The Idiocy of the Tesla Attacks
The Idiocy of the Tesla Attacks
Here is a big applause line on a recent show by late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel: “Tesla stock is way down—almost disastrously so.” After the cheers died down, he continued: “People have been vandalizing Tesla vehicles”—speaking of a spate of incidents of people keying cars, scratching swastikas, and physically harassing or assaulting drivers. Kimmel then stared into the camera and said sarcastically: “Please don’t vandalize. Don’t ever vandalize Tesla vehicles.” This elicited huge laughs. Isn’t it hilarious?
News clips of Tesla dealerships and Cybertrucks burning from arson attacks evoked claps and whoops from the audience of the satirical news program The Daily Show. “Police say the attacker used Molotov cocktails,” the newsman in the clip intoned to more ecstatic shouts. “Tesla Cybertrucks were set on fire in Kansas City, and earlier this month, shots fired at a Tesla dealership in Oregon.” Footage of a bullet hole in a shop window drew enthusiastic applause and hurrahs. After the clip ended, the host said, “Wow, you guys like petty acts of domestic terrorism, huh? Cool.” More cheers and laughs erupted.
Why are Americans hatefully destroying fellow Americans’ American-made electric vehicles while American celebrities goad American audiences into cheering for it and whistling for more? What are we doing to ourselves, and why?
A few short months ago, the Tesla logo symbolized an environmentally friendly future, a shift away from oil dependency, a path to combating climate change. Driving one signaled that you might be a supporter of these causes and leftism in general. But virtually overnight, leftists have branded Tesla as a symbol of evil. It is now a lightning rod for their rage and propensity to destroy.
Why the sudden transformation from love to hate? The story of this swift metamorphosis profoundly illuminates some lessons we all need to learn—about our world and about ourselves.
How to Waste a Trillion Bucks
What fuels these flames of leftist outrage? Surprise, surprise—it’s Donald Trump. Their specific gripe concerns Tesla founder Elon Musk’s efforts on the president’s behalf to eliminate government waste and fraud.
The members of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are the bureaucratic equivalent of superheroes. They are fearlessly facing down the bloated federal leviathan, whacking away at its $2 trillion deficit in the shadow of a $36.6 trillion national debt. Many people realize that the debt has become a threat to America’s national security. This late and desperate effort to root out government waste and save America from bankruptcy is incredibly important and unquestionably noble. It is crucial for even the possibility of the nation’s long-term survival.
Consider: The Treasury Department estimates that the federal government is headed toward a record deficit this year. A breakdown of spending during the first five months of fiscal year 2025 shows that Social Security costs are up $38 billion because of more beneficiaries and higher cost of living; Medicare is up $20 billion because of increased enrollment; Medicaid is up $15 billion due to rising costs; military spending is up $27 billion due to international conflicts.
But the biggest single increase in those five months over the same period from last year was interest payments on America’s ballooning national debt: These were up $44 billion. They’re becoming the fastest-growing part of the federal budget. And the national debt keeps climbing: The Congressional Budget Office expects it to grow by $23 trillion in the coming decade—approaching $60 trillion.
This is insanity. It cannot and simply will not continue. So, if you’re concerned about the damage done by government cuts, think of the catastrophe that would result from government collapse.
doge aims to erase $1 trillion of the federal deficit by cutting federal spending by 15 percent. “Our goal is to reduce the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day, every day, seven days a week,” Musk said in a March 27 Fox News interview, alongside seven members of his team. “And so far, we are succeeding.”
The reality is, even a $1 trillion cut is not nearly enough. It merely slows the rate of sinking deeper into nation-destroying debt.
Still, what doge is trimming is astonishing. Four billion dollars a day. “We routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more—casually,” Musk said. He cited one example of a government survey that the average businessman could have easily used Survey Monkey to create for about $10,000; it cost taxpayers nearly $1 billion. And the survey results weren’t even used.
