The Proud Boys and Militias Come to Tesla’s Defense

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Over the weekend, thousands of people joined the “Tesla Takedown” protest movement at the company’s showrooms across the country. At the same time, a much smaller number of Elon Musk supporters turned out at Tesla locations for a counterprotest movement that some participants dubbed “Tesla Shield.”

While the protest movement comprises people angered at Elon Musk’s role in the dismantling of federal government agencies, the counterprotest movement that showed up this weekend was peopled mostly by MAGA supporters. Among them were an array of far-right extremists, including members of the Proud Boys, armed militias, and at one event in Idaho, a guy dressed as Hitler.

As Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) rips through huge swaths of the federal government and puts people’s lives and livelihoods at risk, the Tesla protest movement has gained traction. Tesla’s stock price has dropped by more than 30 percent since the beginning of the year. Isolated incidents of vandalism against Tesla vehicles and chargers as well as dealerships have led Trump to push the Department of Justice to treat alleged violent protesters as “domestic terrorists,” and now some extremist groups have taken it upon themselves to help Musk fight back.

“My people will be free, my people will rule again,” David Pettinger, a member of the extremist anti-government People’s Rights group, shouted at protesters in a fake German accent outside a Tesla dealership in Meridian, Idaho, on Saturday, according to video footage of the incident.

A moustachioed Pettinger wore a T-shirt with the words “LITERALLY HITLER” written on the back and a picture of Musk giving a nazi-like salute on the front. Wearing jodhpurs and black boots, Pettinger marched in front of protesters and handed out heart-shaped stickers to Musk supporters.

Pettinger told WIRED that he dressed as Hitler to “make fun of the overuse of the terms nazi and fascist.” However, Pettinger’s posts on X echo Hitler’s deeply antisemitic worldview.

Also in Meridian were a number of armed individuals in camouflage gear, some wearing body armor, according to images of the counterprotest posted to Bluesky. Pettinger also appeared to be armed, according to video footage showing a handgun tucked into his jodhpurs.

Meanwhile, Josh Fulfer, who is known online as Oreo Express and was at the US Capitol in Washington on January 6, joined a counterprotest group in Fresno, California, telling a local news outlet: “We’re out here to show support for DOGE, Elon Musk, Tesla, and this administration.” Fulfer can be seen on his own videos harassing and shouting at protesters.

Ahead of the Tesla Takedown protests this weekend, the Proud Boys and other far-right groups put out calls on their social media channels for supporters to show up in numbers and counter the protests.

A virtually all of the dealerships which had protests this weekend, however, the number of anti-Musk protesters vastly outnumbered the pro-Musk protesters.

In Columbus, Ohio, news that a local Proud Boy chapter had urged supporters to show up didn’t dissuade more than 1,000 anti-Musk protesters from turning up. Meanwhile, fewer than 50 pro-Musk supporters were in attendance, according to local media. The Proud Boy group claimed they would be infiltrating the protesters to gather information, but it’s unclear if they were present at Saturday’s protest.

In Salem, Oregon, pro-Musk supporters waved Proud Boys flags in front of a Tesla dealership while many of them walked around wearing the group’s uniform of yellow and black clothing.

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, the far-right anti-government militia group Veterans on Patrol announced on its Telegram channel that it was taking a break from monitoring and tracking immigrants to infiltrate a Tesla Takedown protest for “redirecting action against Elon and EVs towards a more reasonable target.”

Musk himself posted multiple times about the protests over the weekend, claiming without any evidence that the protesters were being paid. The hate-filled LibsofTikTok account, operated by Chaya Raichik, responded to one of Musk’s post, claiming: “Soros is paying for this,” referring to Hungarian billionaire and philanthropist George Soros, who far-right figures believe is controlling huge swaths of the global population.

As Musk continues to tear through the federal government, and Tesla’s stock price continues to plummet, the organizers of the Tesla Takedown movement have pledged to continue to protest, with the movement now reaching other parts of the world as well. But equally, members identifying with the so-called Tesla Shield movement have vowed, on posts on X and Facebook, to continue their efforts to defend Musk and his company.

They’re Not Tariffs, They’re Sanctions

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I’m watching the stock market plunge, and the expectations for recession and stagflation rise, along with everyone else. I’m aware of the innumeracy of the Trump administration, apparently using a shortcut AI formula to reset global trade imbalances and trying to bullshit their way through the criticism.

But I think we give too much credit to Donald Trump and his lieutenants when we suggest that they’re pursuing a misguided trade policy, or that they aren’t pairing tariffs with the necessary steps to boost domestic manufacturing. Those things are true, of course: U.S. trade policy has been deeply inequitable for decades, favoring multinationals over workers and the environment, giving benefits to those corporations in free-trade agreements that they could never get through normal legislative channels, and handing over economic decisions to Wall Street. But these careful explanations, however correct, have nothing to do with what we saw on display in the Rose Garden yesterday.

Because these aren’t really tariffs at all.

