Episode 149: Inside the Tesla Takedown Protests

Sarah Goodyear: This episode was produced with the generous support of the William and Helen Mazer Foundation.

Lara Steele: I’ve always just been a shower upper. I’ve never been an organizer before. And we’re sort of accidental organizers, but we are absolutely embracing it. It gives me a sense of power and agency when it is so easy to feel powerless with everything going on, and it just seems so big. And what I’ve been saying since 2016 is I want a good answer when my grandkids ask me what I did to stop this. And you’ll never know if the answer is enough. But it’s not nothing.

Sarah: This is The War on Cars. I’m Sarah Goodyear. Since early February, a protest phenomenon has been building steadily across the United States and the world. It sprung up at scores of Tesla dealerships from coast to coast. Organizers call it Tesla Takedown. In this episode, we hear from some participants and organizers about what’s motivating them. We’ll also hear from journalist Ed Niedermeyer, return guest of The War on Cars and author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, about what effect this could have on Tesla’s bottom line and why it’s an effective tactic to weaken the hold that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has on the United States government.

Sarah: Before we get to all that, though, you can support The War on Cars on Patreon. We’re an independently-produced podcast and we depend on listener contributions. Go to Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod to join us. For as little as $3 a month, you’ll get our regular episodes ad free, bonus episodes, early access to tickets for live shows, stickers, and a handwritten thank-you note. Now let’s get to it.

Sarah: You’ve probably seen videos of Tesla Takedown protests, or maybe you’ve seen the hashtag #TeslaTakedown in your social media feeds. Or maybe you’ve gone to one yourself. People have been gathering at Tesla dealerships from coast to coast to chant and wave signs—a lot of them very funny—and to push back against the Musk-Trump alliance and its dismantling of the United States government.

[Protesters: [chanting] Trump and Musk belong in jail. Trump and Musk belong in jail.]

Sarah: There are a couple of Tesla dealerships in Brooklyn, and one of them in the Gowanus neighborhood has become a protest magnet. It’s within walking distance of The War on Cars headquarters, and we went down there to ask people why they felt the need to give up part of their day to protest.

Protester: We have this guy who wasn’t nominated, he wasn’t confirmed. He answers to nobody. Somehow, he’s actually running the country. He’s the president. The other guy’s just a, you know, a puppet. And, you know, this is enough. This is bullshit. You know, we gotta end that.

[Protesters: Hey hey, ho ho, Elon Musk has got to go.]

Protester: I’m here because I will protest anything that this current coup is doing to destroy the lives of people who believe in this country, who do the work of this country, and who care about humanity. So I didn’t pick Tesla per se. I’ll demonstrate every which way, because also, it’s the only way that you can feel that you have any kind of efficacy, because it’s such a perilous feeling when you have a coup that’s taken over your country.

Protester: It’s really joyful to be out here, and also to see that there’s so many other people that are concerned about what’s happening to our country and the rule of law right now. Like, you can talk about it with your friends in the living room, maybe a little bit in the workplace if you’re comfortable, but to see other people who share our concerns and also just …

[Car honking]

Protester: Exactly. To show other people, hey, this is a coup that’s happening. This is really scary, and this is unprecedented. And we’re against it, and we want to show you that we’re against it. And honk if you’re against it, and we will show that there’s more and more people against this.

Sarah: These protests are remarkable in part for where they are happening. In other countries, we often see mass protest movements forming in large urban public spaces. The Arab Spring found a focal point in Tahrir Square in Egypt. The move toward democracy in Ukraine was centered on the Maidan, a huge plaza in the center of Kyiv. In Serbia over the last few weeks, Slavia Square in Belgrade has been the epicenter of a huge popular outcry against government corruption.

Sarah: In today’s United States, though, we’ve engineered an environment that prioritizes automotive convenience and speed, and in the process, deadens civic life and makes protest difficult. That doesn’t mean that people haven’t made use of the infrastructure that exists. The Black Lives Matter movement blocked highways and suburban arterial roads. And in some of our densest cities, large natural gathering places do exist—Washington Square in New York and the mall in DC, for instance. But in most of America, finding the center isn’t so easy. By designing our cities and towns for cars, we have effectively, if in part unintentionally, destroyed many of the common spaces where people can gather and organize to push back against tyranny. There isn’t a need for the government to actively suppress people’s First Amendment rights to peaceably assemble. Car infrastructure does it for them. The problem with America in the 21st century is that there’s no place for the revolution to start.

Sarah: That’s why it’s a little strange that Tesla dealerships, many of them located in the worst kinds of automotive sprawl, have emerged as crucial nodes in a decentralized network of resistance to Elon Musk and Donald Trump. But here we are. Protesters around the country are gathering along arterial roads and on overpasses and in strip malls and parking lots to protest the hijacking of our democracy by a man who in large part made his name and a big part of his fortune peddling cars.

[Cars honking]

Sarah: One of the cool things about the Tesla Takedown phenomenon is that it has been overwhelmingly peaceful, despite a handful of confrontations started by Trump/Musk supporters. In fact, a lot of the protests have an atmosphere that’s downright festive. But there have been a few isolated incidents of vandalism directed at Teslas and Tesla dealerships as well, unrelated to the official Tesla Takedown movement. That led to President Trump announcing at the bizarre and humiliating Tesla sales event he held on the White House lawn that his administration would prosecute any such actions as “domestic terrorism.” And on March 31, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced stiff charges for a man who is accused of throwing incendiary devices at a Tesla dealership in the middle of the night.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Pam Bondi: I’ve made it clear, if you take part in the wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, we will find you, arrest you, and put you behind bars. Today, I am proud to announce that the Department of Justice has unsealed federal charges against another Tesla attacker. We are seeking 20 years in prison. The crime was committed in Colorado, and thanks to the great investigative work by the FBI, the defendant was arrested in Plano, Texas. Let this be a warning: You can run, but you cannot hide. Justice is coming.]

