Elon Musk’s salute was weird, but not fascist

We’re not even 24 hours into the second Donald Trump term and already there’s a “New Nazis” panic. Only this time it’s not The Donald who’s being branded Hitler 2.0. It’s his billionaire pal and state-slashing tsar, Elon Musk.

At yesterday’s wacky inauguration, a giddy Musk gave a speech during which he saluted the crowd. I’ll be honest — it was a weird salute. He slapped his right hand against his chest and then threw his right arm upwards, diagonally and with vigor. He did it twice. His facial expression was an odd blend of love and anger.

Within seconds, X — the platform he owns — was awash with Nazi chatter. “He’s Sieg Heiling!”, people cried. The Guardian says Musk did “back-to-back fascist salutes.” It furnished us with the official definition of a Nazi salute — “raising an outstretched right arm with the palm down” — so that we would know just what evil Elon was up to.

Commentators watched and rewatched Musk’s gesture, analyzing the angle of his arm, the positioning of his hand. And they’re in no doubt: he was being Hitlerish. “Elon Musk’s ‘odd-looking’ salute sure looked like a ‘Sieg Heil’ to me,” said a writer for USA Today. Okay then: case closed.

Look, none of us knows what’s going on in Musk’s mind. I’m not convinced he himself knows half the time. But are we really meant to believe that one of the world’s best-known entrepreneurs decided to come out as a Hitler fanboy at the inauguration of the 47th President of the United States? Does that not sound a little far-fetched to you?

In the longer clip of Musk’s supposed fascist antics, you can hear him say “My heart goes out to you” as he throws his right arm from his chest towards the crowd. Come on, this was just a goofy guy giving his heart to an adoring audience of Trumpists. As Batya Ungar-Sargon said over at Newsweek, this wasn’t a Nazi unmasking himself before the eyes of the world — it was “a man with Asperger’s exuberantly throwing his heart to the crowd.” For what it’s worth, Musk himself has responded to the attacks by saying that his opponents needed “better dirty tricks” and that “the ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”

Even the Anti-Defamation League, the NGO that fiercely fights antisemitism, is skeptical of the Musk-as-fascist nonsense. He “made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute,” it said. America is entering a new era, said the ADL, so how about we “give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt?”

What a quaint and refreshing idea — that instead of dogpiling people and screaming “HITLER” in their faces, we should show them a little good faith. It will never catch on. In this clash between random rancorous Trump-haters on the internet who insist Musk did a Sieg Heil and the ADL’s expert warriors against Jew hate who say he did not, I’m going with the ADL.

There’s a pungent whiff of desperation to the branding of Musk as a Hitler lover. It seems some on the left have yet to outgrow their Rick-from-The-Young-Ones habit of bellowing “Nazi” at everyone they dislike. They don’t care if it’s inaccurate. They don’t even care that it’s a species of historical relativism that risks diminishing the crimes of the Nazi era by comparing the pretty normal political stuff of the 2020s with the unique barbarism of the 1930s.

No, all that matters is that it makes them feel good. Barking “Nazi!” at right-wingers allows sun-starved online leftists to fleetingly feel like warriors against fascism. They get to cosplay as modern-day International Brigadiers without having to leave their bedrooms. It’s not Musk who’s the saddo — it’s this army of idle insulters.

The left knows that history is leaving them behind. That the momentum is no longer with their racial hucksterism, gender lunacy and cancel culture, but rather with those millions of good, working people who are sick of such eccentric ideologies and who are looking to the likes of Trump to crush them. Their wails of “Nazi!” are best seen as the rage of the left behind, the dying howls of a political clique wholly rejected by all normal people.

What is really hilarious, and almost endearing, is the left’s belief that it still has the moral authority to hold forth on “fascism.” This is a left which, for the past 15 months, following Hamas’s fascistic pogrom against the Jews of Southern Israel, has marched shoulder to shoulder with jihadists calling for further attacks on the Jewish nation. Which has mingled with radical Islamists dreaming of the return of the “Army of Muhammd” to finish off the Jews. Which has waved placards showing the Star of David mangled with the Nazi swastika to imply that Jews are now Nazis. Which has insisted that “the Zionists” control the media. And which has attended demos at which people have done literal Nazi salutes in the faces of Jews.

And they still think they can wag a finger at others for allegedly being fascist-adjacent? Oh comrades, that ship has sailed. In fact it has sunk. It is so over for you people.