Burn Baby Burn, Elon Inferno!

In the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of… combusting green autos?

It seems another wacky instance of horseshoe theory has emerged in our politically turbulent times. The hard left and hard right firmly shake hands: lithium-ion-battery-powered cars deserve a good grilling. How do you want the off-white Cybertruck that just cut you off from the right lane? Medium-rare, with a side of whipped cobalt lithium oxide?

The left has snapped out of the fatalist funk inflicted by Trump’s re-election to get back to the business of resistance. Pudendum-pink-ushankas are out; conflagrant street demonstration is in. Or, maybe it’s more accurate to say vandalistic pyromania is renascent, the charring strategy always a snug fit in the leftist toolbelt.

The last time we witnessed such wanton destruction was the hot summer of Floyd, when everything from police precincts to your local CVS was burned in vengeful memory of a pill-popping serial criminal. Fires were kindled to testify that a black man died unjustly by martial hands. Now flames are sparked in defense of middle-age career bureaucrats offered generous packing severance.

Across the country, from urban cores to far-flung weeded locales, Teslas are under assault. The current-run car—and its N64-graphic all-terrain truck model—is a gaping target for MSNBC bingers enraged over a neurodivergent African immigrant assisting the President in shaving the federal workforce. If Elon Musk thought his adopted country’s capitalist mores precluded violent political demonstration, he is sadly mistaken. Like the calloused immigrant of old, who blithely encroaches on the lazing nativist’s commercial ken, Musk is getting an object lesson in populist protectionism. His whelk stall isn’t being ransacked; his nifty ionic rides are getting the bat-and-club beatdown.

Tesla owners are reporting all manner of accostment, from random insults spewed to their face, to key-cutting, to corpulent men riding Rascals as battering rams into passenger doors, to being run down like scurrying road rodents. One bitter man set ablaze a few idling Musk-mobiles at a Las Vegas garage—probably fresh off losing his DOGE buyout at the Bellagio craps table.

Dealerships aren’t immune to attack, nor are they safeguarded by U.S. borders. During one March Saturday, “over 200” Tesla Takedown protests took place across varying Western countries. (The 200 number likely comes from a press release from organizers who have zero incentive to inflate their cause.) Most of these jacquerie jamborees were the usual leftist play-theater: punning signs, inane chanting with spoonfed lines, coordinated dance numbers, crudely crayoned sonnenrads. A few featured assault, such as a peeved geriatric clipping a pro-Musk counter-demonstrator at an Idaho event.

For the moment, the eruptions of violence towards Teslas is one-off, not coordinated, isolated to singular assailants out of temper over Musk corporate-raiding the federal fisc. These sporadic “absurd revolt[s] against what exists,” to borrow Del Noce’s phrase, may be aimed at one man, but have dispersed damage. And the attackers refuse to discriminate—likely due to the d-word being a mortal sin in the liberal imagination. Progressive Tesla owners have resorted to plastering their electro-buggies with homemade stickers saying they bought before Elon went full bureau-butcher. These embattled leftists, so righteous in minding their emissions, are getting a psych clinic in how boiling blood trumps the cool brain, even if the spike-haired feminist swinging a crowbar at their side mirror is a ballot ally.

But will treating Teslas like so many Matchbox cars in garbage disposal ward DOGE off its pink-slip spree? It’s a bootless question. The car-crash campaign is symbolic, not effective; a cathartic bellow over the fact that, not deputy secretaries for obscure federal departments are being lustrated, but that Democrats no longer hold the West Wing.

This resort to “motiveless terror” is a return to form for the American left. When conservatives lose elections, they invent all manner of theories, fantasies, and fanfiction to reconcile their side’s failure, and cling to their pet theory like the Gospel. Rarely is violent revolt hatched—January 6th an exception to the staid rule. The right’s high-prole vocations dissuade them from blocking off thoroughfares and ringing klaxons on a Tuesday night. Those hours are reserved for the real stuff of life: mowing the lawn, downing a microwaved dinner, slurping a few domestics during Fox News primetime, ordering the kids to bed for some quality sheet time with the wife.

The left is ideologically incapable of compunction over trivial property damage. If the right is animated by high ideals that flow into material goods, the left’s impetus to action is inverted: dispatching with mere material in service to an abstraction. Every Tesla owner has already forked over quid to Musk’s sprawling business empire. Slashing the tires of the Model Y charging in the Wegmans parking lot doesn’t sap a red cent from the billionaire’s bottom line. “The revolution revolutionizes the counter revolution,” said Régis Debray. The more Musk and co. are pushed by lashing leftists, the greater chance Pam Bondi, attired in a pink blazer and stilettos, will televise the arrest of a college sophomore who tossed a pebble at a Tesla windshield.

So our national temperature ratchets unceasingly up. Our days of rage show no sign of abating. And Exxon Mobil shareholders quietly applaud their competition being menaced out of the marketplace.