Over the past several months hundreds, if not thousands, of acts of violence have been perpetrated against the Tesla Corporation and its creator, Elon Musk. Tesla auto dealerships have been torched and vandalized and thousands of individually owned Tesla automobiles have been vandalized and defaced. Literally thousands of Tesla cars have been damaged or defaced with graffiti condemning Elon Musk as a Nazi or the car as a “Swasticar.”
The irony here is that until very recently Elon Musk was a “darling” of the left because of how environmentally friendly Tesla cars were. Teslas had become what Volvos became in the 1960s, the trendy car of the “touchy-feely” left.
Now, Elon Musk has become an arch-villain of the left. Why? First, Musk became the driving force behind the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) which has been the instrument used by the Trump Administration to expose mind-boggling waste in federal government expenditures.
Second, Elon Musk bought X, formerly known as Twitter, thus severely limiting the Biden Administration’s ability to continue censoring social media of conservative speech. Many people believe that without Musk having purchased Twitter, and making public the manifest attempts to exercise censorship by the Biden Administration, President Trump would not have won the 2024 election.
Whatever is motivating the manifest animosity toward Mr. Musk, the violent expression of that opposition to Mr. Musk is both illegal and profoundly disturbing. This nationwide outburst of violence is yet one more disturbing evidence that increasing segments of the American population have rejected the rule of law and embraced violence as a legitimate alternative.
This societal slide into the mainstreaming of violence as legitimate political speech has been gathering force and metastasizing for decades. The violence generated in conjunction with the “Black Lives Matter” movement in 2020 illustrated the exponential growth in the acceptance of violence as legitimate political expression. The groundswell of popular support for alleged New York assassin Luigi Mangione and death threats against U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi for seeking the death penalty for Mangione underscores the extent to which the acceptance of politically motivated violence has poisoned our culture.
