Left-wing activists are kicking protests against Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) into high gear to manufacture a narrative of widespread opposition to the agency’s waste-cutting crusade. However, polling data shows that most Americans broadly support DOGE’s mission.
Musk and his team of whiz kids have been rooting through the bowels of the federal government to identify wasteful spending with the express purpose of using technology “to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
So far DOGE has flagged more than $65 billion in wasteful spending, including now famous examples like $70,000 in taxpayer funds for a “diversity, equity, and inclusion” music festival in Ireland, $1.5 million to promote LGBT diversity in the Serbian workforce, and $25,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia. In another shocking revelation, DOGE found that the Treasury Department did not have spending codes for $4.7 trillion in payments.
In response, left-wing activist groups have rolled out anti-Musk and anti-DOGE protests throughout the country, which the corporate media has excitedly reported as evidence of widespread opposition to the Trump administration’s waste-cutting efforts.
Some of these protests have targeted Tesla dealerships (Musk is the CEO of the electric car company). The Tesla dealership in Libertyville, Illinois, for instance, saw a protest last month organized by the Lake County Democrats. “Elon Musk paid to control Donald Trump, who broke his promise to bring down prices on day one, and now the American people are paying even more,” Lake County Democrats Chair Lauren Beth Gash said, as reported by the Lake and McHenry County Scanner.
The Tesla dealership in Charlotte, North Carolina saw a similar protest a few weeks later. In Rockville, Maryland, protesters outside yet another Tesla dealership called Musk an “authoritarian” while one activist claimed that Musk’s efforts were similar to what she experienced in Nazi Germany, as reported by Fox 5.
But as Fox News detailed, these protests are hardly organic. The left-wing groups funding the demonstrations “have been funding a variety of progressive causes in recent years, including defunding the police, pushing socialism, anti-Israel protests and opposing President Donald Trump’s agenda in general.”
One of those groups is MoveOn, a prominent liberal group originally founded to push Americans to “move on” from President Bill Clinton’s sex scandals and attempts to impeach him. As Fox also reported, MoveOn “has taken millions of dollars from George Soros and his Open Society Policy Center in recent years.”
Another Soros funded left-wing group called Indivisible has even created a “toolkit” to organize protests of Musk and DOGE, as reported by Fox News. The group, founded in 2017 explicitly to oppose Trump, claims “our democracy was rigged from the start in favor of the white and wealthy.”
The group also claims that “in the last few decades, an alliance of white nationalists and the ultra-rich have been actively working to further undermine democracy and cement their hold on power permanently.”
“People are just fed up. They’re fed up that Elon Musk is doing what he’s doing. It’s a quiet coup…The activist groups are banded together and look what you can do,” Dan Stoller, an organizer with Indivisible, told Westchester 12 News about a protest in Mount Kisco, New York.
Ironically, the median household income in Mount Kisco is $25,000 higher than the national median income of $75,000. Meanwhile, the median property value is more than half a million dollars, according to data from 2022.
In Lake County, Illinois, where Democrats protested at the Tesla dealership, the median household income is around $160,000 according to 2022 data, and the median home value is just shy of half a million dollars. Rockville, Maryland is one of the richest suburbs in America.
In other words, it seems that it is primarily wealthy liberals who are claiming that Musk only cares about the rich.
This apparent contradiction has been of no concern for the legacy press. As the Washington Free Beacon reported, “The demonstrations drove mainstream media coverage of brewing backlash against the Trump administration.”
But while the media and left-wing activist groups are opposing the government efficiency effort, most Americans, Democrats included, are generally supportive of DOGE’s mission.
“70% of voters say government expenditures are filled with waste, fraud, and inefficiency,” a Harvard CAPS-Harris poll published on February 24 found. The poll found 58% of Democrats agree with this statement, as do 78% of Republicans and 75% of Independents. “60% of voters think DOGE is helping make major cuts in government expenditures,” the poll also reported.
The Harvard poll also found 72% of voters overall support a government efficiency initiative.
The First Amendment protects the rights of all Americans to protest their government. However, the liberal activists opposing Musk and Trump are outnumbered by a clear majority of Americans who want their government to stop wasting money and to run more efficiently.
AMAC Newsline contributor Matt Lamb is an associate editor for The College Fix. He previously worked for Students for Life of America, Students for Life Action, and Turning Point USA. He previously interned for Open the Books. His writing has also appeared in the Washington Examiner, The Federalist, LifeSiteNews, Human Life Review, Headline USA, and other outlets. The opinions expressed are his own. Follow him @mattlamb22 on X.
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