I just watched two videos, one after the other, that brought an idea so sharply into my mind it was as if providence herself inspired the thought. The first video was an interview on The Roads With Beau with Kim Kelly on her months of journalistic work with the striking miners at Warrior Met Coal. It’s a great interview, full of talk about worker cooperatives, mutual aid, unions, and other great stuff going down in the rural deep south.
One thing in particular stood out about Kelly’s experience. The striking miners are under constant threat of vehicular attacks: trucks and cars pulling off the highway and driving into picketing workers. There were three vehicular attacks on three consecutive days. Several people have been injured, including a husband and wife with the ironic family name “Pinkerton”.
It brings to mind the terrorist attack at the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville that killed Heather Heyer and injured 35 others. This was just one instance of a larger trend: there were 104 vehicle ramming incidents over the course of the George Floyd protests, to the point it became a meme in far-right and white supremacist circles. Various state legislatures have proposed granting legal immunity to drivers who run over protesters. One such proposal actually passed in Oklahoma.
