Murder on Fourth Street

Dozens of people were taken. As words spread, more crowds 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.

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 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.

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 that I know all too well. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird. Little guys. This is the story of 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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. 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

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 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, 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 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 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. 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

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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, 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 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 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, 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.

a larger organization in front of the news media. Vanguard 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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

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 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. 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

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 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 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

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 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.

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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

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 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. 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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.

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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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

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. 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, 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, 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 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 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 phone call with his own mother.

few occasions. We've never talked to politics, not really. We 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 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 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 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 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 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 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?

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. 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 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, 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,

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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,

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.

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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.