Transcription
I find the people vandalizing Teslas and committing other acts of violence and vandalism frankly fairly despicable. I think they're children. I think they're acting like little spoiled brats and proto-terrorists, but I understand. Hey, there friends, fans, and foes of Dad Saves America. Juma pole here, and I thought I would take this Friday to talk about, well, Tesla. Tesla's exploding all around the country, and what it means for America, for uh, whether or not we live in an oligarchy, and a lot more.
Police found at least five Teslas burned or shot out with guns; this happening at a Tesla facility in Las Vegas. The incident follows a string of protests and violence targeting Tesla across the country over Tesla CEO Elon Musk's Department of government efficiency. San Jose police have announced an arrest after a man was caught on video vandalizing a Tesla. The car's owner tells us this happened last Friday afternoon in a Costco parking lot. The video of the man keying the car has gone viral on social media. Listless man keys Tesla while being confused where he is. Authorities arrested 41-year-old Adam Lansky Tuesday, saying they've linked him to two separate incidents at the Salem Tesla dealership. The first happened on January 20th when authorities say someone threw Molotov cocktails at the dealership. Here you can see a suspect lighting an incendiary device in these new surveillance images. It's telling that this is, and many of this kind of footage, are coming out of Portland, Oregon. I don't know why gorgeous trees and fascistic terrorism seem to go hand in hand, but it is something about the genetics of the American Northwest that this is what we get; that explosion eventually causing all of this damage. Police say two Cybertrucks were spray-painted and each had all four tires slashed. A Model S sedan also has tire damage. There have been at least two other Tesla-targeted attacks in the Boston area: an arson at a charging station in Littleton and Musk's picture stuck on parked cars in Brookline.
There's a lot of obsession with Nazi imagery, and yes, it's a criticism, but I think it has shifted into an obsession and maybe even a fetish of spreading Nazi imagery all around. I mean, if you look at some of the other stuff going on here, it is just uh, it's the kind of thing that we used to see from the KKK, but now it's being delivered to us by the progressive left. This right here is a flyer that's gone out in my current hometown of Austin, Texas, again with the Nazism. Is it that you hate Nazis, or are you secretly getting your kicks out of spreading Nazi imagery? I am not sure which one is the more dominant force. This is not an isolated incident, as you can tell; it is spread all over the place. But, of course, uh, it's not limited to the dealerships; individuals are also getting targeted. There's a website that's trying to dox Tesla owners across the country and saying they're only going to take down personal information when uh, people show that they've sold their cars. What's the administration going to do about that? Uh, I haven't seen that website, but we certainly think it's despicable, the violence that has taken place against Tesla, the company, its employees, and also just Americans who have chosen to drive an electric vehicle. Many of them are Democrats, by the way. Democrats were big supporters of Tesla and of electric vehicles until Elon Musk decided to vote for Donald Trump. This reminds me of the vaccination rates in Marin County; so that was, that's super blue, as blue as they come. It used to have the lowest vaccination rates in the country, and then suddenly when vaccination became political, they now have the highest vaccination rates in the country. This is the politicization and frankly the toxification of our entire culture.
Speaking of culture, the comedy scene, the comedy scene really is a mirror into what our sort of uh, cultural elite think and how they think we should act in a so-called civil society. Pay attention to the crowd, and some people are not content to just scream about Elon in a high school gym; they're taking to the streets or the parking lots. Tonight, the FBI and ATF are now investigating multiple cases of possible arson targeting Teslas and Cybertrucks. This dramatic video shows multiple cars in flames. Police say the attacker used Molotov cocktails. It's the latest in more than a dozen instances of—hear the cheering, the woots, and the hoots and the hollers in the audience in New York City—of arson and vandalism targeting Tesla. The same suspect shot more Teslas with a gun. Tesla Cybertrucks were set on fire in Kansas City, and earlier this month, shots fired at a Tesla dealership in Oregon. Cybertrucks on fire in Seattle. Wow, you guys like petty acts of domestic terrorism, huh? Woo woo woo, yeah, domestic terrorism. Yeah, that's what's going on; that's what's going on in the uh, the Upper West Side and over on the uh, the Left Coast. Uh, we've also got more of the same: vandalizing Tesla vehicles, new Tesla vehicles. Please don't vandalize; don't ever vandalize Tesla vehicles. And so uh, subtle wink wink, subtle.
Speaking of comedy acts, uh, apparently our could-have-been vice president is doing his own comedy act. Uh, that's that's what this I think is saying on my phone. I don't know. Some of you know this: on the iPhone, they've got that little Stock app. I added Tesla to it to give me a little boost during the day; 225 and dropping, so. And and if you own one, if you own one, we're not blaming you; you can you can take dental floss and pull the Tesla thing off, you know, and take out—just telling you.
