Should We Mythologize Killdozer?

On Not Submitting to Injustice

By guest contributor TJ Martinell.

Earlier this month we marked the 20th anniversary of Marvin Heemeyer’s rampage through the town of Granby, Colorado. On June 4, 2004, using a customized bulldozer equipped with bulletproof metal plating which he had personally welded, Heemeyer was able to destroy several buildings unimpeded, and was so unstoppable against all available firepower that the state governor allegedly considered deploying Hellfire missiles.

We’ll never know how drastic the efforts would have been to stop him, as he inadvertently got his vehicle stuck in a hardware store and committed suicide inside of it.

Since then, Heemeyer has turned into a quasi-folk hero, particularly among libertarians, complete with funny memes and a faux Pixar Cars-style movie poster. According to the Killdozer legend, Granby resident Marvin Heemeyer was an ordinary man who was beaten down by corrupt elected officials and a bureaucracy intending to destroy his small business (he ran a muffler shop). Brought to his knees financially, in desperation, he built an invincible weapon through creative genius and the skill of his own hand. Rather than submit when cornered, he wrought vengeance upon those who had harmed him and then left this world on his own terms.

However, not everyone buys this tale. Among them is Scott Greer, host of the podcast Highly Respected.

On both his podcast and on Twitter, Greer argues that Heemeyer was an anti-social misanthropic who needlessly destroyed his own community and put people’s lives in danger; he didn’t die for a noble cause, and he therefore shouldn’t be celebrated or mythologized by people on the Right, especially since what he did had nothing to do with any right-wing issues.

So, who’s right?

I don’t think anyone is actually wrong. I see it as more of a case of confusion over what is being communicated. It’s a case of the dialectic colliding with rhetoric.

The first thing to keep in mind is that myths and folk legends are usually a far cry from their inspirations. The earliest tales of Robin Hood depicted him as the trickster that he probably was, not a noble soul who robbed the rich to feed the poor. The King Arthur of Thomas Malory’s legends (written in the late 15th century) probably bears little resemblance to the actual man.

To be sure, Greer makes excellent points. It can be dangerous to mythologize the wrong people or to believe false stories of them, as we’ve seen with Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and, of course, George Floyd.

However, there are two things to keep in mind with that. None of these men are known for what they did, but for what happened (or didn’t happen) to them and why they died. Also, the false narratives over their deaths have provoked severe damage to the country. It’s impossible to calculate the number of people who have been killed because of “Defund the Police.”

Whether it was deliberate or just happenstance, the fact that nobody was killed during Heemeyer’s rampage just makes the folk legend easier to sell. What Heemeyer did himself is a drop in the bucket compared to the property damage brought about by the 2020 riots following Floyd’s death. Furthermore, I’m not aware of any example of someone committing violence in a similar manner and claiming to have been inspired by Heemeyer to do so.

One of the reasons is that it’s not easy to replicate what he did. One of the driving forces behind the Killdozer legend is that he created an undeniably awesome invention. He spent more than a year all by himself customizing the bulldozer. This was not an impulsive act committed in the heat of passion; this required Noah-like perseverance to achieve. Right or wrong, it’s difficult not to admire his abilities in this regard.

Greer also highlights one of the controversies that led up to Heemeyer’s rampage: a dispute over an easement for a sewer line. Greer argues that Heemeyer was inspired to rampage over a relatively petty issue that could easily have been resolved.

I watched a documentary on the events leading up to June 4, 2004, and I would argue that it’s probably a little bit more complicated than that. Small-town politics are always insanely personal, and that personal nature often guides decision-making more than anything else. Simply read this column that I wrote more than 12 years ago about a city council I covered as a newspaper reporter, and you will get an idea of how that actually plays out.

I personally don’t have an opinion over whether Heemeyer was right or wrong regarding his spat over the property and zoning. I’m more inclined to say that there are plenty of guilty parties, and he was one of them.

