This article was originally published by Connor O’Keeffe at the Mises Institute. 

In recent weeks, there has been a sharp increase in violent attacks aimed at destroying cars and other property carrying the logo of Elon Musk’s electric car company, Tesla.

In Colorado, a woman was charged with using Molotov cocktails to set multiple cars at a Tesla dealership on fire before painting the word Nazi on a store sign. In Oregon, one man fired a rifle into one Tesla dealership while someone else fired shots and threw explosives into another. In Washington, four Tesla Cybertrucks were set on fire, a Tesla sedan was covered in gasoline and set ablaze on a city street, and various other Cybertrucks had swastikas painted on them.

Seven Tesla charging stations were burned in Massachusetts, two Teslas were set on fire in Texas, several Teslas were shot and lit on fire in Nevada, and much more. As recently as Monday, multiple firebombs were discovered in a Tesla dealership in Austin, Texas. It’s clear that these are, at the very least, copycat acts aimed at Elon Musk and anyone who owns or is interested in buying a car from his company.

The violent wing is only one part of a broader anti-Musk movement that’s cropped up since the Tesla CEO endorsed Donald Trump and took on an advisory role in the new administration. The more above-board side of the effort—organized by the progressive group Indivisible—has officially denounced the destruction of property and has instead focused on staging protests and obnoxiously shaming Tesla owners in public.

But the more extreme, violent factions appear to share the same objective as these progressive activists—as can be deduced from the sudden popularity of these crimes, the symbols and messages left by perpetrators, and the various far-left blogs doxing Tesla employees and calling for more direct action at dealerships in a mass “Tesla Takedown” on March 29.

Because of the tactics and rhetoric used, it’s clear that many of the left-wingers carrying all this out see themselves as soldiers in a noble, grassroots resistance that’s taking on the world’s richest man and his fascist underlings. But this is just the latest example of the American far-left being easily co-opted into playing directly into the hands of the political establishment.

Elon Musk was already absurdly wealthy for years before he bought Twitter and began leaning more into politics. Sure, his success in producing the first electric car that people didn’t have to be bribed into driving helped his reputation in the eyes of climate-conscious progressives. But his massive net worth still made him a textbook villain to the left-wing mind. To those who genuinely believe that world hunger could be solved entirely for just a couple of billion dollars, for example, anyone “sitting on” a net worth as high as Musk’s is considered downright evil.

But the left’s opposition to Elon Musk never really rose above the occasional grumblings in online comment sections. That is, until Musk began to take on projects that the political establishment doesn’t like. First, he broke the establishment’s stranglehold over social media by buying Twitter. Then, later, he threw his money and support behind Donald Trump at the apex of the 2024 election. Finally, he signed on to help the current administration determine how to effectively cut government and then carry out those cuts.

Leaving aside how genuine or effective Musk has been or will be in his recent anti-establishment turn, it is clear that the political class is not happy with the Tesla CEO. He has brought a lot of attention to some of the interventionist scams at the heart of our political system and generated a lot of excitement about cutting the government power, fueling it all.

The politicians, government officials, politically-connected rich, and corporate media higher-ups who benefit from those interventionist scams are making an effort to demonize Musk for the exact kind of conduct they have partaken in for decades—mainly warping government policy to his own benefit at the expense of poor people.

We could speculate over whether all this violence is an unintended consequence of this rhetoric or a sought-after reaction. But what nobody can deny is that the people destroying and defacing Tesla cars, chargers, and dealerships believe exactly what the political establishment wants them to believe about Elon Musk.

If the left is genuinely interested in restructuring our political system to help the people artificially held at the bottom, they should notice and recalibrate when they find their movement playing directly into the hands of the group rigging the rules to stay on top.