Tag: Tesla

A president touting Musk’s cars from the White House shows this: the Tesla boycott really irks him – The Guardian

Personally I’ve always had my doubts about consumer boycotts, which at best tend to make the non-buyer feel good without achieving very much and at worst hurt ordinary employees with no power to grant whatever the boycotter wants. But Magaworld evidently believes in them, judging by the way Bud Light’s sales plummeted after it featured a trans influencer in a marketing campaign. And while there’s no justification for violence against car dealers, peacefully not buying stuff is the safest form of protest imaginable for anyone fearful of retaliation by this regime. You don’t have to risk getting arrested, fired or deported; you don’t even have to wave a placard. And for all Trump’s talk of campaigners “illegally and collusively” boycotting Tesla, you can’t be sued for not wanting to buy a car. That boycotts get under the president’s skin where nothing else – not court orders, not the barely disguised horror of old allies abroad – seems therefore to make a strange kind of sense. To a president who sees everything in terms of making money, it’s consumers who matter. And now their wrath is spreading well beyond Musk’s companies.