Yes, Attacking Teslas is Self-Defense

I’ll say it in a way that is as legally unobjectionable as I can manage: I do not endorse violence but I understand why it’s happening.

 I’m not even talking about the type of violence that harms people. When people feel politically powerless in America it’s common for them to lash out at objects. Things and people are equal concepts under both capitalism and the definition of the word “violence,” which is why capitalists love that word. The use of force to inflict harm on people—or things.

 But most people don’t want to harm other people. A lot do, but most don’t. In protest, the violence is rarely random—the protest strikes at what they perceive to be causing them harm. If not individuals then institutions, or power structures, and their symbols. That’s the difference between far-right groups like the Proud Boys and, for example, the dreaded Antifa. Leftist violence often means overturned police cars and vandalized statues. Symbols of authority and control. 

For the Proud Boys, their anger very much is other human beings. Brown colored people, or people who look too gay. When the far right rioted in 2024 to the glee of Tommy Robinson and his fan abroad Elon Musk, it was immigrant businesses and homes that burned.

 Today, in the United States, it’s Teslas being incinerated.

 When you break property in protest it’s not the property itself that you care about breaking. The right and their allies and pawns will have you believe these are just angry toddlers smashing stuff because they’re having a tantrum. That analogy actually much better describes what the Trump administration and DOGE are doing. The violence here is not indiscriminate and its participants aren’t random.

 Attacking these ass-ugly cars is so far the only thing that has ever been proven to land a blow against the richest human being who has ever lived, and one of the most powerful. A man who has made it his singular laser-focused mission to destroy lives.

 This is self-defense.

 Allegedly, “3 out of 4 people who have been arrested for vandalizing Teslas are transgender or nonbinary.” That’s unconfirmed at the time of this writing but whether true or not Elon Musk has taken this revelation as proof that transgender people are overwhelmingly predisposed to violence.

“That is simply a fact,” states the man who cannot present a single academic source to prove the theory he invented in his ketamine-melted brain.

 The thing is, I wouldn’t be surprised if a statistically abnormal number of transgender people were involved in smashing, vandalizing, picketing, or just flipping off Teslas. This is a class of people he has repeatedly vowed to scour from the face of the planet he believes he owns. Not because they have done anything to harm him, but because he has taken unfathomable personal insult at their existence and especially the fact that one of his own offspring is one.

Musk is a eugenicist who sees himself as the beneficiary of a perfect genome. (God knows how—his father is a monster and a degenerate for reasons both known and suspected). One of his ludicrous grand plans to direct our species’ future is to repopulate humanity with his own perfect descendants, and it’s an open secret that his children are all or mostly the product of IVF and gene tampering to sire only boys, who he hopes will grow into future sex pests.

 Only two of his children are known to have been born female, and he has at least 14 kids, almost definitely more. Maybe many more.

 I can only imagine the sense of not just insult but betrayal that he felt when one of his perfect boys began identifying as she. As Musk told Jordan Peterson, it was the exact equivalent of his child dying. If one of his clones could rebel, what might that say about his own perfection?

 Musk has made it abundantly clear that certain minority groups are within his scope for disposal, and when they refuse to go quietly he has the audacity to opine about their violent nature.

 Let’s talk about violence, shall we?

The 21^st century has already been embroiled in immense violence: Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, there are of course many others. But let us, as Musk and his allies want us to, equate destruction of all kinds with bloodshed. What Musk is doing, and being empowered and encouraged by the President of the United States to do, is an act of violence that we would surely have to put right up there somewhere beside those others.

 He has unilaterally eliminated foreign aid that hundreds of thousands of people count on for their survival, and if you don’t care about that, he’s ramping up efforts to do the same with domestic aid. For a supposed man of admiration for scientific endeavor, he’s taking particular efforts to purge the nation of its museums and libraries. He is dismantling the entire postal service of the United States. He is removing hundreds of thousands of people from the workforce and dumping them on the social security system that he also plans to eliminate.

 But how dare you run your fucking keys along the side of my Model Y?

 No, this is self-defense. 

I don’t expect a single Musk ally to agree with my assessment. They will say it’s the moral equivalent of cockroaches defending themselves against a can of Raid. The foreigners who will die (good riddance), the sick and elderly who will die (parasites), the poor who will die (should have learned to code), the education and knowledge that will be lost to the next generation (they have Grok). If you’re one of the people cheering this then I don’t care what you have to say.

 It's those supposed leftists and liberals and Democrats and centrists and aisle-reachers and capitulators who put the safety of inanimate cars above the lives of human beings that I cannot abide.

