Andrea Pitzer (0:00)

You're listening to Next Comes what from Degenerate Art. This is Andrea Pitzer. Be sure to subscribe@Andrea pitzer.com so this podcast can remain free for everyone. You're giving up your other stuff. I mean, what do you. How are you running your other businesses? With great difficulty. Yeah. I mean, but there's no turning back. You're saying 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? Nobody's ever seen anything like we're witnessing now. Americans are still working out the answer to that question, but they're making some progress. Everything in Wisconsin is decided in razor thin margins. What you're seeing here is a blowout. Elon Musk and his $26 million got wrecked tonight in a state that that Donald Trump won just a couple of months ago. One concerted effort that is growing that I've talked about at length before are the Tesla takedown protests. Things are bad at Tesla. They're about to get much worse. Started just this year, they've slowly expanded and March 29 was set as a target date for simultaneous action. The White House is denying a report that President Trump is telling his inner circle that Elon Musk will be stepping back in the next few weeks. Last weekend, demonstrations took place at showrooms in the US and at least a dozen countries around the world, from New York to Washington to Los Angeles to San Francisco and even abroad. Tesla Takedown, a global day of peaceful action demanding an end to Elon Musk's influence over Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, and its sweeping federal cuts. I had a chance to cover one of the Tesla demonstrations this weekend and see what was happening for myself today. I want to talk about what I saw, discuss what the point of these even is, and offer some other examples of what people are doing that you might have heard less about. I had a few local options. Last weekend there were four protests in the greater D.C. area. You guys might find this interesting. In Washington, D.C. before the Tesla takedown, there's going to be a dance party, which I actually said that's kind of not a bad idea out of community mindedness or maybe sheer laziness. I went to the one in Tyson's Corner, Virginia, which is the one closest to my home. The Tysons Tesla showroom sits on a side road in a busy commercial area, which meant that for those who couldn't Metro to the protests, parking was a real challenge. Still, over 200 people showed up altogether 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 either side of the street, with one enthusiastic musician opening up the trunk of his car to amplifiers and setting up actual speakers on stands. On the other side was just a lonely megaphone, but we could hear both, and the usual chants went up, denouncing Elon Musk and asking what democracy looks like, while cars drove by and many of them honked in support of the protest. I saw police vehicles parked out of the way at each end of the demonstration and noticed what I'm pretty sure was a Fairfax county policeman intermittently checking in with the protest organizer in a low key way. But for our protests, police remain mostly out of sight. One woman in a Tesla flipped off demonstrators and some cybertruck drivers on their way into the showroom, maybe 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. All this is the latest setback for Tesla. US Regulators are now recalling nearly every cybertruck on the road. It is the eighth recall for the cybertruck since it was first released in 2020, but the general atmosphere was one of pissed off festivity, and 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, I would say, were retirement age nearly or maybe already retired. And I talked to a woman named Julie who didn't want to go on camera, but held up her sign reading Musk Trump smash and 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 said that people know what's going on is wrong, and not just with Musk's role in government. Newsflash. These guys are incompetent. They don't know what they're doing. I mean, we hired a weekend Fox News host with no diplomatic or management experience, with a checkered personal history of abuse and alcoholism to be our chief national security official, and it's going very badly. They talked about the use of a signal messenger group by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other officials and how it violated a number of laws. Julie said, man, if I had done what they did. Elon Musk has offered to put his technical experts on this to figure out how this number was inadvertently added to the chat. A little later, I also talked to Howard, another demonstrator who had come out that day, and he said, what brings me out here is trying to save democracy. He noted that Musk was unelected and unconfirmed and currently devastating our government. As the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency continues to make cuts, lawmakers are sounding the alarm about cuts to a little known office within the national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or noaa. If Office of Space Commerce is gutted, the harm to America's economy, its national security and its public safety will leave everyone worse off, except. Except perhaps for SpaceX. So they are raising concern about a potential conflict of interest given Doge advisor Elon Musk's stake in SpaceX. Howard said he had worked at NOAA for 16 years and had been coming out to the Tesla showroom each week. He claimed a 95% beep ratio from passing cars, which he took as a personal accomplishment, was very inspiring. I'm really happy about this, and I think it's had an effect. Look at the people not buying Teslas anymore. Then I ran into one of my neighbors who had come with a friend. They held signs reading, Nobody elected Musk and no kings in America. Almost everybody I spoke with had already been to several Tesla protests, and they said it felt good to be part of a community that aimed to defy Musk, even as they were frightened about what more damage he might do to the country. One of my followers wrote me on social media this week about these Tesla protests, saying, I wonder if this just harms the dealers