When White Supremacy Gets Road Rage

The Dodge Challenger is a muscle car, capable of accelerating from zero to sixty in 3.9 seconds and achieving a top speed in excess of two hundred miles per hour, all courtesy of a supercharged engine that starts at 305 horsepower. This is the car that twenty-year-old James Alex Fields chose to drive from Ohio to a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the one he accelerated into a throng of jubilating counter-protesters, killing a thirty-two-year-old paralegal and injuring at least nineteen others. Then, while people stumbled and lay wounded in the street, he put the car in reverse and floored the gas again.

In America, cars have been the weapon of choice in mass killings perpetrated by people suffering from mental illness or under the influence of narcotics (San Diego in 1995, Venice Beach in 2013, New York City earlier this year), and for terrorist attacks motivated by Islamic extremism (the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 2006, and Ohio State University in 2016). But as far as I can tell, Charlottesville marked the first time in recent recorded history that a citizen with American hate in his heart intentionally used a car in an act of domestic terrorism—one in which the aim was to kill for reasons not of madness or addiction, but ideology.

“This is usually in Western countries, responsible for more than half of the terrorism-related deaths in the West. According to the , this increase is attributable to that fact that ISIS has explicitly called on supporters to use cars as weapons. “The ISIS call, as well as that of other terrorist groups, has been to use what you have on hand,” John Miller, deputy commissioner of intelligence for New York police, told CNN in 2015. “And that means if you can make a bomb, you’re a bomber. But if you can’t, use a gun. And if you can’t find a gun, use a knife. And if you can’t find a knife, use a car.”