The doge team members described more head-shaking examples: 15 million “living” individuals on the Social Security rolls who are aged 120 or older; 4.6 million government-issued credit cards for 2.4 million employees; systemic vulnerabilities that cost billions, such as 40 percent of calls to Social Security phone centers coming from crooks impersonating retirees and stealing money; redundant workers; outdated software systems; and on and on.
Every day, doge announces more outrageous examples of taxpayer money being dumped into preposterous projects, squandered by politicians or stolen by fraudsters: $333 million in loans dished out to 1,600 suspiciously spry “borrowers” over 157 years old; $312 million in covid relief checks sent to 47,000 kids under age 11 who somehow qualified as small business owners; $1.5 million spent on a “voter confidence” conference held in Liberia complete with luxury catering; $600,000 dumped into a mysterious consulting contract for a firm that exists only as a post office box in Delaware; $397,000 shoveled into a “queer farmers’ seed saving symposium” in Oregon featuring artisanal compost workshops.
The scale of federal bloat, corruption and rot being exposed is ludicrous. The more that is uncovered, the clearer becomes a truth that, on some level, we already knew: Our government is far bulkier and more expensive than need be. It is doing a lot that it has no business doing—to the point that it threatens the nation’s future! (sidebar, “Rightsized Government”).
Scratching the Surface of Sickness
The Trump administration has been taking cues from doge to target federal programs and agencies to downsize or eliminate. On March 14, Trump’s executive order “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy” put seven small agencies on the chopping block. A Daily Wire investigation gave a jaw-dropping peek into one of them: the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.
This agency is supposed to help the economy by resolving disputes that threaten the free flow of commerce. In reality, it “seemed, quite clearly, to exist for the benefit of those on its payroll, and not much else.” The Daily Wire called it “a real-life caricature of all the excesses that the Department of Government Efficiency has alleged take place in government.” One top official went on an all-expenses paid “business” trip to Italy and Switzerland, where she conducted a business meeting—over video chat. Another “used a ‘recreation and reception fund’ to order champagne and $200 coasters for his office, and to purchase artwork painted by his wife.” Like decadent monarchs in a crumbling empire, officials adorned their halls with self-commissioned portraits, squandered public funds on endless indulgences, offered lavish positions to unqualified friends and family—and did nothing for the country.
Forget about being shut down—some of these people need to be in jail for embezzlement. Such revelations are maddening and embarrassing.
doge is only scratching the surface, but everywhere it scratches, this is the kind of rot it finds.
It brings to mind an end-time prophecy about the modern descendants of ancient Israel, which include the Americans: “Alas, sinful nation, A people laden with iniquity, A brood of evildoers, Children who are corrupters! They have forsaken the Lord, They have provoked to anger The Holy One of Israel, They have turned away backward,” the Prophet Isaiah wrote. “… The whole head is sick, And the whole heart faints. From the sole of the foot even to the head, There is no soundness in it, But wounds and bruises and putrefying sores …” (Isaiah 1:4-6; New King James Version).
doge is uncovering sickness in America’s head—its leadership and government: wide-scale negligence, squandering, misappropriation, purloining, lavishness, graft, deceit, and throwing money at myriad ludicrous and even perverted causes. It’s like a brain cancer on a national scale.
Every American should be deeply grateful for this effort to make the government accountable to the people—the entire premise on which America was founded. Yes, it can be painful to diagnose and verify that your country is so deeply diseased. But recognizing the truth provides the only hope for even the possibility of survival!
In undertaking such a mammoth task, doge is certain to make mistakes. They are trying to avoid them, operating “with a scalpel, not a hatchet,” as they say, and correcting them quickly when they happen. But to kill the entire operation to prevent mistakes would keep the government and the nation on course for its own demise.
Still, crowds of vandals, politicians and television audiences are upset that someone is trying to curb the waste and corruption. They are indignant over government agencies being downsized and eliminated. They are angered that federal employees are being fired (even though the number amounts to less than one sixth of 1 percent of the federal workforce). They believe the government needs to remain just as vast and corpulent as it is.
