“Five Tesla vehicles were damaged when a fire was started at a Tesla Collision Center in Las Vegas on Tuesday morning,” reports Megan Forrester for ABC News, “the latest in a wave of incidents aimed at the electric vehicle company, according to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.”
Described as a “targeted attack” by the police, these acts of outrageous property destruction are not confined to the Silver State. Occurring all over the country, these are obvious political attacks on Elon Musk, who turned against Democrats by supporting Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run, and who has since led the DOGE effort to confront federal government “waste, fraud and abuse.”
“Violence against Tesla dealerships will be labeled domestic terrorism,” Reuters quotes President Trump, “and perpetrators will ‘go through hell.’”
As of last week, Tesla stock had plunged 50 percent since December, but “[s]hares of the automaker closed nearly 4% higher on Tuesday,” continues the Reuters report, “rebounding from the biggest one-day fall in four-and-a half years the previous day, after the president appeared with Musk at the White House to select a new Tesla for his staff to use.”
“House DOGE Subcommittee Chairwoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.,” USA Today told us last week, “announced that she and her committee colleagues had sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel asking for an investigation into the ‘organized’ attacks against Musk, Tesla and the DOGE effort.”
These spectacular destructions of private property are indeed terroristic. Anarchists used to use a similar approach over a century ago, calling the technique “propaganda by the deed.”
But the tide of public opinion turned against the anarchists, and I suspect it will turn strongly against today’s saboteurs as well.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Krea and Firefly
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4 replies on “Propaganda by the Deed”
But just think of how many more Teslas would be burned if USAID were still channeling funds towards people of the sorts who do such things!
Statistically speaking, Tesla owners tend to have been especially committed to the Democratic Party — voting for its candidates, donating money to it, &c.. So the vandalization of Teslas reminds me of the joke about putting pro-Trump bumper-stickers on the cars of people arriving to protest against Trump, to watch them then destroy each other’s car.
Then there was a senator who traded in his Tesla for a gasoline-powered vehicle. Green energy isn’t good for him anymore? I have to ask if SpaceX successful return of astronauts from the space station wasn’t the last straw for Dems. What do they do now?
If one recognizes the mainstream narrative as an evolving religious doctrine with little rationality though much fervor, then the behaviors of people who once bought EVs and now sell them or who previously insisted that we were inferior for not having bought them but now call for them to be burned [see one comment below] become understandable, albeit perverse.
Burn them all!