So what are we supposed to make of this? Um, what what is going on here? Obviously, it's just in some sense a kind of typical social contagious bunch of infantile nonsense. It's um, it does seem to be something that tends to happen on the left more than the right; left, right. I think one of the things that's interesting about our times is that the question of whether this populist rage is left or right is getting murkier and murkier, and and that's what I want to actually focus on today because I think that this is all just criminal acts of vandalism that borders on terrorism. Terrorism is a term that gets used and thrown around in ways that are very, very dangerous for us as citizens. Um, terrorist is this label you can get put on and suddenly have some of your rights just stripped away. This is our post-9/11 world we live in; that is the button you push if you want to do things that aren't really supposed to be the way the law works or the law has been rewritten to allow it. But in this case, I think terrorism can be fitting because terrorism is essentially criminal acts designed to alter your behavior by scaring you into changing what you do, how you act, or in this case, the car you buy. That's what's going on here. But let's get into the underlying cri—here, the fundamental question, the fundamental concern being raised about Elon Musk and his role in the administration, his role um, investigating all of the executive branch's activities through Doge—is the question of oligarchy. And President Biden actually raised this in his um, farewell address, which we've accelerated for all of our benefits because otherwise it takes all afternoon to watch. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America, of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America, and we've seen it before, more than a century ago, but the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts. They didn't punish the wealthy; just made the wealthy pay their way, play by the rules everybody else had to. We've seen it all before, the age of the robber barons; we are back, the new age of the robber barons, the Rob bro Barons, if you will, the tech bro Barons. This is something that you can find on both the left and the right. I'm going to come back to that, but as I was thinking about what's going on with Elon and is there precedent for it, I was reminded of somebody who I read about quite a bit about a decade ago during the financial crisis, and that is the former treasury secretary of the United States through the booming 20s and into the Crash of 1929, Andrew Mellon, one of America's most famous and most infamous robber barons. He, in a lot of ways, is more Elon than Elon when it comes to his role in the government, although Andrew Mellon was born into a wealthy Pittsburgh family; he took that wealth and multiplied it many times over. He played a crucial role in financing America's industrial boom through his Mellon Bank. He was a driving force behind Alcoa, Gulf Oil, Union Steel, and other industrial giants. By 1921, he was one of the richest men in America. He was especially active in the development of coal, coke, oil, and aluminum industries. President Warren G. Harding appointed him Secretary of the Treasury in 1921. Mellon is credited with bringing on the prosperity of the 1920s, and while he was in office, the government reduced its debt from World War I by $9 billion, and income tax rates were cut substantially. An avid art collector, Mellon donated many millions of dollars to various charities. By the time of death in 1937, Andrew Mellon, a business legend; Andrew Mellon was one of the richest men at the time, and he also served as treasury secretary under three successive presidents: Harding, then Coolidge, then Hoover. It is pretty remarkable.
So let me just paint the picture of what was going on because frankly, it has eerie resonance with where we are right now in the 2020s. What was going on? Well, at the start of the Harding administration, he was coming into the end of World War I, and World War I was a catastrophe. World War I set the stage for World War II, but one of the things that World War I brought about was our first post-Federal Reserve inflationary boom and bust. Just to put this in context: in 1915, the federal debt of the United States was only 3 billion, with a B, dollars. 1915. By 1919, as World War I was coming to an end, the debt had ballooned to 27 billion. So that's a ninefold increase in the federal debt. So what happened? Well, Andrew Mellon, along with Warren Harding as president, cut the actual debt, not the deficit, not the amount that's still being borrowed; they actually ran a surplus while cutting taxes. So four years later, in 1924, the debt was down almost 20%; it was down to 21 billion. And then four more years later, it was down to $16 billion—another 177%. This is unprecedented fiscal constraints. When we talk about Doge and oh, all of the hard cuts being made, this doesn't even come close to what happened during the 1920s. We haven't even really reduced our deficit yet. As I sit here, the federal government is currently on track to yet again have a $2 trillion deficit, adding two trillion more dollars to the debt. Meanwhile, Andrew Mellon and Warren G. Harding and then Calvin Coolidge after him were slashing like crazy. Not only did they cut spending, they cut tax rates from a high of 73% down to 25%. This is something that we have not seen in this country since. And instead of a horrible depression taking place, unemployment went straight down to 2 to 4%, and we had the Roaring 20s. Now, the Roaring 20s obviously came to an end in 1929 with the big crash, and this brings about some of the turn for the worst for Andrew Mellon's reputation. Back in 2013, um, Andrew Mellon came into the sort of economic news in the aftermath of the Great Recession as we were all looking back and saying, are we at risk of a Great Depression too? And Paul Krugman liked to beat up on him, noting that at the time Mellon's recommendation to then-president, his third, Herbert Hoover, was to quote, "liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers." And by this, not like liquidate like the commies like to say, which is just murder them all, like liquidate the cows—that's not what he's talking about; he's just letting people go bust; it will purge the rottenness out of the system. This is what Andrew Mellon recommended doing. And in fact, today you can see this term being echoed in our current politics. The Wall Street Journal asked, "Is Trump taking a liquidation approach to our economy?" You see, the echoes here are eerie. One other piece of echo was that Republicans at that time, including Andrew Mellon, were protectionists, and so he was in favor of raising tariffs, including tariffs that would benefit the industries that he invested in, like heavy metals and aluminum. And Herbert Hoover ultimately signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which played a role in instigating the Great Depression. It was not the primary cause, but it did contribute to the Great Depression.
