Playing in takedown mode

How can a country of nearly 350 million people scattered across more than 3.5 million square miles of land register its unhappiness with a power-grab from an elected would-be tyrant? Americans are still working out the answer to that question, but they’re making some progress.

Are you worried about the future of the country but still wondering what to do that might actually make a difference? One concerted effort that continues to grow are the Tesla Takedown protests. Started this year, they’ve steadily expanded. March 29 was set as a target date for synchronized action, and last weekend demonstrations took place all over the U.S. and in at least a dozen countries around the world.

I had a chance to cover one of the Tesla demonstrations on Saturday and see what was happening for myself. Today I want to share what I saw, ponder what the point of these even is, and offer some other examples of what people are doing that you might have heard less about. And I’ll address that burning question: are these protests likely to work?

What democracy looks like

I had a few local options last weekend—there were four demonstrations in the greater D.C. area. Out of community-mindedness or sheer laziness, I went to the one in Tysons Corner, Virginia, the one closest to my home.

The Tysons showroom sits on a side road in a busy commercial area, which meant that for those who couldn’t metro to the protest, parking was a challenge. Still, over 200 people showed up in all, standing on both sides of the street, waving signs saying everything from “Dethrone Musk” to “Stop the Billionaire Takeover.” There were competing sound systems on each sidewalk, with one enthusiastic musician opening up the trunk of his car to amplifiers and setting up speakers on stands.

The usual chants went up denouncing Elon Musk and asking what democracy looks like, while cars drove by, many of them honking to support the protest. I saw police vehicles parked out of the way at each end of the demonstration and noticed what I believe was a Fairfax County officer intermittently checking in with the protest organizer in a low-key way. But police remained mostly out of sight.

One woman in a Tesla flipped off demonstrators. Some Cybertruck drivers on their way to the showroom (perhaps in response to one of the recent recall notices) laid on their horns in a way I suspect wasn’t meant to indicate support for the protest. But the general atmosphere was one of pissed-off festivity, where people seemed glad to have a place to gather and shout about the idiocy of the current moment.

A sprinkling of college-age kids dotted the crowd, but most of the attendees were near retirement age or already there. I talked to Julie, who didn’t want to go on camera but held up her sign reading "MUSK-TRUMP Smash-N-Grab our Social Security.” She said that she was old enough to remember Vietnam and had protested at various points across her life.

She was also a Navy veteran who’d been on active duty for eight years, and had begun attending Tesla protests earlier in March. She and her husband John agreed that people know what’s going on is wrong, and not just with Musk’s role in government. They mentioned the use of a Signal messenger group by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other officials as violating a number of laws. Julie said, “Man, if I had done what they did…”

Howard, another demonstrator, chimed in with his reason for showing up. “What brings me out here is trying to save democracy,” he said, describing Musk as “unelected, unconfirmed… and he is devastating our government.”

Howard said he’d worked for NOAA for 16 years and has joined demonstrators outside the Tesla showroom every week. He claimed a 95% “beep ratio” from passing cars, which he took as a personal accomplishment.

Later I ran into one of my neighbors, who came with a friend. They held signs reading “Nobody Elected Musk” and “No Kings in America.” Most of those I spoke with had attended several Tesla protests already, and said it felt good to be a part of a community that aimed to defy Musk, even as they were frightened about what else he might to do the country.

Bringing the fight to Musk

Someone wrote me on social media this week about the Tesla protests, saying, “I wonder if this just harms the dealers, not Musk.” It occurred to me that other people might not know that Tesla doesn’t have traditional dealerships the way other car manufacturers do.

And let’s be honest—as the richest man in the world, no matter how successful the Tesla Takedown protests are, Elon Musk is unlikely to ever go hungry or homeless. But he faces real financial instability if Tesla’s stock price continues to drop. So yes, sullying his public image and cratering orders for Teslas will absolutely hurt Elon Musk in direct ways.

We’re still in the early stages of a lot of people waking up to what’s happening in the U.S. So it’s critical that organizing to stand up against these actions feels open-ended and like an invitation to voice concerns individuals might have had personally in the light of the daily news. The more they begin to pay attention, the clearer it is that the president and his deputies are dismantling the parts of the federal government that actually serve the public, and destroying it in ways that promote corruption, decrease the likelihood of maintaining democracy, and cause direct suffering.

