The recent wave of vandalism against Tesla cars and trucks is steeped in irony.
The people spray-painting, keying, and burning electric vehicles are left-wing haters of President Donald Trump and Tesla owner Elon Musk; many are explicit about it. But most of the cars are probably owned by people on the Left, too. I’d wager that there are hardly any Republicans among the vandals, perhaps none. So, the Democratic vandals are targeting their Democratic peers.
Anyone might choose to drive a Tesla, assuming they have the money to meet the hefty price tags, which range from just below $60,000 for a basic model up to $100,000 or more for Cybertrucks. For Democrats, they offer or, until recently, offered more than the simple allure of a stylish and high-functioning car. They allowed the driver to signal virtue unambiguously by showing everyone on the road he cared about the environment and also put considerable sums of money where his mouth was to display his climate credentials.
Those sums would, in a further irony, be greater had not Democratic presidents, first Barack Obama and then Joe Biden, chipped in $8,000 per Tesla in an effort to achieve their fatuous goal of displacing gasoline vehicles with electric vehicles (powered by coal-fired power stations).
So the sum is that the vandals, the climate alarmism that boosts Tesla sales, the subsidy pushers in the federal government, and the owner-victims are all on the Left. Fewer Republicans have the money to buy such expensive vehicles, and anyway, they don’t want to switch from their internal combustion engine. They can mostly stand aside and watch incendiary lefties attack each other.
One consequence is that Tesla owners now festoon their cars and trucks with bumper stickers bearing such slogans as, “I bought this car before we knew Elon was crazy,” and “Vintage Tesla, pre-madness edition.” The stickers serve two purposes, one boastful and the other appeasing. They signal that the owner is of a liberal and tolerant ilk, hates Musk and Trump, and is thus on the side of the angels (and the fire bombers). They are also a sort of defensive manifesto, implying to the vandals, “Don’t wreck my ride; I’m on your side.”
A further irony is that incinerating a row of Teslas or Tesla charging stations surely pumps more carbon dioxide and other acrid pollutants into the air than the vehicles would save if allowed to live out their working lives unmolested.
Ready for more ironies? One is that spray-painting swastikas is an odd way to suggest you are against Nazis, which is how many on the Left, and certainly the vandals, characterize Trump and Musk.
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Perhaps the final irony is that vandalism is an utterly unsympathetic form of protest, as repellent to the decent majority of people as, for example, staging a sit-down strike in the middle of a busy road to block commuter traffic. It is natural when faced with such people, whose other tactics include spray-painting or slashing works of art or gluing themselves to the tarmac of a city intersection, to muse not admirably but irresistibly about the feasibility of reinstituting corporal punishment.
That won’t happen. But there will be punishment, as there certainly should be. One hopes it will be salutary — and will sting.