June 19, 2025 • 60 mins
With vehicular attacks on protests on the rise and elected officials encouraging the tactic, old conspiracy theories about one vehicular attack in particular are circulating once again. This is the story of what actually happened on Fourth Street in downtown Charlottesville on August 12, 2017.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/08/us/la-immigration-protests-photos-map.html
https://files.integrityfirstforamerica.org/14228/1641845853-dillon-hopper-deposition-as-played-at-trial.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/12/us/politics/florida-desantis-protests-warning.html
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6168921/sines-v-kessler/
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7299259/united-states-v-fields/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Coo Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
On Friday, June sixth, twenty twenty five, ICE agents descended
on Los Angeles, California. The agents carried out immigration raids
at three separate locations, including a home depot in Westlake.
Dozens of men were snatched by masked armed agents. Ordinary
(00:28):
people bystanders and shoppers tried to intervene. They tried to
rescue the agent's targets, tried to pull them from the
grasp of the masked men. They put their bodies in
front of the unmarked SUVs. The detainees were shoved into.
Dozens of people were taken. As words spread, more crowds
(00:51):
began to gather. Protests sprang up organically. The people of
Los Angeles demanded an end to the immigration raids and
the unchecked violence by the ICE agents. Over one hundred
people were arrested that first night, including California SCIU President
David Huerta, but the raids continued, and so did the protests.
(01:17):
Nearly a weekend for the ongoing protests, on June eleventh,
twenty twenty five, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appeared on The
Reuben Report, a right wing political talk show hosted by
failed comedian turned YouTube commentator Dave Rubin. The pair were
discussing the situation in California, kind of DeSantis mostly used
(01:39):
the opportunity to brag about his commitment to preventing people
from freely exercising their civil rights, promising that anyone who
stepped out of line in Florida would be arrested. But
it's not just the police that protesters in Florida should
worry about.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
And we also have a policy that if you you're
driving on one of those streets and a mob comes
and surrounds your vehicle and threatens you, you have a
right to flee for your safety. And so if you
drive off and you hit one of these people, that's
their fault for impinging on you. You don't have to
sit there and just be a sitting duck and let
(02:18):
the mob grab you out of your car and drag
you through the streets. You have a right to defend
yourself in Florida.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
A day later, on June twelfth, Brivard County, Florida Sheriff
Wayne Ivy held a press conference. He echoed many of
the governor's warnings that protesters will face violence from both police.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
And civilians if you try to mob rule a car
in Brevard County, gathering around it, refusing to let the
driver leave. In our county, you're most likely going to
get run over and dragged across the street.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Desantiss comments came just a day after a hit and
run at a protest in Chicago injured sixty six year
old woman. In the days that followed, there were vehicular
attacks on protests in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Riverside, California,
and Culpeper, Virginia. By the time you hear this, there
may well have been more. This kind of attack isn't new,
(03:18):
and it isn't rare. It's become frighteningly common in recent
years and is now being openly encouraged by right wing
commentators and legislators alike. There are too many stories about
angry drivers using a car as a weapon because they're
unhappy with a protest. But there is one in particular
(03:40):
that I know all too well. I'm Molly Conger, and
this is weird. Little guys. This is the story of
(04:07):
James Alex Fields Junior. I wish it weren't. I wish
his story was irrelevant, that it was over and he
didn't have to tell it again. On August twelfth, twenty seventeen,
James alex Fields Junior drove his Dodge Challenger into a
crowd of people on Fourth Street in downtown Charlottesville. The
(04:29):
attack took place two hours after police declared an unlawful
assembly and dispersed the crowd at nearby Market Street Park.
Both the white supremacist who were gathered there to attend
the United the Right rally and the counter protesters who'd
shown up to oppose them were cleared from the area.
The day was over. The group of people on Fourth
(04:50):
Street that afternoon were marching to celebrate the Nazis were gone,
the city was safe again. They were singing, enchanting. They
were peaceful, they were joyful. The street they were on
was closed to traffic that day. They had every reason
(05:13):
to believe they were safe. He accelerated as he approached them.
He injured dozens of people, he murdered one of them,
and he will be in prison for the rest of
his life. And because this is the story of James
Alexfield Junior, that's where I'll focus. This is the story
(05:36):
of a young man who loved Hitler and hated almost
everyone else. He hated black people, he hated Jewish people,
he hated anyone who wasn't white, and he hated white
people who didn't share the hate that fueled him. It
was hate that drove him as he drove his car
into a crowd of people one hot August afternoon, eight
(05:59):
years ago. That's what we're talking about. We won't talk
too much about his victims, the dozens of people who
are badly injured and survived. Many of them are very
private people out of necessity, They've endured years of harassment
from the supporters of the man who tried to kill them.
(06:21):
For those who try to downplay the violence of what
happens in this story, fix your hearts. It's been nearly
seven years since Fields's trial, but the testimony of those
victims is seared into my soul. There are pages of
my notes where the ink is smeared from tears I
couldn't wipe away fast enough as I hunched over the
(06:41):
notebook in my lap in that courtroom. So I won't
tell you how many surgical screws are in their bones,
how many of them still can't run or jump, or
lift their children into their arms, or make a closed
fist with hands once shattered to dust. Of them still
have nightmares and panic attacks and can't bear to look
(07:03):
in the mirror because the sight of their scars sounds
like screeching tires. Now isn't the time for that. And
we won't talk about Heather Higher, not really that was
her name, the woman that he murdered. I didn't know Heather.
(07:24):
I wasn't there when she died. But I've met her mother,
and I've seen the pain in her eyes when she
talks about burying her daughter in secret in an unmarked grave,
because conspiracy theorists think she was a crisis actor and
neo Nazis talk openly about how they'd love to desecrate
her final resting place. And I've seen her smile with
(07:47):
tears in her eyes, remembering that one of the last
things they said to each other was I love you.
She's grateful for that. And I've heard her friends talk
about who she was. She was outspoken and compassionate, and
she was very much not a mourning person. She loved
her chihuahua violet, and her favorite color was purple. She
(08:12):
was loved. But this is a story about the man
who took her life. And now with vehicular attacks on
protesters on the rise. The story of Heather's murder bears
remembering not just because these attacks bear frightening similarities to
the one that took her life, but because the discourse
(08:32):
surrounding them is full of lies about her death, lies
used to justify more attacks and to call for the
release of her killer. On August twelfth, twenty seventeen, white
supremacists filled the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. The event they'd
all come to town for is one I've discussed several
(08:53):
times already on this show, the Unite the Right Rally.
James Alex Fields Junior was just one of thousands of
people who traveled here that weekend to hear speeches from
prominent neo Nazi and white supremacist activists. They never got
to hear those speeches. The violence in the streets started
hours before the event was scheduled to actually begin, and
(09:14):
an unlawful assembly was declared. By eleven thirty a m.
State police and riot gear pushed the rally goers out
of the park and into the streets, where violent altercations
with counter protesters continued. Maryland clansman Richard Preston had been
threatening to shoot people all morning, and as he exited
the park shortly before noon, he drew his gun, shouted
(09:38):
die nward, and fired a single shot into the dirt
at the feet of a young black man. As the
white supremacist begrudgingly began making the two mile trek back
to where they'd parked their cars, they encountered more counter
protesters walking down Market Street. Alex Ramos, Daniel Borden, Tyler Watkins,
(09:58):
and Jacob Goodwin were all eventually convicted for the brutal
beating of another young black man. It was a vicious
assault that took place directly outside of the Charlesville Police station.
At least three other men who participated in the attack
were never arrested. Two of them have never been identified.
(10:18):
The third uncharged attackers identity is known, but he can't
be charged. I identified him myself, but I was a
little too late. It's a strange and terrible coincidence that
I was going back through the video of that assault
in February of twenty twenty three and I finally identified
Teddy von Neuwcomb as one of the attackers just two
(10:42):
weeks after he died. Teddy von Neucomb shot himself in
the heart the morning he was scheduled to go on
trial for fentanyl trafficking. But back to the morning of
August twelfth. People got hurt that morning. The neo Nazi
street fighting gang the Rise Above Movement, punched, shoved, and
(11:04):
choked counter protesters standing on the sidewalk outside the park.
A feyalanx of uniformed fascists carrying home made shields shoved
their way through a line of peaceful counterdemonstrators. Members of
the clergy were assaulted by Nazis. The air was thick
with mace and screams. But that was the morning. By noon,
(11:28):
they were all retreating to their cars. They were disappointed,
They were hot and tired and frustrated. They were angry,
but they were leaving. James Alex Fields hadn't actually parked
his car at McIntyre Park. Most people had, but many
(11:50):
of them had come with a group of some kind.
Fields came alone. He left his home in Maumi, Ohio
on the evening of Friday, August eleventh. He hadn't been
sure he'd be able to attend. He only secured the
weekend off from work a few days earlier, but he'd
known about the rally for months. On Twitter, he followed
(12:12):
rally organizers Richard Spencer and Augustus and Victus, as well
as other prominent white supremacists like David Duke and Brad Griffin.
He replied frequently to Richard Spencer's posts, though there's no
indication Spencer ever took any notice of him. In July,
Fields retweeted a post containing a flyer for the rally.
(12:34):
All summer, he enthusiastically posted, retweeted, and commented on posts
about violence at right wing rallies and other cities. He
seemed particularly thrilled by images of the violence at rallies
in California, pictures of members of the Rise Above movement
beating a man in Huntington Beach, a gift of Nathan
Dimigo punching a woman at Berkeley. He tweeted often at
(12:58):
Baked Alaska, write Internet celebrity. On one occasion, he tagged
Baked Alaska in a post that contained just fourteen words,
A very specific fourteen words. We must secure the existence
of our people and a future for white children. The
white supremacist slogan first penned by David Lane while he
(13:19):
was in prison, for his role in the murder of
Jewish talk radio host Alan Berg. Fields posted pictures of
Nazis marching in nineteen forties Germany, captioning it hashtag Tuesday motivation.
He posted often about his belief that black people were
genetically inferior, had low IQs, were predisposed to crime, and
(13:40):
were more eighth than human. He self identified as a
nationalist and expressed a willingness to kill anyone deemed to
be a threat, writing things like violence is our only
hope for survival as a people, and violence is the
only solution. Many of the men who attended the United
Stas Right rally would later claim that they'd only been
(14:02):
there because they love Confederate statues. Protesting the removal of
the statue of Robert E. Lee was allegedly the purpose
of the event. But Fields is not an outlier here.
