A friend’s sister lives in a rich all-white all-Democrat suburb of Chicago. Her Tesla was parked at the top of her driveway and she found the following note on it:
A dispute among white Democrats regarding 50 shades of righteousness was, of course, gold from my point of view and I immediately deployed it on X and Facebook. I assumed that a quiet claim of authorship would be understood as ironic given (1) the expressed desire of the author to remain anonymous (“signed, your neighbor”), (2) the legible and, therefore, likely feminine handwriting, (3) the inconsistency with viewpoint-diverse Florida, and (4) the inconsistency with the rest of my social media and Web output. Of course, I was wrong!
Here’s part of a post from a university professor turned Facebook executive turned venture capitalist:
Concerning an example of a Tesla being “keyed” as an act of protest, and the owner understandably complaining about it:
I’m sorry this happened to you. It’s regrettable. I think it’s immoral and antisocial, in the ways you do.
But I do think the issue here is whether the conditions obtain to make it justified, rather than merely the structural claim that it’s wrong because it’s property destruction.
If the KKK were active in town and terrorizing and killing people with impunity, symbolic property rights infringement as a social retaliation would be regarded as understandable by many people.
There are of course many reasons to object to even that. It’s unlawful. It’s vigilante justice. It can be seen as socially destabilizing. So there are people who will say it’s never ok.
But many people think that unlawful civil disobedience is OK when the injustice issue is sufficient to warrant what they regard as a proportional response.  There’s a strong history of this in America. We like “law and order” but if we think the law is unjustly favoring the wrong order, we sometimes accept the moral appropriateness of unlawful behavior.
So I think if you want to object to this, it needs to be met at that level. And I must say that folks who own these vehicles who are upset about these events, do not seem to be acknowledging that and engaging with it as such. At least not that I’ve seen on social media.
When someone puts this much thought into the nuance of keying a Tesla (“civil disobedience” for Democrat A to damage Democrat B’s car), it is time to spring into action.
On the theory that the most believable lies contain some element of truth, much of my reply is true. There is a board-certified emergency medicine doc who shares an alley with us (access to garages in our neighborhood is via alley so that houses don’t have ugly garage doors in front). He is married (being divorced in our part of Florida, due to a feminism deficit, lacks prestige). He does have a Model Y from a couple of years ago and, in fact, recently said that the car made it from Gainesville to our neighborhood via self-driving without a single intervention (3.5 hours).
Despite the elements of truth, it didn’t occur to me that the thoughtful Facebooker wouldn’t see the attempt at humor. He has some familiarity with my failure to conform to righteous political dogma, for one thing. His response:
I think what you did is exactly the right kind of response. You aren’t trying to upset someone or retaliate against them with violence or property destruction, or some other sort of harm, lawful or not. Your interpreting their car is potentially problematic and you’re explaining to them why and mentioning the broader context. I think that even somebody who disagrees with your views should find that admirable.
Maybe somebody should create flyers with different interesting points on them and master distribute them to protesters and encourage them to leave them on cars instead do destruction.

The flyers could have a URL where the specific issue is being discussed and requested the person who owns the car participate.
A female Deplorable attacked me in the same thread and I admitted that the note was authentic, but my authorship wasn’t. That prompted the thoughtful original author to ask
So you didn’t write this note? But you left it for your neighbor? Or not even that?
When I confirmed that I was not the heroine behind the note, he added
Many of the things that I’ve seen you post on make you seem not just like somebody who disagrees with me politically but like a very mean spirited or unkind person. I was pleasantly surprised by this, but I can see now that actually you think that graciousness is worth mocking.
So… he is a kind person willing to look at the positive aspects of keying someone’s Tesla while I am an unkind person for mocking anti-Tesla hysteria among those who, just months ago, were saying that everyone should drive a Tesla in order to stave off a climate emergency.
Much the same thing happened on X. In response to a Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (99% as progressive as Queers for Palestine?)…
Some responses…
Sad that a professor at MIT and Harvard is so blissfully unaware as to think this is the first time an election has been bought. The naïveté is stunning.
(The guy clicked through to my profile, upgraded me from humble “teacher” to august “professor”, and didn’t learn enough from the context of my other posts to realize that this was a joke.)
From a “data scientist”:
You’re actually a retard aren’t you?
60,000 views and seemingly hardly anyone cottoned on to the claim of authorship being a joke.
Let me close this out with a photo from Sun ‘n Fun (Lakeland, Florida), in which a Tesla uses camouflage to hide from visiting progressives.
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