It's the engineer in me. Anyone in a crowd that blocks a street is really asking for trouble and has no business complaining when the sh!t hits the fan and a motorist uses the street the way it was designed to be used.
The way the press first reported it, it was if he'd driven through a taped-off protest area or up onto the sidewalk. Then when I saw the video, it wasn't that at all... the protesters were in the street where they had no business to be, and he did not jump up on the sidewalk.
It doesn't matter if he was a bigot or not- he had a right to use the street as it was designed to be used, unmolested, but every reason to expect that an Antifa and BLM crowd would beat the hell out of him if they could catch him. Could indeed be an engineer thing, that's the way I see it, too.
Even after a ball game lets out and people flood the streets to get to their cars, they make way for vehicles. Of course after a ball game the interesting thing is fans leaving the stadium don't carry baseball bats because they aren't planning on attacking the other team's fans, nor do they expect the opposing fans to attack them. Cardinals fans don't travel to Chicago to heckle Cubs fans at Cubs rallies, and Cubs fans don't travel to St. Louis to heckle Cards fans. Why? Because it's rude, and even among friends you don't ask for trouble. Do unto others as you'd have them do to you. Decades of rivalry, no soccer field style bloodshed.
What idiot issues permits for political groups that oppose each other- particularly when one or both of them have a reputation for violence -to protest on the same day ... except someone who doesn't care about their police force and wants violence to break out?