Such thinking is encouraged by leftist, socialist and Communist-minded influencers who hate Donald Trump and the principle of returning power back to “we the people.” Several judges, using dubious legal authority, have blocked doge initiatives, demanding that fired employees be reinstated, restricting access to data, ordering funds on canceled contracts to be paid. Mainstream and other left-leaning news media coverage of doge’s activities is mostly negative. They depict the team as unruly, shoot-from-the-hip cowboys, they exaggerate claims of legitimate benefits being slashed, and they frame any reduction in government services as ruinous.
An untold number of people in the country have come under the sway of this thinking—to the point where they want to see Musk suffer for what he is doing to expose and eradicate the corruption. They are cheering the destruction of one of his companies, and in some cases, committing violent acts against it.
This is sickness in the body of the nation, down to the sole of the foot!
This Is Irrational
The “Tesla Takedown” movement peaked with over 200 protests on March 29 during a “Global Day of Action.” It aimed to ruin Tesla by encouraging people to divest from the company, sell their vehicles, and even engage in destructive acts. The campaign’s website, teslatakedown.com, featured inflammatory posts and accusations tying Musk to Nazism.
Texas Democrat Rep. Jasmine Crockett said she wants to see Musk “taken down” on a livestream. Former New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman labeled Musk a thief and a Nazi on cnn. Lincoln Project cofounder Rick Wilson wrote an article titled “Kill Tesla, Save the Country” that accused Tesla of financially backing fascism. The movement turned violent, with at least 80 reported cases of vandalism, arson and attacks on vehicles and infrastructure across the country. A doxing website published Tesla owners’ personal information and encouraged “creative expressions of protest” with a Molotov cocktail cursor on its map.
Tesla’s stock lost nearly half its value from a December 2024 high to the start of April. Minnesota governor and former Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz mocked the drop at a town hall—despite the fact that his state holds 1.6 million Tesla shares in its retirement fund, which supports public workers like teachers and first responders, many of whom are loyal Democrats. Tesla’s stock slump cost that state fund alone an estimated $384 million—not because the quality of Tesla decreased, but because leftists attacked it.
Protesting the cleanup of government fraud and waste reflects infirm thinking. Protesting by trying to tank an American car manufacturer because of an ideological disagreement with its ceo is a more advanced state of disease. But protesting by acts of intimidation, vandalism, sabotage, violence and destruction is truly sick!
Just yesterday it seems, driving a Tesla meant you were helping combat the civilizational threat of global warming. But today, you must destroy Tesla to combat the even bigger civilizational threat of … trimming bureaucratic bloat. It defies logic.
And the way to “solve” this “problem” is to spray-paint Nazi symbols on the vehicles of complete strangers—people who may actually be fellow leftists who bought those vehicles to try to save the planet. This is truly bonkers.
Unless you are literally a Communist Party USA member or a government employee on the take, who would be genuinely upset at doge’s labors? There is plenty of evidence that many of the protests were not spontaneous outbursts but campaigns that were contrived, organized and funded by elites with larger, more overtly Communist goals in mind. Political money certainly could have sparked and fueled the fire. But luckily for the left, they have a great many devotees who live by emotion and impulse and can be led by the nose into all manner of inanity.
The same nonsensical Tesla-hatred piggybacked atop already fervid anti-Trumpism and rising anti-Americanism globally. London saw demonstrators outside a Tesla showroom on the March 29 “Day of Action” accusing Musk of supporting fascism. Protests popped up in Finland, Norway, France and other European nations. “Tesla Takedown” also took hold in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, where a Montreal dealership was vandalized with pink paint. Why these dissidents are revolting against Musk’s efforts to cut federal waste in the U.S. is truly a mystery.
The whole episode is a vivid example of how illogical, how inconsistent, how self-defeating the beliefs and actions of the left can be. Here they have ensnared themselves in a self-contradictory web of ideological fervor, environmental hypocrisy, anti-capitalist sentiment, socialist zeal, fanatical anti-Trumpism, and a knee-jerk resort to cursing and shouting, violence and destruction. Behold the idiocy. Take a good hard look.