 And we absolutely cannot equate violence against people with violence against things. No working persons’ lives are being destroyed by the act of violence against cars. Dealerships are insured. Private vehicles are insured. Do I think it’s right to spraypaint or smash up someone’s vehicle in the parking lot of a Wegmans for them to find when they emerge laden with groceries? No, not really. But it’s not violence against them. For those who actually do see their Tesla as an extension of themselves, I’m very happy to disavow them of that delusion.

 Let’s be perfectly clear: The only people who have ever been killed or injured in a Tesla were harmed through the course of operating the vehicle as instructed.

 Fine: Also that one guy who packed it full of fireworks and then shot himself.

 And I know Brianna Wu is practically Republican Lite already anyway but Jesus Christ: 

 Here’s someone who will tirade quite rightly all day about the direct threat to her life that the Musk/Trump administration poses (even if her definition of real transgender is so narrow that only she and Caitlyn Jenner fit easily through it) but God forbid someone in her community who feels as scared and desperate as she allegedly does should go as far as to chuck a Molotov at an empty car that doesn’t even belong to anyone let alone hurt anyone.

 I don’t think it’s a good idea to set Teslas on fire, but only because an electric car fire is incredibly dangerous. Do I think a minority scared for their survival under a Musk/Trump dictatorship who sets fire to an empty Tesla should be brought up on domestic terrorism charges? Fuck no. A Tesla doesn’t need much help lighting on fire anyway, and the only person who has ever killed anyone with an exploding Tesla is, technically, Elon Musk

 I reiterate: I don’t encourage this stuff. But you know why I don’t condemn it?

 It is literally the only thing that has ever been known to hurt him.

 We have buried ourselves in such a hole with capitalism that capital alone can literally immunize a man from any and all of the checks and balances we ludicrously pretend exist. Laws won’t stop him. If people tell the truth about his fraud, he will sue them. If they win the lawsuit due to truth being an absolute defense against libel, he will either pay the fine or not (see: laws won’t stop him) and then sue them again until they are bankrupt. If enough people protest, he will buy whoever publishes them, fire them and then sue them. 

All the while his wealth continued to explode while his cars continued to explode and his rockets continued to explode. The inertia of his meme stock went up and up fueled by lies about self-driving cars and Mars colonies until he had enough money to buy the country and then he became seemingly unstoppable. 

Then someone smashed up a Tesla and he fucking flinched. 

The air fell silent. Someone tried it again. Tesla stocks, which had been rocketing upward since the election at an 89 degree angle, stuttered, and then began doing this. 

 Elon Musk went on Hannity looking visibly afraid in a notable change of mood from smug-ass sunglasses-and-chains demeanor he presented at CPAC just last month when he told the underprivileged to go fuck themselves, he was coming for their social security and there was nothing they could do about it. 

 He had to ask the fucking President to do him a favour and record an embarrassing Tesla advertisement on the White House lawn in an effort to boost his stock, a humiliating fiasco for both Musk and Trump, the latter of whom was forced to reveal himself as the pathetic used car salesman he is accused of being. Trump’s own popularity took a hit from this and the stunt also failed. Musk’s wealth continued to plummet. 

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had a go, making a deeply unethical plea in his official capacity for people to buy Tesla stock. He might as well have tied another anchor to the sinking stock. 

So for the critics of Musk and DOGE and the oligarch takeover of America, a takeover that looks to expand to the rest of the world if it isn’t stopped, if you cry and wail about these people’s unchecked power but you still draw the line at damaging objects, I ask you: What exactly is your proposal? 

We have watched for decades as men like Musk and the constellation of billionaires around him continued to grow stronger, break the containment of law and regulation, foolishly wringing our hands and telling ourselves that there is an upper limit to the power that they could amass. That there was something more powerful than capital, in a system literally called capitalism, that could arrest an individual’s power at some certain point. 

There is not. Attacking his capital is the only possible way to attack Musk. There might be another way to do that without blowing up cars, but nobody has figured out what that might be, and right now that’s the only thing with any proven results. 

If you have a better idea, then try it. Until then, people are going to keep trying this. Forgive me as I continue not to clutch a single pearl about it.

Anyway, don’t firebomb a Tesla, or commit crimes of any type, is my official legally binding recommendation. If you’d like to protest while protesting is still legal (for the time being it still is, unless it has anything to do with Palestine) then you might like to show up to some of the worldwide Tesla protests happening this weekend. Be careful, sometimes these things just explode on their own.