Oh, how opinions have changed. In a few short months, Tesla went from the Democrats’ favorite company to Donald Trump and Sean Hannity making a big show of buying Elon Musk’s products. If you had that on your 2025 bingo card, you should buy a lottery ticket.

Tesla was once the darling of left-wingers who fancied themselves as heroic planet-savers for driving electric vehicles. This was always a self-aggrandizing fantasy, of course, but now, radical ecofascists delude themselves into thinking they’re fighting fascism with “mostly peaceful” protests like vandalizing Tesla dealerships and lighting vehicles on fire.

“The swarm of violent attacks on Tesla property is nothing short of domestic terrorism,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi. The Justice Department will respond accordingly.

This profound shift happened because Musk teamed up with Trump to form the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Cutting waste, fraud, and abuse from government caused many leftists to lose what little was left of their minds.

While Democrat minions terrorize Tesla dealerships and owners, congressional Democrats are screaming about how unfair it is that Tesla doesn’t pay corporate income taxes. But why is Tesla favored by the tax code? Democrats, of course.

Naturally, Massachusetts Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren is the chief purveyor of chutzpah. “American taxpayers will shoulder the burden of tax cuts for Tesla, and they deserve answers about your efforts to secure massive tax breaks for billionaire corporations,” she wrote to Musk earlier this month.

Of course, Tesla did nothing illegal. The company simply took advantage of the tax breaks and write-offs provided by Democrats in Congress. They picked their winner, but now they dislike its CEO and feign outrage over the results of their own policies.

The numbers are appalling, though. Here’s the Wall Street Journal editorial board:

Note first that most of Tesla’s $7.1 billion in net income last year doesn’t even derive from selling electric vehicles, solar panels or battery storage. Some $2.8 billion came from the sale of regulatory credits to other auto makers that need to comply with government EV mandates. As EV mandates have increased, so have Tesla’s profits from such credit sales.

Those credits have the perverse effect of making gas-powered vehicles much more expensive because other manufacturers basically have to pay Tesla for their emissions sins. Tesla also gets to carry forward those credits against future tax liabilities. At the end of 2024, the company still booked $1 billion in renewable energy tax credits.

Furthermore, Democrats and their “fact-checking” media propagandists insist Joe Biden didn’t “mandate” EVs, but what he did do was set emissions standards that could be met only with more EVs on the road. They accomplish that in two ways: favor EVs with the tax code and make combustion engines vastly more expensive. Automakers are thus incentivized to increase EV production and limit the number of gas-powered vehicles they make.

In other words, the deck is stacked in Tesla’s favor, and now Democrats are complaining.

Their fascist central planning certainly doesn’t end with Tesla, though. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) primarily comprised Green New Deal income redistribution and had virtually nothing to do with reducing inflation. Quite the opposite, in fact, to the point that even Biden later confessed, “I wish I hadn’t called it that.”

A new study by the libertarian Cato Institute estimates that the IRA’s energy tax credits “will cost between $936 billion and $1.97 trillion over the next 10 years, and between $2.04 trillion and $4.67 trillion by 2050.” Just the News says, “That’s roughly 12 times the stated cost.”

A lot of your money (yes, Chuck Schumer, it’s our money) is wasted on the green dream via tax code distributions similar to those benefiting Tesla. It may be easy for me to say, but if Musk wants to put his money where his mouth is with DOGE, he’ll work to pull Tesla from the government teet.

Unfortunately, as I wrote in 2023, Musk’s Tesla, a world leader in electric vehicles, joined several Chinese automakers in signing a letter pledging to uphold “core socialist values” in a clear attempt to placate the party poobahs in Beijing. Part of doing business is working with the government presiding over the market, whether that’s the ChiComs or the Democrat ecofascists. Musk is hardly unique for playing by the rules made by politicians.

If Democrats don’t like what’s done with the tax credits they hand out like candy, the solution is to return to a constitutionally limited government that doesn’t put its thumb on the market scales.

Follow Nate Jackson on X/Twitter.