Column: The Politics of Weaponized Car Attacks

As news breaks about the senseless attack by an SUV on Waukesha’s Christmas parade, Wisconsin crowd, liberal media outlets try to distance themselves from Darrell Brooks and the left-wing politics he espouses on social media.

That’s funny. Kyle Rittenhouse and Kyle Rittenhouse quickly dug into Kyle Rittenhouse’s social-media activities. The Washington Post warned last summer “the 17-year-old shadowed local law enforcement, filling his social media feeds with posts declaring that ‘Blue Lives Matter’ and photos of himself posing with guns.” For Brooks, the Post lamely mentioned Brooks wrote under the name MathBoi Fly, that “after multiple legal battles,” he “started turning the life he lived in the streets into music.”

Their Thanksgiving Edition USA Today’s front page explored the politics of “vehicle ramming.” But they shifted the scrutiny back to people who resent “Black Lives Matter” protests, especially the protesters that block roads and threaten drivers and passengers with violence.

Reporter Dennis Wagner wrote: “Weaponizing of vehicles is a practice sometimes used by terrorists abroad. However, the number of wanton attacks has increased in America as well. The increase began after the police murder of George Floyd prompted Black Lives Matter demonstrations, which in turn prompted angry or fearful motorists to run over protesters.”

This framing makes it sound like protesters are “peaceful” and not “angry” and pose no threat. Wagner added “A Boston Globe survey identified at least 139 incidents in which vehicles ran into crowds of demonstrators since Floyd’s death in May 2020. Fewer than half resulted in criminal charges.”

Really? The original GlobeStory by Jess Bidgood, a reporter who sounds more like an editor, was published on Halloween. Her first subject was the familiar sympathetic character, a paralysed man who fell off an Oklahoma interstate overpass and blocked traffic in Tulsa. Bidgood was outraged no one was arrested, despite admitting that the red pickup involved felt threatened as “protesters banged on its hood and threw things at the vehicle as it moved in.”

Bidgood wrote “A Globe A review of recent events revealed that there were scores of victims, many injuries and at least three deaths. However, very little justice was done for those injured, killed or scared. Yet Oklahoma and 15 other states have considered bills protecting drivers, not protesters, as these ramming incidents have proliferated.”

The minds of the Boston Globe,Driving into roadblocking protests makes you guilty until proven innocence. “Given the choice between defending the safety of pedestrians protesting a police murder and the drivers of the vehicles running them down, prosecutors and lawmakers here have reserved their concern for the drivers.” You’re “running them down” if you attempt to escape.

Bidgood actually compared Bull Connor to the drivers and violent racists that beat John Lewis and civil-rights activists. “To those on the short end of this cold calculus, it feels like siding, during the 1960s civil rights protests, with Bull Connor’s firehoses over the Black children of Birmingham. Or with the cops with clubs over the brave, battered souls who traversed Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge.”

You will find reckless remarks like these in this article. But this article is linked in Bidgood’s pinned tweet. She’s very proud of this.

The Globe’s ramming-incident numbers were accumulated in part with the help of “The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project,” which sounds objective. But this ACLED group has also delighted the liberal media with the data that “the vast majority of Black Lives Matter protests—more than 93%—have been peaceful.”

These studies can be loaded with ideology, so consumers should be wary.