He was not alone in the months that he spent
watching the violence at other rallies that summer months, posting
violent fantasies of killing for the white race. He was
(14:25):
here because he was a Nazi, as were many of
the men in the park that day. On Friday afternoon,
he dropped his cat Buddy off at his mother's house
for the weekend, and he texted her to let her know.
She replied, as mothers do, be careful. He texted her
(14:47):
back a picture of Adolf Hitler. Along with the image,
he typed, we are not the ones who need to
be careful. He didn't get here in time for the
Torch March that night. He drove through the night, arriving
in Charlottesville around two or three AM. Sitting alone in
(15:10):
his car in McDonald's parking lot, he scrolled through social media.
He saw a tweet from David Duke with pictures of
the Torch March. Duke wrote, our people on the march,
will you be at Unite the Right tomorrow? Field saved
the pictures onto his phone and then he texted them
to his mother. He also asked about his cap. He
(15:36):
knacked a little bit in his car in the McDonald's
parking lot, drove to waffle House to eat breakfast alone,
and then returned to that McDonald's parking lot downtown early
Saturday morning, as other attendees gathered in McIntyre Park, nearly
two miles from the location of the rally, he was
already downtown, just a few blocks from his destination. I know,
(15:58):
that's a lot of seemingly extreme raeous information about where
people were parking their cars, and it probably means nothing
to you unless you live here and you can picture
in your mind how close the McDonald's on Ridge Street
is to that park downtown. But getting back to various
parked cars becomes a key piece of this timeline, I promise.
(16:20):
So Fields's car is downtown at the McDonald's, but most
of the attendees have parked their cars at a different park,
one that was far away from the park where the
rally would be. Fields had probably planned to sit there
in his car until closer to noon, when the rally
was scheduled to begin, but from where he was parked,
(16:40):
he could see that people were starting to walk in
that direction, so he joined them. By around nine am,
he was among the first attendees to arrive at Market
Street Park. Photos taken that morning show Field standing with
members of Vanguard America. That's a now defunct neo Nazi
group that later that year would morph into what we
(17:01):
now know as Patriot Front. There had been an ongoing
power struggle within Vanguard America that summer, and the group's
official leader, Dylan Hopper didn't actually attend the event. In
Hopper's absence, the group was commanded on the ground that
day by the man who was trying to wrest control
of it from Dylan Hopper. It was an eighteen year
(17:22):
old whose name you might already know was a young
Thomas Rousseau, the current leader of Patriot Front. Everyone involved
has always maintained that James Alex Fields was not a
member of Vanguard America. They claimed they'd never met him before,
(17:42):
but there he was, marching in their ranks, dressed identically
to their members and holding a round wooden shield with
their logo on it. According to deposition testimony from Dylan Hopper,
it was Thomas Rousseau himself who handed Fields the shield.
Speaker 5 (18:00):
Morning.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
From his deposition, he told me that he let James
Fields into Vanguard America's formation at Charlottesville when nobody knew
who he was. He didn't come with anybody, and they
just gave him a shield and said, hey, march with us.
And Thomas Rousseau's reasoning was to make Vanguard look like
a larger organization in front of the news media. Vanguard
(18:22):
America's official position was that James Alex Field was not
a member of their organization, but they also claimed that
they didn't actually have any kind of list of their
members that they could show that didn't have his name
on it, because there was no list. The organization was
one of many named defendants in a lawsuit filed by
people who were hurt that day, and over the years
(18:45):
of litigation in that suit, Vanguard America never produced a
single document. They expect us to believe that they didn't
have a single text message, email, organizational communication, or internal
document that was responsive to the discovery request. Hopper claimed
they kept no records of any kind and he didn't
even know the real names of most of the group's members.
(19:09):
So they're able to swear under oath that they know
for sure that Fields wasn't a member, but they couldn't
actually tell you who was. For what it's worth, I
do think it's pretty plausible that a teenage Thomas Russo
was foolish enough to hand a shield to a stranger.
He really to make himself look more important, so that
(19:30):
it looked like he was commanding a larger group of
Nazis in front of a TV camera. Videos show Field
standing with the Vanguard America shield wall at the perimeter
of the park. He's joining in racist, sexist, homophobic, and
anti Semitic chants, and he seems to be having a
pretty good time. When the police cleared the park at
(19:52):
eleven thirty, Field's left with everyone else. There was some
hope that the rally would regroup back at McIntyre Park
and they could still hear the scheduled speeches, So even
though he was so close to his parked car, which
again was downtown, he walked with the crowd back to
McIntyre Park two miles away. At trial, an FBI analyst
(20:15):
testified about the geolocation data extracted from Peels's cell phone.
This shouldn't matter. This is tedious, and it's boring, and
it's nitpicky, and it shouldn't matter. It shouldn't matter where
he was from minute to minute between eleven thirty am
and one forty pm. It should be enough for me
(20:36):
to tell you that he left the park around eleven
thirty and by one forty pm he was committing a murder.
But two hours in between are just a long hot walk.
Why does it matter? But unfortunately it matters a great deal.
A conspiracy theory has broken containment and I feel compelled
(20:58):
to try again to set the record straight. When people
like Rond De Santis or Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivy
encourage people to run protesters over, they claim they're talking
about self defense, but the self defense that exists in
their imaginations doesn't really have any relationship with reality. It's
(21:19):
the same self defense that James Alex Fields would claim
after his crime, the same self defense his supporters have
cooked up elaborate imaginary scenarios to justify what Fields did
was not self defense. He was convicted by a jury.
He eventually pled guilty to similar charges in a federal court.
(21:44):
But the recent popular enthusiasm for murdering protesters has broken
free from the confines of hardcore violent extremist chat rooms.
It's gone mainstream, and the conspiracy theories about Fields's crime
are spreading now too. And I want to give you
the facts you might need to combat those lies if
you encounter them out there in the world. Some of
(22:07):
those lies are easy to debunk quickly. There are people
who will tell you that Heather Higher didn't even get
hit by the car, that her death was from a
heart attack. To that, I offer you the testimony of
a DNA analyst from the Virginia Department of Forensic Science.
She performed testing that confirmed that a piece of human
(22:31):
flesh that was embedded in the car's broken windshield was
a DNA match to Heather. Higher testing performed on bloodstains
found on the vehicle showed at least ten distinct profiles.
Ten people's blood was on that car, including Heather's. The
(22:51):
medical examiner who performed Heather's autopsy showed the jury X
rays of a displaced fracture to Heather's right femur, broken ribs,
cut her lungs, and her liver. Her aorda was completely transsected.
The doctor's exact words, according to my notes, were, it
(23:12):
was snapped in half. The aorda is the largest artery
in the human body, taking blood directly from the heart
out into the body. Completely severing the aorda is not
a survivable injury. She bled to death internally very quickly.
The official cause of death was blunt force trauma to
(23:34):
the Torso anyone who was stuck arguing that the car
never struck her, or that she died of anything other
than being struck by that car is willfully ignorant.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
These facts are quite concrete.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
The other persistent lie is a little more complicated. I
mean the facts are there. I don't mean there's actually
any lingering confusion. It's just a more convoluted narrative, and
the average conspiracy theorist isn't going to sit quietly long
enough to have it explained to them. The story goes
like this, He had to do it. Fields was terrified
(24:26):
of Antifa. He didn't want to hurt those people. He
was trying to escape from a man who was threatening
him with a rifle. He was afraid for his life.
That people who repeat this story often don't know or
don't care to know, any more than that the specifics
aren't important, only the feeling. They feel it must be
(24:50):
true because it affirms their existing belief that left wing
protesters are violent and that right wing white men are persecuted.
The problem is this never happened. This was a lie
born by accident. A leftist counter demonstrator made an understandable mistake.
(25:13):
You see, there were members of left wing groups in
Charlottesville that day who carried guns. This is Virginia. It's
legal to open carry a rifle in public, regardless of
how you feel about that. In terms of God laws
in general, protest tactics specifically, whatever, that's just the situation.
It is legal for people to open carry a rifle
(25:34):
in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Members of an anarchist gun
club were in a different downtown park, Court Square Park,
which is about two blocks from the Market Street Park
where the rally was held. In the days after that rally,
one of those counter demonstrators, who had been legally carrying
his rifle that day, posted online that he'd seen Fields
(25:57):
that afternoon before the attack. He wrote, I used this
rifle to chase off James Fields from our block of
Fourth Street before he attacked the marchers to the south.
And when he posted that he believed it to be true,
he was traumatized. He had survivor's guilt. He truly believed
(26:19):
that he had seen James Fields driving around hunting for
victims and the hour before the attack happened, but he
was wrong. After his Facebook post, a Charlesville police detective
drove to his home to interview him, and I've obtained
a copy of that police interview. He said that around
(26:41):
one pm that afternoon, he saw a dark gray muscle
car with very dark tinted windows circling Court Square Park.
The car was driving slowly, as though the driver were
trying to observe the people in the park. The third
time the card drove past, it came to a complete stop,
(27:02):
level with where he was standing inside the park, and
at that point, he says, he stepped down off the curb,
standing between two parked cars, so not all the way
out into the road, but off the curb, and he
yelled at the car something like get out of here.
And he says the interaction was brief. The driver did
not roll down the window. They didn't exchange words. His
(27:26):
rifle remained slung across his body, muzzle pointing at the ground,
and he never put his hand on the pistol grip.
He did not raise his weapon, he didn't step all
the way out into the road, and he was the
only person who moved in the direction of the car
at all. There was no mob, there was no threat,
(27:47):
there was no rifle pointing, but more importantly, there was
no James Alex Fields. He was mistaken. After the attack,
he saw photos of Fields's dark gray Dodge Challenger, and
he believed it was the same car he'd seen earlier
that day, but it absolutely could not have been. It
(28:10):
is not possible. At the time of the attack one
forty pm, this man was in the middle of an
interview with a reporter. The reporter took photographs of him
for the story, and those photographs are timestamped at one
thirty pm. He estimates they'd been talking for about fifteen
(28:31):
minutes before they started taking the pictures, and the incident
with the mysterious car had occurred a little bit prior
to this, So if he's been talking to a reporter
since one fifteen, his best guess is that he saw
this car sometime between twelve forty five and one fifteen.