and not Musk. And I realized that other people might not know that Tesla doesn't have dealerships the way that other car manufacturers do. Tesla doesn't have a network of independent dealerships that sell its cars. The company runs its own showrooms. Though that's the case. Let's be honest, the richest man in the world is unlikely to ever go hungry or homeless. If you lose control of the House, there will be nonstop impeachment hearings. There will be nonstop hearings and subpoenas. But Elon Musk faces real instability financially if Tesla's stock price continues to drop. A big reason for slower sales is that China's domestic EV companies are starting to beat Tesla on, well, everything. Shareholder Ross Gerber said, quote, china had a plan when they let Tesla have a fully owned factory. They wanted the technology and the knowledge and experience. With that came a Risk China would take that technology and build better stuff. That's exactly what they're doing. So I would say yes, absolutely. Sullying his public image and cratering orders for Teslas would have an effect. Americans aren't souring on electric vehicles. They're just over Tesla. Elon thinks this storm is worth weathering because Tesla's future is in self driving cars, AI and robotics. He believes that Tesla is on the cusp of solving autonomy, a claim that he's pretty much made every year for almost a decade. Well, I tend to be a little optimistic with time frames. It would hurt him in direct ways. And we're still early on in a lot of people waking up to what's happening in the us so it's critical that organizing to stand up against these actions feels open ended and like an invitation for more people to come and build on concerns that they might have had personally. In light of the daily news, Donald Trump can buy or sell as many Teslas as he wants. But if Tesla's future is built on a bunch of falsehoods and fantasies, it's unlikely the company can emerge from this fire unscathed. 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 they're destroying it in ways that promote corruption, decrease the likelihood of maintaining democracy, and they cause direct suffering. It's not just about job losses, it's also about vaccines for children and disease outbreaks. 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. Does that sound like a good person to you? Musk himself becomes a key symbol of the current corruption. And since Musk is unelected and hasn't been appointed to any leadership position in the range of what he's exercising as his authority. Highlighting Musk's role also underlines the degree to which the current administration is operating outside democratic institutions and any constitutional framework. Does that help Tesla? But the demonstrations simultaneously have concrete effects on his bottom line. If US courts haven't yet gotten Musk's mythical doge team's hands out of the national databases or its pocketbook, Tesla protests at least help keep people out of Musk's cars. Not advantageous. This strategy appears to be working on all fronts. Musk is rattled and has called for terrorism charges against the masterminds he believes are out there 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. But what an evil thing to do. What a creep. What a joke like who derives joy from that? Keep in mind that Musk has already directly caused tens of thousands of deaths overseas by, as he himself described it earlier this year, feeding USAID into the wood chipper. He's on track to kill tens of thousands more this year due to the decimation of PEPFAR treatment for people living with hiv, as well as largely disbanded USAID programs combating malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases abroad. USAID supporters, meanwhile, insist it has saved lives, bolstered civil society and help to fight hunger and poverty across the globe. With the cuts dealing a sharp blow to health programs, some experts fear a renewed AIDS epidemic. Certainly hundreds of thousands would die, especially in sub Saharan Africa. We will see extreme consequences of the cuts. Anti Musk protesters have overwhelmingly been non violent in the US Though there have been a few dramatic incidents of vandalism involving serious damage to showrooms or to vehicles, and police in New York are, in response reported to be considering weighing charging vandals with hate crimes for spray panning swastikas on Tesla vehicles. It's not yet clear how Tesla owners are a protected class, but who knows what will happen there? I my companies are suffering because I'm in the government. In Florida, a woman was charged with a felony for putting her gum on a cybertruck, and meanwhile Musk supporters have threatened protesters with their vehicles or with a stun gun in two separate incidents. European freelance protesters who appear to be unaffiliated with the Tesla takedown movement, which labels itself clearly nonviolent in Europe. They're not messing around. Several Teslas, as I've mentioned before, were torched near Toulouse, France in February, and many more were set on fire in Rome just last weekend. Now that Tesla protests have been going on for several weeks, it might feel like an old story, but this is exactly the kind of continuous activity that will be necessary for public protests to become effective and to actually harm Musk's company. In addition, as I've mentioned lately, my sense is that a massive popular movement will become vital to stopping Trump at some point. It's not hard to imagine this scenario as we hear him talking earnestly about an illegal third term this week. Many legacy media outlets reference the concept as just some new possibility, when any attempt like this would not only be unconstitutional, but also perhaps the defining mark of entering dictatorship. Something else worth pointing out, this other page from Trump's playbook, which is to repeat something so outrageous enough times that it sort of loses its shock value. I think of the need to build the power of protest when I see pundits talk about how the left has failed to appeal to Christians or to some other group while catering only to this imaginary far left base that it has. I