A local businessman who decided to out himself publicly as a Tesla owner seems to think it’s odd that Democrats aren’t going to pains to denounce an extremist website that is no longer online and that nobody heard about until reading the news reports about how it was taken down.
“They might not represent you, but they’re still on your team (whether you want them or not). Pretending they aren’t doesn’t make the problem go away. It just signals to reasonable people that you’re not willing to deal with your own,” Evan Pettrey, the founder of Converge, a Waynesboro– and Richmond-based marketing company, wrote in a public Facebook post on Thursday.
So, according to Pettrey, who none of us knew was a Tesla owner until he bragged about it on social media, a website that none of us can access now because it has been taken down, that none of us had heard of until media outlets reported about it – at the behest of Elon Musk, whose posts about it on his flailing social-media site are what got it in front of everybody – is evidence that Democrats are on the wrong side of history.
This feels like a guy repeating a Fox News talking point to me.
Which is an odd flex for a guy who described himself in the Facebook post as a “moderate,” parroting the fake-news folks who are doing their best to make the legit peaceful protests at Tesla dealerships across the country into domestic terrorism, even calling for the death penalty for protesting Musk because the Department of Justice has now charged four people with vandalism at Tesla dealerships in Colorado, Oregon and South Carolina.
The Fox News folks are the same folks who told us about Jan. 6 being about “tourists” who were “largely peaceful,” and remained silent as Donald Trump pardoned the thousands who attacked democracy, tried to overturn an election and killed cops protecting the Capitol.
Two wrongs don’t make a right, but, damn, the one wrong is a different level of wrong.
Making hay about an extremist website that is no longer accessible and that none of us saw feels like cover for the other thing that we all know was wrong, but maybe that’s just me thinking that.
That said, I will concede, as the self-styled “moderate” Pettrey laid out in his Facebook post, that “the individuals threatening Tesla owners and publishing their locations online are extremists.”
Those folks, without question, are extremists.
Does that make everybody happy?
Whoever put together that website is an extremist.
Just like my neighbors who live two doors up the street from me, and were overheard on a forum of militia militants talking about how I was leading a “secret far-left plot,” that they “had a score to settle” with me, how I had to be “stopped,” are extremists.
That one, I think we all can concede, is a little more direct, in that we’re not talking about a website that nobody can see anymore being the threat, but actual people, described to me by the person who tipped me off about them, as being “heavily armed,” who still live two doors up the street from me.
I’ve written about this incident, which got the attention of local police and the FBI, and so did ProPublica, which found itself interested in the story because the guy who tipped me off was a mole within the militia movement, whose decision to tip me off led to him deciding to blow his cover and flee, fearing for his life, as I feared for mine.
ICYMI
Actually being targeted by extremists who still live two doors from me, that sucks.
Wouldn’t wish it on anybody.
Which is why I’ll be the guy to say here, leave Evan Pettrey alone because he bought a Tesla a while ago, and still likes his car.
Now, me personally, if I’d bought a Tesla, because I’d wanted to be on the spear of the EV movement, and then the guy who is the face of the company turned out to be a Nazi, I’d have divested by now, because there are other EV companies out there that aren’t fronted by a Nazi, but that’s me.
I concede that it might not be economically possible for everybody to do that, and it’s not a sin to be constrained by finances, so, not judging.
But I don’t know that people like Pettrey need to make themselves out to be martyrs because they still want to tool around in their swasticars.
“Owning a Tesla isn’t a political statement. It’s a car. A good one,” Pettrey wrote, which, I dunno, the panels falling off the Cybertrucks might tell another story, but if his Tesla isn’t falling apart, good for him.
“Targeting people over a personal buying decision doesn’t strengthen a movement, it drives people away,” Pettrey wrote.
Odd how it’s not the same for the other side. I didn’t hear from a single MAGA about how they’d read the story of the actual people who lives two doors from me targeting me specifically because I write things they don’t like and decided, that’s it, not going to take this extremism anymore, they’re driving me away from being a MAGA.
Hell, I got more threats, among the scores of vile messages from people suggesting that I do things that are physically impossible involving various of my body parts.
“When moderate Tesla owners (of which there are many) find themselves targeted by extremists on the left, they don’t lean in. They simply move to the right. Not because their values changed, but because they were targeted as the enemy,” Pettrey wrote.
Here Pettrey is echoing Musk, who has made the spurious claim that he left the Democratic Party because “they have become the party of division and hate.”
As if it’s Democrats who are rounding up legally-here immigrants with no criminal records and putting them on planes for max-security prisons in El Salvador, marginalizing the LGBTQ community as second-class citizens, threatening to throw political dissidents in jail for speaking out – and that’s the tip of the iceberg.
ICYMI
- Allegation: JMU fraternity members using Nazi salutes, taunting LGBTQ+ community
- Beyer highlights USAID chaos in Congo: ‘Astounding display of incompetence and apathy’
Musk, his right arm thrust toward the sky to signal fealty to The Fuhrer, is the embodiment of the “division and hate” that thousands are taking to the streets in front of Tesla dealerships to protest.
It’s among our fundamental rights to protest bad politics, and because Elon Musk has been able to buy his way into a position of power through his dramatically overvalued Tesla stock, protesting at the dealerships that sell his vehicles to strike at the heart of his ill-gained political power is fair game.
To me, the line isn’t commerce, it’s Tesla owners, many of whom bought their cars long before Musk revealed himself to be a Nazi opportunist, and with the market for his company’s cars cratering by the day, can’t unload their cars without taking a massive economic hit.
Gotta say here, I don’t know that Evan Pettrey is on the right side of that line.
He told us in his Facebook post that he’s moving to the right, using reasoning directly associated with Musk, and he’s also evoking Musk in defining Musk critics as “extremists,” while also claiming for himself the mantle of innocent “moderate.”
This Pettrey guy wants you to believe that “owning a Tesla isn’t a political statement,” but let’s be real here – the world didn’t know, or care, that he owns a Tesla until he made it an issue on social media.
He seems to want to have it both ways – to make his political statement, and to bully you into not making yours.
Wrapping up here, my personal approach is, I don’t care that somebody owns a Tesla, any more than I care that somebody owns a Ford, a Chevy, a Toyota, a Studebaker.
I think differently about a person who would go out of their way to buy one now to make a political statement, but the issue would be more about the political statement than the car they’re buying.
I also think differently about people who were all well and good with the boycott of Bud Light because of the commercial with a trans influencer but think protesting Tesla dealerships is anti-American.
I wouldn’t know this Evan Pettrey guy if he walked up to me wearing an “I’m Evan Pettrey” T-shirt and told me he was Evan Pettrey, but if that interaction were ever to happen, I’d tell him to stop whining about people giving him hell over his swasticar, and that his politics suck.
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Chris Graham