Sarah: It’s intimidating stuff, the kind of thing that chills free speech. Because it isn’t hard to imagine this Justice Department, under this administration, trying to connect the Tesla Takedown protests with the property destruction that they call domestic terrorism. That hasn’t stopped peaceful protests from growing exponentially each week at Tesla dealerships everywhere. It’s been a true organic grassroots movement, spreading on social media and by word of mouth. Some of the people involved are experienced organizers, but there are others who have never undertaken anything quite like this before. We talked to one of them.

Lara Starr: My name is Lara Starr. I live in Marin County, California, which is just north of San Francisco. And after 2016, like almost every suburban, middle class, middle-aged white lady, I joined an organization to help start the resistance. And I joined an organization called Solidarity Sundays. And so for the last, you know, now it’s almost nine years, we’ve been writing postcards of resistance once a month on Sundays. But after the last election, postcards just didn’t seem like enough. Putin’s not afraid of a postcard. Elon Musk is not afraid of a postcard.

Sarah: And so Lara and her small group decided to go out to a Tesla dealership and see if they could get Elon’s attention.

Lara Starr: Our group is relatively small. We thought there would be six, eight people there, tops. But one of our members is also involved in Indivisible, and our local Indivisible group is quite active and has quite a large mailing list. And they surfaced our protest, and much to our surprise, there were 200 people there. [laughs] The cars just kept coming and coming! And I was joking. Like, on the one hand it was like, “I’m responsible for this. Look at you!” And on the other hand, it was like, “Oh, no. I’m responsible for this. Everybody better behave!” But of course everybody did. And the overwhelming thing I heard from folks was, “Thank you. Thank you for giving us something to do.” You know, this was February 23, so it was just a month after we were into all this. And they kept saying, “You know, we’ve been sitting at home, we’ve been angry. We needed somewhere to go, we needed something to do. Thank you for organizing this.”

Sarah: Despite Trump and Musk insisting on painting the protesters as a bunch of left wing lunatics, the people turning out around the country are more establishment than fringe. In Marin, Lara told us, the folks waving signs and chanting looked like the same people you’d find at the supermarket, or anywhere else around town. This being Marin, that was a certain crowd. Many of them may be the exact type of people who might have considered being Tesla customers until not so long ago, which is why there is a Tesla dealership in the area to begin with, of course.

Lara Steele: Marin County, if people aren’t familiar, it’s kind of a funny place. On the one hand, it’s one of the highest cost of living communities in the country, if not the planet. It’s also one of the bluest. It’s got a real sort of hippie tradition to it. And so the kind of people we’re seeing, honestly, are, you know, sort of people who look like me. They’re mostly white, they’re mostly middle class. There’s a lot of folks who sort of have a hippie patina to them, who’ve sort of been doing this kind of thing for a very long time, and are tired but are turning out because of what they’re seeing going on. So all that is to say it’s not a lot of young people, and our community is not diverse. So it’s not really a diverse community that’s coming out, but that’s just the nature of Marin County.

Lara Steele: And what brings people out is sort of unique to each individual. Of course, the overall dismantling of our government, the overall dismantling of decency in this country. But some folks are very concerned about the environment. Some folks are very concerned about the Department of Education. Some folks are very concerned about Social Security. So there are definitely individual issues that you’ll see on people’s signs that are driving them out there. But the one good thing that Elon has done in the last month and a half, almost two months, is given us a physical place to go and make our voices heard and make ourselves seen, because we can’t all go to Washington, we can’t all go to Mar-a-Lago, we can’t all go to places where Donald Trump is. But there’s a Tesla dealership in a lot of communities all over the country. So even though the issues may be bigger and broader than Elon and Tesla, he can’t be disentangled from Tesla, and he can’t be disentangled from Trump, and he can’t be disentangled from all of the horrible things that are being done to our country.

Sarah: Lara says she has heard Trump’s threatening remarks about anti-Tesla activists, but they don’t deter her.

Lara Steele: Our president, for all of his faults, which are almost the entirety of who he is, is very good at saying things with enough wiggle room for them to be interpreted however you would like them to be interpreted. So yes, when you parse out the things that he and his administration have been saying about the Tesla protests, a case could be made that they are referring strictly to acts of violence and vandalism. You could also interpret them as any demonstration of protest at a Tesla dealership. And that is intentional. So when I first started hearing those things coming, I joked with my partner, “Bring it on, Pam Bondi.” [laughs] Like, you know, I would love nothing more than to be a martyr for the cause. And of course, that is somewhat true and also somewhat scary. 

Lara Steele: You know, I’m just a lady in Marin standing there with the sign. Like, I am not somebody who wants to, you know, literally take one for the team. And part of me thinks this is still America, you know, stop thinking this way. And then part of me is like, you know, that’s what a lot of people who are currently detained thought a couple weeks ago, right? So is it a possibility and something I think about? It is. Does it make me feel a little crazy sometimes? Kinda. And do I think it’s likely? No. And it’s not gonna stop me from turning out.