(28:51):
It couldn't have been any later than one fifteen. And
we know exactly where James Alex Fields was at one
thirteen PM because there a security footage from a Shell
gas station showing him purchasing a blue power aid. Fields
left his car in the McDonald's parking lot around nine
am and he didn't return to it again until around
(29:13):
one twenty pm. Neither Fields nor his car were anywhere
near Court Square Park when this man saw a dark
gray muscle car slowly circling the park. The police have
never weighed in on this. I wish they would, because
I think they know the answer. I think they could
(29:36):
put this to bed if they felt like it. It
is my very firmly held belief that the car that
man saw that day was an unmarked police car. The
Charlstol Police Department did have an unmarked dark gray Dodge
charger with dark tinted windows. Mistaking a charger for a
(29:58):
challenger is a hard to believe if you saw it
only briefly, and it's very easy to imagine why a
cop might make several laps around the park to try
to get a better look at the guys with the guns.
I don't think we'll ever get an answer to the
question of who exactly it was driving around the park
at one pm, but I can promise you it was
(30:20):
not James Alex Fields. Field's left downtown around eleven thirty
am with the other rally attendees. Again, they all kind
of hoped that maybe the rally wasn't a total wash
and they'd still be able to hear some speeches back
at McIntyre Park, so he joined in the crowd walking
back that way. According to GPS data from his cell phone,
(30:43):
Fields was in McIntyre Park shortly afternoon. He milled around
a little, but it quickly became clear that nothing was
going to happen there. He needed to walk back downtown
to get to his car, but he didn't really want
to walk there alone. He met another man in the
same situation, Joshua Matthews. The pair soon met Sarah Bolstad
(31:06):
and her boyfriend Hayden Calhoun, two other rally attendees who
needed to get back downtown, and they all decided to
walk there together. Fields's cell phone pings show a minute
by minute progression of this walk, and at one thirteen
p m. He's on camera buying that power aid. Joshua
Matthews testify that he bought a bottle of wine at
(31:27):
the gas station to celebrate getting through the day safely.
It took another five minutes from there to walk back
to Fields's car at the mc donald's. All four of
them got into his car and he drove Bolstad and
Calhoun to their car, which turned out to be right
across the street. Matthews had parked in the garage downtown,
which was another couple of minutes away by car. By
(31:50):
one thirty five p m. James Alex Fields is alone
in his car after dropping off his last passenger at
the Market Street parking garage, typed Mammy Ohio into the
search bar on the maps app on his phone to
get directions home. The streets were empty at that point.
(32:10):
Everyone had gone home, even the police. There were extensive
road closures downtown that day for the scheduled rally, and
officers had been stationed in the intersections around the roadblocks.
The officers were gone now, but the streets were still
blocked off. In hindsight, maybe they should have closed the
(32:30):
Market Street parking garage too. That part of downtown has
a lot of narrow one way streets and it can
be confusing for out of towners even without the added
complication of the roadblocks. But there are a lot of
things I think the city would have done differently with
the benefit of hindsight, and even locals were a little
bit puzzled about how to navigate this situation. Two other
(32:53):
drivers had run into the same problem, ending up on
Fourth Street just before Fields did. The first driver was
a woman I'll just call l She was driving home
from running an errand and she got mixed up with
the roadblocks. Fourth Street was technically closed to traffic two
but the tiny wooden sawhorse still standing in the road
(33:14):
didn't block it completely, so she turned down that street.
At the intersection of Fourth and Water Street, there was
a stop sign, and as she stopped at the bottom
of Fourth Street, the crowd of marchers is coming up
Water towards that intersection. They're chanting and singing, and they're
(33:34):
joyfully reclaiming their city streets from the Nazi invasion. And
as they approached the intersection, they turned left up Fourth
Street towards the pedestrian mall. They were singing, they were laughing.
She said. The crowd just felt so positive, so happy
(33:56):
that she got out of her car. I wanted to
get that on film, she testified at Feels' trial. This
was a moment in history. One of the marchers recognized
her and ran over to say hi and smile for
the Snapchat video she was recording. It's a joyful moment.
(34:18):
As this is happening, A second car pulled in behind
Elle's van as she stopped at this intersection. This car,
driven by a woman I'll just call Tea, stopped too.
She hadn't attended any of the protests that morning, but
when she heard that everything was over, she left her
house to go visit a friend who lived near downtown.
(34:39):
She was on her way home when she got caught
up trying to navigate the roadblocks. Tea testified that as
she wound her way around downtown trying to figure out
which streets weren't closed, there was another car behind her
the entire time. He seemed to be in the same boat.
He followed her at a safe distance, driving calmly and safely,
(35:00):
making the same turns she made, and stopping behind her
at a red light. Like L. She drove past the
little saw Horse on Fourth Street, and the gray dodged
challenger was still right behind her. She saw the crowd
at the end of the street as she approached, so
she was driving really slowly, and she came to a
(35:20):
stop behind L's van. It was amazing, she said, I've
never seen so many people standing up for black people,
so many people of another color standing up for us.
She testified that a passing marcher leaned in toward her
open car window and thanked her for being so patient.
(35:42):
As the group moved up the street around her idling car,
the challenger was still behind her. In her rearview mirror,
she saw the car start to back up. That made
sense to her. D saw the crowd and changed his mind.
Maybe he didn't want to wait down there at the
bottom of Fourth Street for the crowd to pass. Who
(36:02):
knows how long it might take, so he's probably going
to back all the way back out onto Market Street
and try a different path. She remembered, thinking she might
be there for a while, but there was no way
she would be able to maneuver her car all the
way back out to Market Street and reverse, so she
stayed put. If you're not familiar with downtown Charlottesville, we
(36:26):
have a pedestrian mall. It's just an outdoor area a
few blocks of shops and restaurants, and it's just for pedestrians.
But for some ungodly stupid reason, there are two streets
that intersect it. Our pedestrian only mall has two vehicular crossings,
(36:48):
and Fourth Street is one of them. So these three
cars turned onto Fourth Street from Market Street where it
crosses the mall, and as you pass on to and
then back off off of the pedestrian only area, as
you proceed down Fourth Street, there are speed bumps. Security
camera footage from a nearby business shows each car as
(37:09):
it drove down Fourth Street. L's red van, then tes
silver sedan, then the Challenger. The angle of this camera
was only meant to capture the area just outside the
restaurant's door, so it just catches a fleeting glimpse of
each vehicle as they cross onto the pedestrian mall. One
(37:33):
minute and ten seconds after it fields, his car first
appear driving down Fourth Street. It reappears in frame driving
in reverse, and then suddenly it accelerates forward. There was
no one around him. The security camera footage shows that
(37:55):
witnesses testified to that the state police helicopter hover overhead
recording video of the entire scene clearly shows it. El
and T had made the same mistake he did, turning
down a closed road, and they were waiting patiently for
the peaceful crowd to make their way onto the pedestrian mall,
(38:16):
but he was behind them, idling alone watching. When T
saw him start to reverse, she assumed he was leaving,
but he was just giving himself more room to accelerate.
A photojournalist from the local newspaper was on the mall
(38:37):
that afternoon. He'd worked all morning taking pictures of the
violent scenes on Market Street, but he'd come back out
that afternoon, now that everything was over, to look around.
It wasn't with the crowd, but he heard them and
walked over to see. He saw the Great Challenger just
as it started reversing, and he too assumed the car
(39:00):
was trying to back out onto Market Street. But then
he heard the engine revving. He raised his camera and
captured seventy four frames, a rapid burst of photos, sort
of a grisly flip book. Here, too, we can lay
to rest another persistent lie. While the helicopter footage provides
(39:25):
a clear view of the entire scene, it's a bird's
eye view. You can only see the tops of things,
only the top of the car. I've seen the video.
It's clear enough to me that the driver was accelerating,
that he made no attempt to slow down as he
plowed into the crowd. But both his attorneys at trial
and his supporters online will tell you that he hit
(39:48):
the brakes he tried to slow down. These photos prove otherwise.
On the stand, the photographer has shown his own pictures.
In one frame, the brake lights are illuminated, indicating that
the driver tapped his brakes. But this wasn't as he
(40:11):
neared the crowd. It was the moment his car bottomed
out over a speed bump. Several witnesses testified that they
heard the car's undercarriage scrape the speed bump as he
crossed the pedestrian mall. Several testified that it looked like
the car was briefly airborne because it hit the speed
bump so fast. But once he cleared that barrier, the
(40:32):
brake lights never came on again. As he approached the crowd,
he was accelerating. It sounded like a gunshot. I just
remember screaming. I think I was saying, where are my kids?
Where are my kids? I thought a bomb went off.
(40:53):
I thought more cars might be coming. I tried to
get out of the street, but I didn't know why.
My legs wouldn't work. When I came to, my leg
was broken and I couldn't find my child. The only
thing I could think about was getting my wife out.
Speaker 5 (41:09):
Of the way.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
These are the words of the people whose bones he broke.
He drove right through that crowd, ramming into the back
of Tea's car, pushing it forward into L's van. L
was actually hit by her own parked car. She'd gotten
out to greet a friend in the crowd and was
standing in front of the van when it was pushed
(41:33):
forward in the crash. The street was too narrow for
fields to continue on this path. The two cars he'd
crashed into were blocking the intersection. And here again we
have a moment in time that has become distorted in
the retelling conspiracy. Theorists will tell you that the crowd
attacked his car unprovoked, that the damage to his vehicle
(41:57):
occurred before the attack, that he feared for his life
because this mob attacked him, and there certainly was some
damage to his car that wasn't from the crash, but
that didn't happen until after the crash. Dozens of people
relying on the ground, bleeding and broken. Many people ran,
(42:18):
not knowing what horrors might come next. Was he going
to get out of the car with a gun? And
for every person who was lying injured on the pavement,
half a dozen others stepped up to render aid, moving
victims out of the street, tearing off their own clothes
to try to stop bleeding, stabilizing possibly broken necks. But
(42:40):
some people in that crowd identified a threat and they
did what they felt was necessary, striking the vehicle and
putting a few good dents in it. He had just
killed someone. I think that's fair. With no path forward,
Fields really was surrounded by an angry crowd. Now in
(43:01):
the collective imaginations of aggrieved white supremacists, this angry crowd
has existed throughout the story, but the evidence is clear
no one had an issue with the gray Challenger until
after it was a clear and present danger. He threw
the car into reverse, hitting several more people in the process,
(43:23):
and backed all the way back up Fourth Street, back
onto Market Street, and he drove toward the highway. He
still had the GPS directions for his trip back home
pulled up on his phone. The footage captured by the
state police helicopter tracked his flight from the scene. The
officers who filmed it never actually testified they couldn't. A
(43:46):
few hours later, miles from downtown, they lost control of
their helicopter and both troopers died in the crash. Fields
drove for a little over a mile, with an officer
in pursuit for much of that drive, before surrendering just
blocks from the on ramp to the interstate. The officer
who pulled him over actually had no idea what Fields
(44:08):
had done. He just happened to hear the radio call
just as Fields was passing by where he was sitting
in his parked car. So in Field saw the officer
and asked, are the people okay? He didn't know the answer.
