RICH LOWRY: Tesla terrorism only reveals the left’s impotence.
The left, with Soros-funded organizations taking a big role, has its next project — an intifada against the country’s largest maker of electric cars.
The progressive fear and loathing of Elon Musk now may be greater than that directed at Donald Trump.
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The heretofore trend-setting, eco-conscious vehicle for the affluent is now a hate object, a so-called swasticar, the equivalent of a Volkswagen in 1930s Germany.
Everyone has a right to peacefully protest, of course, and to refuse to buy whatever products they wish.
But when the left engages in direct action, it’s always a sign you should take steps to protect your property and person.
Teslas have been set on fire, spray-painted and otherwise damaged. Charging stations have been burned and dealerships vandalized.
Shots were fired at a Tesla showroom in Portland, Ore.
A woman in Colorado who attacked a Tesla dealership, including with a Molotov cocktail, was subsequently arrested near the location with more makeshift bombs in her car.
A Tesla charging station in South Carolina was also Molotov-cocktailed. The vandal spray-painted “LONG LIVE UKRAINE” on the ground.
In Ukraine, they prepared Molotov cocktails to blunt the advance of Russian tanks closing in on Kyiv; in America, progressive activists use them to stick it to an entrepreneur whose politics they don’t like.
Of course, Teslas have been painted with swastikas, as if a streamlined federal government is an indicator of incipient fascism.
We’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which the son of John and Yoko is a voice of sanity:
Joel Kotkin adds: The climate has changed on climate change.
Immiseration has become central to green ideology. According to Robert Jackson, a Stanford professor of earth system science, Americans should learn to like living on one-quarter of their current energy, essentially turning the clock back to consumption patterns of the 1950s. This does not make an appealing proposition to the public, as the likes of Bill Gates and even the head of a powerful and prominent UK trade union have noted.
Political scientist Roger Pielke’s “iron law of climate policy” suggests that “substantially increasing the costs of energy, which supports every aspect of modern life, is off the table as a policy option for achieving deep decarbonization.”
Fortunately, there are other less damaging ways to reduce emissions, by using natural gas instead of coal and building emissions-free nuclear plants. Gradual shifts in cars with greater efficiency — such as hybrids — are more likely to win marketplace acceptance than the current insistence on electrical vehicles. (EVs also have their own considerable environmental drawbacks, due to the heavy use of carbon-intensive materials.)
Mark Kelly’s Musk Derangement Syndrome is causing him a definite “past performance is no guarantee of future results” moment: ‘Trashing the Climate to Own the Cons’! Here’s What Dem Sen. Mark Kelly Traded in His Tesla For.
Exactly. Like Al Gore selling out to oil-rich Qatar a decade ago, Mark Kelly has just declared “Mission Accomplished” to radical environmentalism:
Earlier: “Seriously, it’s like Musk is some kind of evil genius who figured out how to separate lefties from billions of their dollars by appealing to their idiotic climate religion…and then made them despise themselves for doing it. He should get a Nobel Prize for that.”