Why Did a Car Plow into a Crowd of Protesters in St. Louis?
Cars and protesters
Joe Raedle / Getty
A car plowed into a crowd of protesters in St. Louis Wednesday night. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
A disturbing sequence of photos shows a car driving through a group of protesters blocking Manchester Avenue on Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2017. The car stopped and then accelerated. Only minor injuries were reported. The driver was taken into custody about a block away from the protest.
Photos from tonight’s candlelight vigil/protest that ends w/ car driving through protesters in St. Louis https://t.co/mvL5lRIT7n@stltodaypic.twitter.com/GXRJO8aP3g
— David Carson (@PDPJ) August 24, 2017
The protesters had blocked the street to protest the police shooting of a Kenny “Kiwi” Herring, a local transgender woman who, officers alleged, had stabbed a cop. Videos of the interaction seemed to show the car rolling up to the protesters, then stopping, then driving on through the crowd. According to another story in the Post-Dispatch, the various accounts did not agree:
Police and a witness gave differing versions of how protesters were injured when a driver pulled into a group that had blocked an intersection on Wednesday night. The witness, Keith Rose, said the driver had his middle fingers raised before he accelerated through the group of people who were blocking Manchester Avenue and Sarah Street in the Grove neighborhood. But St. Louis police said the driver stopped, honked and attempted to drive around the protesters before some of them surrounded his car and began hitting it with their hands and a flag pole. The police statement, from spokeswoman Schron Jackson, said that three protesters were injured after they jumped onto the car and fell off when the driver pulled away.
As several sources have pointed out, the idea of hitting protesters with motorized vehicles has a long history in modern America. In recent years, it has been a fetish narrative of the alt-right. At Salon, Henry Grabar noted that ISIS and other terrorist training manuals have celebrated the “deadly and destructive capability of the motor vehicle ad its capacity of reaping large numbers of casualties if used in a premeditated manner” for years. However,
… Saturday’s attack also has a lineage closer to home: a long-running right-wing fantasy of running over protesters, especially members of Black Lives Matter who have blocked intersections and highways during rallies. It’s an idea, as the artist Gary Kavanagh observes, that has far broader currency than the white nationalism on display at the “Unite the Right” rally that brought Fields to Charlottesville. “Run them over” is a popular anti-BLM catchphrase … This February, Troy Baker, president of the police union in Santa Fe, New Mexico, shared an image from the “Prepare to Take America Back” Facebook page, a right-wing meme factory with links to conspiracy theories. “All lives splatter: Nobody cares about your protest,” it reads over an image of a jeep plowing through a crowd. … But “jokes” like those have been accompanied by a string of drivers doing exactly that.
Additionally, there may soon be law behind the laughter now:
This is not just a handful of sociopaths living out a 4chan meme. Across the country, Republicans legislators have attempted to codify the idea that protesters surrender their rights when they stand in the road. The philosophy behind these bills was elucidated by Keith Kempenich, a trucking company CEO and North Dakota state legislator whose mother-in-law was stopped by a Dakota Access Pipeline protest. “There’s a line between protesting and terrorism, and what we’re dealing with was terrorism out there,” he told the Washington Post.”
Kempenich wrote a House bill which would have given legal immunity to drivers ramming protesters. It failed.