Public Notice: How #TeslaTakedown is bringing the fight to Musk
While the Trump administration and DOGE recklessly dismantle the federal government, millions of Americans are outraged and looking for ways to hold the Trump administration accountable. Considering Elon Musk is the CEO and largest shareholder of a major car company — Tesla — resistance is increasingly focused on how to disrupt his marquee business.
Going by the moniker of #TeslaTakedown, activists and regular citizens around the nation (and world) have been showing up to Tesla showrooms to protest Musk’s actions and DOGE generally. What started as small protests have grown to well-attended demonstrations in many different states. These protests, as well as random acts of vandalism that Tesla car owners and dealerships have experienced, have clearly ruffled the feathers of Trump and Musk.
WSJ: Meet the Former Tesla Die-Hards Now Selling Their Shares
Elon Musk’s role in the Trump administration turns off some loyal investors; stock is down more than 40% this year
Wired: The FBI Is Investigating Attacks on Tesla as ‘Domestic Terrorism.’ Here’s Why That Matters
The domestic terrorism designation could give law enforcement sweeping authority to surveil people protesting against Elon Musk’s role in the US federal government, civil liberties experts warn.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Tucson today
I wanted to take a moment from the road to share this photo with you from Tucson, Arizona today:
Original projected attendance was 3,000 people.23,620 showed up, making it the largest political rally in Arizona history.
While Republicans try to gut Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security to pay for tax cuts for billionaires, people across the country are standing up against these attacks on the working class.
Pa’lante,
Alexandria
Closer to the Edge: Bernie and AOC go to war with Trump’s ‘Billionaire Empire’
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aren’t just holding rallies — they’re launching a progressive airstrike on Trump’s billionaire-backed demolition of democracy. Their Fighting Oligarchy Tour is less of a political roadshow and more of a full-scale offensive against a government that’s now operating like Elon Musk’s private sandbox — complete with firings, shutdowns, and policy ideas that sound like they were drafted on a napkin at Mar-a-Lago.
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The Verge: How ‘Careless People’ is becoming a bigger problem for Meta
The company’s attempt to squash an ex-employee’s controversial memoir has gotten the attention of Congress.
“Members of the United States Congress, the Parliament of the United Kingdom, and the Parliament of the European Union have requested to speak with Ms. Wynn-Williams on the issues of public concern raised in her memoir,” her motion to lift the gag order reads. “These include Meta’s coordination with the Chinese Communist Party, its exploitation of emotionally vulnerable teenage girls, and its conduct in this very arbitration.”
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Zuckerberg is in the process of reorienting his company to be politically aligned with the Trump administration and making regular visits to the White House to discuss “American technology leadership.” If I wanted to throw a wrench in those conversations, especially when DeepSeek has reframed the debate about how the US should approach the AI arms race with China, I’d resurface that Zuckerberg was willing to censor on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.
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If I had to guess, we’ll be hearing more from Wynn-Williams now that lawmakers have taken an interest in her story. Even though she has been barred from promoting her book, members of Congress could subpoena her, which would give legal cover to let her speak freely again. Meta spokesman Andy Stone tells me that the company “has no intention of interfering with anyone’s rights under the law.”
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Beschloss: Is Conceding Defeat the American Way?
In the oft-repeated first chapter of On Tyranny, author Timothy Snyder warns us not to obey in advance. “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given,” the Yale historian explained. And those who give in to a repressive government “without being asked” are “teaching power what it can do.” Snyder calls this “anticipatory obedience,” describes it as “a political tragedy,” and gives the example of Nazi Germany after the elections of 1932 when a still-forming Adolf Hitler government benefited from enough people volunteering their obedience and hastening regime change.The parade of billionaires offering millions to fund and attend Donald Trump’s inauguration and media company owners changing their editorial policies and restricting journalists’ freedoms—Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg offer particularly vivid examples of both—illustrated early on that there would be cowards and enemies of democracy on board with Trump’s despotic rule. …
This week we saw two large institutions take a sobering next step by choosing to work with Trump rather than fight for the principles that a free, democratic society depends on. Both did not simply obey in advance, but responded to Trump’s hostile threats and attacks by conceding defeat and bending to his will.
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – March 21, 2025
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After news broke last night that the Pentagon was preparing a top-secret presentation for billionaire Elon Musk on plans for fighting a potential war with China, members of the administration denied that Musk’s visit to the Pentagon would include such a meeting. This morning, Musk posted on social media that the “leakers” “will be found.” “I look forward to the prosecutions of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to NYT,” he posted.Aside from appearing to confirm the story—one can’t “leak” a false story—Sophia Cai, Danny Nguyen, Daniel Payne, Amy MacKinnon, and Eli Stokols of Politico suggest that Musk’s threat has backfired. “We are public servants, not Elon’s servants,” one Food and Drug Administration employee told the reporters, adding, “[t]he public deserves to know how dysfunctional, destructive, and deceptive all of this has been and continues to be.”
A senior Federal Aviation Administration official said, referring to Musk, “He IS A LEAKER. When you put hard drives on data systems at government agencies you are creating the biggest security breaches we have seen in years and years. Possibly ever.” A Department of Agriculture staffer said: “If the Biden administration or Obama had acted like this, no one would have tolerated it. The Trump administration doesn’t get a pass.”
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In place of Republican town halls, Democrats are holding their own packed events in Republican districts. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are on a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour across the country because, as Sanders says, people are “profoundly disgusted with what is going on here in Washington, D.C.”Today, 11,000 people turned out to hear Sanders and AOC in Republican-led Greeley, Colorado. Another 34,000 turned out in Denver.