The Tesla protests are effective because they hit all three of these points. They remind the public that Elon Musk is actually CEO of companies that profit from the havoc he’s wreaking—Musk himself becomes a key symbol of the current corruption.

Since Musk is unelected and hasn’t even been officially appointed to any serious position of leadership, highlighting Musk’s outsize role also underlines the degree to which the current administration is operating outside democratic institutions and any Constitutional framework. But the demonstrations simultaneously have concrete effects on his bottom line. If U.S. courts haven’t yet gotten Musk’s mythical DOGE team’s hands out of the national databases or pocketbook, Tesla protests at least help keep people out of Musk’s cars.

Don’t stop, it’s working

And it appears to be working on all fronts. Musk is rattled, and has called for terrorism charges against the masterminds he believes are opposing Tesla. He gets weepy when he talks about these protests in public. He calls people evil for joking about the richest man in the world facing the slightest business crisis as a consequence for his actions harming others.

Keep in mind that Musk has already directly caused tens of thousands of deaths overseas by (as he described it earlier this year) “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” And he’s on track to kill hundreds of thousands more this year due to the decimation of PEPFAR treatment for people living with HIV, as well as largely disbanded USAID programs combatting malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases abroad.

Anti-Musk protesters have overwhelmingly been nonviolent in the U.S., though there have been a few dramatic incidents of vandalism involving serious damage to dealerships. Police in New York are reported to be considering weighing charging vandals with hate crimes for spray-painting swastikas on Tesla vehicles. In Florida, a woman was charged with a felony for putting her gum on a Cybertruck. Meanwhile, Musk supporters have threatened protesters with their vehicles or a stun gun in two separate incidents.

European freelance protesters, who appear to be unaffiliated with the Tesla Takedown movement, torched several Teslas near Toulouse in February and many more in Rome just last weekend.

The long haul

Now that the Tesla protests have been going on for several weeks, they might feel like an old story. But this is exactly the kind of continuous activity that will be necessary for public protest to become effective and damage Musk’s bottom line.

In addition, as I’ve written before, my sense is that a massive popular movement will become vital to stopping Trump at some point. It wasn’t difficult to imagine this scenario when hearing him talking earnestly about an illegal third term this week. Many legacy media outlets reference the concept as just some new possibility, when such an attempt would be not only unconstitutional but also perhaps the defining mark of dictatorship.

I think of the need to build the power of protest when I see pundits talk about things like how Democrats have failed to appeal to Christians while catering only to their extreme-left base. I’m not calling out any specific individuals, but it’s something I’m seeing pretty often. There’s an institutional disease happening right now which conflates political communications with political principles.

If Democrats are serious about power, they need to establish principles that they stand for. I strongly think these should include looking out for everybody, reclaiming freedom from persecution, and living our best lives together as a rallying cries. But I feel like I often see people throwing out trans rights and immigrants as ways to compromise, long after it’s been made clear that concessions on either of these issues only lead to further demands to dehumanize the targeted group.

It shouldn’t be that complicated that for political communication, you can emphasize the ways we’re all at risk—the havoc at Social Security, the ongoing risks to Medicaid, and an economy under tremendous threat from Trump’s senseless love of trade wars and tariffs. But focusing your barnstorming and your ads (if you’re a candidate) on those issues doesn’t mean you have to give an inch on anyone’s rights or humanity. If Trump allies try to box you in, call out the broader harm they’re trying to distract the public from, and remind listeners of the ways everyone will pay the price for his agenda.

Other methods of protest

Economic non-cooperation is a whole concept—there are a lot of ways to protest using your buying power. Since January 24, when Target announced it was ending its DEI initiatives, predominantly Black faith groups and civil rights organizations called for a boycott. Target stock had already been in decline, and the market itself has been in turmoil. But the Dow Jones in that same period has had a six percent loss, while Target stock has fallen twenty-seven percent in that window.

Other affected groups encouraged a buycott—spending money at Costco instead to show purchasing power in another concrete way. I’m not a market analyst, so I haven’t researched every variable about Target vs. Costco. But in the same window since Target ended its DEI initiatives and lost 27% of its stock value, Costco has faced the market turmoil confronted by all companies in the Trump era. But instead of losing 27% like Target, or losing 6% like the broader market, as of the date we’re recording, Costco shares are sitting almost exactly even with where they were on January 24.