Rule Your Own Spirit
This is an extreme example of a defect in modern life that fills the daily news: people living by impulse and passion rather than reason and sense. And the underlying cause of this self-destructive illogic infects all of us.
Think on this important proverb: “He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls” (Proverbs 25:28). An inability to govern your anger and rule your spirit leaves you vulnerable to attack.
Attack from whom? Many scriptures speak of evil spiritual powers that can influence your spirit. Revelation 12:9 reveals the alarming truth that an “old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan … deceiveth the whole world.” The whole world—deceived by the devil? How is that possible?
Ephesians 2:2 calls this malevolent being “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in [the minds of] the children of disobedience.”
“If your radio is set on the proper radio wavelength, or television set is tuned to the proper channel, the broadcaster’s message comes through clearly,” Herbert W. Armstrong explained in Mystery of the Ages. “Satan as prince of the power of the air broadcasts—not in words, sounds or pictures, but in attitudes, moods, impulses.”
The devil actually rules the world (2 Corinthians 4:4). He influences, deceives, affects and destroys unsuspecting human beings, very often through unreasoned, uncontrolled emotion. People who fail to govern their mind and rule their own spirit make themselves dangerously susceptible to the devil drawing and pulling them where he pleases.
And when people reject God and repudiate moral absolutes—like the fact that government programs are not sacrosanct, or that visceral hatred of other people is an inappropriate reaction to a clash of ideas, or that destroying property is wrong—they open themselves up to even more malign spiritual influence.
Satan is a liar and a murderer (John 8:44). He is the author of the spirit of hatred. You see it plainly in the videos of unhinged people throwing objects at the vehicles of strangers, cursing at people they have never met—somehow convinced in their fevered minds that they are improving society, helping to reverse a grave injustice in the nation’s capital. They are untethered from reality. Frankly, Satan has them in his grip.
You have to protect yourself. “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded” (James 4:7-8).
Clean Up Your Own Waste
One last lesson. Think about the left’s defiance against a good-faith endeavor to expose fraud and eliminate waste. What are they fighting? Why?
Obviously some people like things as they are. Surely those who are enriching themselves on taxpayer money have powerful incentive to block doge. Others simply have an ideological hostility to all things Trump and will find fault no matter what his administration does.
This unwillingness to acknowledge what is clearly harmful, even disastrous prodigality and chicanery with public money well illustrates the common, very human resistance to admit error and to change.
This is the greatest obstacle in our human nature, as influenced by the devil, to being able to “cleanse our hands and purify our hearts,” to recognize sin in our lives and truly submit ourselves to God in repentance!
“No one can have the Holy Spirit, which alone can open the human mind to understanding of this Word of God, without a complete repentance and an implicit belief in Christ as well as believing what He says,” Mr. Armstrong wrote. “Repentance can only follow admission of being wrong—of wrongdoing and wrong believing. The most difficult thing for any human seems to be to admit being wrong—to confess error of belief and conviction—to unlearn false knowledge as well as to learn true knowledge” (ibid; emphasis added).
Every one of us must acknowledge that, like the American government, we too have waste, fraud and abuse in our heads that must be identified and exposed—then reduced, eliminated, purged!
This starts with an honest look at ourselves, no matter how painful. For this we need God’s help to open our eyes, because “[e]very way of a man is right in his own eyes: but the Lord pondereth the hearts” (Proverbs 21:2). We need to pray, like the psalmist, “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts. … Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me …” (Psalm 139:23; 19:12-13).
Don’t make the mistake of the angry leftist, condemning the man who is uncovering the sickness in the body politic and pointing the way to health. Embrace whatever correction God gives you—and take action. Repentance means changing what you find wrong and fixing it. God commands that we cut away what doesn’t belong in our heart (e.g. Jeremiah 4:4).
This is a miraculous process that leads to spiritual health—and eternal life!
