Back in 2017, I was taken by the irony of the mass of public employee union workers, professors, "elite" university students, bureaucrats and other people with tenure, power and clout - peolple who qualify as "establishment" figures, and who had the lifestyles, sinecures and pensions to show for it - chose to try to rebrand themselves as a "#Resistance*. As opposed to those they were "resisting" - mostly middle Americans in the private sector, disproportionally blue-collar workers and people with families.
They're back, of course. Not so much the hashtag, as far as I've seen, but the idea of the crowd of plush-bottom grandees fashioning themselves as a rag-tag band of underdogs? Big Left is doing its best to recapture the "Spirit of 2017".
The latest (for lack of a better term) "vehicle" for those particular brand of social justice larping is the "spontaneous, grass roots" and "mostly peaceful" protests at Tesla dealerships.
When people ask "there is no way the Minnesota Star Tribune could come up with a bigger stenographer for Big Left than Lori Sturdevant or Jill Burcum", the Strib said "hold my beer" and gave us Jennifer Brooks - who is a hot contender for worst major market columnist in America today.
And she got the memo: those Tesla protesters are plucky underdogs on a quixotic grass roots mission:
Seven weeks ago, there were a few dozen people with signs shivering outside the Tesla dealership in Golden Valley. The next week, a few more. Then a few more. Then a few hundred more.
Saturday was designated a “Global Day of Action” — with four protests planned in the Twin Cities, hundreds planned around the globe —aimed at one of the richest assets of the richest man on Earth.
That asset is worth considerably less, now that Tesla CEO Elon Musk devotes the bulk of his time to di. mantling federal government services and meddling in a judicial election in Wisconsin, where he was expected to show up Sunday
Not sure if the Minnesota Newspaper and Communications Guild, which representes Strib employees, owns any Tesla stock, but you know what I'm rooting for.
But that's not my focus, here.
Brook's gauzy-focused framing notwithstanding, these protests are about as organic and spontanous as Taylor Swift's "Eras" tour.
Asra Nomani - former Wall Street Journal reporter and the first actual journalist I've cited in this piece - did a little digging, and brought the receipts.
It's a very, very long tweet on "X" in reply to a question from Elon Musk. I urge you to read the whole thing:
Hello @ElonMusk and Friends,
— Asra Nomani (@AsraNomani) March 30, 2025
You asked who is funding and organizing the #TeslaTakedown protests. I've got answers for you, after going onto the streets of northern Virginia for the local protests here, seeing familiar faces from the Virginia Democratic political machine and… pic.twitter.com/53MMDpOnOx
I do urge you to read the thread - but some of the exerpts are worth pulling out on their own.
Nomani is on familiar ground:
I went to the #TeslaTakedown protest a week ago Saturday on Tyco Road at the Tysons, Va., and saw familiar faces from Indivisible and the Fairfax County Democratic Party, shouting for you to be deported as they stood outside the Tesla dealership. I wondered too who is organizing and funding the protests nationwide.
The protesters are the tip of a huge organizsational iceberg:
24 organizations and counting are funding and organizing the #TeslaTakedown protests and leading the very partisan propaganda campaign against Tesla, Tesla drivers, Tesla employees, Donald Trump and you. See [the tweet, above] to see all 24 groups with their revenues, involvement, tax ID numbers and other info...100% of the groups are aligned with the Democratic Party. At the protest on 3/29 at Tyco Road, in Tysons, Va., a photo I took of a "Virginia Democrats" sign in front of the Tesla dealership.
She then goes on to start explaining how she found where the proverbial bodies are buried:
In an article for the @FairfaxTimes, I wrote about how the local protests in Tysons, are a window into how the protests are AstroTurf, not "grassroots." What this case reveals is the way that a multi-million dollar professional protest industry manufactures outrage in top-down political theater, agitprop, or agitation propaganda, and now criminal offenses. Here is the article: https://fairfaxtimes.com/articles/local-teslatakedown-reveals-grassroots-protests-are-astroturf/article_1c368d4d-708c-4074-b5fa-5eaf6a32ea97.html
The moral - whatever part of Big Left you're discussing - is that if you dig into any of their "grass roots", you usually find astroturf.