So here we are in 2025, repeating a little too many of the steps of the 1920s for, I think, all of our likings and perhaps starting to feel some potential consequences uh, as far as so, social unrest. But I think it's worth considering that nothing going on right now as it pertains to Elon Musk is new. It's not new for an industrialist to play a critical role in an administration or three. It's not new for the public to be up in arms about changes to the way the government works. This is part of American history, and we are still standing 100 years later. But we are not in the same place we were 100 years ago, and for that I want to come back to this present debate about oligarchy, perhaps seeking to ingratiate themselves in the early hours of a more autocratic era in American history. Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos were there. I love that—a more autocratic period of American history, as if um, mass censorship and vaccine mandates weren't the most autocratic thing we've seen in this country in 50 years. But I digress. At St. John's Church earlier, the CEOs for Google and TikTok will be around for all of the Trump inauguration events happening; that that one's weird, having the CEO of TikTok, which bipartisan Congress passed a ban or a prospective ban on TikTok, I think with some justification, although I'm generally anti-banning things, and I'm not convinced that TikTok is any worse for America than frankly most of the US government propaganda. But I digress again today, and they were at the swearing-in; people who have everything to gain in a democracy that has everything to lose. You're watching the unraveling of our democracy; it's not about to happen; it is happening right now. The oligarchy is forming; our democracy is falling; the corruption is beginning. This is a common talking point now, isn't it? One might say a um, a recurrent one, but I don't want to be dismissive of it because it's coming from all sides, both left and right. We are witnessing an oligarchy in America, and we are at a point where the wealthiest people in the world, like Elon Musk and all the Republicans enabling him, are turning to loot what is left of Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security to bankroll even deeper tax cuts and sweetheart contracts for themselves, their fellow billionaires, and their corporations; the lords of easy money on Wall Street and, of course, the oligarchs in uh, in Silicon Valley and some in Corporate America. They, the corporate America, are really more globalist and corporatist; the oligarchs are really Silicon Valley and some on Wall Street. Bernie Sanders saying similar things. My friends, what we are looking at here has nothing to do with democracy; what we are looking at here is oligarchy. And uh, here's a recent guest from the show, somebody I watch all the time, Jimmy Dore, saying similar things and uh, with a lot of force like he does. The idea that we have progressives inside the Democratic party, it's actually more deleterious to the Progressive Movement to have them there. Why is that, Jimmy? Because it gives people a false impression that there's somebody in government fighting for you, that there's one of the parties that are kind of on your side, and they aren't. And the quicker people realize that that both parties are not on their side; they only serve the oligarchy. We are in fact in an oligarchy; your democracy was stolen way before Trump. Until that happens, we won't ever have real change. But what about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? She's on Instagram. Oh, Tucker, I could pull up similar um, oligarchy talk from Tucker, but as for AOC, when she's not on Instagram, she's illegally parking her Tesla at Whole Foods. Oh yes, our politics is a clown show. What is—is an oligarchy exactly? What are we talking about here? Well, according to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, an oligarchy is a government in which a small group exercises control, especially for corrupt and selfish purposes. And it is worth noting that Tesla has received a lot of taxpayer money; all of these EVs have, in fact. One of the ironic things is that President Biden has talked about oligarchy, as have a lot of these other liberal Democrats; they passed trillions in corporate subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, the most dishonestly named piece of legislation in recent memory, to give to companies like Tesla to subsidize so-called green energy, EVs, and the like. So this is a very selective kind of attack line that's being used, and just as the outrage about Tesla is incredibly selective and incredibly partisan and has flipped now that he is on the wrong team. But it is worth looking deeper; what what Jimmy Dore is referencing about losing our democracy is actually a study that was conducted in 2014. This is from the BBC: "The US is an oligarchy, not a democracy." This was coverage of this report in 2014, and the report in question is right here: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites and Interest Groups. And as you scroll through what you encounter is this set of graphs. But let me let a video from the folks at RepresentUs explain it for you because I think it does a really good job.