Sarah: Lara knows that her lack of worry about being arrested and disappeared is a sign of privilege, and she is trying to make the best use of her status as part of a group that has traditionally been protected in this society: middle-class white women.

Lara Steele: I make actually a specific point when I protest to—with no offense to the Karens in your audience, I kind of make a point to look like a Karen when I go out. I wear a very nice red wool coat. I wear a red, white and blue scarf. I wear makeup. My nails are done. I specifically go out there to not look like somebody who can be dismissed as a leftist hippie weirdo. And I specifically want to use that privilege for good and to my advantage. And I know for better or for worse, those social cues signify somebody with privilege who should be taken seriously and is not easily dismissed. And that’s how I intend to show up.

Sarah: For Lara, it’s a new kind of commitment, but it is real and personal.

Lara Steele: I’ve always just been a shower upper. I’ve never been an organizer before. And we’re sort of accidental organizers, but we are absolutely embracing it. It gives me a sense of power and agency when it is so easy to feel powerless with everything going on. And it just seems so big. And what I’ve been saying since 2016 is I want a good answer when my grandkids ask me what I did to stop this. And you’ll never know if the answer is enough, but it’s not nothing. And that helps motivate me as well.

Lara Steele: A friend of mine has a graphic novel out right now that partially takes place in Holland during World War II, and tells a lot of stories of Dutch resistance that are just fascinating. And while I was listening to her and I was thinking, you know, we all grew up asking ourselves just that. You know, we all like to think that we would be the family that hid the Frank family when they came knocking on the door, of course. But what would we have done five years before that? What would we have done before we got to the point where the Frank family was knocking on our door? I don’t have the answer to that, but that sort of chilled me, because it’s like the frog in the water. And it’s like you can sort of dismiss and excuse and look the other way and just live your life. Because it takes, for some of us, it’s just all we can do is live our life. And then you turn around and there’s, you know, a Panzer division going down the front of your street. And so yes, what would we do during the takeover and what would we do five years before are questions I’ve been thinking about a lot.

Sarah: Thanks so much to Lara for talking with us. After the break, you’ll hear the conversation Doug and I had with Ed Niedermeyer, author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, about his involvement in the Tesla Takedown movement, and why he thinks it’s such an effective way to fight back against Musk and Trump.

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Sarah: Ed Niedermeyer, welcome to The War on Cars.

Ed Niedermeyer: Thanks for having me. It’s always so great to be here.

Sarah: You have been covering Elon Musk since about 2015, is that right?

Ed Niedermeyer: Yeah, it’ll be 10 years this year. It’s kind of a fascinating time to have the sort of 10-year anniversary of this whole weird trip.

Doug Gordon: The 10-year anniversary. That’s stainless steel, yes? That’s what you get? Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah. It does corrode, though.

Ed Niedermeyer: I was gonna say, we’re like pop metal in this instance.

Sarah: And you wrote a whole book about him. My first question is: Did you ever think that Elon Musk was actually going to get as much power as he has today?

Ed Niedermeyer: No. I think that’s kind of the most surreal thing about this whole situation is that I feel like I’ve been yelling louder and longer about what a bad guy he is and what a bad company Tesla is, and sort of the bad places this was all going. Like, I’m proud of my record on that, and yet I could not have predicted this at all. And it’s especially strange because, you know, my background is actually originally sort of more political science. And, you know, so early on in covering him, I sort of got this sense that maybe he had some sort of, like, underlying political ideology that was animating it all. And I tried for a very long time to figure out what it was, and I kind of just gave up because I just couldn’t figure one out. There didn’t seem to be any sort of ideological consistency to anything that he’s doing. I think we have a different view of that now, and I think with the benefit of hindsight, it’s easier to kind of suss out sort of the seeds of this. But unfortunately, no, you know, I really—I really could not have predicted this.

Doug: Ed, you kind of stand out in this field of people who have been covering Elon Musk for so long, and that you were more or less right about him from the beginning. We’ve talked about this with you on the show before, that there’s a lot of fraud, and we literally have an episode with you titled “Tesla is a Fraud,” that many of the green bona fides that they were selling were false. And that a lot of the reputation that Elon has banked is also based on a lie. And there was a whole crop of journalists who propped him up. I don’t need to name names necessarily right now. I think a lot of people know who they are. You know, he was hailed as the next—he was Tony Stark. He was literally in Iron Man with a cameo. He was on television sitcoms, on SNL, the cover of magazines as, like, the next Thomas Edison. But we know that that’s not true. I don’t know, what does that say about our culture that, like, someone can so easily pull that fraud over journalists, over pop culture, over regular people?

Sarah: Especially journalists, though.

Ed Niedermeyer: Especially journalists.

Sarah: Because journalists are supposed to be skeptical. That’s just part of the job.

Ed Niedermeyer: Yeah. I mean, gosh, it’s a big question, especially when you look sort of socially. I think there’s been a lot of things that have sort of gone into allowing him to get away with this. And some of them are things that he’s done, and a lot of it is just circumstance, I think, especially as time goes on and the story develops. The more I look back at the history, the more I’m struck by how often Elon was just sort of the right guy in the right place in terms of his narratives and things sort of striking a chord the way that they clearly have.

