The Tesla Takedown movement’s “Global Day of Action” on Saturday was, to its credit, mostly peaceful. But that’s only if you don’t count the placard-waving, rainbow-draped protesters doing the electric slide outside a Tesla factory in Seattle as an assault on aesthetics.
Cringe scenes such as this played out in cities across America over the weekend. In Los Angeles, around 100 protesters, mostly middle-aged white people in REI gear, rallied outside a service center wielding signs such as “Save Democracy” and “No Fascist America.”
In Austin, at the same Tesla dealership where incendiary devices were found in the showroom last week, a similar demographic of protesters — truly, the entire movement appears to be made up of Portlandia extras — banged cowbells and shouted “hey hey, ho ho, Elon Musk has got to go!” They were so few that they stood in single file along the highway.
In Georgetown, approximately 100 people gathered to dance to disco music, shout at traffic, and cheer at the occasional beep of affirmation.
The Tesla Takedown “Global Day of Action,” organized by the Democratic Party-aligned group Indivisible, was intended to pressure Tesla CEO Elon Musk for his role leading the Department of Government Efficiency. And while the group was careful to differentiate its means from the arsonists and vandals who have taken part in a wave of attacks against Tesla in recent weeks, their rhetoric aligns.
“Elon Musk is destroying our democracy, and he’s using the fortune he built at Tesla to do it. We are taking action at Tesla to stop Musk’s illegal coup,” read an Indivisible event description for Saturday’s protest in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
New Jersey Indivisible organizer Natasha Purdum agreed, saying, “If we can drive that Tesla stock price down, we will hit him in the spot that it matters.”
Despite these grandiose goals, the Tesla Takedown movement didn’t deliver a spectacle large enough to move the political needle, let alone outlast Musk’s influence or cause him to back off DOGE. For Indivisible, founded by Democratic Party insiders Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg and funded by radical billionaires George Soros and Reid Hoffman, the “Global Day of Action” was an embarrassment, to say the least.
THE BONFIRE OF THE TESLAS: POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND THE LEFT
And for a Democratic Party still attempting to rebound from its humiliating 2024 defeat, the sheer piteousness of scenes like Seattle’s electric slide serves as a reminder of how deep they’ve journeyed into the wilderness. Indeed, it’s disconcerting to witness a once proud party appear so hapless and so delusional as to believe they were helping their cause with these rallies. Can they really not see themselves?
Their disconnect from reality has been on public display since Trump took office — shaking their canes outside the Treasury Department, sitting on their hands during Trump’s address to the joint session of Congress, et cetera. As much as conservatives can (and should) enjoy a sweet hit of schadenfreude, the total dysfunction of a major party in a two-party system isn’t good for democracy. It’s fun to see them lose, but it’s unsettling to see them electric slide into oblivion.