Researchers at Princeton University looked at more than 20 years worth of data to answer a pretty simple question: Does the government represent the people? Now this is what they found. This axis here represents public support for any given idea. On the left at 0% are ideas that not a single American wants; on the right at 100% are ideas that everyone supports. This axis represents the likelihood of Congress passing a law that reflects any of these ideas, from a zero to a 100% chance. On this graph, an ideal republic would look like this: if 50% of the public supports an idea, there's a 50% chance of it becoming law. I just want to stop for a second because this isn't intuitive, and it's sort of truthy; it's truth—is, I actually don't think this is correct because at any given time most people don't know about most things, myself included, and so public opinion, and this has been proven over other studies, tends to be very brittle and subject to even tiny amounts of additional information. So what is popular is not necessarily representative of what should be done or even what people would want if they're forced to study it even a tiny bit more. But even so, I think this is a useful low-resolution um, idea or ideal: if 80% of us support something, there's an 80% chance—you get the idea. Now, most Americans would probably agree that, with a few exceptions, we should be as close to this ideal as possible, with caveats, with lots of caveats. Unfortunately, the way America actually works doesn't even come close. Take an idea that nobody supports—literally nobody—and it has about a 30% chance of becoming federal law. Now take an incredibly popular idea, the most popular idea this country has ever seen, and there's also about a 30% chance of it becoming law. This means that the number of American voters for or against any idea has no impact on the likelihood that Congress will make it law. Put another way, and I'm just going to quote the Princeton study directly here: "The preferences of the average American appeared to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy." So if you've ever felt like your opinion doesn't matter and that the government doesn't really care what you think, well, you're right. Pretty dark, huh? Not not not so great. But there's a catch: this flatline only accounts for the bottom 90% of income earners in America. Economic elites, business interests, people who can afford lobbyists—they get their own line. Look at how much closer their line is to the ideal. When they want something, the government is much more likely to do it, and when they don't, they have the power to completely block it from happening, no matter how much the rest of the country supports it. They get what they want, and guess who ends up paying for it. So if that is true, one could understand why someone that feels marginalized might feel like they have no other voice and no other way to affect change in our society.
I am not justifying violence. I find the people vandalizing Teslas and committing other acts of violence and vandalism frankly fairly despicable. I don't think they—I think they're children. I think they're acting like little spoiled brats and proto-terrorists, but I understand. I can understand in principle how you might feel like things are hopeless and that nothing changes no matter who gets elected or what you do. We have a lot of stuff that's broken in America, and this um, this way of looking at things is so compelling that I myself made a video, a little more goofy, around the same time. It's called The Cronies. I'll play just a little bit of it, but you'll get the picture.
(Sound of video playing)
I'm not a Pangloss in here. I don't think America's perfect. I don't think that we lack reason for concern about oligarchic forces. I think we should always be on guard for that, and I actually think that this is a role that the American left has played healthily in our society, and now the American right does too. This is a horseshoe politics moment where the left and right come together and narrow in on a target. And I think one of the things that is weird about Elon as a target here simultaneously is that he has been clobbered financially for doing what he's doing with Doge, and he does seem to be sniffing out a lot of corrupt activity, and he's joined an administration that is very hostile to most of his business interests as far as solar panels and electric vehicles. Trump doesn't like these things, despite White House lawn press junkets for Tesla cars going on, which is also kind of not really what you should be doing as the president. But the bigger question is, is this story true? Are we screwed? Is this an open-and-shut case? One of the problems that has been encountered in this research since then is that its own data doesn't tell the story quite the way those graphs, which are a representation of the paper, actually work. There's actually a great article from a left-of-center website, Vox.com, that actually broke down some of the criticism of this article and its use of its own data, and it showed frankly that there's a lot more variability going on; people tend to agree far more on on the bills than the data suggested, and frankly, by and large, what was popular for most people would get passed, and what was unpopular for, say, the middle class but popular for the top 10%, basically it was a coin flip, roughly 50%, um, whether that would become law or not. We can do a lot better than we're doing; we have a lot of corruption in our political system, but we are not yet a hopeless oligarchy, not on the grounds of this one study at least.