Ed Niedermeyer: Looking at the journalist piece in particular, I think, it’s a really interesting one, right? Because I think, weirdly, two things have kind of really played into it. One is sort of this question of, I think, sort of neutrality and objectivity. And I think, you know, clearly one of the reasons that Elon Musk has taken the trajectory that he has is because we’ve been entering a new era of information where the information economy works differently than it has in the past. And I think one of the ways that you can tell that is because traditional journalism has really failed to hold him accountable. He’s spread so many lies. And even, you know, there’s been so many stories that were damning and that would have taken down or at least caused congressional hearings, you know, for any other company. And yet, you know, the stock maybe went down for, like, a day and then went right back up, right? I personally feel like objectivity is something, and neutrality and lack of bias is something that Elon has used to hit back at his critics without applying it at all to himself. And I think for me, I want to stop letting him have that weapon. And so my position kind of now, and I’m trying to take every opportunity to say this—so thank you for that—is that look, like, caring about this, having an opinion about this, about who he is, about the company, it doesn’t make me care less about the facts, about getting the facts right. It actually makes me care more. And the stakes of all of this, the stakes for, whether it’s EV policy or the spread of fascism in our country, and everything sort of in between.

Ed Niedermeyer: You know, I think journalism has really handcuffed itself by not allowing it to say, like, this stuff is bad. There’s been this thing of, like, “Well, we’ll just report the facts and it’s out of our hands, and then it’s up to someone else.” So part of this problem is that, you know, prosecutors and criminal law enforcement and everything else is not picking up where they’re supposed to, where journalists lead off. But rather than waiting for that to change, I think, you know, we have to recognize to some extent that we are in a new information age, that his success reflects the new rules of the information age, and that we can sit around and keep playing by the old rules and get steamrolled, or we can try and adapt and move with the times. And I think that, you know, the Tesla Takedown for me has catalyzed my thinking around this, and I see this as an opportunity to start kind of playing the game a little bit more on his terms.

Doug: It has been maddening watching journalists not describe things for what they are. And you could just sub in Trump’s name for a lot of the things that you’re saying as well. Because we saw this play out in 2016, certainly in 2024, where the whole notion of objectivity was, “We can’t call Trump racist because we don’t know what’s in his mind.” And now the brain rot is so deep that we can’t call a Hitler salute a Hitler salute because we don’t know what’s in Elon’s mind, when the facts are plain as day that that is what he was doing. So it’s been maddening to see. I think you’re right that objectivity has led us down a really bad path. And the bastardization of what it means to be objective as well.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, objectivity is not not asking questions, right? And it’s not just taking someone’s self account as the truth. It’s always looking around the backside of something. And kind of to that end, for people who really don’t have the deep background on Elon, maybe you could talk a little bit about why, even before this latest act, he was a person to be regarded with skepticism, he was a person who was potentially dangerous in a number of ways. What is it about Elon that you’ve learned that makes him uniquely problematic?

Ed Niedermeyer: The thing that I look back to the most when I think about the things that I missed that should have warned me where this was all going, it was a huge red flag for me, but I was so stuck in, like, covering this as a car company that I couldn’t get past it. But it was the culture around him. You know, it’s easy to say, oh, it’s a cult or it’s this or it’s that, but, like, there was a lot to it. Like, you know, what was happening online in 2013, ’14, ’15, ’16, ’17 and beyond was really interesting and important because it was a lot of unique stuff. And so there were unique things. I think the core of it, fascism and these kinds of authoritarian movements often tend to have a lot of contradictions in them. And I think that’s sort of one of the big ones.

Ed Niedermeyer: And at the heart of that was this idea that Tesla, as a movement, it was both consumers and investors, and a lot of times people who were both consumers and investors. And now fundamentally, in economics, those are not compatible perspectives. It’s zero sum, right? You either are an investor who’s trying to maximize profit, or you’re a consumer that wants to maximize the quality of the product, which comes at the expense of profitability—in a competitive marketplace at least. Which, of course, there wasn’t really competition, so it allowed this to kind of be that way. But I think there were these contradictions like that that people simply didn’t confront. And I think deep down what it comes down to is that the underlying bedrock of this—and this is absolutely something that connects Musk and Trump—is people are so fixated on the goal, right? What is the goal? The goal is to accelerate the advent of sustainable transportation, or however they worded it, right? That that goal was more important than the ways in which you achieve it.

Ed Niedermeyer: And I think that this is why people thought that they were supporting someone who just cared about EVs, when really the EVs were the pretext. And that if you looked at the culture that was around him, there was no way that that culture was going to lead to positive outcomes in the sense that it was based on cult of personality, it was based on not engaging with critics, but attacking them. One of the deepest sort of abstracted lessons away from the specific details of this that people need to learn is that people who are ruthless about creating power, especially on the internet by building these sorts of online movements, what you can’t do is say, “I agree with your stated goals and therefore I’m gonna shut off my critical faculties about how you’re achieving it.” Right?

Ed Niedermeyer: And I think that, you know, you look at the classics of dystopian literature, and what you learn from, like, 1984 is that the means become the ends, right? The power is not just a means to an end. The ends are always some made up thing, and the goal is always the power. And the question is: How are they exercising the power? Forget the goals, how are they exercising power? Because how people exercise power determines the trajectory of where that power is going to take them. That’s the piece that, to me, I feel like I really missed, and it should have been more clear to me. As I realized that, that this is not just about promoting a car company, sales or their stock, but that this is going in this direction, that here we are sitting here, having to just watch it play out.

