“A Sort of Second Amendment for Cars”

“I’m fucking hitting people with the car, did you hear me, I was like, ‘get the fuck—” says a Boston police sergeant in footage recorded on an officer’s body camera last summer, at the height of protests against police brutality, shortly after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd.

The officer whose camera is recording walks away, then returns, telling the sergeant that his body camera is on.

“Oh, no, no, no, no, no, what I’m saying is, though, that they were in front, like, I didn’t hit anybody, like, just driving, that’s all,” explains the sergeant, aware that he has just been recorded bragging about hitting protesters with his car. (As Eoin Higgins, the journalist who originally reported on the footage, writes in a recent update, that sergeant is back on desk duty).

The tactic once most closely associated with ISIS is now being deployed by another death cult: not only police officers, who have been caught driving into protesters and have a history of encouraging such actions, but civilians who oppose protests, particularly anti-police protests. Conservatives used to frantically warn that ISIS’s tactics would spread; as it turns out, they were right. These attacks now occupy such a prominent place, both in reality and in the fever dreams of protesters’ most obsessed opponents, that a raft of anti-protest, pro-vehicular-attack bills are being introduced across the United States by a GOP bound to increasingly autonomous police forces and the civilians who love them.

The most well-known such attack, one that preceded the tactic’s spread, occurred in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. There, at the “Unite the Right” rally, twenty-year-old James Alex Fields Jr drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring several people and killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer. Fields Jr has been convicted of murder, but his actions are now being imitated by a not insignificant number of people across the country.

According to Ari Weil, a terrorism researcher at the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats, between May 27, 2020 — two days after Floyd’s death — and September 5, there were over one hundred incidents of people driving vehicles into protesters. While some of these incidents were accidents, Weil deems just under half malicious.

In the wake of this tactical innovation comes a spate of bills that criminalize protest and indemnify those who attack, or even kill, protesters.

In Oklahoma, Republican legislators passed a bill that grants immunity to motorists who strike protesters in public streets, even if those attacks kill someone. As State Senator Rob Standridge, the Republican who wrote the bill, explained, the legislation was motivated by an incident in Tulsa last year in which a motorist drove through a crowd of protesters. The driver’s actions injured several protesters, including paralyzing one person from the waist down. Despite this, the driver was not charged. In other words, driving through a crowd of civil rights protesters is already legal. No matter. The GOP knows legalizing vehicular attacks against the Left — “hit and kill” bills, as the ACLU calls them — is red meat for its base.

Oklahoma isn’t the only state with such bills. Iowa’s House has passed similar legislation. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, just signed an “anti-riot” bill into law. In addition to infringing on the First Amendment right to peacefully protest, criminalizing the blocking of public streets, and making it a second-degree felony punishable by up to fifteen years in prison to take down a monument, the legislation grants civil immunity to motorists who attack protesters with their cars so long as the attacker claims self-defense. DeSantis called it “the strongest anti-looting, anti-rioting, pro-law-enforcement piece of legislation in the country.”

These are just some of the eighty-one anti-protest bills introduced by Republican lawmakers in thirty-four states during the 2021 legislative session. Some of the measures would be comical — criminalizing insulting a cop with “offensive or derisive” gestures — if they weren’t so likely to become law. This is the GOP’s response to millions-strong protests against policing. Republicans have long dug in their heels to defend the country’s uniquely homicidal police, and it was the closest thing to a platform the party had at last year’s Republican National Convention. But now, they’re building the legal infrastructure to further criminalize protest while adding new protections for individuals who take violent action against protesters. Naturally, this will endanger workers too, a group of people who sometimes find themselves on picket lines, exposed to passing vehicles and, occasionally, preventing scabs from driving onto company property.

As the New Republic’s Alex Pareene writes of the anti-protest bills, conservatives are creating “a sort of Second Amendment for cars.” He writes: “Just as the heavily armed patriot is encouraged to consider himself deputized to carry out violence on behalf of the police (the only legitimate arm of the state in his eyes anyway), now certain drivers are permitted to harm certain people in defense of the social order.” And much as cops know that claiming they feared for their life can get them off the hook for murder — Darren Wilson said he feared Michael Brown, who he called a “demon,” was going to kill him, to justify why he shot him dead in the street — those who oppose protests are being encouraged by the state to claim the same defense.

“Very few actually comprehend the deadly and destructive capability of the motor vehicle and its capacity of reaping large numbers of casualties if used in a premeditated manner,” reads a 2016 article in Rumiyah, ISIS’s magazine. Maybe that used to be true. It isn’t anymore.