Who holds back the electric car? The answer to that old question turns out to contain surprising insight about the professed concerns of “climate activists.”

In the past month, Tesla electric vehicles have been vandalized in dozens of incidents. The electric vehicles, their dealerships, and their charging stations have been spray painted with swastikas, keyed, shot, and burned with Molotov cocktails. And it hasn’t been oil barons or auto tycoons committing these crimes.

Attacks against the American automaker have erupted in response to the prominent role of Tesla CEO Elon Musk in the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency. A “Tesla Takedown” movement is building to mobilize activists at 500 protests, including more than 277 Tesla stores and Supercharger stations worldwide. If all goes according to plan, these events will occur on March 29, the birthday of Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), who urged protesters to “fight” against Musk.

Though Crockett has urged followers to limit themselves to peaceful or mostly peaceful protests, both U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have labeled the attacks as “domestic terrorism” and created an FBI task force to investigate.

How did we get to this point, after decades of assurance that global warming or climate change is an “existential threat” to humanity? President Joe Biden, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, along with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have all referred to climate change as an existential threat. It’s a central theme in the 2024 Democratic Party Platform.

If they aren’t exaggerating, then Tesla, the largest seller of EVs to Americans, should probably be considered the single greatest achievement of the climate change era. Environmental activists have assured us for years that electric vehicles are an essential component of their campaign to curb carbon dioxide emissions and mitigate a climate catastrophe.

Something isn’t adding up. To call something an existential threat is to place the highest importance on it. Books like Andreas Malm’s “How To Blow Up a Pipeline” argue for sabotage and destruction of fossil fuel infrastructure for the climate’s sake.

Global warming activism is increasingly a dangerous, cultlike belief, but as with many cults, its practices follow the demands of the shaman in charge, not the truth of the apparent revelation. Eco-terrorists may hope to reduce carbon emissions, but their real enemy is always Donald Trump.

If billions of lives were actually at stake without a complete restructuring of the economy and a mandated ban on the use of fossil fuels, we could understand why the environmental left has become so radical.

But if the threat of climate change genuinely endangers our existence, why are progressives violently opposing the company most responsible for EV adoption in the United States – their policy proposal?

Maybe anti-Tesla progressives seriously believe that Musk and Trump are an even more significant threat than the purported end of life on Earth brought on by “global boiling.” But that doesn’t make a lot of sense, given that a presidential term lasts only four years, and even a human life lasts fewer than a hundred, while carbon emission is an epochal atrocity that goes back at least to the invention of the steamboat.

Perhaps left-leaning domestic terrorists are happy to use any excuse to vent their anger. Malcontents exist in every society. Climate catastrophism and the alleged threat of Musk’s DOGE-driven budget cuts don’t need a rational connection, as long as they both offer an excuse to damage other people’s property.

One other possible explanation is that while climate change is a professed existential crisis, it’s also a convenient cover to justify expanding regulatory power. Whether it’s global cooling, global warming, a hole in the ozone, acid rain, or all of the above, the proposed solution always provides a convenient moral platform from which to demand increased state power.

This could be the most believable explanation. If more power is the real aim, a Department of Government Efficiency that publicizes the grift and graft of the state is a far more pressing threat than the illusion of climate catastrophism.

It’s possible that each progressive activist contains multitudes and is driven by some variety of these explanations.

Whether the reason is climate catastrophism propaganda or the “threat to democracy” narrative, we should probably pity people who are so desperate that they feel obliged to resort to domestic terrorism. And we should definitely defend ourselves from them.

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