The state of protest

But there’s still a lot of power in good old-fashioned street protests. A lot of people who are only online have been asking, “Why aren’t people in the streets, the way they were during the first Trump administration??” But in fact, they are. Protests are growing. According to the Crowd Counting Consortium, the number of protests in 2025 from January 22 on have consistently exceeded those from the same period in 2017. Protests have doubled since eight years ago.

If you’re not feeling that or seeing it, encourage your local media to cover protests more often. Or join a demonstration yourself. It can be stabilizing and energizing to realize just how many people are taking action.

Protests against political repression and authoritarian leaders are growing overseas, too. Hungary, which legalized same-sex partnerships back in 2009, has been rolling back personal rights and freedoms across the board under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. In response to recent punitive legislation that penalizes queer communities—and reminds a lot of people of Russian suppression of gay rights a decade ago—thousands of LGBTQ+ Hungarians and their supporters have taken to the streets to demand that their annual June Pride march take place as usual. After Orbán outlawed protests, demonstrators in Budapest have kept showing up.

Turkey has seen even bigger crowds, with what’s been reported as hundreds of thousands to millions of protesters making their opinions known on the streets. They’ve come out to denounce the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who opposed the repressive measures of President Erdogan. İmamoğlu was recently jailed, as soon as he was selected to run against Erdogan in an election that won’t take place until 2028.

And I just want to take a moment once again to tally up the ways that other countries, unlike the US, are still trying to address corruption at the highest political levels. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had to interrupt proceedings in his ongoing corruption trial on Monday to answer questions from police in a separate crisis, after two close associates were arrested in connection with the Qatargate scandal.

Also on Monday, a French court blocked Marine Le Pen from being a candidate in any new election during the next five years. This decision torpedoes (at least for now) her dreams of running for president one last time in 2027, when Emmanuel Macron’s current term ends. Le Pen was also sentenced to four years in prison for embezzlement, though she’s only likely to serve part of that term, and even that will be under house arrest.

Does protest work?

Closer to home, I’d like to highlight another kind of demonstration—bridge protests by Alphabet resistance on the 50th Street overpass in Seattle. For the latest one, they offered an A-side and a B-side. First, each person held up a letter to spell out “HEGSETH SHARES WAR PLANS.” The B-side? “TRUMP CABINET INCOMPETENT.” And “Next Comes What” producer Jason Sattler has likewise been doing some bridge protests, but in Michigan.

Yes, but. I can hear some of you saying. Of course it’s fun to stand on a bridge while people cheer you on, and of course you’re on the side of the angels if you’re trying to bankrupt Elon Musk. But does protest really have the effects it’s supposed to? Does it make a difference?

I’d like to point out some recent research about Black Lives Matter, a movement that launched a wave of protests after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020. (Black Lives Matter even held a march in my hometown of Parkersburg, West Virginia.) These protests were used as propaganda by right-wing news outlets—and even some mainstream ones—which suggested that the protesters were violent thugs and that Black Americans were out of control.

Black Lives Matter is often used to assert how protests can push things too far, or that they don’t work. But a study out in March from Bouke Klein Teeselink and Georgios Melios in the journal Political Behavior shows the effect of Black Lives Matters on voting in the 2020 elections. Researchers found that though there was conservative backlash in the immediate wake of the protests, the demonstrations made a difference in increasing Democratic support during elections that November. The research also suggests that “the effect of protests is relatively large in counties with smaller, whiter, and lower-educated populations.”

They cite an earlier study by Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, noting that “Through imitation and conversion, protest participation can create a ripple effect whereby one protester potentially influences multiple non-participants.” This is just one way that even small protests all across the country matter.

So on that note, I’ll mention that there’s a conglomeration of protest this weekend across the country. On Saturday, April 5, Indivisible, 50501, the Women’s March, and many other groups are co-endorsing a Hands Off! protest, calling for hands off Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights, and much more.

Key events will take place in Washington, Seattle and Portland where the numbers are likely to be big. But smaller ones will happen nationwide, too. So I encourage you to go if you can, secure in the knowledge that standing up, even before others do, really makes a difference. And the more people that come aboard, the more power we wield as voters, citizens, residents, and Americans.