The New Yorker:

“It’s ironic that, as a pro-democracy and pro-climate group, we’re protesting against electric cars,” one activist said. “But you cannot sacrifice our democracy for one piece of the thing.”

By Sarah Larson

On Saturday, as Elon Musk was making headlines for his continued efforts at doge and dodging a lawsuit for offering money to Wisconsin voters ahead of the state’s Supreme Court race, thousands of people were outside Tesla dealerships around the world protesting him. The grassroots Tesla Takedown movement—a series of demonstrations against Musk, Trump, and what the two of them have wrought, in front of Musk’s most prominent business—had been gathering steam for weeks, and March 29th was billed a “global day of action.” Protests were held in more than two hundred and fifty cities worldwide, organizers say.

In Boston, it was thirty-seven degrees, and protesters on Boylston Street wore wool hats and down coats as they called for an end to the “dictatorship of the billionaires”; in Manhattan, it was seventy-six and windy, good weather for lusty hollering (“Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Elon Musk has got to go!”). Hundreds of people gathered in the cobblestoned nook outside a Tesla showroom in the West Village, by the Standard hotel, chanting, holding posters, and playing instruments. Trump, predictably, had been demonizing anti-Tesla sentiment (while also promoting Tesla, in his strange vroom-vroom White House driveway moment), and the Justice Department recently declared that any violent acts against Tesla properties were to be considered domestic terrorism. And yet despite a huge banner at the West Village protest reading “BURN A TESLA / SAVE DEMOCRACY,” made more vivid by a demonstrator wearing a cardboard flaming-Cybertruck costume, all was peaceful. A few dozen people waved red placards with Musk’s face on them that said “I AM STEALING FROM YOU.” Some signs combined Tesla branding and fascist imagery—a swastika instead of an “S,” a logo with a Hitler mustache. Other signs: “MUCK FUSK,” “NO ONE VOTED FOR ELON MUSK,” “CONGRESS: PLEASE REMOVE THE DOG•E DOO!

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