Doug: I mean, hindsight is obviously 20/20. There’s an appearance that Elon makes on Colbert’s show, and Colbert is talking to him about Tesla and electric vehicles. And I think he asks him something to the effect of, like, do you care about the planet and the environment?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stephen Colbert: Okay, you’ve got your finger in so many different advanced technologies. As I said, SpaceX, Tesla, now you’ve got SolarCity and the solar pack that people put in their houses. [applause] Are you sincerely trying to save the world?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elon Musk: Well, I’m trying to do good things, yeah. I mean, saving the world is not—I mean …]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stephen Colbert: But you’re trying to do good things, and you’re a billionaire. I mean …]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elon Musk: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stephen Colbert: That seems a little bit like either superhero or supervillain. You have to choose one.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elon Musk: Trying to do useful things? I mean …]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stephen Colbert: Uh-huh?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elon Musk: Yeah.]

Doug: I watched that recently thinking, “Oh, yeah. Like, Elon could never speak with any sort of depth about carbon emissions, about sustainable transportation. And “I care about a lot of things” really reads differently now when you look at that.

Ed Niedermeyer: It’s crazy how many examples of this there are. For me, the one that I saw recently was it was one paragraph from Ashlee Vance’s book, which is basically the bible of Elon Musk mythology, right? This is where that personal narrative was really created. And this paragraph was like, “Oh, in 10 years, you know, America thinks that this man could have, like, the most sustainable transportation system on the planet with, like, these, you know, autonomous vehicles. And we’ll be doing missions to the moon, and space stations and maybe even to Mars within 10 years.” He wrote this in 2015, so he’s talking about right now. And it’s this whole paragraph just completely buying into, again, the vision thing, which has been everything for Elon. And then at the very end he tacks on a sentence, a quote from Elon’s first wife, Justine. As she says, “It’s Elon’s world and we’re all just living in it.”

Ed Niedermeyer: And it’s like there it is in one paragraph, right? Three quarters of it being spent on the bullshit that 10 years later we could say definitively that was bullshit, that did not happen. The book was mostly mythology and bullshit that again, like, really one of the most foundational texts for this Elon Musk myth. But it was sprinkled with these little quotes just like this one from his wife, which at the time the argument is, we need to let him do his thing so we can have this future that the guy just spent three quarters of the paragraph talking about how great it’s gonna be. But really, the real lesson was Ashlee Vance should have listened to his wife. He should have spent 10 percent of the time listening to Elon and 90 percent of the time listening to his wife, because his wife knew what really mattered to Elon. And that was it’s his world, and we all just live in it. And everything else is just window dressing to that.

Doug: All right, so let’s bring it back to the Tesla Takedown protests. You’ve been really involved with this. This is a really unique protest in many ways, not so much in other ways. We’ve had boycotts of companies before, but never have we had one that is directed at a person through a company, right? Like, people are boycotting Target because they’re abandoning DEI. There’s all kinds of stuff like that. Why is this such an effective tactic to take him down? Why has it become the target?

Ed Niedermeyer: I think the protest movements really, it started initially just as, “This is where Elon is. Let’s go protest there.” Right? Because we don’t like what he’s doing. But yeah, I think what I’ve really been trying to explain to people is the vulnerability. And I think that is what makes all the difference here, right? It is vulnerable. And I think, for me, that’s what I’ve been really—that’s kind of my role in this movement. You know, I’m not an organizer; I can’t organize my sock drawer. So I’m not really an organizer in any traditional sense. What I can do is help people understand how vulnerable he is.

Ed Niedermeyer: Because, you know, people look at the wealth, and I think one of the issues is we’ve been really conditioned in this country to believe that if you have enough wealth, that nothing bad can ever happen to you, that you can never lose it, that you can never face the consequences of your actions. And so people get very cynical about it and just assume there’s nothing we can do. And what I want people to really understand, if nothing else, is that he is so vulnerable. And it’s important for two reasons. One is because this gives us a lever on power, obviously, right? Like, if he’s vulnerable and the vulnerability exists within Tesla. Tesla’s vulnerable because it’s propping up everything else. So his empire is vulnerable because it’s propped up by Tesla. Tesla’s vulnerable because he’s been neglecting the business because the product is old, because the sales are dropping, the margins are dropping. It’s propped up by promises he can’t deliver on. His wealth is on paper. He can’t convert his wealth largely into cash because he needs to hold onto that stock to retain control, because it’s all based on confidence, and if he sells, everyone else will sell, and it will—it will fuel this thing. So his wealth is trapped there. Tesla’s the only place where it’s liquid at all, and this whole structure makes him personally really, really vulnerable.

Ed Niedermeyer: The other side of it is that it’s easy to not buy the cars, right? They’re expensive. It’s a purchase that people don’t necessarily make all the time. And so I think when you sort of combine those two—and frankly, we’ve been helped along, right? The fact that Donald Trump was out in front of the White House basically saying, like, these cars are red baseball hats on wheels. It’s like, thanks, you’re doing our work for us, right? Like, if you support what’s going on in the White House, sure, buy a Tesla. If you don’t, any ambiguity about what these cars stand for is completely gone now.

Ed Niedermeyer: So what we’re up against in this country is there isn’t a lot of tradition of people exercising political power outside of the formal political system, right? Like, I think in places like in Europe, France or Italy or whatever, you have traditions of striking, and various other sort of forms of people collectively harnessing their political power outside of that, you know, voting for a representative who passes laws and all that kind of stuff. I hope this is the beginning of not just of a movement that really has a real chance of literally destroying the wealth of this awful guy who’s doing awful things. Beyond that, I really hope this is the start of Americans understanding that there are these other routes to political power, that you don’t have to just engage in the formal political system to do that.