(44:36):
It wasn't until he was sitting at the police station
that an officer told him that someone had died. Based
on the audio of this interview, sounds like he was
having a panic attack. It is impossible to know which
one of a man's lies he actually believes. As he
was lying face down on the side of the road,
(44:58):
he said, I didn't want to hurt people, but they
were attacking me, And later at the magistrate's office, Fields
can be heard on bodycam footage saying, I felt like
the people behind me were trying to surround me, but
that just isn't true. There were no people behind him,
(45:21):
not until he drove over them. Anyway. The only time
his car was ever surrounded by anyone was when he
drove into them. He sat all alone for a minute
and ten seconds, looking down that street at the crowd.
He was obviously capable of backing all the way back
(45:42):
up Fourth Street. He ended up doing just that after
the murder, but he chose to accelerate forward instead. He
chose that because he wanted to hurt them. He wanted
to hurt black people and Jewish people and gay people
and liberals and communists. He saw Black Lives Matter signs
(46:05):
and rainbow flags and people in black bandannas, and he
couldn't stand it. He had other options. He wasn't defending himself,
and he knows that a few months after the attack,
while he was awaiting trial in the local jail, he
brought up the topic of heather Hire's mother in a
(46:27):
phone call with his own mother.
Speaker 5 (46:33):
Was like going around one speeches and ship slander and
me commies. I had unheard anything I'm going to do
radiyat oh okay, No, I think I think was that
she was on the news and one speeches and ship.
(46:54):
She's one of those anti white communists. She lost it
on her. You know, it doesn't matter. She's a communist.
You need to stop talking. Nobody isn't She is a
communist and anti white. Okay, it's not for questioning she is.
(47:20):
She's the enemy, Nobody's mother.
Speaker 2 (47:29):
Her death doesn't fucking matter. Her mother's pain doesn't fucking matter.
They're the enemy. They're anti white communists, and their lives
are worthless and they don't fucking matter. That's what he believes.
(47:52):
That's the truth. Not the self serving, self pitying tears
and the mattressrate's office, not the lies that he told
his lawyers that they repeated for him in court. None
of that. This is the truth. Like I said, I
didn't know Heather, but I've met her mother on a
few occasions. We've never talked to politics, not really. We
(48:17):
talked about her daughter, about the case, about the Nazi
who said he was going to use her daughter's grave
as a urinal. She always asks me how my little
dogs are. But I'm willing to stake a claim here
and say that neither Heather nor her mother would say
that they're communists, because that word doesn't mean when you
(48:39):
think it means. Here, he doesn't mean someone who identifies
with the political ideology of communism. It means someone who
doesn't want Nazis around. It means someone that white nationalists
don't like. In another record of jail call, Fields explained
to his mother that all liberals are communists who hate
(49:00):
white people and want to destroy a white society. So
when you see a white supremacist talking about his fervent
desire to hurt or kill communists, just know he means
you too. The murder was premeditated. He was convicted of
first degree murder, which in Virginia requires premeditation, but that
(49:24):
doesn't mean you have to make the plan far in advance.
At trial, the prosecutor emphasized that they believed he formulated
his intent during that one minute and ten seconds that
he spent idling on Fourth Street, staring down at the crowd.
And I think that's almost certainly the truth. I don't
(49:44):
think that he drove here from Ohio intending to do this.
I don't think he knew when he left his cat
at his mother's house for the weekend that he would
never come home again. The plan didn't form until the
opportunity presented itself. But the plan was able to form
so quickly because he'd thought about it before, and he
(50:07):
wasn't the only one. I think I need to do
a follow up episode about the history of vehicle attacks
on protests. I'd intended to get into it here, but
I sort of lost track of things. It was a
subject of interest in certain circles and several similar attacks
in the United States predate this one. In the discord
(50:28):
server for Unite the Right rally attendees, the idea came
up several times. I don't believe there's any evidence that
Fields was ever an active participant in the chat, but
it just goes to show how prevalent the fantasy was.
A month before the rally, a user posting as Tyrone,
said is it legal to run over protesters blocking roadways?
(50:51):
I'm not just ship posting. I would like clarification. The
same user posted a meme showing a large piece of
John Deere farming equipment with the text introducing John Deere's
new multi lane Protester digester Tyrone wrote, sure would be nice.
(51:12):
A week earlier, another user posted what is it called
when you run over a protester? Black lives splatter? Shane Duffy,
a member of the neo Nazi group Traditionalist Worker Party,
posted this will be us alongside an image from the
two thousand and four movie Dawn of the Dead depicting
a bus driving into a crowd of zombies. Two days
(51:36):
before the rally, another user posted on the subject of
counter protesters, writing, you're supposed to run them over with
your car. These are jokes, probably kind of that's what
they'd tell you, And none of those men actually did it,
(51:56):
so maybe they were kidding. Think it's instructive here to
quote from the style guide written by the editor of
the neo Nazi website The Daily Stormer. It was intended
to be an internal document for the site's authors, and
the site was one that many of these men read daily.
In the section about humor, the document's author Andrew Anglin wrote,
(52:19):
the tone of the site should be light. Most people
are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging,
non ironic hatred. The undoctrinated should not be able to
tell if we are joking or not. There should also
be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists.
I usually think of this as self deprecating humor. I
(52:40):
am a racist making fun of stereotypes of racists because
I don't take myself super seriously. This is obviously a ploy,
and I actually do want to gas antisemitic slur for
Jewish people, but that's neither here nor there. Serious articles
are fine and can be written and published with absolute seriousness. However,
articles which take a serious tone should not include racial
(53:03):
slurs or even rude language about other races. Another section
with a heading violence reads it's illegal to promote violence
on the Internet. At the same time, it's totally important
to normalize the acceptance of violence as an eventuality slash inevitability.
(53:24):
I'm extremely careful about never suggesting violence. I go beyond
legal requirements in America. However, whenever someone does something violent,
it should be made light of and laughed at. For example,
Anders Bravic should be forever referred to as a heroic
freedom fighter. This is great because people think you must
(53:46):
be joking, but there is a part of their brain
that doesn't think that. So this is partly an attempt
at just plausible deniability. If someone's offended, it was just
a joke, and you haven't lost face. If you get
in trouble it was just a joke, maybe you won't
be punished. But if it works, if you tell a
(54:10):
racist joke or propose a violent act and it's well received,
then you've made a connection. You've found a fellow traveler.
But as they say themselves, it's also a recruitment and
indoctrination strategy. You ease people into it you let them
have an uneasy chuckle at your racist joke, give them
(54:31):
the internal deniability that they need to hear something like
that and not push back erode their boundaries. Get them
comfortable with that kind of talk. Normalize it. A now
deceased Daily Stormer writer said it himself. Here's Robert Ray,
(54:53):
the Nazi who called himself Asthmador, greeting a fan. The
audio is a little bit fuzzy, lot of background noise
in this clip, and that's because it was recorded inside
Market Street Park on the morning of August twelfth, twenty seventeen.
Speaker 5 (55:11):
You know, I checked that.
Speaker 3 (55:12):
Site every day that always laughed. It's you know, it's
it's a humor like that's how I get to be
a boy.
Speaker 5 (55:19):
I think it's.
Speaker 2 (55:22):
Yeah, it's humor, but we mean it. Just moments before
this segment of the clip, Asmador had just finished telling
this man about how he'd assaulted several people the night before.
He was laughing and smiling when he said it, but
(55:43):
he meant it. Robert Ray died a fugitive. He was
charged with a felony for pepper spraying counter protesters who
were trapped by the ring of torch marchers. The night
before this, and he never appeared in court. And while
Fields may not have been in the discord, he posted
some jokes of his own about murdering protesters. In May
(56:06):
of twenty seventeen, three months before the attack, he posted
a meme on Instagram. The image is strikingly similar to
the photo taken of the moment his car hit the crowd.
It looks just like it. The text on the image reads,
you have a right to protest, but I'm late for work.
(56:28):
When he posted that image in May, I don't think
he was thinking to himself, I'm going to do this
one day. I don't think he was even thinking about
it on his drive here, but the idea lived in
his head. It was a joke, but he meant it.
It was normalized. It was normal to think of people
(56:51):
who protest Nazi rallies as subhuman, as enemy combatants. It
was normal to think about hurting them, shocking or upsetting
was funny. It was just a joke, but they meant it,
which is why I feel so sick Browsing the comments
(57:13):
on posts made today by mainstream MAGA influencers, the rhetoric
in these posts is as bad, sometimes worse than what
was posted in the Nazi rally planning chats. That protester
digestor meme, the one that Tyrone posted, and it ended
up entered into evidence in federal court to demonstrate the
(57:34):
casual attitude the rally goers had towards this kind of violence.
That meme is now being posted by people who probably
think of themselves as having pretty normal Republican politics, and
I guess by today's standards they do. Accounts with hundreds
of thousands of followers have posted it. People posting under
(57:56):
their real names, are posting it. Tech executives, small business owners,
federal employees. It's not just the radical fringe anymore. Average
suburban conservatives are posting the kinds of things that I'm
used to seeing with an exhibit number stamped on them.
(58:17):
There is a lot more to be said about the
rise in popularity among American right wingers of this very
particular form of violence, and I think I'm going to
have to revisit that history another day, because I think
it's important. This is a relatively recent phenomenon spiking dramatically
in frequency in the last ten years. Feels his crime
(58:38):
is not an isolated one. He was acting on a
fantasy that was common among his peers eight years ago.
That peer group was small. It was just around the
radical fringes of society where people felt comfortable talking about
this so often that it started to feel acceptable. And
now it's everywhere. Politicians, law enforcement officials are telling you
(59:04):
it's allowed. They're damn near encouraging you to go out
there and do it. And it's happened at least five
times in the last week. Keep an eye out for
each other out there. Don't ever assume that a driver
is going to behave rationally, because I have a terrible
feeling this is going to keep happening. Weird Little Guys.
