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Posted on 10/18/2026 7:26:01 AM PDT by MtnClimber
The left is not just indifferent to innovations like Musk’s flying cars. No, they actively hate such things.
I have been interested in Teslas since a neighbor told me about the cars back in 2013, a year after the Model S made its debut. It was quite some time before I saw one for real. I agreed with my friend that they were spiffy-looking cars. Then I saw the video of Elon Musk revealing the Model S P85D in the fall of 2014. I was hooked.
As I noted the following year, I am in some ways an unlikely enthusiast for Elon Musk. From the beginning of his career, Musk has said that his two governing passions are “sustainable transport” to battle “global warming” and finding a way to make mankind an interplanetary species, beginning with a space colony on Mars. “For my part,” I wrote,
the word “sustainable” has me reaching, if not for my revolver, then at least for an air-sickness bag. I regard the whole Green Lobby as a cocktail composed of three parts moralistic hysteria mixed with a jigger of high-proof cynical opportunism (take a look at Al Gore’s winnings from the industry) fortified with a dash of beady-eyed left-wing redistributionist passion. You can never be Green enough, Comrade, and if the data show a 20-year “hiatus” in global warming (so much for Michael Mann’s infamous hockey stick), that’s no reason not to insist that capitalist powerhouses like the United States drastically curtail their CO2 emissions right now, today, while giving egregious polluters like China a decade or more to meet its quotas.
No, when it comes to energy, I often quote, sometimes with attribution, the Manhattan Institute’s Robert Bryce: what the world needs now is cheap, abundant energy, period, full stop, end of discussion. My motto is: frack early, frack often. Do you want to help the poor/clean up the environment/save the spotted wildebeest? Then you need economic growth, and to achieve that you need energy, which at the moment means you need fracking. Q.E.D.
As for making mankind an interplanetary species, I quoted the end of Robert Frost’s great poem “Birches”:
Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better. I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree, And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back.
I haven’t changed my mind about either. But my enthusiasm for Elon Musk is undimmed. I remain excited by all things Tesla—the cars, the robots, the software, and autonomous driving. My only disappointment is Musk’s decision last winter to retire the Model S. I have owned a few and have loved them all. At the moment, there is no real successor to that elegant, well-appointed, and gratifyingly zippy sedan.
Then there is SpaceX, whose products include not only rockets (they are now responsible for some 90 percent of the world’s space launches) but also Starlink, which is providing internet access to even the remotest areas, and Starshield, a military application of that satellite network. Soon, Starlink will be providing internet and telephone service directly to your mobile phone and other devices. When I wrote about Musk in 2015, he had yet to catch or reuse rocket boosters. Now he has done both.
All along this journey, churls, doubters, and naysayers have dogged Musk’s footsteps. Electric cars would never be more than a novelty. Really, Tesla was a sort of joke. For the last few years, the Tesla Model Y has been the best-selling car in the world. A similar roster of establishment executives once upon a time lined up to belittle SpaceX. They are much quieter and less numerous now.
Musk’s latest venture was unveiled last week on October 15 in Waco, Texas. In 2011, Musk’s friend Peter Thiel, reflecting on the moribund state of innovation in the U.S., famously said, “We wanted flying cars; instead, we got 140 characters.” That was several years before Musk acquired the company formerly known as Twitter (now X); his transformation of that platform from a left-wing censorship tool into an ideologically neutral (and financially viable) friend of free expression has not received the attention it deserves. But the main event on Thursday was the fruit of a collaboration between Tesla and SpaceX. Tesla first announced the long-awaited new Roadster in 2017, with initial production scheduled for 2020. In the years since, the car grew bolder and more technologically advanced. On Thursday, Musk and his colleagues unveiled a vehicle that could not only hang upside down but also could, for a short distance, fly.
The response to this extraordinary feat divided neatly along ideological lines. The left hated it; the right loved it. This X commentator got it exactly. “A car flew last night,” he wrote. “An actual car, flipping in midair on cold gas thrusters and landing on its wheels.” In short, he continued,
Elon Musk’s companies built a sports car that does what science fiction promised for a century. The same man lands rockets on barges and builds the machines that carry our astronauts. That is what one free mind, and the thousands of minds he employs, can produce.
Bernie Sanders says billionaires should not exist. He looks at the man who makes cars fly and concludes the problem to solve is that such men keep too much of what they create. He has spent five decades in government producing nothing, yet he claims the moral authority to dispose of the men who produce everything. A man who seeks unearned control over the lives and property of others is corrupt in the fullest meaning of the word, and that corruption runs deeper than any bribe.
The bottom line? “A flying car is what men do when they are free. A wealth tax is what politicians do to the men who built it. One of them needs the other to survive, and it isn’t Musk.” Touché.
The commentator Glenn Reynolds quotes that last bit in his Substack article “Flying Cars and Those Who Hate Them.” “The thing about the left,” Reynolds writes, “is, it’s made up largely of people who aren’t great at doing things. They don’t get rich by building things or doing things. They get rich, when they do, by declaring problems, getting the government to throw money at them, and then stealing some (sometimes pretty much all) of that money for themselves and their NGOs. There’s nothing for them in flying cars.”