Sarah: I mean, the irony of the locus of these protests being car dealerships on arterial roads in the middle of sprawl development, exactly the kind of infrastructure that has, in my opinion, really prevented political organization from happening easily in the United States of the 21st century. That very infrastructure is now being appropriated by the anti-Tesla forces. And so there’s just a beautiful poetry to it for me.

Ed Niedermeyer: Yeah. You know, and one of the reasons, you know, one of the arguments that I made, in addition to, you know, hey, this guy is really vulnerable, more vulnerable than you realize. The other side of it is more kind of personal, which is because of both the built environment and I think the information environment that we’re in, it’s very easy to feel isolated, right? You’re isolated in your suburban home. You’re physically isolated. You’re reading this endless scroll of doom about these things that you can’t control, that things are happening to you. You’re not being given a way to do anything about it. And that is intellectually and emotionally and spiritually isolating, right? And in a way that reflects our physical Isolation.

Ed Niedermeyer: And one of the things I’ve been telling people is, like, look, like, get out of the house, man. Like, go down to the Tesla store and meet people. Just hang out with people, build some community in person. It’s amazing what we’re achieving using social media. And a really important piece of this is Bluesky being a platform that is not controlled by a billionaire, allows us the opportunity—that’s where the organizing is. I mean, for me, I organize by making posts on Bluesky, and it’s amazing. Hundreds of people will show up at protests as a result. It’s a really cool thing.

Ed Niedermeyer: But there’s no guarantees that the Tesla Takedown works. I think it’s our best path. I’m open to other, better strategies, but I think it’s the best one I can see. But regardless of the odds of success, on a personal, human level, it’s really good to not just sit in isolation and be exposed to the doom, but to get out, to feel like you’re doing something, to meet other people whose reaction to this is not to just sit back and be passive and isolated, but to fight back.

Ed Niedermeyer: What’s really fascinating about the protests is that ideologically, they’re all over the place. We had people in Portland at the protests that are waving Ukraine flags and are, like, national security hawks. We have people who care about the Constitution; that’s what their signs say. We have people who care about the foreign aid issues. There’s all these different reasons. It’s a really broad coalition. We’re fighting for our very basic constitutional order and democratic representation, but what unites these people is not ideology, it’s the willingness to fight back. And I think there’s something really healthy and good about just spending time with people like that. You will be amazed at how it changes how you think about the situation.

Ed Niedermeyer: And I do think one of the reasons it’s easy for bullies like Trump and Musk to have bullied their way into the position of power that they’re in is because we are weak when we are isolated and we are strong when we come together. And I think, again, this is part of this broader process beyond just dealing with Elon and the damage he’s doing right now. I think healing this country is about rediscovering our power when we come together collectively. And as you say, absolutely part of this is finding the places to make that happen. As time goes on, I do really worry about counterprotests and the trucks and some of the stuff we’ve seen in the past with protests and vehicles, and those locations do not alleviate my concerns about those things. But I will say, if we’re gonna find a way out of this thing, it’s gonna start with people just coming together and bonding over the fact that we don’t have to sit back and take it, that we can fight back against this. And it’s really a beautiful thing to see, and I think everyone should go out, even just to witness it one time.

Sarah: As you were talking, I was thinking about how one of the other traditional places that protest has happened in the United States of America is on university campuses, and how that has been gutted and taken off the table very effectively by this administration. The institutions are failing, and this is really something that is taking place outside of any kind of institutional framework. And that’s really exciting to me, I have to say.

Doug: I mean, I think the other thing that’s so remarkable to me about the Tesla Takedown protests is that they’re ideal protests in some ways, even though they’re unexpected—or because they’re unexpected, right? Like, we expect people to gather in the Mall in Washington. We expect people to gather in Union Square here in New York or Times Square. And if you’re not really paying attention to politics and you see a thing flash by on the news, you know, “100,000 people protest in Washington.” Fine, 100,000 people are always protesting in Washington. But if you’re driving to Walmart or to pick your kids up from soccer practice and you go by and yeah, there are people waving Ukrainian flags and saying, “Hands off my Social Security” on Route 2 in New Jersey, then you might think, “Huh, what’s going on?”

Doug: And I think it ties back, Ed, to what you said, is that the media has really failed here. A lot of people, if they’re not terminally online like we are, don’t really know what’s going on. They won’t know what’s going on until maybe their Social Security check doesn’t arrive on time, or their kid’s school is defunded to the tune of 20 percent. And so disrupting people’s normal routine is a very good thing that happens with protests.

Doug: I think another thing I’ve really liked seeing, there was a picture that I’m sure a lot of people saw, and I’m sure you saw, of all of those Chicago police officers guarding the downtown Chicago Tesla dealership. And you had people saying, “Oh, you know, like, Americans are getting a lesson in who the police really protect.” And yes, that’s true. I’m glad that that lesson is being taught. But I also think it shows that the protest is working. Who is looking at their partner on a Saturday afternoon and saying, “Huh, you know, the old car is about to die. We need to go get a new one. Let’s break through the phalanx of police officers and go test drive a model Y.” We’re not gonna do it. You’re gonna go to the Hyundai dealership 10 minutes down the road.