(59:43):
It's a production of Poolzone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research,
written and recorded by me while I hunger. Our executive
producers are Sophie Lichtermann and Robert Evans. The show is
edited by the wildly talented Lorry Gagan. Theme music was
composed by Brad Diggert. You can email me at Read
the Guys podcast at gmail dot com. Definitely read it,
but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You
can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners
(01:00:06):
on the Weird Lit the guys superad. It just don't
post anything that's going to make you one of my
rud of the guys.
Coo Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
On Friday, June sixth, twenty twenty five, ICE agents descended
on Los Angeles, California. The agents carried out immigration raids
at three separate locations, including a home depot in Westlake.
Dozens of men were snatched by masked armed agents. Ordinary
(00:28):
people bystanders and shoppers tried to intervene. They tried to
rescue the agent's targets, tried to pull them from the
grasp of the masked men. They put their bodies in
front of the unmarked SUVs. The detainees were shoved into.
Dozens of people were taken. As words spread, more crowds
(00:51):
began to gather. Protests sprang up organically. The people of
Los Angeles demanded an end to the immigration raids and
the unchecked violence by the ICE agents. Over one hundred
people were arrested that first night, including California SCIU President
David Huerta, but the raids continued, and so did the protests.
(01:17):
Nearly a weekend for the ongoing protests, on June eleventh,
twenty twenty five, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appeared on The
Reuben Report, a right wing political talk show hosted by
failed comedian turned YouTube commentator Dave Rubin. The pair were
discussing the situation in California, kind of DeSantis mostly used
(01:39):
the opportunity to brag about his commitment to preventing people
from freely exercising their civil rights, promising that anyone who
stepped out of line in Florida would be arrested. But
it's not just the police that protesters in Florida should
worry about.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
And we also have a policy that if you you're
driving on one of those streets and a mob comes
and surrounds your vehicle and threatens you, you have a
right to flee for your safety. And so if you
drive off and you hit one of these people, that's
their fault for impinging on you. You don't have to
sit there and just be a sitting duck and let
(02:18):
the mob grab you out of your car and drag
you through the streets. You have a right to defend
yourself in Florida.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
A day later, on June twelfth, Brivard County, Florida Sheriff
Wayne Ivy held a press conference. He echoed many of
the governor's warnings that protesters will face violence from both police.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
And civilians if you try to mob rule a car
in Brevard County, gathering around it, refusing to let the
driver leave. In our county, you're most likely going to
get run over and dragged across the street.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Desantiss comments came just a day after a hit and
run at a protest in Chicago injured sixty six year
old woman. In the days that followed, there were vehicular
attacks on protests in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Riverside, California,
and Culpeper, Virginia. By the time you hear this, there
may well have been more. This kind of attack isn't new,
(03:18):
and it isn't rare. It's become frighteningly common in recent
years and is now being openly encouraged by right wing
commentators and legislators alike. There are too many stories about
angry drivers using a car as a weapon because they're
unhappy with a protest. But there is one in particular
(03:40):
that I know all too well. I'm Molly Conger, and
this is weird. Little guys. This is the story of
(04:07):
James Alex Fields Junior. I wish it weren't. I wish
his story was irrelevant, that it was over and he
didn't have to tell it again. On August twelfth, twenty seventeen,
James alex Fields Junior drove his Dodge Challenger into a
crowd of people on Fourth Street in downtown Charlottesville. The
(04:29):
attack took place two hours after police declared an unlawful
assembly and dispersed the crowd at nearby Market Street Park.
Both the white supremacist who were gathered there to attend
the United the Right rally and the counter protesters who'd
shown up to oppose them were cleared from the area.
The day was over. The group of people on Fourth
(04:50):
Street that afternoon were marching to celebrate the Nazis were gone,
the city was safe again. They were singing, enchanting. They
were peaceful, they were joyful. The street they were on
was closed to traffic that day. They had every reason
(05:13):
to believe they were safe. He accelerated as he approached them.
He injured dozens of people, he murdered one of them,
and he will be in prison for the rest of
his life. And because this is the story of James
Alexfield Junior, that's where I'll focus. This is the story
(05:36):
of a young man who loved Hitler and hated almost
everyone else. He hated black people, he hated Jewish people,
he hated anyone who wasn't white, and he hated white
people who didn't share the hate that fueled him. It
was hate that drove him as he drove his car
into a crowd of people one hot August afternoon, eight
(05:59):
years ago. That's what we're talking about. We won't talk
too much about his victims, the dozens of people who
are badly injured and survived. Many of them are very
private people out of necessity, They've endured years of harassment
from the supporters of the man who tried to kill them.
(06:21):
For those who try to downplay the violence of what
happens in this story, fix your hearts. It's been nearly
seven years since Fields's trial, but the testimony of those
victims is seared into my soul. There are pages of
my notes where the ink is smeared from tears I
couldn't wipe away fast enough as I hunched over the
(06:41):
notebook in my lap in that courtroom. So I won't
tell you how many surgical screws are in their bones,
how many of them still can't run or jump, or
lift their children into their arms, or make a closed
fist with hands once shattered to dust. Of them still
have nightmares and panic attacks and can't bear to look
(07:03):
in the mirror because the sight of their scars sounds
like screeching tires. Now isn't the time for that. And
we won't talk about Heather Higher, not really that was
her name, the woman that he murdered. I didn't know Heather.
(07:24):
I wasn't there when she died. But I've met her mother,
and I've seen the pain in her eyes when she
talks about burying her daughter in secret in an unmarked grave,
because conspiracy theorists think she was a crisis actor and
neo Nazis talk openly about how they'd love to desecrate
her final resting place. And I've seen her smile with
(07:47):
tears in her eyes, remembering that one of the last
things they said to each other was I love you.
She's grateful for that. And I've heard her friends talk
about who she was. She was outspoken and compassionate, and
she was very much not a mourning person. She loved
her chihuahua violet, and her favorite color was purple. She
(08:12):
was loved. But this is a story about the man
who took her life. And now with vehicular attacks on
protesters on the rise. The story of Heather's murder bears
remembering not just because these attacks bear frightening similarities to
the one that took her life, but because the discourse
(08:32):
surrounding them is full of lies about her death, lies
used to justify more attacks and to call for the
release of her killer. On August twelfth, twenty seventeen, white
supremacists filled the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. The event they'd
all come to town for is one I've discussed several
(08:53):
times already on this show, the Unite the Right Rally.
James Alex Fields Junior was just one of thousands of
people who traveled here that weekend to hear speeches from
prominent neo Nazi and white supremacist activists. They never got
to hear those speeches. The violence in the streets started
hours before the event was scheduled to actually begin, and
(09:14):
an unlawful assembly was declared. By eleven thirty a m.
State police and riot gear pushed the rally goers out
of the park and into the streets, where violent altercations
with counter protesters continued. Maryland clansman Richard Preston had been
threatening to shoot people all morning, and as he exited
the park shortly before noon, he drew his gun, shouted
(09:38):
die nward, and fired a single shot into the dirt
at the feet of a young black man. As the
white supremacist begrudgingly began making the two mile trek back
to where they'd parked their cars, they encountered more counter
protesters walking down Market Street. Alex Ramos, Daniel Borden, Tyler Watkins,
(09:58):
and Jacob Goodwin were all eventually convicted for the brutal
beating of another young black man. It was a vicious
assault that took place directly outside of the Charlesville Police station.
At least three other men who participated in the attack
were never arrested. Two of them have never been identified.
(10:18):
The third uncharged attackers identity is known, but he can't
be charged. I identified him myself, but I was a
little too late. It's a strange and terrible coincidence that
I was going back through the video of that assault
in February of twenty twenty three and I finally identified
Teddy von Neuwcomb as one of the attackers just two
(10:42):
weeks after he died. Teddy von Neucomb shot himself in
the heart the morning he was scheduled to go on
trial for fentanyl trafficking. But back to the morning of
August twelfth. People got hurt that morning. The neo Nazi
street fighting gang the Rise Above Movement, punched, shoved, and
(11:04):
choked counter protesters standing on the sidewalk outside the park.
A feyalanx of uniformed fascists carrying home made shields shoved
their way through a line of peaceful counterdemonstrators. Members of
the clergy were assaulted by Nazis. The air was thick
with mace and screams. But that was the morning. By noon,
(11:28):
they were all retreating to their cars. They were disappointed,
They were hot and tired and frustrated. They were angry,
but they were leaving. James Alex Fields hadn't actually parked
his car at McIntyre Park. Most people had, but many
(11:50):
of them had come with a group of some kind.
Fields came alone. He left his home in Maumi, Ohio
on the evening of Friday, August eleventh. He hadn't been
sure he'd be able to attend. He only secured the
weekend off from work a few days earlier, but he'd
known about the rally for months. On Twitter, he followed
(12:12):
rally organizers Richard Spencer and Augustus and Victus, as well
as other prominent white supremacists like David Duke and Brad Griffin.
He replied frequently to Richard Spencer's posts, though there's no
indication Spencer ever took any notice of him. In July,
Fields retweeted a post containing a flyer for the rally.
(12:34):
All summer, he enthusiastically posted, retweeted, and commented on posts
about violence at right wing rallies and other cities. He
seemed particularly thrilled by images of the violence at rallies
in California, pictures of members of the Rise Above movement
beating a man in Huntington Beach, a gift of Nathan
Dimigo punching a woman at Berkeley. He tweeted often at
(12:58):
Baked Alaska, write Internet celebrity. On one occasion, he tagged
Baked Alaska in a post that contained just fourteen words,
A very specific fourteen words. We must secure the existence
of our people and a future for white children. The
white supremacist slogan first penned by David Lane while he
(13:19):
was in prison, for his role in the murder of
Jewish talk radio host Alan Berg. Fields posted pictures of
Nazis marching in nineteen forties Germany, captioning it hashtag Tuesday motivation.
He posted often about his belief that black people were
genetically inferior, had low IQs, were predisposed to crime, and
(13:40):
were more eighth than human. He self identified as a
nationalist and expressed a willingness to kill anyone deemed to
be a threat, writing things like violence is our only
hope for survival as a people, and violence is the
only solution. Many of the men who attended the United
Stas Right rally would later claim that they'd only been
(14:02):
there because they love Confederate statues. Protesting the removal of
the statue of Robert E. Lee was allegedly the purpose
of the event. But Fields is not an outlier here.
He was not alone in the months that he spent
watching the violence at other rallies that summer months, posting
violent fantasies of killing for the white race. He was
(14:25):
here because he was a Nazi, as were many of
the men in the park that day. On Friday afternoon,
he dropped his cat Buddy off at his mother's house
for the weekend, and he texted her to let her know.