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Sure, in some functional sense, Trump announced a set of levies to be collected on imports upon their entry into the country. But a tariff policy would consider whether Americans have the wherewithal to make that good domestically, whether component parts that go into U.S. manufacturing should be targeted at the same rate as finished goods, and whether government policy has incentivized a transition to domestic production to encourage the investment. Even the Gilded Age era that Trump looks at longingly did not feature across-the-board tariffs; the famed McKinley Tariff of 1890 cut tariffs on sugar, the biggest revenue-raiser of the era.

What Trump is doing is a sanction policy, only he’s doing it against the whole world, all at once, for the assumed harm of “ripping off” the United States for decades. Sanctions have become a dangerously large component of American geopolitical strategy, an instrument of economic war felt disproportionately by the world’s poorest citizens. The stated reason that Russia and North Korea and other rogue states aren’t on the tariff lists is because sanctions have destroyed their ability to have a trading relationship with the U.S. Trump is applying those punitive measures to the rest of the world.

It is not at all surprising that Trump sees the appeal in sanctions. It is no different from a mob boss moving into town and sending his thugs to every business on Main Street, roughing up the proprietors and asking for protection money so they don’t get pushed out of business. Trump believes that the U.S. is indispensable enough that it can intimidate every country on Earth by, well, asking for protection money, which would take many forms: curbing migration, taking in more U.S. farm exports or weapons systems, reducing industrial capacity in China and forcing more consumption, buying long-dated U.S. debt on the cheap, siding with a war strategy against Iran, literally anything the White House wants. Trump now has a tool by which he can achieve whatever goals he conjures up, or simply have his leg-breakers beat the global economy to a pulp. It’s a mentality fit for someone repeatedly linked to organized crime.

I laid this out nearly six months ago, after Scott Bessent was named Treasury secretary. He sketched out this entire policy last year in an interview explaining his “green-yellow-red” theory. Essentially, Bessent would put every country in a box with one of those three colors. “This is how you get in the green box, this is how you stay in the green box. If you’re India, you want to have 20% tariffs, you want to buy sanctioned Russian oil, you’re in the yellow box, and by the way, if you keep buying that oil, you’re moving toward the red box.”

Check out this statement from the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue, a coalition of U.S. and European Union consumer and digital rights organizations, highlighting that the U.S. National Trade Estimate lists EU laws on privacy, competition, food safety, and climate as “trade barriers.” Regardless of the ridiculous way the administration calculated its tariffs, it’s clear that the proposed remedy for removing them is for the EU to change its laws.

Trump believes that every relationship is zero-sum and transactional. There are no win-win arrangements with allies. They have to suffer for us to win. And if a deal is made, it must be made from a position of strength. From Trump’s perspective, he just gained leverage on every country in the world, even the ones only inhabited by penguins.

The problem with this “logic” is that America is not indispensable and other countries have just as much ability to retaliate, forcing the whole world into recession and making it very clear who started it.

But countries are not alone in the boxes; corporations and industry sectors are as well. The phalanxes of lawyers and lobbyists who try to ease sanctions through their contacts at the highest levels of power now have a new target. Companies have been lawyering up for months in anticipation, while enlisting friendly politicians for the task. The White House has fielded hundreds of letters from businesses pleading their case. And it’s already working.

Here’s the head of the American Petroleum Institute with a slobbering note: “We welcome President Trump’s decision to exclude oil and natural gas from new tariffs, underscoring the complexity of integrated global energy markets and the importance of America’s role as a net energy exporter.” We already know there has been some resistance from the oil and gas industry over Trump’s demand to increase production, which would lower prices below the break-even rate that makes exploration viable. Let’s watch for any changes in those decisions in the weeks ahead. Or maybe the industry will make good on the billion dollars in campaign cash Trump wanted.

I’ve really only seen Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) understand this, that this is just a loyalty test for virtually every business in the nation, a universal attempt to gather protection money. It’s no different than using the leverage of government funding to force universities and law firms into submission. These economic sanctions force businesses to supplicate. “One by one, every industry or company will need to pledge loyalty to Trump in order to get sanctions relief,” Murphy writes. That’s correct, and it could come in the form of campaign support, corporate governance changes, or just raw cash. Anything is possible.

So this policy is an open invitation for corruption, yes. Where you sit in relationship to Trump, what donations you gave and what endorsements you’ve made, will dictate your level of success. America is now a country where proximity to the king matters above any other business strategy. As Tim Wu writes, companies so dependent on government treatment don’t innovate because they don’t have to. Their government relations departments rise well beyond their research and development departments. And as there are only so many favors to dish out, they trend the country toward oligarchy.

Most of all, I think the attempts to overlay coherence in trade policy on this set of actions really misses the point. There is no effort here to rewrite the rules of trade or reverse deindustrialization. It’s actually more like a funhouse-mirror version of the neoliberal era: using trade as a bargaining chip to win other policies. In that era, the attraction of duty-free treatment was used to get countries in line; now, it’s the stick of tariff sanctions.