The latest target in America’s culture war/Tesla

Don’t retreat; torch a Tesla

Pity the poor Tesla owner living in these increasingly crazy unUnited States.

One day, the driver is a proud, holier-than-thou greenie speeding along in a pricey electric vehicle that proclaims to the world a belief in the doomsday vision of global warming while making a statement that “I’m trying to do something about it even if all you morons motoring along in hydrocarbon powered cars and trucks don’t care.”

And the next day, the driver is living in fear that those on the left, who are supposed to be aligned with the idea of saving the world from global warming, might decide to vent their emotions on that pricey Tesla or its charging station because company founder Elon Musk joined forces with narcissistic President Donald Trump to try to reduce the size of government.

Since then, Teslas have been shot up and set afire in Las Vegas, Kansas City, Seattle, a Denver suburb and elsewhere.   A South Carolina man has been arrested for setting afire a Tesla charging station last month, and in the Seattle area, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is searching for a suspect who earlier this week blew up another Tesla charging station. 

Some on the American left appear to have stolen a page from lefty turned righty Sarah Palin, the one-time Alaska governor and failed Republican vice-presidential candidate who in the wake of her failure as national political candidate took to Twitter (now X) to declare “Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: “Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!”

Palin was later taken to task for promoting violence with that comment. CBS news headlined that “Palin Refuses to Back Down from Gun Rhetoric.” Newscaster Katie Couric, meanwhile, would predicted that the reloading Palin was little more than “the harbinger of things to come,” a prediction that has become all too true.

Bad man

Musk, who might or might not be a bad man, now finds his car company, which is reported to employ somewhere around 100,000 working women and men in the U.S., under fire for hooking up with Trump to do one of the few things about which most Americans formerly agreed – shrink a bloated and inefficient federal bureaucracy.

Yeah, yeah, some left-leaning reader somewhere is going to take issue with that conclusion. But c’mon, admit that the reason the Walter Peck character worked so well in the movie Ghostbusters, the original version, is because almost everybody had met that guy.

You remember, Peck, right? The pretentious “I represent the Environmental Protection Agency, third district” guy.

Walter Peck introduces himself to Ghostbuster Peter Veckman/YouTube

And it’s impossible to forget what happens after know-it-all Peck orders the ghost containment system shut off.

YouTube

Ka-boom!

Peck helped make Ghostbusters a big hit. It was the highest-grossing film of 1984, pulling in $221 million that year, and in the process giving birth to a Ghostbusters franchise that has since resulted in three sequels and more than $1 billion in earnings to date.

Thank you, Walter Peck.

And now, well, there are protesters in the streets because Musk and DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency, an agency with a name that could have been born in a Ghostbusters script) wants to put some of the Pecks out of work.

This would be crazy if the crazy began and ended there, but it doesn’t. There are all kinds of associated twists and turns.

Some of the people who previously wanted to get rid of government scientists they didn’t like when President Joe Biden was in office and replace them with those born with “indigenous knowledge” are now screaming “save the scientists.”

All that need be said about indigenous knowledge was summarized in a Biden White House official statement in 2022:

“Indigenous Knowledge is a body of observations, oral and written knowledge, innovations, practices, and beliefs developed by Tribes and Indigenous Peoples through interaction and experience with the environment.”

The key word there is “beliefs.” Beliefs are not science. Beliefs are feelings, and in that, indigenous knowledge is wholly anti-science. Beliefs can be anything because beliefs need no foundation in fact.

During the pandemic, some people decided to believe they could protect themselves from the Covid-19-causing SARS-CoV-2 virus by drinking bleach or other disinfectants, an idea Trump was later accused of promoting although he never actually did.

The mainstream media, however, interpreted his bumbling statements about sunlight and disinfectants as a suggestion people should drink the latter, and the Reckitt Benckiser Group, the company that produces Lysol, became so worried about beliefs that it issued a public statement declaring that “under no circumstance” should anyone drink its disinfectant.

