I'm not actually convinced it was Vance specifically. Their support seemed to grow a bit after the US election gave their movement a bit more legitimacy, but then started back the other way when people saw what it means in action. Vance's visit was timed at roughly the peak, but, snark aside, it's probably more correlation than causation.
The actions of the Trump administration as a whole are a more plausible cause of any slight erosion of support.
You see this (or used to, anyway) from time to time with gas strikes.
If it's just a month of "don't buy," it wouldn't do much in the long run. All that does is time-shift demand to when the strike is over. If the company can anticipate well enough, they'd raise prices when the demand comes back and come out ahead in the long run.
You have to use/consume less, and for an extended time period, not just change when that purchase happens.
But yes, with that caveat, use less, and choose the lesser evil when you do need to buy something. The individual effect is small, but small things add up.
Combine this with German polls showing a drop in AfD support this month since Vance's meeting with them (https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/germany/), and you have actual European Nazis looking at the Trump administration and collectively saying "whoah, maybe dial it down a bit."
If you want to talk about how the Pinto's reputation was not entirely earned, I'll probably be on your side. My first car was a '72 Pinto, and it will always have a special place in my heart. Cars were dangerous in the 70s, including a lot of poor designs that led to fires. The Pinto had somewhat more than most other models, but it was not exactly the ticking time bomb that people made it out to be. Overall, the safest car engineers could possibly produce in 1980 wouldn't even be legal to drive today; that's how much safety has progressed, including Tesla.
And all that's irrelevant. The Pinto has been dead for longer than most internet users have been alive. I'd wager that less than half of the people in this thread have even seen one on the road. But still, if you say the word "Pinto" online, more people will reach for a fire extinguisher than a can of beans. That's how ingrained the reputation is.
So when comparing the reputation of the Pinto as a fire hazard to the reality of the Cybertruck as a fire hazard, the author isn't trying to make any rigorous, peer-reviewed, scientific conclusions about total safety here. It's about fire. Maybe the best answer is to give the Pinto some (some) leeway for being better than its reputation, but if that reputation can persist in the country's consciousness for nearly half a century after the car died maybe we can also look to today and see that some lessons were apparently not learned.
The whole premise is that the pinto was known for being a fire hazard. Deaths due to lack of airbags and piss-poor seatbelt usage is the 70s has nothing to do with fire-related deaths.
And given they're also using the number of cyber trucks produced, that is also an apples to apples comparison.
It takes some olympic-level mental gymnastics to look at a story about exploding cars and try to rope in non-fire-related deaths.
I can't give a first-hand account, but I'd think it should be enough to say you aren't close with your family. The details don't have to come unless things start to get serious, and even then, only what and when you're comfortable sharing.
"My God thinks I should drink, and do drugs, and rob the blind and sick. I'm not entirely sure if that's right, but I should do those things just in case I have to to get into his good graces."
Even they have to think it sounds pretty silly when you turn it around on them.
The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what's to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn't have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don't want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don't want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you. -- Penn Jillette
Ok, this is obviously stupid, but if we can turn the power of the nutjobs against airport scanners and biometrics and such, I say bring on the crazy.