But that is only part of the story. The other part has to do with the economy of jealousy and résentiment. That is to say, the left is not just indifferent to innovations like Musk’s flying cars. No, they actively hate such things. Why? Partly it’s because of the light such innovations shine upon their own paltriness and affronted sense of “self-importance.” “When Elon does something cool,” you see, “they’re offended because they feel diminished by that.” There is a political side to this equation as well. Thus it is that Reddit “is actively banning videos of the Tesla Roadster,” calling them “political.”
Reynolds cuts to the chase in his essay: “[R]emember that if it was up to the left, Elon would be in jail and his money would be fed to corrupt NGOs. Luckily, it’s not up to the left. Cool things are what Americans do. Let’s stay Americans.”
The commentator Robby Starbuck made a kindred point. As you watch the video of the new roadster hanging upside down, flying over a line of cars, and gently landing on the ground, Starbuck warned, “Remember that if it was up to Democrats, Elon Musk would be in prison and his money would be seized to fund their NGOs and DEI pet projects.”
This would mean an end to all the advancements at his companies. They’d quickly waste the money and target a new wealthy job creator to jail and steal money from. Leftism is the enemy of innovation and human advancement.
There’s no single larger threat to our species surviving and advancing than leftist ideology. It’s anti-child, anti-family, anti-innovation, anti-prosperity, anti-tradition, anti-white, anti-liberty, anti-strength, and anti-Christian.
Musk creates reusable rockets. The EU struggled mightily for years to produce a bottle cap that would remain tethered to its bottle after being opened. Was this not, as one wag put it, a “radical, beautiful innovation that will change the course of humanity”? Musk creates self-driving cars and a roadster that can fly. Emmanuel Macron proudly shows off a “futuristic” Citroën concept car that has light bulbs.
What is happening far transcends party politics. Still, since we are on the run-up to an important election, allow me to ask that you bear in mind that there are significant differences between the parties and what they have to offer. As one canny observer put it, “The ‘far-right’ is developing flying cars, self-landing spaceships, and unrivaled military tech.” Savor those scare quotes around the phrase “far-right.” Then ponder what the other side is all about. “The far-left don’t know what a woman is, sterilize themselves, kill their babies, and hate their own race. A godless death cult that only destroys.”
In my view, that about sums it up. Keep it in mind.
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I have never been as a principal against the concept of electric cars.
I have been virulently opposed to government subsidies for them, governmental mandates to purchase them, the deliberate inhibition of petroleum exploitation, the push to do all this without an electrical grid prepared to handle it, and the immature technology in the form of large, heavy battery systems that are costly to replace, toxic to produce, have limited range, and take too long to charge.
Over the years, as these things change, my opinion will change with those changes.
As for Musk? SpaceX and Starlink are the signal achievements of his in my opinion.
In her last Prime Minister's Questions, a Liberal MP tried to criticize Margaret Thatcher's entire term as Prime Minister by saying the poor were "relatively" less well off than the rich and saying that was a record no one could be proud of. Thatcher shot right back with a quote that sums up the Leftist philosophy that applies to her time - the UK in the early 1990s - as well as today - the US in 2026 - "What the honorable gentleman is saying that he would rather that the poor were poorer, provided that the rich were less rich."
Andrew Sullivan referred to this exchange in his obituary of Thatcher and explained the Leftist view of success - "The Britain I grew up with was, in this specific sense, profoundly leftist in the worst sense. It was cheap and greedy and yet hostile to anyone with initiative, self-esteem, and the ability to make money. . . . Yes: the British left would prefer to keep everyone poorer if it meant preventing a few getting richer."
Which brings me to this story. Elon Musk creates a flying car and the Left hates him for it. To paraphrase Thatcher, the Left would rather not have a flying car if that meant Musk would be poorer.
Starlink is the single greatest thing to happen for people in rural areas since rural electrification.
The bottom line? “A flying car is what men do when they are free. A wealth tax is what politicians do to the men who built it. One of them needs the other to survive, and it isn’t Musk.” Touché.
But, It is the concentration of wealth and power that should trouble us. History shows us the problem If you have a good rich man like Muck or Edison it is good. If it is Soros and ilk ,not so much.
The US is unique in history and the world in that people can move up and down the social/economic ladder. Big business and big government go hand in hand.
Part of the solution is putting power back to the state and less regulations. Trump is doing this in the background and is the goal.
These pathetic little weasels who haven't ever done a thing except get elected and would put innovators in jail just nauseate me. AOC and Sanders at the top of the list.
If I live long enough and can afford one, I’ll be flying with the birds and poop on Priuses.
Wish I still had my 1984 Monte Carlo. I have a 2006 Buick now. It’s a beast...
I want the espresso machine in the car. When’s Christmas coming?
For later.
L
I do believe Starlink is going to push a lot of carriers out of the market.
Well. Given that the Starship resembles a giant phallus (which the con-man Musk designed that way, no doubt) I am surprised that AOC isn’t infatuated by the concept and fully in approval.
I fully get the mindset of not wanting to buy a car with all this electronic crap. Some of it I really like, particularly the adaptive cruise control. Roads have become so crowded that traditional cruise control just can’t be used anymore. The adaptive cruise control is a great feature. And I do like backup cameras.
But a most of it, including the lane change alarm and most of all, the execrable function that shuts off the engine when the car is stopped in traffic, I could do without. In spades.
I recently divested myself of my 2007 Tundra. 337,000 miles, and suspension work on the horizon. Farewell, sweet truck.
Didn't I see your posts on Reddit?
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