She replied, as mothers do, be careful. He texted her
(14:47):
back a picture of Adolf Hitler. Along with the image,
he typed, we are not the ones who need to
be careful. He didn't get here in time for the
Torch March that night. He drove through the night, arriving
in Charlottesville around two or three AM. Sitting alone in
(15:10):
his car in McDonald's parking lot, he scrolled through social media.
He saw a tweet from David Duke with pictures of
the Torch March. Duke wrote, our people on the march,
will you be at Unite the Right tomorrow? Field saved
the pictures onto his phone and then he texted them
to his mother. He also asked about his cap. He
(15:36):
knacked a little bit in his car in the McDonald's
parking lot, drove to waffle House to eat breakfast alone,
and then returned to that McDonald's parking lot downtown early
Saturday morning, as other attendees gathered in McIntyre Park, nearly
two miles from the location of the rally, he was
already downtown, just a few blocks from his destination. I know,
(15:58):
that's a lot of seemingly extreme raeous information about where
people were parking their cars, and it probably means nothing
to you unless you live here and you can picture
in your mind how close the McDonald's on Ridge Street
is to that park downtown. But getting back to various
parked cars becomes a key piece of this timeline, I promise.
(16:20):
So Fields's car is downtown at the McDonald's, but most
of the attendees have parked their cars at a different park,
one that was far away from the park where the
rally would be. Fields had probably planned to sit there
in his car until closer to noon, when the rally
was scheduled to begin, but from where he was parked,
(16:40):
he could see that people were starting to walk in
that direction, so he joined them. By around nine am,
he was among the first attendees to arrive at Market
Street Park. Photos taken that morning show Field standing with
members of Vanguard America. That's a now defunct neo Nazi
group that later that year would morph into what we
(17:01):
now know as Patriot Front. There had been an ongoing
power struggle within Vanguard America that summer, and the group's
official leader, Dylan Hopper didn't actually attend the event. In
Hopper's absence, the group was commanded on the ground that
day by the man who was trying to wrest control
of it from Dylan Hopper. It was an eighteen year
(17:22):
old whose name you might already know was a young
Thomas Rousseau, the current leader of Patriot Front. Everyone involved
has always maintained that James Alex Fields was not a
member of Vanguard America. They claimed they'd never met him before,
(17:42):
but there he was, marching in their ranks, dressed identically
to their members and holding a round wooden shield with
their logo on it. According to deposition testimony from Dylan Hopper,
it was Thomas Rousseau himself who handed Fields the shield.
Speaker 5 (18:00):
Morning.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
From his deposition, he told me that he let James
Fields into Vanguard America's formation at Charlottesville when nobody knew
who he was. He didn't come with anybody, and they
just gave him a shield and said, hey, march with us.
And Thomas Rousseau's reasoning was to make Vanguard look like
a larger organization in front of the news media. Vanguard
(18:22):
America's official position was that James Alex Field was not
a member of their organization, but they also claimed that
they didn't actually have any kind of list of their
members that they could show that didn't have his name
on it, because there was no list. The organization was
one of many named defendants in a lawsuit filed by
people who were hurt that day, and over the years
(18:45):
of litigation in that suit, Vanguard America never produced a
single document. They expect us to believe that they didn't
have a single text message, email, organizational communication, or internal
document that was responsive to the discovery request. Hopper claimed
they kept no records of any kind and he didn't
even know the real names of most of the group's members.
(19:09):
So they're able to swear under oath that they know
for sure that Fields wasn't a member, but they couldn't
actually tell you who was. For what it's worth, I
do think it's pretty plausible that a teenage Thomas Russo
was foolish enough to hand a shield to a stranger.
He really to make himself look more important, so that
(19:30):
it looked like he was commanding a larger group of
Nazis in front of a TV camera. Videos show Field
standing with the Vanguard America shield wall at the perimeter
of the park. He's joining in racist, sexist, homophobic, and
anti Semitic chants, and he seems to be having a
pretty good time. When the police cleared the park at
(19:52):
eleven thirty, Field's left with everyone else. There was some
hope that the rally would regroup back at McIntyre Park
and they could still hear the scheduled speeches, So even
though he was so close to his parked car, which
again was downtown, he walked with the crowd back to
McIntyre Park two miles away. At trial, an FBI analyst
(20:15):
testified about the geolocation data extracted from Peels's cell phone.
This shouldn't matter. This is tedious, and it's boring, and
it's nitpicky, and it shouldn't matter. It shouldn't matter where
he was from minute to minute between eleven thirty am
and one forty pm. It should be enough for me
(20:36):
to tell you that he left the park around eleven
thirty and by one forty pm he was committing a murder.
But two hours in between are just a long hot walk.
Why does it matter? But unfortunately it matters a great deal.
A conspiracy theory has broken containment and I feel compelled
(20:58):
to try again to set the record straight. When people
like Rond De Santis or Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivy
encourage people to run protesters over, they claim they're talking
about self defense, but the self defense that exists in
their imaginations doesn't really have any relationship with reality. It's
(21:19):
the same self defense that James Alex Fields would claim
after his crime, the same self defense his supporters have
cooked up elaborate imaginary scenarios to justify what Fields did
was not self defense. He was convicted by a jury.
He eventually pled guilty to similar charges in a federal court.
(21:44):
But the recent popular enthusiasm for murdering protesters has broken
free from the confines of hardcore violent extremist chat rooms.
It's gone mainstream, and the conspiracy theories about Fields's crime
are spreading now too. And I want to give you
the facts you might need to combat those lies if
you encounter them out there in the world. Some of
(22:07):
those lies are easy to debunk quickly. There are people
who will tell you that Heather Higher didn't even get
hit by the car, that her death was from a
heart attack. To that, I offer you the testimony of
a DNA analyst from the Virginia Department of Forensic Science.
She performed testing that confirmed that a piece of human
(22:31):
flesh that was embedded in the car's broken windshield was
a DNA match to Heather. Higher testing performed on bloodstains
found on the vehicle showed at least ten distinct profiles.
Ten people's blood was on that car, including Heather's. The
(22:51):
medical examiner who performed Heather's autopsy showed the jury X
rays of a displaced fracture to Heather's right femur, broken ribs,
cut her lungs, and her liver. Her aorda was completely transsected.
The doctor's exact words, according to my notes, were, it
(23:12):
was snapped in half. The aorda is the largest artery
in the human body, taking blood directly from the heart
out into the body. Completely severing the aorda is not
a survivable injury. She bled to death internally very quickly.
The official cause of death was blunt force trauma to
(23:34):
the Torso anyone who was stuck arguing that the car
never struck her, or that she died of anything other
than being struck by that car is willfully ignorant.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
These facts are quite concrete.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
The other persistent lie is a little more complicated. I
mean the facts are there. I don't mean there's actually
any lingering confusion. It's just a more convoluted narrative, and
the average conspiracy theorist isn't going to sit quietly long
enough to have it explained to them. The story goes
like this, He had to do it. Fields was terrified
(24:26):
of Antifa. He didn't want to hurt those people. He
was trying to escape from a man who was threatening
him with a rifle. He was afraid for his life.
That people who repeat this story often don't know or
don't care to know, any more than that the specifics
aren't important, only the feeling. They feel it must be
(24:50):
true because it affirms their existing belief that left wing
protesters are violent and that right wing white men are persecuted.
The problem is this never happened. This was a lie
born by accident. A leftist counter demonstrator made an understandable mistake.
(25:13):
You see, there were members of left wing groups in
Charlottesville that day who carried guns. This is Virginia. It's
legal to open carry a rifle in public, regardless of
how you feel about that. In terms of God laws
in general, protest tactics specifically, whatever, that's just the situation.
It is legal for people to open carry a rifle
(25:34):
in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Members of an anarchist gun
club were in a different downtown park, Court Square Park,
which is about two blocks from the Market Street Park
where the rally was held. In the days after that rally,
one of those counter demonstrators, who had been legally carrying
his rifle that day, posted online that he'd seen Fields
(25:57):
that afternoon before the attack. He wrote, I used this
rifle to chase off James Fields from our block of
Fourth Street before he attacked the marchers to the south.
And when he posted that he believed it to be true,
he was traumatized. He had survivor's guilt. He truly believed
(26:19):
that he had seen James Fields driving around hunting for
victims and the hour before the attack happened, but he
was wrong. After his Facebook post, a Charlesville police detective
drove to his home to interview him, and I've obtained
a copy of that police interview. He said that around
(26:41):
one pm that afternoon, he saw a dark gray muscle
car with very dark tinted windows circling Court Square Park.
The car was driving slowly, as though the driver were
trying to observe the people in the park. The third
time the card drove past, it came to a complete stop,
(27:02):
level with where he was standing inside the park, and
at that point, he says, he stepped down off the curb,
standing between two parked cars, so not all the way
out into the road, but off the curb, and he
yelled at the car something like get out of here.
And he says the interaction was brief. The driver did
not roll down the window. They didn't exchange words. His
(27:26):
rifle remained slung across his body, muzzle pointing at the ground,
and he never put his hand on the pistol grip.
He did not raise his weapon, he didn't step all
the way out into the road, and he was the
only person who moved in the direction of the car
at all. There was no mob, there was no threat,
(27:47):
there was no rifle pointing, but more importantly, there was
no James Alex Fields. He was mistaken. After the attack,
he saw photos of Fields's dark gray Dodge Challenger, and
he believed it was the same car he'd seen earlier
that day, but it absolutely could not have been. It
(28:10):
is not possible. At the time of the attack one
forty pm, this man was in the middle of an
interview with a reporter. The reporter took photographs of him
for the story, and those photographs are timestamped at one
thirty pm. He estimates they'd been talking for about fifteen
(28:31):
minutes before they started taking the pictures, and the incident
with the mysterious car had occurred a little bit prior
to this, So if he's been talking to a reporter
since one fifteen, his best guess is that he saw
this car sometime between twelve forty five and one fifteen.
(28:51):
It couldn't have been any later than one fifteen. And
we know exactly where James Alex Fields was at one
thirteen PM because there a security footage from a Shell
gas station showing him purchasing a blue power aid. Fields
left his car in the McDonald's parking lot around nine
am and he didn't return to it again until around
(29:13):
one twenty pm. Neither Fields nor his car were anywhere
near Court Square Park when this man saw a dark
gray muscle car slowly circling the park. The police have
never weighed in on this. I wish they would, because
I think they know the answer. I think they could
(29:36):
put this to bed if they felt like it. It
is my very firmly held belief that the car that
man saw that day was an unmarked police car. The
Charlstol Police Department did have an unmarked dark gray Dodge
charger with dark tinted windows. Mistaking a charger for a
(29:58):
challenger is a hard to believe if you saw it
only briefly, and it's very easy to imagine why a
cop might make several laps around the park to try
to get a better look at the guys with the guns.