Ed Niedermeyer: Yeah. Again, I think it sort of started as this reflexive, just sort of this is where Elon is, and so we’ll go there. But I think what’s really cool to see is over time, people really understand that no, no, no, this is our route to power. These are not good places to protest, actually. The location, again, as you’ve said, they’re horrible, really, in a lot of senses, but this is how we create power. And yes, protesting out of this kind of, for lack of a better term, “cultural ghetto” that’s kind of been in the US broadly, where it is sort of this, like, cultural thing. Again, like if you grow up in Eugene, Oregon, you know, like, you protest, right? Like, if you’re in a liberal college campus, like, it’s like a social activity, it’s where you go to meet girls or boys or whatever, right?

Ed Niedermeyer: And this is about the power. We’re there because it’s about the power. And it’s not just about shouting that we’re angry about something. It’s exactly like you say, it’s creating an atmosphere around a consumer brand that if you’re gonna go somewhere and spend $50,000 on a premium product, do you want that A) your buying experience to be one where you’re surrounded by protesters and police? B) do you want a vehicle that your neighbors are out on the streets literally saying, like, “Buying this vehicle makes you part of something bad”? It’s stigmatizing that brand.

Ed Niedermeyer: The other thing is the protests are the visible tip of the iceberg. And, you know, this is a decentralized movement, and one of the things I’ve sort of encouraged people to do is to do things that are not violent, that are not property destruction, but that still hurt the performance of Tesla’s business, because it is vulnerable, and the more it hurts, the better. So calling up and scheduling test rides. And go down to the store, pretend that you’re a buyer, let the protesters yell at you. You know, don’t—don’t let on. And waste as much of their salespeople’s time as possible. If you own a Tesla, and you really don’t like the feeling of owning a Tesla, but you can’t really sell it—and there’s a whole other conversation we can get into, but one thing that you can do if you really can’t get rid of that vehicle, is go to Tesla and tell them you have problems with it, and make their service people work hours and hours and hours trying to figure out the squeaks and the rattles, and make them give you free Lyft credits and the other things that they do, or loaners or whatever it is.

Ed Niedermeyer: All these little things help. And so the protests are the visible part of it. When you realize that the protests are not just traditional protests, that they’re actually an effort to manipulate a lever of power, then you realize oh, other people are manipulating this lever of power in other ways that aren’t as visible. We’ll see when the Q1 numbers come out, but I’m really excited about it, and I’m especially excited because I know from talking to people that a lot of this other non-traditional protest stuff is what excites people who are not typically protesters. So people who are kind of new to this whole sort of kind of activism seem to be, in a lot of cases, they’re not as anxious to leave home. They want to be able to do stuff from their computers. And leaving negative reviews, or just all these other things are things that they can do to do that. And it’s bringing a whole other element into this movement that again, it’s not as visible, but I think it’s gonna end up being just as important over time.

Ed Niedermeyer: We have a line to walk here. And, you know, as someone who’s sort of involved in the Tesla Takedown, the organized part of it a little bit more, I’m—you know, I want to be very careful that I think it’s really, really important that we not cross these lines, right? If other people feel like they need to cross these lines for their own reasons, keep it away from the movement, keep it away from the protests. There’s been no crossover between the protests and any kind of violence or property destruction. And if you support the goals that we’re all working towards, keep that stuff separate. That said, the property destruction that we are seeing is coming, in a sense, from the same place, which is that we don’t have legitimate political options.

Ed Niedermeyer: Protesting is an act of frustration. It’s going out on the street and saying, “I have been robbed of my democratic representation. I’ve been robbed of our opportunity as a country and as a body politic to debate the agenda that’s now being enacted.” Not only did we not vote for Elon, but we elected someone who specifically denied, you know, in the lead up to the election, the agenda that is now being pursued with full force. We’re all coming from a place of frustration and a lack of options. And I think to some extent, I think it’s important for folks on the other side of this to understand that, like, engaging with the peaceful protest is the right move here in a positive way. Because the alternative to what we’re trying to do is more of the destruction. Like, that’s the real self-defeating part of the saber rattling that we’re seeing from the White House in terms of referring to the protests as “domestic terrorism.”

Sarah: Yeah.

Ed Niedermeyer: And even prosecuting people as it. And I think what’s worrying to me about that is that they’re saying that property destruction makes you part of a domestic terrorist organization. And it’s really important to note that all of the property destruction that we’ve seen so far—there has been some—it all seems to be individuals acting completely alone in the dead of night with no obvious link of any kind to the protests. These are completely separate things, and those are individual. The protests are organized. The property destruction is frustrated individuals. One of the things that worries me a bit is the idea that they’re gonna take actions that are being done by individuals and make them out to be part of something organized when they clearly aren’t. Because the only people who are organizing are the people who are specifically choosing not to engage in any kind of violence or any kind of property destruction.

Doug: Look what they did to Mahmoud Khalil. They accused him of activities “aligned” with Hamas. They didn’t say that he provided material support or espionage or anything like that. So that you could very easily see a situation where they say to a bunch of people protesting outside a Tesla dealership, “You’re involved with activities aligned with domestic terrorism.”

Ed Niedermeyer: I think though, that if we go down this path, and, you know, I really hope we don’t, but I think if we do start to go down this path further of sort of a crackdown on the protests, I do think it’s gonna be incredibly self defeating because, you know, clearly this is a different crowd than the BLM protests or other kinds of protests we’ve had in the past. But it is incredibly normie. It is moms and kids. We have more and more kids every week. We have lots of old folks. There’s a whole group of retired police officers who come out and protest. And when I look at the video and the footage and the photos from the protests across the country, it’s the same thing. This is a normie movement. This is older folks, this is middle-aged folks, this is families with kids.

