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WHERE DO YOU PROTEST ELON MUSK? EVERYWHERE, IT TURNS OUT.  
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Melissa Gira Grant
February 18, 2025
The New Republic
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_ From Stonewall to Tesla dealerships, protesters are pioneering a
form of opposition that doesn't necessarily center on Washington,
D.C.. _

People attend a protest outside the Stonewall Inn in New York on
February 14, after the word transgender was erased from the National
Park Service's webpage., KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images

 

In recent weeks, it’s become clear that the Trump/Musk takeover does
not need to be well-executed
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to accomplish its goals. But now, it’s also becoming clear that
protesters have adapted to the seemingly unending number of attacks,
on an ever-expanding number of targets—the emerging theme in
whatever kind of fascism this is.   

Last week, the words “transgender” and “queer” were deleted
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from the National Parks Service website for the Stonewall National
Monument, to demonstrate compliance with one of Trump’s executive
orders. A biographical note about legendary activist Sylvia Rivera was
nonsensically edited to read
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“At a young age Sylvia began fighting for gay and rights,” with no
effort to even replace the deleted
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dreaded word “transgender
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from where it had originally appeared (following “and”). Historic
descriptions
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about why Stonewall mattered were hastily truncated to read
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“Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a
lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal”—missing the two
letters that made up what had been “LGBTQ+.”

Within hours, queer and trans groups and activists organized a protest
at Stonewall to condemn the erasure, with hundreds of people rallying
to condemn the administration’s attempts to edit trans people out of
the nation’s history. These sorts of protests are now following each
new Trump decree, every agency Musk has ravaged. The sites are
expanding: from DC sidewalks
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to Congressional offices
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from Stonewall
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to Tesla dealerships
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The day after the protest against trans erasure, a small group
picketed the Manhattan Tesla dealership, one of a number of actions
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across the country that day, each organized
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autonomously to locate the fight with Musk in any city or town where
Teslas were sold. The signs and chants varied, but all illustrated the
collapse of Musk’s business interests into his government takeover,
tying his “Swasticars” to the “broligarchy.” On Monday, they
were still popping up outside Tesla properties. In San Francisco, a
sign
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spotted in the dealership’s upper window: “We Hate Him Too.”

Building on the first weeks of protest, which focused on the budget
freezes and staff firings at federal agencies, now protest is
intentionally distributed. The Women’s Marches of 2017 took place in
hundreds of cities and towns
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across the country, but only once and on one day. Eight years later,
in a sense, the scene of the crime is everywhere: each hospital that
has denied
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care to trans kids; each neighborhood
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ICE has tried to terrorize. From close up, this may seem diffuse or
non-strategic. But it reflects the multi-faceted nature of the crisis
(and the seemingly random volley of executive actions driving it):
Those who are feeling rightfully overwhelmed are reasonably not
limiting themselves to just one target in their response.

The Stonewall riots of 1969 were against the police, who wielded vice
laws to suppress queer and trans life; the protest at Stonewall last
Friday was a demonstration that the history
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made on that spot was alive, even if the opponents in that story had
shifted. Throwing a brick or handfuls of pennies at the cops worked
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do you make a stand against whoever has the password to the content
management system running the website of a national park? Where do you
protest the gangs of Elon Youth accessing government servers
containing our private data? Why not Tesla?

The protests in Washington continue, some very small. But the more
that some people—even a handful—remain visible, the more others
seem inclined to join them. On February 7, outside the building where
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency Musk had pledged
to kill, the small crowd included a woman who had spent 36 hours
traveling by bus so she could be there and do something. “She was
sleeping in a cheap motel and going to any protest she could find,”
journalist Hamilton Nolan reported
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last week, “She’d been homeless before, so this didn’t feel like
a great hardship. She was holding a hand-drawn poster that read
‘HONK FOR DEMOCRACY,’ but getting little traction with passing
drivers.” It’s earnest, but it’s what’s happening.

On Monday, also known as President’s Day, another wave of the
Reddit-organized
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50501  protests hit dozens of cities. 50501 seems to be drawing out
some people who have never organized a protest before. “I decided to
pick the ball up and do it myself. And I learned a lot extremely
quickly,” said
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one organizer in Pennsylvania. Indivisible is now running with the
Tesla protest idea, urging people
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to plan their own “Tesla Town Halls” wherever they are. “If
you’re in Texas or California,” their guide suggests, “consider
a SpaceX facility or X (formerly Twitter) headquarters.”

Mere weeks ago, media outlets were still publishing pieces asking
where the “resistance” was. It seems we are now well past that:
Possibly, that’s because “the resistance” is bubbling up in too
many places to track. When we look back on these weeks, we may see a
broader narrative was emerging: The rolling protests everywhere may
turn out to be more sustainable than the mass one-day turnouts by
which many judge the strength of a movement. 

Melissa Gira Grant
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Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at _The New Republic_ and the
author of _Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work._

 

* Protests Against Trump/Musk; Stonewall National Monument;
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