see this a lot, so I'm not calling out any specific individuals. But this kind of talk about failing to appeal to some imaginary constituency that's going to save the Democrats. I see it enough that I do want to address it. I think it's an institutional disease that's happening right now, and it conflates political communication with political principles. And I would say if Democrats are serious about regaining power, they need to establish principles that they stand for. It's not enough to just be against Trump. If Democrats are serious about power, they need to establish principles that they stand for. No matter if you know all the right words to say, no matter your race, religion, gender, identity or status, no matter even if you disagree with me on a few things. But if you are willing to fight for someone you don't know, you are welcome here. I strongly think that these principles should include looking out for everybody and reclaiming our freedom from persecution and our ability to live our best lives together as a rallying cry. 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 any concessions on either of these issues only leads to further demand to dehumanize the targeted group. It should not be that complicated that for political communications you can emphasize the ways that we are 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 else's rights or humanity. We shouldn't be one accident away from catastrophe, one natural disaster from losing everything. We don't have to live this way. And in fact, we are all here together because we share in the frustration and the heartache if Trump allies try to box you in on those subjects, 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. We are here because an extreme concentration of power and corruption is taking over this country like never before. But we are also here because we know that a better world is possible. Economic non cooperation is a whole concept with its own long history. In 1965, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, led by Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz, began the Delano grape strike, a movement that would change the course of farmworker labor organizing history. There are a lot of ways to protest using your buying power, some of which are more effective than others. Up until this point, farm owners had pitted one ethnic group against the other as a tactic to break up the strikes. Italy, Young and Veracruz went to Mexican American organizers Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez and asked them to join the strike. And from there, solidarity and history was born in the fields between Filipino and Mexican workers. But just one example. Since January 24, when Target announced it was ending its DEI initiatives, as Trump has been pressing universities and corporations and government agencies to end diversity efforts. Since that time on January 24th, predominantly black faith groups and civil rights organizations have been calling for a boycott of the company. Black women made Target sexy. They. They did. And renamed it Target. Come on now, y'all love our sisters, man. They made it sexy and cool. So I want to pause and say the whole Target movement would not be effective it weren't for black women. Terry Bain. Now, Target stock had already been in decline, and of course, markets themselves have been in tremendous turmoil since Trump took office. But the Dow Jones in that same period has had a 6% loss since inauguration, while target stock has fallen 27% in that same window. I've been saying it everywhere that Black people spend $12 million a day. Yeah, you should be paying for the whole NAACP convention period. Yeah. So for us to fight to be recognized, you ain't doing us a favor. This is good business. Other affected groups, or some of the same affected groups actually encouraged a boycott, spending money at Costco instead to show purchasing power in another concrete way. And I'm not a market analyst, so I haven't researched every variable about differences between Target and Costco. But I will say that in the same window, since Target ended its DEI initiatives and lost 27% of its stock value, Costco has faced the same market turmoil confronted by all companies in the Trump era. But instead of losing 27% like target or losing 6% like the broader market to date, as of this recording, Costco shares are sitting almost exactly even with where they were on January 24th. So we don't need everybody to do it, but we need a concerted group to say, I'm sticking to it. Ten Toes down. There's still a lot of power in good old fashioned street protests, though. 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? I think we have to take a minute to note that, in fact, they are. Protests are growing. There's way more protests happening than is commonly talked about. This is showing that basically by the end of February, we. We had tallied twice as many protests in the United States as had happened at this time in 2017. And I want to mention that because I think there's a very dangerous narrative out there that there's no resistance happening. The number of protests in 2025 from January 22nd forward have consistently exceeded those from the same period in the first Trump administration. In 2017, I think there's surprisingly less resistance happening from establishment institutions than there was in 20, but there is not less resistance happening with ordinary people getting together and making their voices heard, whether that's at, you know, rallies, town halls, or protests. So if you are not feeling that or seeing it, encourage your local media to cover protests more often or join one yourself. It can be stabilizing and energizing to realize a lot of people are already taking action. I'll also say there's some research on the emotions of protest, and in it, there's a kind of understand that the emotions that mobilize people are anger and hope. Those two together, not just anger and not just hope, but anger and hope are what make people ready to engage in collective 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 Orban. And 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 