Rage Against Tesla: What’s Really Driving It?

Anti-Tesla protesters keep directing eggs, dog poop, Molotov cocktails and invectives against "the Swastikar" and its maker Elon Musk.

Yes, some people have set Teslas ablaze. But the "Tesla Takedown" movement is proof the anger burns in more than the violent fringes. Urging folks to sell their Tesla cars and stock and join picket lines, organizers have named Saturday a "global day of action."

The protests rail against Musk’s huge conflicts of interest in his appointed role as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency. As well they should. The true goal of DOGE, a blitzkrieg effort to trim government ranks, is to bring on a Trump-led Second American Revolution. And that means less democracy and more oligarchs like Musk.

Most citizens, of course, have no problems with the idea of a lean and competent government. What they didn’t sign up for is a gang of Silicon Valley engineers with no electoral accountability dismantling the federal government by algorithm.

But the implications extend far beyond Washington D.C. or even U.S. borders. Which is why people around the world have made a hairpin turn. The electric vehicle that once seemed to herald a green-tinged, better future has become a symbol of the forces ruining their lives.

So let’s look under the hood of the Tesla revolt and see what’s really powering it. Even Musk’s grandfather has a role to play in this evolving political crisis. Time to buckle up.

Move fast and run over things

It’s only natural that an automobile has arrived at the centre of a raging political debate about our collective futures. The car, after all, remains one of the world’s most disruptive technologies. As it changed the economies, politics, geography and morals of the 20th century, it distorted our sense of space and life’s pace.

The car came to communicate a host of hidden human desires while becoming a talisman of progress. So much so that whenever demonstrators have set fire to a vehicle, the response has been one of shock — for a sacred object has been destroyed, as the philosopher Jacques Ellul noted.

Fascists instinctively have sought to conflate the machine power of automobiles with their own ambitions to manufacture national destinies. Henry Ford, the oligarch who shaped modern America, disliked labour unions as much as he hated Jews. The "America Firster" owned his own newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, which during the 1920s published headlines like "International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem." Adolf Hitler took admiring note of Ford's industrial genius. In 1938 the Nazis awarded dear "Heinrich" the Grand Cross of the German Eagle — its highest honour for foreigners.

Inspired by Ford’s greatest innovation, the assembly line, Hitler patterned his Volkswagen "people’s car" on the Model T. But to project strength, speed and power, Hitler always paraded about town in a big Mercedes-Benz 770.

Elon Musk seems almost fated to be the one to update Henry Ford’s legacy.

Joshua Haldeman, Musk’s grandfather, worked in Saskatchewan in the 1930s. During that time, the successful chiropractor became a vocal proponent of Technocracy Inc. This largely forgotten social movement emerged in response to the chaos that defined the 1930s, when the Great Depression, inflation and wealth inequality fuelled great political upheavals.

The solution, declared movement founder Howard Scott, was to put engineers in charge of everything. Technocracy Inc. produced its own magazine and advocated for a "technically skilled, empirically-driven, non-partisan elite" to run society like a cruise ship.

Scott and his followers imagined redrawing geographical borders to form a Technate – a "beautiful land mass," as Trump might say, extending from the Panama Canal to Greenland.

The rationale for annexing neighbours sounded very Trumpian: "The natural resources and the natural boundaries of this area make it an independent, self-sustaining geographical unit." For the record, Musk, whose industrial ambitions rest upon a reliable supply of rare metals and markets, has also described the idea of annexing Greenland and Canada as "beautiful."

Many of Scott’s followers were overtly racist and, after the movement opposed conscription to fight Japanese and German fascists, the Canadian government banned it in 1940.

As a result, Musk’s incendiary grandfather was arrested by the Mounties for belonging to an illegal organization. Haldeman repented but later moved his family to South Africa where his prejudices found new expression: "The natives are very primitive and must not be taken seriously," he wrote.

Equality shifted into reverse

Whether Musk, who grew up in apartheid South Africa, subscribes to his grandfather’s ideas is not known, but it remains a potent sphere of influence. We can observe Musk recycling various notions of Technocracy Inc. For example, he calls himself a technophilic pronatalist. That’s the idea that smart people (who have naturally gained riches and power) must have more children to save society from extinction and the pollution of inferior peoples.

Given Musk’s elitist beliefs, he makes a ready target for citizens frustrated by the widening divide between rich and poor.  

It’s the poor and the working class that the climate crisis will hit hardest, so the fight to lower emissions should be a broad-based movement. But the proposition that the best way to cool the planet is by purchasing a new $70,000 vehicle does not make much sense to people struggling to save as their paycheques buy less and less.

One digital marketing firm finds, "The typical Tesla customer is male, in his 50s, owns his own home, and has a high household income. Those who own a Tesla Model X have an average of $146,623 per year." The average U.S. income is $40,000.

No doubt, then, a key component of the Telsa revolt is class war. Yet there is another layer of resentment, perhaps buried deeper in the subconscious, fuelling outrage against Musk’s sleek products.

Telsa’s electric vehicles (and those marketed by totalitarian China) now symbolize in many ways the oppressive power of technology. Even Wired magazine, a cheerful voice for Silicon Valley, recently characterized the company’s seven million vehicles as "surveillance systems on wheels."

Every Tesla comes with cameras, GPS monitors and data sharing equipment designed to listen, watch and gather information on their occupants and their surroundings.

A recent Mozilla report which looked at 25 car brands found all of them "can collect super intimate information about you" including medical, genetic and even sexual. They record "how fast you drive, where you drive, and what songs you play in your car — in huge quantities. They use this to invent more data about you through 'inferences' about things like your intelligence, abilities, and interests."

Without the drivers’ knowledge, almost all the car makers sell their harvested data to others and most are fine with handing it over to police and government, found the report.

Which brings us to the methods and overall goal of DOGE as administered by Elon Musk. The agency’s official boilerplate boasts of "modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity."

Efficiency, the key word here, has become the justification for almost every assault on human freedom and democracy by technicians. Even when Musk is assuring us that he is definitely not a Nazi, his proof lacks something. As he recently told podcaster Joe Rogan, to be a Nazi, "You have to be committing genocide and starting wars." Ergo, Musk is not one. He prefers you shrug at his Nazi salutes, his fetish for Nazi symbols, his support for Germany’s far right AdF party, and his zeal in service of of Trump’s regime change.

In fact, as journalist Max Fisher documents in his book The Chaos Machine, Musk is at the vanguard of a new revolutionary chic in Silicon Valley that scoffs at democracy.

Peter Thiel, one of Musk’s early business partners, has confessed that "I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible." Mark Zuckerberg reduces civilization to a code that can be hacked by a God-like technician: "I can break down this system and make it better." Marc Andreessen, an "unpaid intern at DOGE” and vastly wealthy venture capitalist, argues that unfettered technology is the only way forward for society. In other words, it must be allowed to accelerate without regulation and oversight.

Such autocratic thinking mirrors the silent evolution of technology itself. As technologies concentrate power in fewer hands, democratic virtues matter less and less.

And that’s why burning Teslas symbolize our growing disquiet.

And why "Tesla Takedown" has become the moment’s rallying cry.  

The techno-fascist bros are here to re-engineer your life.