‘Smash the broligarchy’: Protest in Seattle joins national Musk backlash
A physician at Seattle Children’s hospital. A janitor at Seattle Center. A retired elementary school teacher. A disabled military veteran.
These people and about 80 others protested in front of a Tesla showroom in South Lake Union on Saturday afternoon, voicing opposition to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s newfound power as an unelected “special government employee” — as well as the Trump administration’s freezing of federal funds, quickstep dismantling of agencies and other efforts to disassemble and repurpose significant aspects of the U.S. government.
“As a disabled veteran, watching our democracy fall apart is excruciating,” said Shannon Spencer, who served in the U.S. Air Force until 2010. “Veterans don’t forget our oath to protect the country. Just because I’m too broken to be in the military right now — that doesn’t go away.”
Saturday’s South Lake Union demonstration was not the first in Seattle. Some protesters had been there earlier this week. But it was one of over three dozen announced on actionnetwork.org at locations across the U.S. and Canada, including Tesla showrooms in California, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin.
The Seattle protesters held signs encouraging people to “sell your Tesla, dump your stock.” If a Tesla drove by, the crowd lit up with the call: “Sell it! Sell it!” Once a cultural signifier of progressivism, the electric vehicles are increasingly seen as MAGA-mobiles. That’s a symbolic problem for affluent local liberals: Seattle-area households are 130% more likely to own a Teslathan the national average.
Demonstrators ticked off lists of agencies and programs whose funding freezes and sudden layoffs encouraged them out onto this South Lake Union sidewalk on a Saturday afternoon: the Department of Education, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs. Their lists go on.
Raj Kapur, a physician at Seattle Children’s and a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine, said he’d never been to a protest before this one.
“I’m so worried about the way things are going in our government,” he said. “I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say I see parallels with pre-World War II Germany: the scapegoating of vulnerable groups (immigrants today, and Jews in Germany); preying on people’s fears of those groups to unite them; and the attack on intellectualism, particularly science and science-based policy, as well as medical research.”
Kapur has seen the results of those attacks in his own world: Seattle Children’s and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center have suspended some programs for fear of losing federal grants. He says his daughter, who works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is watching her friends and colleagues being suddenly laid off.
He’s also alarmed by the unwillingness of other elected officials to resist the intense flurry of executive action.
“It’s unfathomable to me that every Republican approves of every Cabinet nominee, of every pronouncement by the Trump administration,” he said. “When they run for office, they talk about defending the Constitution and the people. Now they’re hypocrites. That’s why I’m out here today — I don’t want to be a hypocrite. I want to put my feet where my mouth is.”
Passing cars and Metro buses honked in approval at the demonstrators, who waved signs saying “Tesla Funds Fascists,” “Stop Musk’s Coup,” “Smash the Broligarchy” and other anti-administration slogans.
Inside the Tesla showroom, employees said they were not authorized to speak with media, but indicated they had no issue with the demonstrators as long as things remained peaceful and nobody was blocked from entering the store.
On the sidewalk, Spencer, the Air Force veteran, said she’s been disheartened to see some military friends take up the MAGA cause, despite Trump’s disparaging comments about veterans, including his infamous dismissal of Sen. John McCain, who was imprisoned in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp, as a “loser” and “not a war hero.”
She suspects many of them were feeling disenfranchised and undervalued — and MAGA gave them a place to vent their frustrations.
“It’s like they pretend Trump didn’t crap on Gold Star families, didn’t make fun of John McCain,” she said. “But we veterans didn’t swear an oath to a human, but to the country, to the people of this country. We don’t want a king — it’s like they forgot why we fought the American Revolution.”
Brendan Kiley: is a Pacific NW magazine staff writer. Reach him at bkiley@seattletimes.com or 206-464-2507.