As Donald Trump’s administration rushes to call the vandalism of Teslas across the country “terrorism,” at least one Republican is not comfortable with doing so.
In a recent story for Semafor on Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), reporter David Weigel highlighted a quote from Republican Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) that he posted on X.
Weigel wrote of Massie, “He was also uncomfortable with Republicans using the word ‘terrorism’ to describe what was being done to the cars.”
The story continued, “That term is overly used by both sides,’ he said. ‘It’s just vandalism and bad behavior.’ With tongue in cheek, he suggested a different term than his colleagues might use to respond: ‘Maybe it’s an insurrection?”
There is only one Tom Massie. https://t.co/U2XAd1r8YN pic.twitter.com/ACYktllDTr
— David Weigel (@daveweigel) March 27, 2025
Indeed.
Democrats desperately needed to label the trespassers, vandals, and protesters who created a riot on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021 as “insurrectionists” because putting them in such a category would allow their basic constitutional rights to be diminished.
That was the entire point. Democrats’ enforcement of this mythology was so thorough that former Vice President Kamala Harris once compared J6 to 9/11. Which is completely absurd.
Republicans calling the people doing damage to Teslas “terrorists” are employing the same tactic, where the criminals won’t be subject to mere existing laws, but harsher punishment by re-categorizing to be on par with al-Qaeda or ISIS.
You don’t fight radical Islamic terrorists in the same way you do mere vandals. That’s what Republicans are trying to achieve by copying the J6-obsessed Democrats.
It is not the least bit surprising that Massie was the only Republican in Weigel’s story to understand the inherent danger of just throwing around terms like “terrorist” or “insurrectionist” to achieve political goals.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden reportedly once called the fiscally conservative Tea Party movement of a decade-and-a-half ago “domestic terrorists.” An internal FBI memo labeled the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protesters as “domestic terrorists.” Many Republicans were eager to portray the various Black Lives Matter protests of the last decade terrorism. The left has constantly warned about MAGA followers being terrorists, as if the seventy-seven million people who voted for Trump the third time around pose some domestic threat.
This is not remotely new. Massie gets it.
More from Weigel’s story:
“In (Attorney General Pam Bondi’s) words, the Department of Justice is now working to ‘protect Tesla owners,’ and classifying anti-Tesla vandalism as political terror.”
Weigel observed, “The linkage between Democrats and Tesla vandalism on the right echoes Republicans’ allegations of violent radicalism within the party after the 2017 shooting at a GOP congressional baseball practice, and during the protests and riots after George Floyd’s murder by police.”
Oh yeah, there’s two more examples of right and left jumping to call others terrorists.
Weigel surmised, “But the stakes now are different: Republicans are very comfortable defending Musk, whose companies have created tens of thousands of jobs and vast wealth, from Democrats who want him out of Trump’s White House.”
“And they are fine with using the state to threaten action against those Democrats,” he added.
As a principled libertarian who has thought about civil liberties issues longer than three seconds—certainly longer than almost everyone else in Washington—Massie understands the inherent danger of using such reckless language to misidentify acts of protest and violence.
We all have vandals, assaulters, and murderers amongst us. They are not terrorists. They are vandals, assaulters, and murderers and should be dealt with appropriately.
What happened on 9/11 was not that. It’s actually an insult to the victims of that awful day to try to equate them.
As Republicans and Democrats continue to take turns trying to label the other terrorists, Massie seemed more amused by the current Tesla attacks than anything. Tesla owner Massie was “simply amused by the Democratic anger with Musk’s company.”
“A lot of people bought Teslas to virtue-signal, and now they own a $80,000 car that’s signaling virtues other than what they expected,” he said.
Thomas Massie is right! In more ways than one.
