The Resistance finds a new target

Last week, I was mindlessly scrolling through Instagram and stopped on a video from musician Sheryl Crow. The post, which has received over 20 million views on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, features the singer waving goodbye to her Tesla Model S as Bocelli’s “Time to Say Goodbye” plays in the background. “There comes a time when you have to decide who you are willing to align with,” Crow wrote in the caption. “So long Tesla.”

I immediately sent the video to my husband, half-joking that his anti-Trump parents would likely see the video and follow suit. A few days later, we heard the news: my in-laws would be trading in their Tesla to protest Elon Musk. 

Our family isn’t alone: across the country, Americans exasperated by Musk’s outsized role in the Trump administration’s chaos have identified the popular electric vehicle brand as a worthy target of their protest. Many Tesla owners are feeling buyer's remorse, as their cars are vandalized or they become publicly shamed by strangers upset with the car company’s MAGA CEO. Others are trying to signal to the public that they aren’t down with MAGA by putting anti-Musk bumper stickers on their cars. 

This weekend, thousands demonstrated outside of Tesla dealerships from Philadelphia to Seattle to register their outrage with Musk’s political power. The #TeslaTakedown campaign page on liberal grassroots organizing platform ActionNetwork has listed 46 upcoming events at Tesla dealerships and charging stations around the country over the next week. On another progressive organizing platform, Mobilize, there are another 32 events listed. 

Progressive organizers see protesting and boycotting the electric vehicle company as a tangible way for Americans nationwide to hit Musk in the pocketbook. Some believe Tesla’s stock price is inflated by and uniquely vulnerable to changing consumer sentiment and that large-scale brand problems for the company could tank a good portion of Elon’s net worth. 

“The biggest single piece of Elon Musk’s portfolio is directly exposed to organized economic action by regular people,” wrote Hamilton Nolan in his Substack this week. “If you want to cost Elon Musk tens of billions of dollars, Tesla is the way to do it.”

Progressive organizer Evan Sutton, writing in Ctrl Alt-Right Delete, agreed. “Buyers in the U.S. are starting to price-in Elon’s ties to Trump and far-right movements around the world—and the potential social consequences of driving a car so closely associated with Musk’s personal brand.” Sutton wrote. “If that spreads, it could pop the hype bubble. Tesla insiders know it, and so do big Wall Street research firms.”

Even centrist Democratic take-maker Matt Yglesias has weighed in on Tesla’s current situation, albeit from a policy perspective. One of his latest columns is titled “Democrats should stop subsidizing Tesla.”

The anti-Tesla fervor is a wild turnaround from just two years ago when the company was attacked by conservative media and right-wing personalities online. Partisan outlets like FOX News, Breitbart, and Newsmax have long been eager to share stories of Teslas breaking down and their inability to compete with combustion engines. As a result, attacking electric vehicles of all kinds has become commonplace among Republican activists and MAGA politicians alike. 

Now, the company finds itself in a spectacularly terrible brand position: in between a chaotic, hyper-partisan CEO and outraged consumers on both sides of the aisle. 

Charted: Unpopular Oligarchs

Major right-wing Facebook influencer to FBI

On Sunday, Donald Trump announced that right-wing media personality Dan Bongino would be appointed to serve as Deputy Director of the FBI. It’s an insane choice that underscores the President’s desire for the Bureau to wage a campaign of retribution against his political enemies.

In the world of online conservative media, Bongino is a rock star with an enormous megaphone and dedicated following. He has over 3.5 million followers on Rumble, and around 6 million followers on Facebook, where his posts regularly receive more engagement than most other political pages. According to data from CAP Action, in the past year alone, Bongino’s Facebook posts have received over 15 million likes, shares, and comments and a quarter of a billion impressions. In 2020, journalist Kevin Roose published an interesting look at Bongino’s relationship with the Meta-owned social media site.

Bernie is once again asking for your support

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is currently on a “coast-to-coast Fighting Oligarchy tour,” holding large-scale rallies in places like Nebraska and Iowa to rage against Elon Musk and our new MAGA overlords. In a sign of how hungry many people are for authentic, populist messengers, the crowds at his events have been ‘yuge. At the same time, the 83-year-old’s campaign has launched a new version of his viral fundraising video, and is putting large amounts of money behind it. 

On Facebook and Instagram, Friends of Bernie Sanders has spent over $400,000 in the past few days fundraising with this familiar video ad. That makes him the highest-spending political advertiser on Meta platforms in the past week. Political digital fundraisers don’t often spend that kind of money without receiving a significant return on their investment - so this high-dollar campaign and others from the likes of AOC and Chris Murphy signals growing enthusiasm from Democratic small-dollar donors.

More things you should read

• CNN went to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this weekend, and found many MAGA attendees distrustful of the new Trump-Big Tech alliance. 

• As Facebook abandons its fact-checking program, the platform is offering incentives for viral content, writes Craig Silverman for ProPublica.

• The New York Times profiled Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who has emerged as a compelling national voice countering Trump. Interesting data points: “Over the past two months, he has doubled his Instagram following on both his official and political accounts…On Substack, Mr. Murphy’s subscribers have increased by 223 percent…His campaign has spent more on fund-raising ads on Meta in 2025 than it did in the entirety of the 2023-24 cycle, when he was running for re-election.”

• Apparently, television screens in the Department of Housing and Urban Development were hacked, and they temporarily featured an AI generated video of Donald Trump sucking Elon Musk’s feet. 

• Betches has a good explainer on that “Republican Makeup” TikTok trend. 

One last thing: Hostile Government Takeover

The viral “Hostile Government Takeover” song from TikTok has an EDM remix that is now streaming on Spotify. It’s a collaboration between @agiftfromtodd and @veryveryvinny, and it’s kind of a bop:

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