I don't think we'll ever get an answer to the
question of who exactly it was driving around the park
at one pm, but I can promise you it was
(30:20):
not James Alex Fields. Field's left downtown around eleven thirty
am with the other rally attendees. Again, they all kind
of hoped that maybe the rally wasn't a total wash
and they'd still be able to hear some speeches back
at McIntyre Park, so he joined in the crowd walking
back that way. According to GPS data from his cell phone,
(30:43):
Fields was in McIntyre Park shortly afternoon. He milled around
a little, but it quickly became clear that nothing was
going to happen there. He needed to walk back downtown
to get to his car, but he didn't really want
to walk there alone. He met another man in the
same situation, Joshua Matthews. The pair soon met Sarah Bolstad
(31:06):
and her boyfriend Hayden Calhoun, two other rally attendees who
needed to get back downtown, and they all decided to
walk there together. Fields's cell phone pings show a minute
by minute progression of this walk, and at one thirteen
p m. He's on camera buying that power aid. Joshua
Matthews testify that he bought a bottle of wine at
(31:27):
the gas station to celebrate getting through the day safely.
It took another five minutes from there to walk back
to Fields's car at the mc donald's. All four of
them got into his car and he drove Bolstad and
Calhoun to their car, which turned out to be right
across the street. Matthews had parked in the garage downtown,
which was another couple of minutes away by car. By
(31:50):
one thirty five p m. James Alex Fields is alone
in his car after dropping off his last passenger at
the Market Street parking garage, typed Mammy Ohio into the
search bar on the maps app on his phone to
get directions home. The streets were empty at that point.
(32:10):
Everyone had gone home, even the police. There were extensive
road closures downtown that day for the scheduled rally, and
officers had been stationed in the intersections around the roadblocks.
The officers were gone now, but the streets were still
blocked off. In hindsight, maybe they should have closed the
(32:30):
Market Street parking garage too. That part of downtown has
a lot of narrow one way streets and it can
be confusing for out of towners even without the added
complication of the roadblocks. But there are a lot of
things I think the city would have done differently with
the benefit of hindsight, and even locals were a little
bit puzzled about how to navigate this situation. Two other
(32:53):
drivers had run into the same problem, ending up on
Fourth Street just before Fields did. The first driver was
a woman I'll just call l She was driving home
from running an errand and she got mixed up with
the roadblocks. Fourth Street was technically closed to traffic two
but the tiny wooden sawhorse still standing in the road
(33:14):
didn't block it completely, so she turned down that street.
At the intersection of Fourth and Water Street, there was
a stop sign, and as she stopped at the bottom
of Fourth Street, the crowd of marchers is coming up
Water towards that intersection. They're chanting and singing, and they're
(33:34):
joyfully reclaiming their city streets from the Nazi invasion. And
as they approached the intersection, they turned left up Fourth
Street towards the pedestrian mall. They were singing, they were laughing.
She said. The crowd just felt so positive, so happy
(33:56):
that she got out of her car. I wanted to
get that on film, she testified at Feels' trial. This
was a moment in history. One of the marchers recognized
her and ran over to say hi and smile for
the Snapchat video she was recording. It's a joyful moment.
(34:18):
As this is happening, A second car pulled in behind
Elle's van as she stopped at this intersection. This car,
driven by a woman I'll just call Tea, stopped too.
She hadn't attended any of the protests that morning, but
when she heard that everything was over, she left her
house to go visit a friend who lived near downtown.
(34:39):
She was on her way home when she got caught
up trying to navigate the roadblocks. Tea testified that as
she wound her way around downtown trying to figure out
which streets weren't closed, there was another car behind her
the entire time. He seemed to be in the same boat.
He followed her at a safe distance, driving calmly and safely,
(35:00):
making the same turns she made, and stopping behind her
at a red light. Like L. She drove past the
little saw Horse on Fourth Street, and the gray dodged
challenger was still right behind her. She saw the crowd
at the end of the street as she approached, so
she was driving really slowly, and she came to a
(35:20):
stop behind L's van. It was amazing, she said, I've
never seen so many people standing up for black people,
so many people of another color standing up for us.
She testified that a passing marcher leaned in toward her
open car window and thanked her for being so patient.
(35:42):
As the group moved up the street around her idling car,
the challenger was still behind her. In her rearview mirror,
she saw the car start to back up. That made
sense to her. D saw the crowd and changed his mind.
Maybe he didn't want to wait down there at the
bottom of Fourth Street for the crowd to pass. Who
(36:02):
knows how long it might take, so he's probably going
to back all the way back out onto Market Street
and try a different path. She remembered, thinking she might
be there for a while, but there was no way
she would be able to maneuver her car all the
way back out to Market Street and reverse, so she
stayed put. If you're not familiar with downtown Charlottesville, we
(36:26):
have a pedestrian mall. It's just an outdoor area a
few blocks of shops and restaurants, and it's just for pedestrians.
But for some ungodly stupid reason, there are two streets
that intersect it. Our pedestrian only mall has two vehicular crossings,
(36:48):
and Fourth Street is one of them. So these three
cars turned onto Fourth Street from Market Street where it
crosses the mall, and as you pass on to and
then back off off of the pedestrian only area, as
you proceed down Fourth Street, there are speed bumps. Security
camera footage from a nearby business shows each car as
(37:09):
it drove down Fourth Street. L's red van, then tes
silver sedan, then the Challenger. The angle of this camera
was only meant to capture the area just outside the
restaurant's door, so it just catches a fleeting glimpse of
each vehicle as they cross onto the pedestrian mall. One
(37:33):
minute and ten seconds after it fields, his car first
appear driving down Fourth Street. It reappears in frame driving
in reverse, and then suddenly it accelerates forward. There was
no one around him. The security camera footage shows that
(37:55):
witnesses testified to that the state police helicopter hover overhead
recording video of the entire scene clearly shows it. El
and T had made the same mistake he did, turning
down a closed road, and they were waiting patiently for
the peaceful crowd to make their way onto the pedestrian mall,
(38:16):
but he was behind them, idling alone watching. When T
saw him start to reverse, she assumed he was leaving,
but he was just giving himself more room to accelerate.
A photojournalist from the local newspaper was on the mall
(38:37):
that afternoon. He'd worked all morning taking pictures of the
violent scenes on Market Street, but he'd come back out
that afternoon, now that everything was over, to look around.
It wasn't with the crowd, but he heard them and
walked over to see. He saw the Great Challenger just
as it started reversing, and he too assumed the car
(39:00):
was trying to back out onto Market Street. But then
he heard the engine revving. He raised his camera and
captured seventy four frames, a rapid burst of photos, sort
of a grisly flip book. Here, too, we can lay
to rest another persistent lie. While the helicopter footage provides
(39:25):
a clear view of the entire scene, it's a bird's
eye view. You can only see the tops of things,
only the top of the car. I've seen the video.
It's clear enough to me that the driver was accelerating,
that he made no attempt to slow down as he
plowed into the crowd. But both his attorneys at trial
and his supporters online will tell you that he hit
(39:48):
the brakes he tried to slow down. These photos prove otherwise.
On the stand, the photographer has shown his own pictures.
In one frame, the brake lights are illuminated, indicating that
the driver tapped his brakes. But this wasn't as he
(40:11):
neared the crowd. It was the moment his car bottomed
out over a speed bump. Several witnesses testified that they
heard the car's undercarriage scrape the speed bump as he
crossed the pedestrian mall. Several testified that it looked like
the car was briefly airborne because it hit the speed
bump so fast. But once he cleared that barrier, the
(40:32):
brake lights never came on again. As he approached the crowd,
he was accelerating. It sounded like a gunshot. I just
remember screaming. I think I was saying, where are my kids?
Where are my kids? I thought a bomb went off.
(40:53):
I thought more cars might be coming. I tried to
get out of the street, but I didn't know why.
My legs wouldn't work. When I came to, my leg
was broken and I couldn't find my child. The only
thing I could think about was getting my wife out.
Speaker 5 (41:09):
Of the way.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
These are the words of the people whose bones he broke.
He drove right through that crowd, ramming into the back
of Tea's car, pushing it forward into L's van. L
was actually hit by her own parked car. She'd gotten
out to greet a friend in the crowd and was
standing in front of the van when it was pushed
(41:33):
forward in the crash. The street was too narrow for
fields to continue on this path. The two cars he'd
crashed into were blocking the intersection. And here again we
have a moment in time that has become distorted in
the retelling conspiracy. Theorists will tell you that the crowd
attacked his car unprovoked, that the damage to his vehicle
(41:57):
occurred before the attack, that he feared for his life
because this mob attacked him, and there certainly was some
damage to his car that wasn't from the crash, but
that didn't happen until after the crash. Dozens of people
relying on the ground, bleeding and broken. Many people ran,
(42:18):
not knowing what horrors might come next. Was he going
to get out of the car with a gun? And
for every person who was lying injured on the pavement,
half a dozen others stepped up to render aid, moving
victims out of the street, tearing off their own clothes
to try to stop bleeding, stabilizing possibly broken necks. But
(42:40):
some people in that crowd identified a threat and they
did what they felt was necessary, striking the vehicle and
putting a few good dents in it. He had just
killed someone. I think that's fair. With no path forward,
Fields really was surrounded by an angry crowd. Now in
(43:01):
the collective imaginations of aggrieved white supremacists, this angry crowd
has existed throughout the story, but the evidence is clear
no one had an issue with the gray Challenger until
after it was a clear and present danger. He threw
the car into reverse, hitting several more people in the process,
(43:23):
and backed all the way back up Fourth Street, back
onto Market Street, and he drove toward the highway. He
still had the GPS directions for his trip back home
pulled up on his phone. The footage captured by the
state police helicopter tracked his flight from the scene. The
officers who filmed it never actually testified they couldn't. A
(43:46):
few hours later, miles from downtown, they lost control of
their helicopter and both troopers died in the crash. Fields
drove for a little over a mile, with an officer
in pursuit for much of that drive, before surrendering just
blocks from the on ramp to the interstate. The officer
who pulled him over actually had no idea what Fields
(44:08):
had done. He just happened to hear the radio call
just as Fields was passing by where he was sitting
in his parked car. So in Field saw the officer
and asked, are the people okay? He didn't know the answer.
