A 41-year-old from Oregon was arraigned in federal court Wednesday for allegedly “possessing” Molotov cocktails near a Tesla dealership in Salem, Oregon, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. The charges come as Americans across the country have been protesting at Tesla dealerships to express their disapproval of Elon Musk and the way he’s been dismantling the U.S. federal government in an oligarchic coup.
Adam Matthew Lansky has been charged with “illegally possessing an unregistered destructive device,” according to the DOJ, after allegedly “throwing Molotov cocktails” at a Tesla dealership in Salem on Jan. 20, the same day as President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Another incident at the dealership occurred on Feb. 19, when bullets were allegedly fired into a building and vehicle on the property, according to Salem Police.
Both incidents have been tied to Lansky, though images captured by surveillance cameras and released to local news stations simply show a masked figure dressed in black. There are no clear indications of the identity of the person, but the DOJ press release claims a vehicle belonging to Lanksy was captured on surveillance video by a patrol car near the dealership. Police have yet to release that footage, as far as Gizmodo can tell. Lanksy was arrested Tuesday without incident, according to the DOJ.
The charges against Lansky come as vandalism of Tesla dealerships has risen across not just the U.S. but around the world in response to billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The wealthy oligarch has been destroying the federal government with his pseudo-government agency known as DOGE, and while just about everything he’s doing is illegal, nobody is stopping him. President Donald Trump has tasked Musk with getting rid of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” but Musk has so far made it pretty clear that he’s just getting rid of government programs he doesn’t like. Musk has yet to present a single piece of evidence showing “fraud” in anything he’s cut across the government.
And with no real avenue to express their discontent, given the weakness of Democrats to present any kind of tangible opposition, average Americans are making Tesla’s brand toxic. A man in Massachusetts was arrested Wednesday for “vandalism” for allegedly putting stickers depicting Musk’s Nazi-like salute on Tesla cars. Tesla charging stations in Northern California were recently tagged with swastikas and a woman was recently charged in Colorado for tagging a Tesla dealership with words like “Nazi.”
Tesla cars on the street are frequently being targeted, with people often leaving flyers imploring the drivers to sell their vehicles. And there are countless reports of Tesla Cybertrucks getting egged and pelted with Mardi Gras beads, as just some recent examples.
“Driving a Tesla went from a cool thing to do to not a cool thing pretty quickly,” one Tesla owner told KPTV news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF88o3EsoBo
The Tesla Takeover movement is organizing protests against Musk at Tesla dealerships across the U.S., with a centralized webpage that allows anyone to search for a protest near them. And Tesla sales in Europe have plummeted as Musk tries to influence the political landscape beyond America’s shores.
Some Tesla drivers have put bumper stickers on their vehicles expressing their disgust with Musk and his extremist views, while some people are going so far as to swap out the badges entirely, opting to disguise their Teslas with Toyota and Mazda emblems. But pretending that you don’t own a Tesla by changing the logo is just a temporary fix to a social stigma that’s likely to hang around for some time.
Musk’s destruction of the federal government is already harming the U.S. economy, with the jobs report on Thursday showing layoffs spiked to their highest level since Feb. 2020. Employers cut 172,017 jobs last month, a 245% increase according to CBS News, and those figures don’t even capture the full extent of the damage yet, according to analysts.