takes place as usual. The bill is the latest in a series of actions by Prime Minister Viktor Orban's government to roll back LGBTQ rights in the name of what it calls child protection. Organizers and participants of Pride marches could now face fines of up to €500. Turkey has seen even bigger crowds, with what has been reported as being from hundreds of thousands to as many as 2 million protesters weighing in on the streets to denounce the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu. And he has opposed the repressive measures of President Erdogan of Turkey for some time. And Ema Monglu was recently jailed immediately after he was chosen to run against Erdogan in an election that won't even take place until 2028. This is the first major protest that's been held in Istanbul for several days, and tens of thousands of people have turned out, even though police have arrested more than 1,800 demonstrators, including activists and journalists. One was journalist Zeynep Kure, now back at work after two days in jail. Arresting me backfired on them. It just made me angrier and more focused on my work because something has to be done and our duty is to record this. I just want to pause again to tally up the way that other countries, unlike the us, are actively working to address corruption at the highest political levels. I'd like to point out that 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 of his spokespeople were arrested in connection with the Katergate scandal. Netanyahu said the probe is purely political, with the goal of keeping him from firing his internal security chief who runs Shin Bet, the very agency that's conducting the probe. There is no case. There is absolutely nothing. Just a political witch hunt, nothing else. 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 has had part of that term dismissed. And even the two years she will still have to serve will be under house arrest. Still, these are major measures against leading political contenders who are made to at least be publicly addressing their corruption and in some cases, paying a price for it. So it is important for us to remember it can be done. It is something that we can be doing in the future. I'd like to mention another kind of protest, bridge protests, for instance, one by Alphabet resistance on the 50th street overpass in Seattle. They went out on the bridge and each person held a sign with one letter on it. And so each sign had two sides for the A side. The one they posted said Hegseth shares war plans and then people drive under and honk and then they flip to the B side, which read Trump Cabinet incompetent. In fact, our very own producer for this podcast, Jason Sattler, has been doing some bridge protests in Michigan himself. And here's Jason to talk just a little bit about what he's been up to. I probably wouldn't have started protesting unless I had to listen to the episode about why protest now? 50 times to put it together and every time feel a little more guilty that I hadn't been out protesting then. We did it for the reason that we do everything in this household, as my wife insisted on it and she loves it. And yes, but I can hear some of you saying, of course it's fun to stand on a bridge while people cheer you on, or to make fun of Elon Musk outside of a Tesla dealership. And of course you're on the right side of the angels if you're doing either one of these. But does protest really have any of the effects it's supposed to? Can it make a difference? I'd like to point out some recent research about Black Lives Matter, which 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. Not far from the long early voting line at the Kanawha County Clerk's Office was a Black Lives Matter get Out the vote rally. Rain, sleet, snow, whatever it is, black lives still matter. They were all over the country and 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 somehow out of control. A study out in March from Bukit Klein Tislink and Georgios Melios in the journal Political Behavior shows the effects of Black Lives Matter protests on voting in the 2020 elections. Researchers found that though there was a conservative backlash in the immediate wake of the protests, the demonstrations made a difference in increasing Democratic support in the elections that November. The research also suggests that this is a quote the effect of protests is relatively large in counties with smaller, whiter and lower educated populations. They cite an earlier study by Zachary Steinert Thricheld, who noted 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. They can change the national landscape, but they can change the landscape on the ground near you. So on that note, I'll mention that there's a confluence of protests this weekend across the country. On Saturday, April 5, Indivisible 50:51, the Women's March and many other local groups are co endorsing hands off protests, meaning hands off Medicaid, hands off Medicare, hands off Social Security, LGBTQ rights, immigrants, much more. And there will be some key ones in Washington, Seattle and Portland that I think they're aiming people to try to get big numbers at, but there will be a lot of smaller ones across the country as well. We're stronger when we take action. And that is what Saturday is about, is all of us that have been standing up for our communities ever since Trump and Musk started getting their grubby little hands all over our our services, all over our democracy, all over our rights, all of us have been taking action. Let's take action together in one day to send a clear story, a clear demand. Hands off. So if you can head out, go secure in the knowledge that standing up even before others do can make a difference and create conditions whereby more people will show up or more people will be ready to make a difference at the ballot box. And honestly, the more people that come aboard, the more power that we wield as voters, as citizens, as residents, and as Americans. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, Please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? 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