Somewhere out there, there’s a meme telling you to go back and find your 2016 self and let him know that Donald Trump just bought a Tesla and that the ecofascist Left is firebombing the dealerships of the world’s most climate-friendly car manufacturer.

Strange days, indeed.

Donald Trump did just buy a Tesla — very publicly — as a show of support for his friend Elon Musk, the “heretic” whose efforts to root out government fraud, waste, and abuse via the Department of Government Efficiency have earned him the unmitigated enmity of the Left. As Musk told Joe Rogan recently, “At this point, I think I’m at the top of the list for a lot of homicidal maniacs. They’re doing the same thing to me that they did to Trump, which is that they’re making it sound like if you kill me, you’re a hero.”

Musk is a Patriot. But beyond his personal safety, his Tesla dealerships, charging stations, and individual owners are being targeted in acts of what we can call civil terrorism. As Tal Fortgang writes at City Journal:

A framework beyond protest politics and civil disobedience is needed to understand this phenomenon. Today’s left-wing agitators deploy random acts of lawlessness designed to inconvenience and disrupt as many civilians as possible, hoping to pressure them to get the government to change course. This tactic is reasonably described as a form of terrorism, though the activists aren’t murderous like al-Qaida or Hamas — they don’t use guns, bombs, or threats of unpredictable bloodshed. Instead, they engage in civil terrorism.

A Tesla dealership in Loveland, Colorado, for example, has been hit six times in the last three months — curiously, beginning right around the same time Musk started his work with DOGE. Gunshots were fired into vehicles at one Oregon dealership and Molotov cocktails at another. In Massachusetts, charging stations were set afire, and a Boston man claimed he had a free-speech right to deface Teslas. And pretty much no matter where you live, if you own a Tesla, you’ve probably been flipped off more than once by a Musk-deranged leftist.

Trump has seen enough, though. “Those people are going to go through a big problem when we catch them,” he said during that Tesla photo op with Musk. “We’ve got a lot of cameras up. We already know who some of them are. We’re going to catch them. And they’re bad guys. They’re the same guys that screw around with our schools and universities, the same garbage.”

These people are garbage, all right. Straight up. And they’ve been operating with relative impunity until now. How? Because they tend to operate in “friendly” jurisdictions — in the big cities like New York and Philly and Chicago and Seattle; and the leftist enclaves like Berkeley and Portland; and the Beltway, of course, where jury pools are sympathetic and George Soros-supported district attorneys can exercise, uh, prosecutorial discretion.

They’ve also been getting a pass from the Leftmedia. Yesterday, for example, a deeply dishonest MSNBC anchor summed up Trump’s vow to crack down on the vandals this way: “So just to be clear: You protest a private company, you are labeled by this administration a domestic terrorist.”

Since when are death threats and firebombs considered “protest”? Okay, other than the summer of 2020.

Even House Speaker Mike Johnson is dropping the gloves, posting, “Congress will investigate the sources of these attacks and help the DOJ and FBI ensure those responsible are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

The point is that Republicans are finally vowing to do something about these acts of civil terrorism, whereas the Biden administration and Democrats generally have been more than happy to ignore these common-causers.

The widespread Tesla dealership vandalism is just the latest manifestation of this leftist lawlessness — from unpunished presidential inauguration riots to Black Lives Matter conflagrations to judicial intimidation to campus Jew-hatred to attempted assassinations of Republican lawmakers, Supreme Court justices, and American presidents. All of it is meant to make us uneasy and thereby force radical change upon our government and our institutions. So far, we’ve been reluctant to address the issue, but we fail to do so at the risk of civil society. Make no mistake: This is a Western Civilizational issue.

Andy Ngo knows a thing or two about all this. Heck, he wrote the book on it after having been viciously attacked by the antifa thugs he’d been working to expose. “Simply put,” he writes in Unmasked, “antifa are an ideology and movement of radical pan-leftist politics whose adherents are mainly militant anarchist communists or collectivist anarchists. A smaller fraction of them are socialists who organized through political groups like The Democratic Socialists of America and others. Labels aside, their defining characteristics are a militant opposition to free markets and the desire to destroy the United States and its institutions, culture, and history.”

As reformed climate-change analyst Michael Shellenberger notes: “The Democrats are really lost. I’ve never seen the Left so lost as it is right now. … I think it’s revealing its true colors that you have one of the main climate justice organizations leading these protests against the most important electric car manufacturer in the world. I think what it shows is that what really upset them is that Elon Musk has been cutting … the budget for all these pet projects that had nothing whatsoever to do with climate change or the environment. … it’s really Musk Derangement Syndrome.”

How do we take the fight to these people? How do we cripple them? City Journal’s Fortgang lists RICO statutes, asset forfeiture, and even private-party class-action civil litigation as avenues of approach. He concludes, “Civil terrorism is a dangerous manifestation of a simmering battle for the West. Its practitioners hate the West. They are trying to destroy it, not fix it. There is no known cure for anti-Westernism.”

The way to fight them, he says, is to “put the criminals who act unlawfully upon those ideas in prison, confiscate their funds, uproot their criminal networks, deter their would-be imitators, and give public spaces back to the decent Americans who deserve them.”

Here’s hoping Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel are listening.