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Hartman: Saturday Report 3/22/25 – Trump to Seniors: No Data for DOGE? No Social Security!
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The Trump administration is bending over backwards to accommodate Elon Musk’s Dark Enlightenment plan to tear our government down and replace as many of its functions as possible with for-profit corporate programs. Given that Social Security cuts checks totaling $1.6 trillion a year, that’s where there’s a huge opportunity for big banks (and smaller ones like the one Elon wants to create with and for X) to administer the funds, skim a few percent off the top, and get rich, rich, rich. A few federal judges aren’t as enthusiastic about the program, though, so Trump’s SSA guy Lee Dudek is now saying that if Elon and his teenage hackers can’t get fully into the guts of the Social Security Administration’s computers and date — giving them all of our medical, financial, and historic employment information — he’s going to simply shut the system down so nobody gets a check. “Really, I want to turn it off and let the courts figure out how they want to run a federal agency,” he said sarcastically according to Bloomberg News. Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander, overseeing the AFL-CIO’s lawsuit against DOGE, noted that Musk’s boys were violating both administrative and privacy laws when they let the DOGE boys have “unbridled access to the personal and private data of millions of Americans, including but not limited to Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, hospitalization records, drivers’ license numbers, bank and credit card information, tax information, income history, work history, birth and marriage certificates, and home and work addresses.” And, she added, they never even provided a good reason to inspect all our personal records: “[D]efendants, with so-called experts on the DOGE Team, never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems, thereby exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government.” It’s fascinating to see how hard Trump is fighting for the Dark Enlightenment guys who want to replace democracy in America with a technocratic oligarchy that they run. Will Americans wake up to what’s happening in time to stop or even slow them down? Will they figure out ways around the court cases they keep losing, or reach the point where they simply begin to deny the legitimacy of the courts and their orders? It feels like we’re at a very significant turning point in this process; stay tuned…
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Al Jazeera: Trump targets Biden, Harris in US security clearance purge
The executive order also targets Hillary Clinton and Antony Blinken, former state secretaries, and some Republicans.
KInzinger: Trump’s Latest Stunt: Revoking a Clearance I Don’t Even Have
While I was enjoying the company of friends, Trump was trembling with rage. Ha
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Nate Silver: How low is Trump’s popularity floor?
A fellow Substacker messaged me the other day to ask why President Trump’s approval rating had been so resilient despite problems in the economy and elsewhere. I argued that it hadn’t been, really. In our approval rating tracker, Trump started out at a +11.6 net approval rating, a much better opening number than in his first term. But now, he’s in the red at -2.2. So there’s actually been a fair amount of movement:
Where Trump might be vulnerable
If Trump’s numbers get worse, it by definition means that some groups of voters turn on him. So which groups might those be? One theory is Last In, First Out (LIFO): that the most recent converts to Trump will be among the first to abandon him. Roughly three groups come to mind here:- Young voters.
- Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans and Black men.
- Riverian types. What in the heck do I mean by this term? It comes from my book, and it loosely refers to Silicon Valley and Wall Street, but more broadly to a community (“the River”) of quantitative types who are competitive and risk-tolerant. And generally also highly successful financially; these are elites, part of the literal 1 percent. Because of that, they have only a trivial direct influence on election results (especially since many of them live in New York or California) and approval rating numbers. But they can influence them indirectly through their financial leverage and their media presence.
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The Daily: The Real Trump Derangement Syndrome Is On The Right
As voters pin the declining economy on Donald Trump, Trump supporters are increasingly blaming former President Joe Biden in what can best be explained as irrational TDS.
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Normally, voters would not blame the former president MORE in March than they did in February, but that’s where Republican voters are at these days, according to a Morning Consult poll
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Reuters: Thousands of agents diverted to Trump immigration crackdown
Summary- Federal agents diverted from crime-fighting to immigration enforcement
- Critics argue crackdown diverts resources from other crimes, making America less safe
- Trump administration defends shift, citing immigration as a national security threat
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Closer to the Edge: Peter’s Death Wasn’t Just Tragic — It Was a Policy Decision
He was ten years old.
Peter Donde was born with HIV — a condition his mother never asked for and never expected to pass on. For most of his short life, that virus had been kept at bay with antiretroviral medication provided through USAID-funded programs.
That lifeline ended in early 2025 when USAID funding was cut off, part of a sweeping political move designed to shrink America’s role in global aid.
Peter’s mother — a widow who had already buried her husband after he succumbed to AIDS — walked for hours to the clinic that had kept her son alive. The shelves were empty. No medication. No answers. No plan.
There was nothing left to give her.
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FPWellman: Terrorizing our fellow Americans
Russ Vought promised to traumatize Federal workers, and it’s happening
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Our government is being dismantled. We can all see that.What you might not see is worse. It’s the inside terrorist campaign that is purposely and deliberately traumatizing the two million Americans that run our federal government—exactly as promised by the guy the Senate approved 53-47 as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
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NY Times: America Last: Why Shoppers Abroad Are Boycotting U.S. Goods
A growing number of Europeans and citizens of other countries are choosing not to buy American products to demonstrate their anger at President Trump’s policies.
Some Danish grocery stores added stars to the price tags of European goods to help customers identify local products.
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AP: The Pentagon’s DEI purge: Officials describe a scramble to remove and then restore online content
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Al Jazeera: US lifts $10m reward for major Taliban leader Haqqani
The removal of the bounty comes days after Afghan group releases US citizen.
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Newsmax: Trump, WH Website Contradict on Alien Enemies Act