At the same time, I doubt that anyone reading this would argue that there aren’t ordinary people being persecuted the way the Killdozer myth describes. I personally know of a man who started a small business and whose experience with local government has been very similar in nature to that found in the Killdozer myth. There are many more men who identify with the legend of Heemeyer, but they didn’t and won’t go his route because it goes against their sense of morality.

And here we get to the heart of the issue. A lot of decent people are frustrated at how their decency is exploited by all levels of government to treat them like dirt with zero fear of repercussions. It’s one thing to be harassed and pushed down by someone; it’s another thing to know that he does so because he knows that you won’t cross a line that he has no qualms crossing.

Killdozer is a catharsis for that frustration. As I wrote in a Substack essay about the TV show Firefly, people embrace myths not because they literally believe they’re true, but to give them hope. The challenge is to avoid bad myths that, wittingly or not, lead to hopelessness.

In online discussions surrounding Killdozer, one post mentioned the Sky King, a.k.a. 28-year-old Richard Russell, a Horizon Air employee who “hijacked” a De Havilland Canada Dash 8-400 in Seattle and flew it around the nearby area, despite having no flight experience, before crashing it on Ketron Island.

The legend around Russell is far easier to accept: that of a young white man kept down by affirmative action from ever achieving his hope of becoming a pilot, who dared to commandeer a plane and live that life that had until then only been a dream, knowing that doing so would ruin his life. But that one hour in the sky fulfilling a dream was preferable to decades of a living death.

Some might say that we should ignore Killdozer and embrace the Sky King, but Russell’s tale conveys a mood and sentiment very different from Heemeyer’s. Russell wasn’t seeking revenge, but fulfillment. He took his own life after his short flight rather than safely land it because he had concluded that there was no hope for his future beyond that time. It’s a compelling story that is both moving and bittersweet.

Killdozer, as celebrated, is intended to serve as an implied warning to government about what can happen when you push someone too far. Heemeyer showed what one regular man was capable of when that occurs, and we can only imagine how long he would have endured if his bulldozer hadn’t gotten stuck in that hardware store. When they finally got inside, they found weeks’ worth of provisions that could have sustained him for a long time.

Imagine being a local elected official in a town where Killdozer is openly praised and venerated, or having a constituent who has a photo of Killdozer framed and displayed inside his business. Call me overly optimistic, but you’re probably going to think twice before you make life hard for someone who admires such actions.

Now, people might say that this whole thing is pure revenge fantasy for people who lack the balls to do what Heemeyer did, but once more, that is missing the point. For those whose lives match the Killdozer myth, what other options do they have when they are pushed into a corner? All of those options may be peaceful, legal, and morally defensible, but they ultimately result in submission to injustice.

That’s exactly what we saw with the small business community following the 2020 lockdowns. How many decent people had their livelihoods destroyed over public policies rendered by bureaucracy, policies whose justifications we now know were completely made up? How many of them are going to exact Killdozer-style revenge on those responsible? Would the lockdowns have occurred or been as severe if the governments imposing them feared the possibility of Heemeyer copycats?

This is why discussing the facts around Heemeyer himself is moot. His actions only serve as a context to discuss a greater political and societal problem in which good people are held down by those in power who don’t fear them, and as a result grow only more emboldened and brazen in their behavior.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote the following on this dynamic:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If… if… We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more — we had no awareness of the real situation… We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

Regarding the Killdozer myth, I personally enjoy it mainly for the memes. I don’t openly praise Marvin Heemeyer or see him as a hero, but I don’t go out of my way to argue with people about him either way.

As for whether the Killdozer mythology is harmful or not, I’d say it really depends on what it leads to. If all it amounts to among adherents is annual social media posts and more funny memes, I see neither harm nor foul.

What I do know is that our government doesn’t fear doing its people dirty. Until a meaningful solution to that is found, the Killdozer legend will be as indestructible as the vehicle Heemeyer climbed into on June 4, 2004.