I bought a Tesla to help the environment,” wrote John Blumenthal for the Los Angeles Times in late December. “Now, I’m embarrassed to drive it.” The article seemed to me to be a kind of encapsulation of all the absurdities of our cold civil war. It was also one of an increasing number of press stories these days whose substance, such as it was, was entirely contained in the headline. You needed to read no further to understand all that the author had, or ever would have, to say in the course of registering his public status as a proud exponent of media groupthink—from the virtue signaling in his choice of motor vehicle to the environmentalist orthodoxy that constitutes his only notion of virtue to his horror of any possible association, however far-fetched, between himself and the latest media hate-figure.

This was, of course, Elon Musk, the chief executive officer of Tesla Motors and its successor company Tesla Inc., whose proprietorship of Twitter had lately led to the revelation of what could only be called collusion between the site’s previous management and elements of the deep state, principally the fbi—with the aims, among others, of suppressing heterodox views of the covid-19 lockdown or vaccines and compassing the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Mr. Blumenthal does not omit to include the conventional media characterization of the Trump partisans who complained about this collusion as “neo-Nazis,” since this is the implied justification for such