Meanwhile, the Washington (state) Emergency Management Division Tweeted “Please don’t eat Tide pods or inject yourself with any kind of disinfectant,” Tide pod consumption apparently having already become some sort of fad among some younger Americans.

And who knows how Washington EMS made the jump from drinking bleach/disinfectants to shooting up with them. But what the hell. This is the world we live in, and it’s crazy what beliefs will lead people to do.

Human history

So many appear to have forgotten that science evolved to help provide the species an alternative to beliefs.

The “scientific method,” which is the foundation of science, tracks back to the 16th to 18th centuries when the smarter among us first recognized there had to be a better way to view the world than by simply believing in whatnot.

Beliefs, as the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine now notes, “cannot be tested, modified, or rejected by scientific means and thus cannot be a part of the processes of science.”

Or in other words, beliefs can be anything or nothing.

The Catholic church once believed the Jews of Spain were a threat to the humanity of the day, and in 1478, Pope Sixtus IV issued a decree allowing the Spanish monarchy to, according to the Britannica, “name inquisitors in order to enforce religious uniformity and to expel Jews from Spain.”

Tens of thousands of Jews were subsequently burned to death to enforce “religious uniformity” and most of the rest of the then-Jewish population of Spain was converted to Christianity or run out of the country. 

Such is the power of beliefs.

Then along came the scientists.

Science, in its purest form, was Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of the Law of Gravity, a recognizable and experimentally repeatable force at work. Throw a ball up, and the force of gravity pulls the ball down. It happens every time on earth.

But Newton also quickly recognized that the power of a force is influenced by the distance from an object being attracted to it, and thus explained why the moon revolves around the earth.

It is locked in orbit by the push-pull of its own force and that of the Earth.

Newton would, of course, be long gone before humans rocketed into space to demonstrate that the bond of gravity can be broken, but also stretches a long way above the planet. We now know that satellites shot into space can only survive in orbit so long because of the pull of gravity.

The orbit of the $160 billion International Space Station (ISS) now floating in space more than 200 miles above the earth decays steadily day by day and thus, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), “ISS has to be ‘re-boosted’ every few months to prevent it from burning up in the atmosphere.”

This is science, not a “belief.” ISS would burn up if not boosted, a danger that has again and and again been documented by the flaming end of other objects put in low earth orbit, and it is this repeatability that is the essence of science.

Or at least it was until the pandemic hit and science got into the “modeling” business. The modelers should have stuck to assembling toy airplanes and getting high on the modeling glue.

Models aren’t science. They suffer from the same fundamental problem as beliefs. There is no way to verify the models until the future arrives, and then a goodly number of the models turn out to be wrong.

The first Covid-19 model predicted 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. Three years into the pandemic, the death toll had reached about half of that, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and the SARS-CoV-2 virus has since evolved into an everyday disease much like the flu as most evolutionary biologists had expected it would given the way nature works.

Flu deaths now, in fact, appear to have surpassed Covid deaths.

Trumped

But enough with the science.

Let’s get back to those poor Tesla owners, many of whom wanted to do their part to help save the world from hydrocarbon-powered motor vehicles and now find themselves under attack because the leader of the company producing Teslas befriended Trump.

Minnesotan Tim Walz, the failed Democrat vice-presidential candidate in the last U.S. election, offered this helpful advice to Tesla owners at a rally in Wisconsin:

“And if you own [a Tesla], we’re not blaming you,” he said. “You can use dental floss and pull the Tesla (logo) thing off.”

As if the Tesla “Cybertruck” could be mistaken for any other vehicle on the roads in the country today.

Tesla

Hopefully, Walz was trying to make funny about the people setting fire to Teslas or otherwise damaging them to protest Musk’s involvement with Trump’s effort to “drain the swamp” as Trump promised during his first successful run for president.

That never happened following the 2016 election for two reasons – one being the pandemic and other being that it is inherently easier to expand bureaucracies than to shrink them. Trump’s first effort to drain the swamp ended with the federal bureaucracy bigger than ever, according to Forbes magazine.

