2 days Ago By Nanette Holt, Nathan Worcester, Ryan Morgan
About 10 protesters gathered across the street from a Tesla showroom in Austin, Texas, after noon on March 29 to criticize the company’s CEO. The demonstration along a stretch of North Highway 183 was one of hundreds organized across the United States on March 29, as part of the nationwide “Tesla Takedown” protest. The action takes aim at Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who, along with leading a range of business ventures, is also a senior adviser to President Donald Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency.
Organizing the nationwide protest of Musk and DOGE, a nonprofit that supports left-progressive causes called the “Action Network” published an interactive map online, sharing protest times and locations. The Action Network website states, “Elon Musk is destroying our democracy, and he’s using the fortune he built at Tesla to do it.” The technologist recently purchased a $35 million property in Austin, a deep blue enclave of Travis County, for his family.
A police cruiser was parked in the showroom lot. Inside, staff declined to comment to The Epoch Times, directing all questions to Tesla’s press team. Standing across the street from the anti-Tesla protesters at the Austin dealership, four pro-Tesla counter-protesters held signs of their own.
One man rolled down his window and shouted that he was “going to buy so much Tesla stock.” “Incel,” an anti-Tesla protester, shouted back as the car drove away. Michael Casey, who was among the pro-Tesla counter-protesters, questioned the rhetoric he was hearing from those across the street who opposed Tesla and Musk.
He also expressed dismay at the pattern of destruction directed at Tesla dealerships and automobiles. “How are you going to get me to come to the other side by just wanting me to hate all the time?” he asked. Some on the anti-Tesla side also held up signs equating Musk with Nazism and fascism.
Tyler Scaglione, 18, who joined the counter-protesters supporting Musk and Tesla said, “I’m surprised by some of that, some of the Nazi stuff, because I think to compare anything to that is a little shameful.” In one hand, Scaglione waved a small American flag, and in the other, a sign calling Democrats “hypocrites.” At another point, Terry said Musk shouldn’t have so much influence in shaping the government because he wasn’t elected.
Terry urged for caution with efforts to downsize the government. “A lot of people here are saying, ‘Get rid of the government. Get rid of it.
Everybody’s lazy who works with the government.’ But the government does great things for us. We wouldn’t be standing by this beautiful highway if it weren’t for the government,” he said.
Elrad expressed dismay that a protest event would target a company like Tesla, which employs more than 100,000 people nationwide, and whose stock is in many Americans’ retirement portfolios. “There’s so much propaganda being spewed from the national parties, the two parties. It keeps us divided,” Stanley said.
Standing among a group of anti-Tesla activists at a protest event about half a mile south of the Tesla dealership in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Teresa Curl expressed openness to the idea of government cuts but shared concerns about how DOGE is going about the effort. “I think that the concept of trying to cut government spending is always a good thing. The way that it’s being done is not a good thing,” she said.
Curl raised concerns not just about DOGE but about the Trump administration more broadly. “I think it’s going to hurt our social security, which I am dependent on. I think that it is hurting the rights of gay people.
It’s hurting the rights of people who are trying to live here in a better country. The way that people are being deported is not humane. The attack on the Smithsonian, the attacks on our cultural arts with the Kennedy Center, the threats against Greenland, the threats against Canada .
.. the list goes on.
” Across the intersection from Curl, a trio of counter-protesters had gathered to show their support for Musk, DOGE, and the Trump administration. One man had staked a Trump/Vance 2024 sign into the grass and stood waving a full-sized American flag on a pole, while a woman beside him held a handful of smaller eight by 12-inch American flag sticks. Bill Schmidtke, the man waving the full-sized American flag, said he felt it was wrong that protesters would protest the business of an individual who was trying to help reduce wasteful spending.
As he spoke with The Epoch Times, Schmidtke acknowledged many people benefit from government programs but warned, “The money’s not endless.” Asked to respond to the concerns of those on the other side of the debate, Schmidtke insisted the DOGE initiative isn’t an effort to end the government altogether, “They’re just trying to eliminate fraud and abuse.”.
