The great Nazi moral panic

We’re in the throes of a full-blown moral panic, but this time it’s Nazis instead of Dungeons & Dragons.

Nazis are everywhere in the United States. There are signs of them everywhere. Their influence is unmistakable, from beverages to hobbies to views on the nuclear family. It’s eleven o’clock. Do you know where your Nazis are?

At least, that’s the current state of America, according to the same industry that attempts every year to convince you that someone may sneak high-grade narcotics into your child’s Halloween candy.

This week, our brilliant commentariat convinced itself that billionaire tech tycoon Elon Musk had performed two “Sieg Heils” during President Trump’s inauguration festivities. This is nonsense, obviously, but good luck explaining this to the organizations that brought you the Satanic panic of the 1980s.

“That salute was evocative of things we’ve seen through history,” warned CNN’s Kasie Hunt, whose workplace very recently lost a $5 million-plus defamation lawsuit.

In the UK, the Guardian declared, “Elon Musk appears to make back-to-back fascist salutes at inauguration rally.”

In Germany, which co-invented the world war with its equally savage European cousins but somehow ended up on the losing side both times, Berlin’s Die Zeit ran an opinion article titled “Ein Hitlergruß ist ein Hitlergruß ist ein Hitlergruß” (“A Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute”).

“Musk’s straight-arm gesture embraced by right-wing extremists regardless of what he meant,” read a particularly Orwellian proclamation by the Orlando Sentinel.

Oh, please. We’ve seen this movie before. Musk is as guilty of throwing out the Sieg Heil as the Conservative Political Action Conference is of sneaking a Nazi rune into its stage design.

Remember that? In 2021, the events design company that created the stage for that year’s CPAC conference in Orlando, Florida, was compelled to respond to allegations that it intentionally designed the set to resemble an obscure rune embraced by the Nazis. “We had no idea that the design resembled any symbol, nor was there any intention to create something that did,” Design Foundry told Insider.

What the set designers failed to understand was that they were simply the latest targets in a very stupid and deliberately dishonest moral panic. Before the Nazi rune dustup, you had groups such as the New York Times warning about milk’s supposed ties to white supremacy (“Why White Supremacists Are Chugging Milk [and Why Geneticists Are Alarmed]”). You had entire news cycles dedicated to the allegedly dark meaning behind the “OK” hand sign, which began as an online in-joke aimed at the press’s notorious gullibility. You had reporters applying the white supremacy label to everything from the Betsy Ross flag to obscure tattoos to Hawaiian shirts to the House Mace to the “SPQR” acronym for the “Senate and People of Rome.” Donald Trump found himself compared to Benito Mussolini merely for waving from a White House balcony. Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito was accused of harboring white supremacy allegiances for flying the George Washington–commissioned Appeal to Heaven or Pine Tree flag outside his beach house in New Jersey. Natalism, working out and performing at Madison Square Garden are also Nazi-coded, according to American news media.

Perhaps the most insane moment in this long-running moral panic occurred in 2019 after the back-to-back mass shootings in Texas and Ohio on August 3. In the aftermath of the tragic events, Trump ordered flags to be flown at half-staff until August 8. This was a victory for the Nazis, former FBI official and MSNBC regular Frank Figliuzzi warned at the time. “The president said that we will fly our flags at half-mast until August 8. That is 8-8,” Figliuzzi said during an appearance on MSNBC.

He added, “The numbers 8-8 are very significant in neo-Nazi and white supremacy movements. Why? Because the letter ‘H’ is the eighth letter of the alphabet and to them, the numbers 8-8 together stand for ‘Heil Hitler.’ We’re going to be raising the flag back up at dusk at 8-8. No one is thinking about this.”

There’s more. These are just a few brief examples from the past seven years.

The point is this: we’re clearly in the throes of a moral panic. There’s a devil under every doily, as they say.

The key difference between this current media-driven panic and, say, the Dungeons & Dragons panic is that the latter seems to have been driven by mere ignorance in the name of public safety. In contrast, this Nazi panic is fueled by pure malice and political disinformation, wielded as a cudgel against perceived cultural enemies. Don’t give the bastards the satisfaction.