate the protesters. This would be the vehicular equivalent
of brandishing a weapon. Now, first of all, what they're

(48:12):
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

(48:34):
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.

Speaker 1 (48:53):
You're using it. You're using the weapon.

Speaker 2 (48:58):
The extremely low fatality rate of those attacks from twenty twenty,
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

(49:19):
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 nonstate actor to attaining political, economic, religious,

(49:42):
or social goal through fear, querition, or intimidation.

Speaker 1 (49:46):
And what is that.

Speaker 2 (49:47):
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,

(50:13):
more of the earlier cases could be connected with ongoing
campaigns of terrorist violence jihadists, wigers 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 twenty twenty cases can be connected with an identifiable group.
None of the twenty twenty cases thus far show evidence

(50:35):
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 nineties, there was no group
calling for that as a tactic. In later years, people
are talking about it, people are calling for it. But

(50:57):
a study of Palestinian vehicle attacks from two thousand to
twenty sixteen shows no group affiliation for any perpetrator in
the data set. The vast majority of jihadist inspired vehicle
tax in the United States and Europe in the last
ten years were carried out by perpetrators with no known
actual contact with any group. They weren't members, they never

(51:21):
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.

Speaker 1 (51:45):
They're right.

Speaker 2 (51:46):
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 moo cases. We do know what they believe
and what kind of media environment they're existing in. I'm

(52:07):
not talking about going on the dark corners of the
Internet to download copies of al Qaeda magazines and isis videos.

Speaker 1 (52:14):
There's always a lot.

Speaker 2 (52:14):
Of airtime for discussion about Islamic extremist content and couraging
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 twenty ten, Inspire magazine, the English
language publication by an al Qaida group in Yemen, published
an article called the Ultimate Mowing Machine. Most of the

(52:36):
first page of the article is taken up by a
gigantic image of a Ford F two fifty, but the
text of the article encourages adherents to carry out these
kinds of attacks.

Speaker 1 (52:47):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (52:48):
The idea is to use a pickup truck as a
mowing machine, not to mow grass, but to mow down
the enemies of a law, the magazine says.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
Quote. The ideal location.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
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

(53:23):
twenty sixteen 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

(53:47):
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.

Speaker 1 (54:08):
I'm not hiding that from you. But they're not alone.

Speaker 2 (54:13):
In January twenty seventeen, 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 flowing through
protesters trying to block the road.

Speaker 1 (54:30):
And the video was just that.

Speaker 2 (54:32):
It's a ninety second compilation of clips of vehicular ramming
attacks on protesters.

Speaker 1 (54:38):
It's set to a.

Speaker 2 (54:40):
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

(55:00):
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 Roused wrote on the post, here's
a compilation of liberal protesters getting pushed out of the

(55:22):
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 Field's murdered Heather Higher and August of that year,

(55:43):
the Daily Caller quietly deleted the post and didn't respond to.

Speaker 1 (55:46):
Requests for comment about it.

Speaker 2 (55:49):
Fox News did issue an official statement saying that they
regretted reposting the video to Fox Nation, which at the
time was an official Fox news companion site focused on
opinion and commentary.

Speaker 1 (56:02):
But the video was there all year, was there.

Speaker 2 (56:05):
All summer twenty seventeen. It wasn't just James alex Field's
and the other Unite the Right attendees posting memes about
running people over. And as if that weren't enough, that
twenty twenty paper from the Minetta Transportation Institute concludes with
one final handwaving dismissal of the very idea quote the

(56:28):
numbers cited in this review of meaning in the more
than ten thousand demonstrations during the late spring and summer
of twenty twenty, there was something on the order of
one hundred incidents. Ari Wyle assigned malicious intent to forty
three of these events, while we discern malicious intent in
thirty five of them. In either case, it is a

(56:49):
very small number.

Speaker 1 (56:52):
No, it's not. No, it's not that's not true.

Speaker 2 (56:55):
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 than numbers
don't match.

Speaker 1 (57:16):
So maybe they're just not numbers. Guys.

Speaker 2 (57:18):
Maybe he doesn't know that this isn't a very small number,
because by their own methodology, they've identified thirty five 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

(57:39):
isn't like that, this is not a big deal, that
paper identified twenty four vehicle ramming attacks in the United
States between twenty fourteen and twenty nineteen twenty four over
a five year period. Thirty five in four months is
more than twenty times the frequency of the attacks in
the earlier data set. That's not a small number. That's

(58:05):
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 twenty sixteen,
they very quickly rose from a fairly rare, isolated event

(58:26):
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

(58:50):
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 jihattist tactic that escaped containment, and
they weren't at Palestinian invention.

Speaker 1 (59:07):
It's a tool.

Speaker 2 (59:09):
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

(59:31):
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 Meneta Transportation Institute are.

Speaker 1 (59:45):
Grotesque to me.

Speaker 2 (59:48):
They downplay the violence of right wing actors and over
emphasize 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 TI data. There
have been a few dozen, very deadly, high profile attacks
in the last ten years, mostly in Europe, where the

(01:00:08):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:00:20):
I don't approve of those but.

Speaker 2 (01:00:22):
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

(01:00:44):
the nineties 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 activity excellent suburban American racist
and a pickup truck who thinks liberals don't have civil rights.

(01:01:06):
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

(01:01:28):
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

(01:01:49):
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 motive 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.

(01:02:09):
There are people who wanted peace, people who wanted civil rights,
people who wanted equality, and 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,

(01:02:31):
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
Field's murdered Heather Hire in twenty seventeen, a police officer

(01:02:52):
in Springfield, Massachusetts got on Facebook and he posted a
news story about the attack, and with that link he wrote, Ahaha,
love this. In twenty twenty, as Summer Tailor lay dying
in a hospital in Seattle, a King County Sheriff's detective
posted a mean depicting a vehicle running someone over and

(01:03:14):
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 nineteen from the hood
of a car on I five last night, and the

(01:03:36):
media landscape today is even worse. Open encouragement to run
protesters down in your car as 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.

(01:04:00):
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 were not of months

(01:04:22):
of encouragement. We're Little Guys is a production of cools
Home Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by me,

(01:04:44):
Molly Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtermann and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickord. You can
email me at Worth Little Guy's podcast at gmail dot 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 Weird Little Guys subredd. It just don't

(01:05:06):
post anything that's going to make you one of my
rudlute guys.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Host

Molly Conger

Popular Podcasts

Crime Junkie

24/7 News: The Latest

Stuff You Should Know

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}A Brief History of Vehicular Violence