THE GIANT PAPIER-MÂCHÉ PUPPET OF DEATH VERSUS TESLA: A little blue-on-blue protest action today; pictured standing outside of San Jose’s Santana Row today is the Giant Papier-Mâché Puppet of Death representing Carpenters’ Local 713 of nearby Hayward, which were protesting the Tesla showroom at Santana Row. Union reps wearing hardhats and safety vests were handing out the flyer illustrated below. The sense of proportion between the GIANT PAPIER-MÂCHÉ PUPPET OF DEATH versus the union complaint that Tesla “hurts workers, hurts families, hurts community,” is fascinating:

When I drove up, my first thought was that somebody was implying that Tesla was Death, perhaps for not being sufficiently environmentally pure or due to past reports of battery problems with the Tesla. Instead, apparently the message is that not unionizing (and the UAW has tried hard to assimilate Tesla) is tantamount to death — an interesting complaint given that Bernie Sanders is concurrently running around screaming that unemployment is over ten percent.  (And note that the Giant Papier-Mâché Puppet of Death and his graphic designers aren’t exclusive to Local 713.)

I couldn’t get a good shot of the puppet himself, lest I end up facing Death personally due to the high level of traffic on Stevens Creek Boulevard. But you can see him more clearly here on a Tesla owners’ blog, at a protest last month by the same union in front of Tesla’s Palo Alto HQ. And you can also see Mr. Death in the flyer’s clip art, driving a 1975-era Volkswagen Thing with a Tesla logo on it, which, given the origins of the Thing, and the origins of radical environmentalism in general, and the crony socialism that birthed Tesla, neatly if unintentionally ties together a half dozen chapters of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism:

RELATED: In any blue on blue action, determining who the real baddies are can often be ascertained by who’s using a skull as their symbol.