Anti-Tesla Terrorism

National Review Online

Monday, March 24, 2025

 

Thanks to his efforts to take a chain saw to the federal government through DOGE, Elon Musk has attracted a level of ire from left-wing activists that now rivals their level of hatred for President Trump.

 

Over the past several weeks there have been a string of attacks on Tesla throughout the country. In some cases, relatively smaller-scale vandalism has been directed at individual Tesla owners, such as making scratches on their parked cars. But other actors have gone much further. Last week, the Department of Justice announced charges against three individuals. One, who was armed with an AR-15, threw eight Molotov cocktails at a Tesla dealership in Salem, Ore. In Loveland, Colo., another defendant who tried to light Teslas on fire was arrested and found with other bomb-making materials. In Charleston, S.C., somebody was charged with lighting Tesla charging stations on fire with Molotov cocktails after writing profane anti-Trump messages in the area. Separate from the DOJ announcement, in Las Vegas, five Teslas were set on fire at a repair shop.

 

While it is, of course, okay for Americans who are upset about Musk to refuse to buy Teslas, or to convince their friends and neighbors not to buy Teslas, there is no place for any form of violence. It was appropriate for Attorney General Pam Bondi to describe what is happening as a “wave of domestic terrorism” in the sense that the perpetrators are resorting to violence to achieve a political or ideological goal; they want to convince people not to buy Teslas and to do enough damage to Musk’s company that it drives him out of public life. It is worth noting that Molotov cocktails, while crude, have been held to be “destructive devices” under federal law and are thus in the category of bombs and other incendiary devices that are staples of terrorism prosecutions — and their use is punished accordingly.

 

The events are deeply revealing. While Democrats will often warn about the rising threat of right-wing violence, these attacks are more evidence of how often left-wing activists turn to violence. In 2020, the George Floyd riots were excused by prominent Democrats and other leftists, who pushed the idea that property destruction didn’t count as violence. When Luigi Mangione gunned down an insurance executive last December, he became a cult hero among left-wingers, while even elected Democrats tried to “contextualize” his act of homicide by talking about the supposed abuses of the health insurance industry.

 

The full-on assault against Tesla also exposes the emptiness of progressive warnings of the looming climate crisis. In the administrations of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Democrats pursued a mix of subsidies and mandates in an attempt to persuade and cajole car manufacturers and consumers to move from gas to electric vehicles. With Tesla, Musk has accomplished an extraordinary feat — he has created an electric vehicle that lots of consumers actually want to drive. Just a few short years ago, progressives who had a bit of money would proudly drive Teslas to signal how much they cared about the environment. Even socialist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez purchased one. And yet, because Musk now has the wrong politics, progressives are desperately trying to convince people not to purchase the cars, or to sell the ones they have. Just as with nuclear power, which is by far the most proven and efficient form of non-carbon energy, progressives are again showing that they aren’t so serious about the climate apocalypse when this supposedly existential priority conflicts with some other ideological predilection.

 

We applaud the DOJ for promising to prosecute those who are violently attacking Tesla to the full extent of the law.