They Like the Cars, the Cars That Go ‘Boom’
I’m emerging (briefly) to welcome our new subscribers who saw my interview on The 11th Hour on MSNBC. Thanks so much for joining! I’m actually on maternity leave through June but don’t worry, Justin Hendrix and Greg Greene, two of my favorite writers and activists, will take turns writing the newsletter until I return.
Since I’m here, I’m also going to promote my cover story in this month’s Progressive Magazine: The Enemy Within: State and Local Republican Parties Have Been Taken Over by White Supremacists, Conspiracy Mongers, and Insurrectionists. Be sure to take a look, and watch me discuss the piece with Brian Willams on MSNBC.
OK Greg, take it away!
—Melissa
As your humble guest writer, I’ll tell you something about myself: I spent seven years as a resident of Charlottesville, Va. Those years spanned the 1990s, as a college and law student — when the town was best known for Monticello and Dave Matthews.
My period there, in other words, came long before ‘Charlottesville’ turned into a shorthand reference for lethal far-right violence.
I now live only two hours from Charlottesville, in the environs of Washington, D.C., but I’ve only visited one time since the ‘Unite the Right’ riot in 2017. The town still enters my thoughts often — and entered them again this week, when a friend from my time there asked a question after I tweeted about moves by lawmakers in Florida and elsewhere to immunize motorists who plow cars into protestors.
Heather Heyer, as you may remember, is the Charlottesville woman who died when James Fields — an Ohio neo-Nazi in town for the Unite the Right weekend — rammed his Dodge Challenger into a gathering of counter-demonstrators.
Fields is serving a life sentence in prison after his conviction on federal first-degree murder and hate crimes charges. Before his case went to the jury, Fields’ attorneys offered the defense that he acted out of fear on the day when Heyer was killed. Fields himself said something similar when police apprehended him: “I didn’t want to hurt people, but I thought they were attacking me,” the New York Times quotes Fields as saying.
The measure signed into law last week by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) offers drivers civil immunity for actions that injure or kill protestors. That stops short (pardon the pun) of giving drivers carte blanche to commit vehicular homicide, but provides a tacit endorsement to motorists who, at encounters with protestors, take matters into their own hands. A similar statute in Oklahoma goes all the way — shielding drivers from criminal liability if their cars hit and injure or kill protestors.
As Alex Pareene wrote in The New Republic last week (emphasis added):
The impetus for the Oklahoma bill, according to the Republican lawmaker who authored it, was an incident in which a pickup truck driver drove into a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Tulsa, paralyzing one person. The driver claimed to be scared and, notably, was not charged with a crime. That is to say that it was apparently already legal to drive into protesters in Oklahoma; these politicians merely helped clarify that fact.
The answer to my friend’s question about whether James Fields could have evaded jail (on state charges, anyway) appears to be ‘yes,’ then — at least in one state. Fields, infamous as a neo-Nazi killer, may end up transformed by the evolution of the American far right into a man caught in the wrong place at the wrong time — if by “wrong place” we mean a state without immunity for vehicular assaults on demonstrators, and by “wrong time” we mean before laws such as the new statutes in Oklahoma and Florida entered existence.
The stark irony here: as Pareene notes, “a few years ago, most people would have seen ‘politically motivated vehicle attacks’ as a terrorist tactic pioneered by ISIS.”
As readers of this newsletter know, this wouldn’t be the first example of radicalization and extremism in the United States reflecting that seen elsewhere. The vehement Islamophobia of the Trumpist right, however, makes the low-fanfare ratification of vehicular aggression feel like a whiplash-inducing development.
But maybe it shouldn’t feel that way. The incredulity of Republican-aligned groups and pundits this month when Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg commented that “there is racism physically built into some of our highways” suggests a pervasive obliviousness on the right to how our built landscape is shaped by, and shapes, our politics. The right’s tacit thumbs up to vehicular violence takes that obliviousness a step further — and has the potential to leave a tire tread across future public clashes and protests.
Research & Projects
- Penn professor Victor Pickard has an essay that explores how commercial media — and the blindness of media scholars to its structural biases — contributed to the systemic failures that fueled the ascendancy of former President Trump.
- In Political Research Quarterly, a county-level study of right-wing violence in the U.S. finds that “right-wing violence is more common in … counties that are in electrorally competitive areas and that are predominantly white.”
- UNC’s Daniel Kreiss, in a book review, zeroes in on the central role that elites play in propagating disinformation — a role that often goes overlooked examinations of the interplay between disinformation and democracy.
ICYMI
- New York Times: “U.K. Far Right, Lifted by Trump, Now Turns to Russia.” Extremist Tommy Robinson has enjoyed the support of the Mercer family, most notorious as Steve Bannon’s benefactor — but sought in 2020 to establish accounts at banks in the Russian Federation, Jane Bradley and Michael Schwirtz report.
- BuzzFeed: “Facebook Knows It Was Used to Help Incite the Capitol Insurrection.” Craig Silverman, Ryan Mac, and Jane Lytvynenko report on an internal task force’s finding that Facebook “failed to stop a highly influential movement from using its platform to delegitimize the election [and] encourage violence.
- Axios: “World leaders brace for historic Trump Facebook ban decision.” Sara Fischer and Jonathan Swan write about the looming ‘Independent Oversight Board’ ruling on whether Facebook’s indefinite suspension from the platform must be reversed.
- MSNBC: “Behind the ‘Thin Blue Line’ flag: America’s history of police violence.” Talia Lavin writes about the lengthy history of backlashes to protests and calls for police accountability.
- The Washington Post: “Researchers warn misinformation on Facebook threatens to undermine Biden’s climate agenda.” Cat Zakrezewski and Aaron Schaffer report on the prevalence of false narratives about climate change and energy on Facebook over the first two months of Joe Biden’s presidency.
- … and The Progressive: “The Enemy Within.” Melissa Ryan — wait, Melissa Ryan? The Melissa Ryan? — writes about the swelling influence of far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists on state and local Republican parties. (You can see one consequence of that influence in this issue’s lead item, which looks at efforts to immunize right-wing attacks on demonstrations.)
- Melissa also appeared on The 11th Hour with MSNBC’s Brian Williams to discuss the piece. Watch the full clip here.
Coda
Ctrl Alt-Right Delete is a labor of love. If you’d like to support Melissa’s newsletter in 2021 please consider a monthly contribution via its Patreon page. There is also PayPal for one-time contributions.
The subject line of this week’s issue is a reference to a novelty song from the late 1980s, titled — not shockingly — “Cars With the Boom.” I thought about it today for the first time in ages, but it’s still kind of a bop:
That’s it for me. Justin Hendrix will be back in your inbox with the next issue, in two weeks. Ta ’til then — and if someone shared this link with you, don’t forget to subscribe to Ctrl Alt-Right Delete here.
