If you haven’t heard already, John Deere workers recently went on strike. The corporate response was to bring in salaried employees and others to keep the factory running, which as you can imagine, has not exactly gone well. But according to the latest report, the situation got a lot worse after one of those employees drove their car into a striking UAW member.
Details are still scarce, so we’ll update this post if more information becomes available. However, according to Jonah Furman, a journalist covering the strike on the ground, the driver was a salaried Deere employee. Thankfully, Furman says the UAW member wasn’t seriously injured or killed.
As Furman points out, though, this isn’t a one-off incident. It’s happened several times at different strikes so far this year. It’s horrible any time someone attempts to murder someone else with their car, but it sounds like workers participating in the the Warrior Met Coal strike in Alabama have been targets of this particular type of violence. According to journalist Kim Kelly, there have been five separate car attacks that sent multiple people to the hospital.
There will probably be plenty of people who try to both-sides these incidents, but unless you’re an awful person who’s completely devoid of empathy, it’s hard to see how that makes any sense. “These people inconvenienced me, so I stabbed one of them a few times,” wouldn’t work as an excuse, but somehow it’s supposed to be different because they used a car?
The worst part is, in a lot of states, Republicans are actively pushing to make it completely legal to run people over. According to the New York Times, GOP lawmakers in 34 states have introduced more than 80 anti-protest bills so far this year. Several states even passed bills that make it legal to run people over as long as those people are exercising their First Amendment right to assemble when they get hit.
I still can’t believe we’re at a point where we’re arguing over whether or not it’s fine to try to kill people with your car, but I guess that’s 2021 for you. And if you disagree, sorry for taking such a lefty SJW stance like, “hurting people because you don’t like them is bad”?