No Teslas on Mars!

Stop the oligarchy!

Ah, that oligarchy, it’s everywhere, it’s in your hair, it’s on your mind….

You’ve seen them all over last weekend, protesting Teslas and Elon Musk like Code Pink on steroids.

Or have you? Well, I’m not sure—or more precisely suspicious. There is data that is a bit surprising. More of that later.

More importantly, these protestors don’t care that Teslas are the best cars on the road for the money and probably the best period. (I own one and can attest to that.) Nor do they care it uses some of the cleanest energy out there, for what that’s worth, with something called the Model Q around the corner that is so cheap, so working class friendly, it threatens to put the rest of the EV world out of business. Pretty soon they’ll be selling Teslas on Mars.

They just hate Elon Musk, hate him most of all because they used to think he was one of them but now he’s with the dreaded Trump.

He’s an apostate! Kill him!

Of course his ideas haven’t changed, but never mind. He’s now a Nazi, formerly a genius. Scratch a swastika on his car and while you’re at it “Free Palestine.”

And never mind his DOGE operation is doing what scads of Democrats (Obama, Clinton, Gore, and others) promised and never did—cut down on our government’s absolutely mammoth waste and do something about the national debt that threatens to destroy our country..

And never mind the people working with him, supposedly pimply-faced teenagers, actually turned out to be high level tech executives with IQs beyond virtually any politician extant, save perhaps Argentina’s Javier Milei and some deceased ones like Daniel Moynihan. Many have left high-paying jobs to work with Musk on DOGE. Brilliant people, they understand the gravity of the situation. If not now, when.

(If you haven’t seen it, be sure to click here to see Musk and his staffers explaining in detail what they are doing with Fox’s Bret Baier. But chances are you already have, since approaching thirty million—some kind of record for the show— have watched this interview in various media, a reassuring testament to the good sense of the American people.)

And, while you’re at it, never mind that Musk himself has done more with his life than anyone I can think of in recent history—miraculously capturing rocket boosters in those “chopstick” arms of the launch tower as they descend from space, rescuing astronauts stranded on the space station, providing internet to the world from satellites, pioneering in artificial intelligence with Grok and xAI, of course x itself, and, potentially most amazing, working to make the blind see through computer chip implants in the brain via his company Neuralink. And there’s more.

Oh, and I forgot, that motor car company that has made him the world’s richest man. You know, the one where the car drives itself. (It really does!) Sounds like someone you should hate, no? (If you actually do, please review the Tenth Commandment. You may be coveting.)

Some people who consider themselves to be liberals have told me that they agree government is bloated but they object to the supposedly will-nilly way it is being carried out by Musk and Company. This is a variation of the “use a scalpel, not a chainsaw” argument you often hear from members of the more traditional right.

Both are being disingenuous or at least deceiving themselves. Consciously or not, these people don’t want change. They fear it. Their conformist gene, shared by most of us, is ruling them. It’s not amazing. It’s all too human. That’s why real change doesn’t happen often and we should grab it on those few occasions when it does.

Like it or not, the only way government will be cut is that it is cut, definitively, one might even say brutally. Otherwise, it’s not really happening in any enduring way.. Minor cuts will be replaced before you know it, almost inexorably. That National Debt Clock many of us have seen will continue to mount at its terrifying pace. (It does contain a DOGE CLOCK now with the “savings per taxpayer” currently $2,329—not bad.)

Linked inseparably to the aforementioned fear is the aforementioned apostasy. Everyone fears apostates, not just Muslims. (We know how they deal with it.). Apostasy makes people question themselves in uncomfortable ways. Very often it breaks lifelong relationships.

But democracy of all sorts, republican or otherwise, depends on apostasy. It comes down to this: if no one ever changed their mind, there would be no point in holding elections. There would be no point in our system or anything like it. Elon Musk is not alone in his apostasy. Ronald Reagan was an apostate as is Donald Trump. There are tons of others out there—including yours truly—some going in the opposite direction.

Needless to say, the looneys demanding Musk’s head have not thought much about this (or anything). Fortunately, despite being the subject of the usual media orgy, there are not many of them.

How do I know? I consulted Grok. (I know. I know. It’s Musk’s. Potential BIAS ALERT. You can run the same on ChatGPT and report back)

According to Grok, an estimated 200+ demonstrations took place against Tesla across the US on Saturday Mar 29. It estimates 20,000 to 60,000 people participated en toto. (Compare that to the tens of millions that watched the Baier interview.) I gave the protestors the benefit of the doubt, took the larger figure of their number and divided it into the population of the USA, roughly 340 million. Somewhere in the area of 1 in every 5,667 citizens demonstrated. Not particularly impressive. (All figures VERY approximate.)

Then I asked how many Teslas there were in the US. (For equal time, I went to Google’s AI.) According to Google, there are roughly 3.3 million EVs on the road in this country of which roughly (it’s getting vague here) 52% (probably more) are Teslas. So let’s say1.7 million Teslas out there. Divide 1.7 million by 5667 and you get 300 Teslas to every protestor. How many of those protestors are willing to risk apprehension by defacing a car is anybody’s guess, but for the sake of argument I’m assuming the chances of someone screwing with a Tesla are less than one in a thousand. Still, the wise man or woman uses Sentry Mode.

NPR AND WASTE

National Public Radio is very much under the DOGE gun and I didn’t want to conclude without my own observations. I have only been on NPR twice—unsurpisingly, they don’t like me nearly as much as conservative radio—once with Glenn Reynolds when we were starting Pajamas Media back in the beginning of this century. I think it seemed exotic to them. It was a hectic time and I don’t remember much about it.

I do remember, however, the time I was invited late 2015 to appear as something even more exotic (to them)—a Trump supporter. When they called, they could hardly believe they found one. It was for Morning Edition, so recorded in Los Angeles , where I then lived, for the next day around midnight. When I arrived at NPR, I was shocked. Now I was still working in the movie industry then, so was very familiar with studios and had had an office at Universal for several years. NPR was more extensive and opulent than anything I had ever seen for a radio station.I had never seen more conspicuous waste, virtually for anything. These days, even then, you could record everything they did at home with a decent microphone, a MacBook and some drapes to deaden sound. You’d think they were going to film a remake of Lawrence of Arabia. Bay after bay sat there empty. I never saw anything like it until years later, spending a good deal of time in DC for the Epoch Times, I saw empty office after empty office all around the Beltway. Who paid for all this? (You, Mr. and Mrs., Taxpayer, among others.)

Beyond the obscene waste, the idea of government-run or sponsored media is of course totally Soviet and the woman who was testifying in front of Congress the other day the perfect apparatchik. NPR should be set adrift by DOGE tout de suite. I love classical music too but there are a bazillion other places to hear it.

Just a short reminder to those who have missed it, our companion Substack The Inoculator is up and running, pursuing our goal of diminishing bias in higher education. People are already subscribing to get paid reports on individual colleges. Free subscribers can get a taste of our approach—ratings only, not the full comment or the course by course analysis—of one school already at the new site (school identification hint: a hair color). Have a look.