(44:36):
It wasn't until he was sitting at the police station
that an officer told him that someone had died. Based
on the audio of this interview, sounds like he was
having a panic attack. It is impossible to know which
one of a man's lies he actually believes. As he
was lying face down on the side of the road,
(44:58):
he said, I didn't want to hurt people, but they
were attacking me, And later at the magistrate's office, Fields
can be heard on bodycam footage saying, I felt like
the people behind me were trying to surround me, but
that just isn't true. There were no people behind him,
(45:21):
not until he drove over them. Anyway. The only time
his car was ever surrounded by anyone was when he
drove into them. He sat all alone for a minute
and ten seconds, looking down that street at the crowd.
He was obviously capable of backing all the way back
(45:42):
up Fourth Street. He ended up doing just that after
the murder, but he chose to accelerate forward instead. He
chose that because he wanted to hurt them. He wanted
to hurt black people and Jewish people and gay people
and liberals and communists. He saw Black Lives Matter signs
(46:05):
and rainbow flags and people in black bandannas, and he
couldn't stand it. He had other options. He wasn't defending himself,
and he knows that a few months after the attack,
while he was awaiting trial in the local jail, he
brought up the topic of heather Hire's mother in a
(46:27):
phone call with his own mother.
Speaker 5 (46:33):
Was like going around one speeches and ship slander and
me commies. I had unheard anything I'm going to do
radiyat oh okay, No, I think I think was that
she was on the news and one speeches and ship.
(46:54):
She's one of those anti white communists. She lost it
on her. You know, it doesn't matter. She's a communist.
You need to stop talking. Nobody isn't She is a
communist and anti white. Okay, it's not for questioning she is.
(47:20):
She's the enemy, Nobody's mother.
Speaker 2 (47:29):
Her death doesn't fucking matter. Her mother's pain doesn't fucking matter.
They're the enemy. They're anti white communists, and their lives
are worthless and they don't fucking matter. That's what he believes.
(47:52):
That's the truth. Not the self serving, self pitying tears
and the mattressrate's office, not the lies that he told
his lawyers that they repeated for him in court. None
of that. This is the truth. Like I said, I
didn't know Heather, but I've met her mother on a
few occasions. We've never talked to politics, not really. We
(48:17):
talked about her daughter, about the case, about the Nazi
who said he was going to use her daughter's grave
as a urinal. She always asks me how my little
dogs are. But I'm willing to stake a claim here
and say that neither Heather nor her mother would say
that they're communists, because that word doesn't mean when you
(48:39):
think it means. Here, he doesn't mean someone who identifies
with the political ideology of communism. It means someone who
doesn't want Nazis around. It means someone that white nationalists
don't like. In another record of jail call, Fields explained
to his mother that all liberals are communists who hate
(49:00):
white people and want to destroy a white society. So
when you see a white supremacist talking about his fervent
desire to hurt or kill communists, just know he means
you too. The murder was premeditated. He was convicted of
first degree murder, which in Virginia requires premeditation, but that
(49:24):
doesn't mean you have to make the plan far in advance.
At trial, the prosecutor emphasized that they believed he formulated
his intent during that one minute and ten seconds that
he spent idling on Fourth Street, staring down at the crowd.
And I think that's almost certainly the truth. I don't
(49:44):
think that he drove here from Ohio intending to do this.
I don't think he knew when he left his cat
at his mother's house for the weekend that he would
never come home again. The plan didn't form until the
opportunity presented itself. But the plan was able to form
so quickly because he'd thought about it before, and he
(50:07):
wasn't the only one. I think I need to do
a follow up episode about the history of vehicle attacks
on protests. I'd intended to get into it here, but
I sort of lost track of things. It was a
subject of interest in certain circles and several similar attacks
in the United States predate this one. In the discord
(50:28):
server for Unite the Right rally attendees, the idea came
up several times. I don't believe there's any evidence that
Fields was ever an active participant in the chat, but
it just goes to show how prevalent the fantasy was.
A month before the rally, a user posting as Tyrone,
said is it legal to run over protesters blocking roadways?
(50:51):
I'm not just ship posting. I would like clarification. The
same user posted a meme showing a large piece of
John Deere farming equipment with the text introducing John Deere's
new multi lane Protester digester Tyrone wrote, sure would be nice.
(51:12):
A week earlier, another user posted what is it called
when you run over a protester? Black lives splatter? Shane Duffy,
a member of the neo Nazi group Traditionalist Worker Party,
posted this will be us alongside an image from the
two thousand and four movie Dawn of the Dead depicting
a bus driving into a crowd of zombies. Two days
(51:36):
before the rally, another user posted on the subject of
counter protesters, writing, you're supposed to run them over with
your car. These are jokes, probably kind of that's what
they'd tell you, And none of those men actually did it,
(51:56):
so maybe they were kidding. Think it's instructive here to
quote from the style guide written by the editor of
the neo Nazi website The Daily Stormer. It was intended
to be an internal document for the site's authors, and
the site was one that many of these men read daily.
In the section about humor, the document's author Andrew Anglin wrote,
(52:19):
the tone of the site should be light. Most people
are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging,
non ironic hatred. The undoctrinated should not be able to
tell if we are joking or not. There should also
be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists.
I usually think of this as self deprecating humor. I
(52:40):
am a racist making fun of stereotypes of racists because
I don't take myself super seriously. This is obviously a ploy,
and I actually do want to gas antisemitic slur for
Jewish people, but that's neither here nor there. Serious articles
are fine and can be written and published with absolute seriousness. However,
articles which take a serious tone should not include racial
(53:03):
slurs or even rude language about other races. Another section
with a heading violence reads it's illegal to promote violence
on the Internet. At the same time, it's totally important
to normalize the acceptance of violence as an eventuality slash inevitability.
(53:24):
I'm extremely careful about never suggesting violence. I go beyond
legal requirements in America. However, whenever someone does something violent,
it should be made light of and laughed at. For example,
Anders Bravic should be forever referred to as a heroic
freedom fighter. This is great because people think you must
(53:46):
be joking, but there is a part of their brain
that doesn't think that. So this is partly an attempt
at just plausible deniability. If someone's offended, it was just
a joke, and you haven't lost face. If you get
in trouble it was just a joke, maybe you won't
be punished. But if it works, if you tell a
(54:10):
racist joke or propose a violent act and it's well received,
then you've made a connection. You've found a fellow traveler.
But as they say themselves, it's also a recruitment and
indoctrination strategy. You ease people into it you let them
have an uneasy chuckle at your racist joke, give them
(54:31):
the internal deniability that they need to hear something like
that and not push back erode their boundaries. Get them
comfortable with that kind of talk. Normalize it. A now
deceased Daily Stormer writer said it himself. Here's Robert Ray,
(54:53):
the Nazi who called himself Asthmador, greeting a fan. The
audio is a little bit fuzzy, lot of background noise
in this clip, and that's because it was recorded inside
Market Street Park on the morning of August twelfth, twenty seventeen.
Speaker 5 (55:11):
You know, I checked that.
Speaker 3 (55:12):
Site every day that always laughed. It's you know, it's
it's a humor like that's how I get to be
a boy.
Speaker 5 (55:19):
I think it's.
Speaker 2 (55:22):
Yeah, it's humor, but we mean it. Just moments before
this segment of the clip, Asmador had just finished telling
this man about how he'd assaulted several people the night before.
He was laughing and smiling when he said it, but
(55:43):
he meant it. Robert Ray died a fugitive. He was
charged with a felony for pepper spraying counter protesters who
were trapped by the ring of torch marchers. The night
before this, and he never appeared in court. And while
Fields may not have been in the discord, he posted
some jokes of his own about murdering protesters. In May
(56:06):
of twenty seventeen, three months before the attack, he posted
a meme on Instagram. The image is strikingly similar to
the photo taken of the moment his car hit the crowd.
It looks just like it. The text on the image reads,
you have a right to protest, but I'm late for work.
(56:28):
When he posted that image in May, I don't think
he was thinking to himself, I'm going to do this
one day. I don't think he was even thinking about
it on his drive here, but the idea lived in
his head. It was a joke, but he meant it.
It was normalized. It was normal to think of people
(56:51):
who protest Nazi rallies as subhuman, as enemy combatants. It
was normal to think about hurting them, shocking or upsetting
was funny. It was just a joke, but they meant it,
which is why I feel so sick Browsing the comments
(57:13):
on posts made today by mainstream MAGA influencers, the rhetoric
in these posts is as bad, sometimes worse than what
was posted in the Nazi rally planning chats. That protester
digestor meme, the one that Tyrone posted, and it ended
up entered into evidence in federal court to demonstrate the
(57:34):
casual attitude the rally goers had towards this kind of violence.
That meme is now being posted by people who probably
think of themselves as having pretty normal Republican politics, and
I guess by today's standards they do. Accounts with hundreds
of thousands of followers have posted it. People posting under
(57:56):
their real names, are posting it. Tech executives, small business owners,
federal employees. It's not just the radical fringe anymore. Average
suburban conservatives are posting the kinds of things that I'm
used to seeing with an exhibit number stamped on them.
(58:17):
There is a lot more to be said about the
rise in popularity among American right wingers of this very
particular form of violence, and I think I'm going to
have to revisit that history another day, because I think
it's important. This is a relatively recent phenomenon spiking dramatically
in frequency in the last ten years. Feels his crime
(58:38):
is not an isolated one. He was acting on a
fantasy that was common among his peers eight years ago.
That peer group was small. It was just around the
radical fringes of society where people felt comfortable talking about
this so often that it started to feel acceptable. And
now it's everywhere. Politicians, law enforcement officials are telling you
(59:04):
it's allowed. They're damn near encouraging you to go out
there and do it. And it's happened at least five
times in the last week. Keep an eye out for
each other out there. Don't ever assume that a driver
is going to behave rationally, because I have a terrible
feeling this is going to keep happening. Weird Little Guys.
(59:43):
It's a production of Poolzone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research,
written and recorded by me while I hunger. Our executive
producers are Sophie Lichtermann and Robert Evans. The show is
edited by the wildly talented Lorry Gagan. Theme music was
composed by Brad Diggert. You can email me at Read
the Guys podcast at gmail dot com. Definitely read it,
but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You
can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners
(01:00:06):
on the Weird Lit the guys superad. It just don't
post anything that's going to make you one of my
rud of the guys.
Host
Molly Conger
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