Ed Niedermeyer: And again, if you’re listening to this, it doesn’t matter who you are. Come to the protests. The more we have—and it’s not just the size, but the diversity of who we’re getting out there—makes it harder for them to crack down on this. You know, if you’ve never protested before, come, please. You are who we want there because it’s really important that we make it clear that this is not the paid protest—no one’s getting paid. There’s no question of that, that no one’s getting paid. It’s handmade signs. I actually went out of pocket to make some signs because they were melting in the Portland snow, my handmade cardboard signs. They lasted about three weeks. They were literally falling apart, so I got some more durable ones made. Everyone else is out there with literally markers on pieces of cardboard boxes and stuff. So I think we just need to keep doing what we’re doing. If and when crackdowns start to happen, I don’t see any way that it doesn’t just backfire on them.

Doug: I will say, you know, for all the talk we’ve just had about, like, look, crackdowns and the threats of violence, there’s another piece of this which is that these protests are very joyful. They’re bringing together lots of people, like you said, who wouldn’t normally be in the same room together—people of different ages and economic backgrounds, people of different races. And we forget sometimes that protests throughout the history of the United States, like, there can be joy, there can be theatricality to them. That’s what makes them effective. Obviously, there’s space for angry disruption, but the creativity with the signs is really helping. And I think that is diffusing any chance of there being, I hope, a bigger crackdown. So I would say to people who are listening: Don’t let some of this conversation scare you from coming. I do think there’s lots of space for this to grow and to continue to be—people want to share these signs on social media, and that spreads the news as well. And that joyful, playful, the pun—you know, “Can’t spell felon without Elon,” like, all of that stuff is attracting attention.

Sarah: Yeah. And I just want to say that what you’re describing, Ed, is really classic coalition building, right? And it’s happening on the ground in real life with real people who can see each other and talk to each other in real space. And, like, that to me, is one of the most exciting things, because you know that there are connections being made that are gonna build a really robust coalition that then can be activated in other instances and for other emergencies and for other purposes.

Ed Niedermeyer: Yeah. This is, to me, like the magic of politics, is that everyone who’s going there to these protests is doing so because they’re either angry or afraid. And myself included, I’m both angry about what’s happening, and I’m afraid about what’s to come. And that is one of the things that is really motivating me to go out there, and so is literally everyone else, even though we all have different things that we’re angry and afraid about. But what the magic of this, and what to me sets us apart from any kind of political experience I’ve ever had before, is that we’re all coming together with all this anger and fear, but what’s coming out of it is so positive and so joyful. This is like the alchemy of participatory collective political action. And again, I think this is something that we, as a culture have really been disconnected from, and I’m constantly thinking of ways to sort of, like, help enhance that.

Ed Niedermeyer: One of the cool ones is, so we started on one side of the street, and as we’ve grown, we’re sort of on both sides of the street now. And one of the things I sort of randomly grabbed—we have this from a party I go to every year, this bubble blower that’s like, it looks like a John Deere leaf blower, but it blows bubbles. And so what we started doing is you get bubbles going across the street. And so you have protesters on both sides of the street and bubbles in the middle that people have to drive through. And it just creates this atmosphere and this sense. And it’s like, this is, I think, one of the things that is encouraging people to bring their kids. It kind of just creates a sort of festive, positive, uplifting experience. 

Ed Niedermeyer: Because again, we’re doing two things here. We are trying to rescue our country, right? Which requires that anger and that grim determination. But we’re also trying to escape from the sense of helplessness and show people. So there’s this, like, collective level that’s happening, but there’s also this sort of personal redemption thing that’s happening, and we have to find a way to kind of make both of those things work. And for me, yeah, make these things like a party, you know? And if you have that atmosphere, you have bubbles in the air, you have kids, you have laughter, you have—you know, you have people shouting and angry, but also people, you know, laughing at the cool signs and taking photos and sharing them online, it makes it harder to crack down on this. You know, the visuals and the aesthetics of cracking down on that kind of a gathering are really hard. But again, it gives people also the utility. Even if you’re not sure that protesting will make the kind of difference that you want to see, what you can be a hundred percent confident is it will make you feel better and will make you feel less helpless. And I think at a time like this where we’re building from almost nothing, to try and build some kind of collective resistance to these bullies, that that is just as important as anything else, including even bankrupting Elon—although that’s also really important. [laughs]

Sarah: I think that’s a great place to end this. Thank you so much, Ed, for a conversation that really, I do feel better at the end of it. Sometimes at the end of these conversations you’re like, “Wow, what are we gonna do?” But this just gives me hope. It gives me hope that there is the energy in this country to, as you say, to take positive action and to have something beautiful grow out of the horror that we are living through right now.

Ed Niedermeyer: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me on. I always enjoy our conversations here so much, and today has certainly not been an exception.

Sarah: That’s it for this episode of The War on Cars. This episode was part of the Deconstructing Car Culture series, supported by the Helen and William Mazer Foundation.

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Sarah: This episode was edited by Ali Lemer. It was recorded at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio by Justin Fernandez. Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. Transcripts are by Russell Gragg. On behalf of my co host, Doug Gordon, I’m Sarah Goodyear, and this is The War on Cars.