At Semafor, David Weigel asks Senator Adam Schiff, “How do you feel right now about owning a Tesla? What do you plan to do with it?” Schiff responds, “I sure as hell wouldn’t buy one now. If I’d have known what a selfish and destructive human being he would be, I never would have bought one to begin with. I’d be happy to unload it.”

I find this attitude bizarre. Does Schiff like the car? If so, has that car changed for the worse in the last year? The purpose of a Tesla — or of any car — is to be a car. It’s not a charity donation, or an affinity tattoo, or a t-shirt with a political slogan on it. It’s a car. Scouring the market for products made by companies whose founders or executives you like is a silly, unwinnable game that, ultimately, deprives you of the core benefits of capitalism. I understand that Adam Schiff is a political person — he’s a U.S. senator, after all — but is he really so political that he intends to sell his car because he dislikes the founder of the company that produced it?

In my life, I’ve owned two Fords and two German cars. Or, per the Schiff approach, I’ve owned four antisemitic cars, two of which were historically associated with the Nazis. Naturally, I did not buy those cars for that reason, and, as such, I’m not going to sell them for that reason, either. My wife likes her car. I like my car. The rest is a distraction.

I have a lot of things in my house. To spend time working out whether the current CEO of the firm that manufactured them happens to agree with me on the issues I hold dear would be wasteful in the extreme. Presumably, Schiff thinks that his objections are more important than mine. But I doubt that they are. On abortion, free speech, the Second Amendment, and other topics, I have strong views that are no doubt contradicted by my toaster or my dishwasher or the batteries in my golf cart. But the thing is: They’re not, are they? That idea is stupid. My toaster and my dishwasher and the batteries in my golf cart do not have political views, and the views that are held by the individuals or companies that make them are not the reason that I own those items or why I chose them over the competition. For years, the Left told me that “everything is political.” I thought this was stupid. Now, this idea has crept in on the Right, too. I still think it’s stupid.

The obvious conclusion to draw from Adam Schiff’s response is that he bought the Tesla to make a political statement, not because he liked it, and that, annoyingly for him, intervening events have sullied or undermined that move. Because he is trapped in this way of thinking, he seems to believe that the only way out for him is to get rid of the car — or, at least, to denounce it when asked. If he ends up doing that, that’s fine. It’s a free country. But it would be much easier in both the long-term and the short-term to acknowledge that, usually, a car is just a car. Not everything has to be sucked into the maw.