Outside Tesla in the Philly suburbs, the green shoots of an American uprising

There was a mad-as-hell-can’t-take-it-anymore moment for every one of the dozen or so sign-waving protesters who stood on the side of busy Route 30 in suburban Devon on a brisk but brightly sunny Saturday morning, urging motorists to boycott billionaire Elon Musk and his Tesla showroom directly behind them.

For Matt DeCarlo, a 39-year-old social worker from Conshohocken, it was watching Musk — currently taking a chainsaw, both figuratively and literally, to the federal government as a bizarre kind of copresident to Donald Trump — give what to all the world looked like a Nazi salute at a rally on the day of Trump’s inauguration.

“It’s the constant Hitler salutes,” DeCarlo told me, as passing motorists on the busy commercial strip honked their support in the background. “My family is half Italian and half Jewish, and we were told to remember — to remember what happens when they come for marginalized people. It’s really hard to turn away from."

That’s what prompted DeCarlo to go to the store and produce his large, emoji-packed, fact-checked-true cardboard sign — “ELON MUSK CHEATS AT VIDEO GAMES” — and hold it up against the cruel February winds, one man raging against the machine.

“Things seen to be getting much worse at an alarmingly bad rate,” he told me, citing the Friday night purge at the Pentagon that included Trump’s firing of Joint Chiefs chair, Gen. Charles Q. Brown. He added a moment later. “I don’t know what else to do.”

But DeCarlo was not alone. He was joined in Devon by those other hearty souls — a mix of scientists alarmed by Team Trump’s research cuts and data abuses, Holocaust descendants, and concerned citizens — and by several thousand protesters at auto showrooms from coast to coast in what was dubbed a #TeslaTakedown.

Indeed, as my luck often has it, I managed to attend maybe the smallest of dozens of anti-Musk protests Saturday, due in part to a lack of sidewalks that make the Devon site, about 15 miles west of Philadelphia, a lousy place to picket. “Omg ... you went to the wrong protest,” one of my offspring helpfully texted me after driving past the Tesla site 10 miles farther west in West Chester, where more than 100 had gathered. Across the Delaware in Cherry Hill, videos showed as many as 300 demonstrators lashing out at Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

But the Devon protest, while much smaller in size, was certainly equal in fury to the other rallies over the shocking role that Musk — the world’s richest person and largest donor to Trump’s 2024 election — has seized inside the White House. The unelected South African native is overseeing massive layoffs and sending threatening emails to federal employees while his army of young dude-bro techies access citizens' personal data.

Consider these pickets the first green shoot of an early spring uprising across America, after a winter of discontented hibernation by many of the 78 million who’d voted against Trump and his anti-democratic vision. At first, some were demoralized, and many argued, reasonably, that there was no point protesting Trump’s plurality victory in a free and fair election. Instead, they’d wait to see if the GOP election winner really kept his unholy campaign promises to rule America by diktat — which he has done, in blitzkrieg fashion.

Indeed, right as the winter soldiers of the Devon Tesla were braving the cold, it felt like America’s tenuous hold on democracy was spiraling out of control. After the annual far-right CPAC conference where a bizarre interview with Musk — wearing sunglasses, at times incoherent — failed to dispel questions about his admitted ketamine use, the $400 billion man sent a bat-guano crazy email to all federal employees demanding they defend their jobs with a list of five things they’d done last week.

Trump, for his part in what feels very much like a copresidency with the DOGE impresario, fired not only General Brown, only the second Black man to serve in the top uniformed military post, but also the only female officer in the Joint Chiefs, as well as three top military lawyers. Call it racism and misogyny, or call it the prelude to unlawful commands from the White House, but either explanation is equally appalling. This as Trump’s apparent abandonment of Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression has folks wondering if America elected a 47th president or Czar Krasnof I.

Saturday’s Tesla protests were the leading edge of rising voter outrage. There were large protests over the last week by laid-off federal workers, by LGBTQ activists in New York City furious over the scrubbing of transgender references from the Stonewall National Monument, and here in Philadelphia and elsewhere for last Monday’s Not My President Day.

At town halls in states like Georgia and Wisconsin that swung to Trump, GOP Congress members hoping to hail the accomplishments of the first 30 days were greeted instead by boos and angry inquisitors demanding explanations for the gutting of federal agencies and proposed deep cuts to Medicaid and food stamps. With the price of eggs — certified by the mainstream media as barometer of the American zeitgeist — at an all-time high, the president’s approval has already plunged underwater, and yet Musk is even more reviled by the increasingly less-silent majority.

» READ MORE: What Elon Musk wants is worse than you think | Will Bunch Newsletter

The idea behind the nationwide #TeslaTakedown protests — with Week Three planned for next Saturday — is to weaken Musk by attacking the main source of his wealth, his massive stake in the EV giant where he still serves as inattentive CEO. The goal is both to cripple new sales of Tesla and also tank its astronomic stock price that underwrites Musk, and there are powerful signs it is already working. Many experts say the CEO’s right-wing politics are why U.S. sales of its EVs flattened in 2024 and fell below 50% of the domestic market, and also why Tesla’s value on Wall Street has plunged as much as 21% since Trump’s inauguration.

“Tesla Takedown isn’t asking Congress to change the laws that Trump and Musk are already ignoring and will continue to ignore, or asking courts to send federal marshals to enforce the orders they have already issued finding many of the actions taken by the putschists to be illegal,” the journalist Edward Hasbrouck wrote in hailing the newest form of direct action. “Instead, Tesla Takedown is an effort to directly undermine the wealth, power and popular appeal of Musk and his collaborators."

The response that I saw in Devon — in affluent Chester County, which backed Kamala Harris over Trump in 2024 — from passing honkers and friendly waves was overwhelmingly positive. One protester said that in Week One, a Tesla-driving motorist pulling into the lot slowed down to say, “We didn’t know! We’re sorry.”

There were some sour notes, like the occasional middle finger, usually from a large pickup truck. Cherry Hill protester Elizabeth Egan told me on Sunday that the crowd there was shocked when one motorist slowed down, opened the window and fired off an obvious Nazi salute. She said demonstrators, including ones whose parents had survived a Nazi labor camp or fought for America in World War II, were shocked.

“I have never, anywhere in the U.S. or abroad, been the victim of a Nazi salute,” she said. “Today it happened. In Cherry Hill. The significance of this is not lost on those of us who know history.”

Indeed, it’s striking how many of the first wave of protesters say they are motivated by relatives who fled Europe before, during or after the Nazi reign of terror and genocide, or who have cited experience with other authoritarian regimes around the globe.

“My family knew what was right. My family lived through the Nazis in Germany,“ Sharon Bennett, a 62-year-old Chester County business owner, told me at the Devon protest. As a child, her family took her to protests against the Vietnam War and to a D.C. march for the thwarted Equal Rights Amendment. Worried that Musk will slash Social Security benefits for herself and her husband, Bennett came with a sign reading, ”stop Destroying Our Government Entirely,” playing up the “DOGE” acronym.

Another picketer, a 63-year-old retired physicist whose resume includes a stint at the government’s Los Alamos lab, and who like several others didn’t want his name used in a time of rising authoritarianism, said Musk and Trump “want a cultural revolution to destroy education and science ... to start with.“ He added that “tech bros are trying to start a monarchy” as he held aloft a sign that read “No Kings.”

The protesting scientist had to raise his voice over the honking horns, the first clatter of an uproar that is building rapidly in grassroots America, even as leaders in the Democratic Party and elsewhere among the befuddled elites are slow to catch on. The spring equinox is coming and temperatures are rising. As a great American bard once said, from small things, mama, big things one day come.

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