Not only that, the government became much more expensive, the magazine reported, because the number of employees making $100,000 per year or more grew by 31 percent from fewer than 407,000 to nearly 533,000. The number of employees earning more than $200,000 grew by 52 percent, and the number earning more than $300,000 grew by 114 percent led by Covid czar Dr. Anthony Fauci, who raked in $434,312.

The nation’s most highly compensated “public servant,” Fauci has since been eulogized by Trump critics as an American hero for pushing to lock the country down during the pandemic, a move that resulted in adverse consequences still being felt.

“Apart from the conspiracy-crazed Trump hardcore eager to burn him at the stake, Dr. Anthony Fauci generally basks in the admiration of a frightened public desperate for truthful leadership,” The Nation, a left-leaning magazine observed in a 2020 story that appeared beneath a headline that asked: “Anthony Fauci: The Last American Hero?”

“For liberals, in particular, he personifies science in shining armor battling the mad dragon in the White House,”

Now the mad dragon is back in the White House, and the political scene in general has become dominated by mad dragons. The Trump model has taken over. Or should we say the Palin model?

Don’t retreat, reload. Don’t compromise, attack. Don’t cooperate, oppose.

A lot has changed since Presidential candidate George Bush, the junior, was on the campaign trail in 1999, proclaiming he wanted to “be a uniter, not a divider.”

Fourteen years later, Liz Sidoti, the national politics editor for The Associated Press, would write that Bush, instead, “left office with a reputation, deserved or not, as one of the most polarizing presidents of our time.”

She would then temper that statement with the observation that it wasn’t “entirely Bush’s fault that he ended up dividing more than uniting. Presidents, after all, don’t operate in a vacuum. He shares the blame with Democratic and Republican parties shaped by their respective extreme ideological wings, a Congress filled with lawmakers who have their own agendas and a modern American political system in which the unifying rhetoric of campaigning usually gives way to the divisiveness of governing.”

Little could she, or anyone else, have guessed that the divisiveness of governing would be trumped by the new and even more divisiveness of rhetoric of political campaigns. All of which shows no signs of ending with former football coach  Walz trying his best to go all Palin.

In Ohio this week, Walz vowed that “we should demonize someone like Elon Musk and those people that do that,” the latter an apparent reference to Walz’s claim Musk is a tax cheat even though he is reported to have paid $450 million in taxes from 2014 to 2018, and $11 billion in 2021, according to CNN. 

Still, his tax rate over the years has been generally low, according to the International Business Times of England, which said Musk earned $13.9 billion in that 2014 to 2018 time period, but reported his total income as only $1.5 billion. Now everyone can have a lively debate about whether Musk was cheating on his taxes or taking advantage of a tax system that favors the wealthiest.

“The rich typically derive their wealth from the value appreciation of assets such as stocks or real estate. It is important to note that stock capital gains and real estate value appreciation aren’t taxable unless sold,” the Times added, while further noting that a ProPublica probe into value appreciation showed it could be exploited to limit taxes.

“Even billionaire investors like Carl Icahn and George Soros (the darling of those on the left) avoided paying taxes for multiple years in a row despite tremendous net worth growth” from 2013 to 2017, the Times said.

But who has time for such nuances in the hot-mess politics of America today, where the way to demonize Musk appears to be to set aflame a Tesla or, better yet, a whole Tesla dealership, owned by someone who might by now also dislike Musk for working with Trump.

And all of this in an effort to destroy the value of Tesla, a company in which the second largest investor is Vanguard, an money management firm handling the retirement accounts of 1 million to 2 million working-class Americans.

Though Walz found falling Tesla stock prices something to joke about, he, unlike Palin, did later try to retreat to when challenged, arguing that it was all a joke.” But “these people have no sense of humor. They are the most literal people. But, but, my point was they’re all mad….they’re all butt hurt about the Tesla thing, but they don’t care.”

One can is only left to ponder why they are butt hurt if they don’t care. But then again, the American politics of the day isn’t about making sense, it’s about inflaming whatever constituency in which a politician thinks votes are to be found.