There's a couple other things worth knowing about and thinking about because they also point towards how we might do better than we are now, because there's a lot of room for improvement in America, a lot. One is: American companies are actually pretty competitive with each other. In fact, studies of companies staying in the S&P 500 has shown that over time, since the 1960s, company time spent in the S&P 500 keeps going down. It is hard to stay on top, and getting harder actually, in America. We don't have a kind of calcified set of state-blessed companies that survive Keller High Water, which is more true in Europe, where Airbus in France or Fiat in Italy more or less are immovable fixtures, prone to basically being protected from death and subsidized to stay on life support for decades and decades and decades. Another example is: if you look at the differences in the Fortune 500 between 1955 and 2019, only 52 companies that were in the listing in 1955 are still in as of 2019, the Fortune 500. The rest, the overwhelming majority, fell out. This has happened over and over again. Giants considered to be immovable monopolies, like Woolworths, go the way of the dodo, and in comes Walmart, and then in comes Amazon, and whatever will come next. That is not to say we are perfect; that is not to say monopolies aren't a problem. But the question about what to do with concentrated corporate power is the big fundamental question here, and I think this brings me to the last piece that I would like to talk about: What do we do about concentrated power in the marketplace? The progressive view, going back to the Progressive Era, back to Teddy Roosevelt and then Woodrow Wilson, is big, muscular government; that is the answer. That big corporations need to be constrained by big government, government with a lot more power to enforce more rules in the name of fairness, to break up companies that it deems to be a problem, to subsidize companies that it deems to be important to keep, and to raise barriers to entry, like tariffs and protectionism, to protect industries and companies that the government believes should be protected. This is the progressive worldview, and it looks at corporate power and says the only competitor is big government. And I think that is an honest view, and it is one that can be debated; it is one that I personally don't think holds up to scrutiny. On the other side, the side I like but you might not like, is the free enterprise perspective. This is the idea that big government ends up concentrating power for a whole host of reasons, but the the only thing to constrain private predation, people like Elon Musk running the show and forcing us to do things we don't want to do, to become a world of company towns and new robber barons, is more competition; is making sure that it is easy for new people to come in and steal away their profits with a better product, to steal away their customers with a better service. That competition and free enterprise—this is the free part of free enterprise—free entry, free competition, the freedom to change the way you're doing things, to improve the way you're doing things, to bundle things in ways that add value for the customer and also to compete for labor, to hire away the best employees with better offers, to make unique deals with people so that you can keep people. It's really hard to keep good people. This story that management and labor, capital and labor, are always at odds—that isn't always wrong; it's but it's often wrong. Great business people recognize that great people, your employees, are the biggest asset you have; they're 70% of your costs, often. The free enterprise perspective says we need to make sure that these companies are trying to kill each other instead of trying to lobby the government for special protections and to be deemed too big to fail, as was happened with the financial system during the financial crisis. We had all these big banks, and what happened after all these government regulations came in? We ended up with fewer, bigger banks. This is how this stuff tends to work. If you don't like Tesla, you cannot like Tesla for a bunch of reasons: one, from the left, because you don't like that Elon's now a Republican, but one because they have gotten unfair treatment through government subsidies. That's the thing I don't like; I don't want companies to get corporate welfare; I don't think any of us should. This was the old horseshoe, the horseshoe of the aftermath of the Great Recession between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party Movement.
And frankly, I think that concern is healthier for our future. So what's the problem? The problem, for my side, for the pro-free enterprise, pro-competition, "let these robber barons kill each other for our own benefit," is that we have no idea how to shrink government. And frankly, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, so far, have probably been the best shot at shrinking government we've seen in a long, long time. And that's with huge caveats, because I think shrinking government spending in this country isn't going to happen. I don't think it's going to happen. I think it's too easy to borrow money. We don't live in the 1920s world. This is where the comparison between Musk and Mellon ends in 2025. Too much of our society is wrapped up in transfer payments between each other through the government that wasn't in place in 1925. And that's a big change, and it's one that is going to catch up on us sooner or later. But since we can't deal with that, we won't. It is politically impossible.
I think we should try to hack away at all of the privileges currently being bestowed on the wealthy and well-connected. We should have a level playing field. No company should get any special deal, special subsidy. No company should get taxpayer handouts. That's all corrupt. That's an area where I think all of us should be able to get on the same page. When that's not happening, we have less of a reason to hate companies because of our politics and hate products because of our politics. Getting government out of the business of picking its favorite businesses would be better off for all of us. But I want to hear what you have to say, so please let me know in the comments below. You know I'm always there. And if you want to dig into some of the references I was referring to, you can head over to DadSavesAm.com. There will be a post with all the links from my my source and research for this video. And we're going to start doing that every Friday to help you kind of dig into where I'm coming from. And with that, have a great weekend.