One thing is easy to see Elon Musk‘s The infamous hand gesture from Donald TrumpThe celebration of his inauguration is that he acted with deliberation. As video from the event shows, he threw his back to her, exhausting himself enough that he grunted from the effort.
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— Aaron Robar (@atrupar.com) January 20, 2025 at 2:58 pm
Then he turned and repeated the gesture in the other direction, in case anyone missed it.
Elon Musk gave two consecutive Nazi salutes at Trump’s inauguration parade
— Patriot Tex 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes.bsky.social) January 20, 2025 at 3:07 pm
I’m not here to sue what the mainstream media, Always be wary of defamation claims And the angry MAGA emails used to describe the gesture are all too familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a World War II film reel. Instead, I want to point out that we’ve been down this road before, during Donald Trump’s first administration, when white nationalists seized on the “OK” hand signal to fool progressives.
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To summarize: Pretending it was a “joke,” white nationalists, starting around 2015, The “OK” hand gesture started flashing. As a sign of racial solidarity. This wasn’t an OK sign in the casual way most people do. They usually exaggerate for effect, sometimes turning their hands upside down to make them look particularly strange and therefore noticeable. The aim was twofold: first, to flag out fascist sympathizers to fellow travellers. Second, luring liberals into ugly and divisive debates about the “true” meaning of the gesture.
The OK sign was just the most visible version of fascist hide-and-seek, but there are plenty of other ways far-right trolls advance with coded language, only to proclaim innocence and feign outrage when called out.
The troll worked beautifully. Every time there is a proud boy or policeman Or your local Republican Party official or online troll Or Brett Kavanaugh’s aide made an exaggerated “OK” hand signalProgressives who understood this tactic called it a fascist gesture. In response, journalists and moderates eager to prove their resistance to hysteria were quick to berate progressives as “megalomaniacs,” insisting that these people are not “real” racists — despite their love for Trump! – but instead they were feigning racism to get a reaction. They rarely stop to ask why a non-racist would be okay with just “pretending” to be a racist, especially since acting like a racist means people see you as a racist.
The biscuit logic phase ended two years later, when… One of these “cynical” racists opened fire on a mosque In New Zealand, killing 50 people. He made an “OK” hand gesture as he was summoned. Since you can’t kill people “ridiculously,” the mainstream media finally had to admit that the gesture was a troll and An honest symbol of white nationalist beliefs. No apologies were made to those who didn’t need 50 murders to get to the obvious truth, but at least the berating stopped.
The OK sign was just the most visible version of fascist hide-and-seek, but there are plenty of other ways far-right trolls advance with coded language, only to proclaim innocence and feign outrage when called out. But it’s not just about going after the left. It’s a recruitment tactic. After provoking progressives into yelling at them, authoritarians will appeal to centrists with a form of “Don’t you hate those megalomaniacal leftists?” Once the hook is in the mouth, they pull out their prey with “But you know, the fascists had some good ideas. Would you like to read some of Curtis Yarvin’s articles on the need to get beyond dictatorship phobia?”
Musk spends all his time on Twitter, chatting with far-right trolls, so the chances of him not knowing how this works are almost zero. His behavior follows the standard script. After he made the obnoxious public gesture, He’s now attacking the “paranoid liberals” hook by tweeting“The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is very tiring.”
But what’s actually tiring is this exhausting “Who am I?” represents. The good news is that much of the reaction shows that progressives have learned how to deal with peekaboo trolling. The first step is to refuse to be drawn into “discussions” about the “true” meaning of the gesture. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has modeled how to do that, as she often does. after Anti-Defamation League (adl), Which led to Trump’s apologyMusk insisted he made an “embarrassing gesture in a moment of excitement.” She responded briefly on Twitter, saying: “People can officially stop listening to you as any reliable source of information now.”
Much of the peekaboo hoax raises widespread arguments, exploiting the often misplaced faith among progressives in the power of reason and evidence. These fruitless discussions exhaust progressive energies and make it easier for the right to paint the left as “noisy.” Although this may seem counterintuitive, the “whatever, man” reaction can make it easier for people, especially silent people, to be open-minded. Instead of being shocked, they are called to trust what their eyes and ears are telling them. This is a more attractive way to persuade people by looking at the evidence.
By not wasting a lot of energy doing a frame-by-frame analysis to determine whether something met the precise definition of a “Nazi” salute, smart progressives and journalists learned to spend time on what really matters: context and implications.
Someone might feel unconvinced that Musk meant the gesture he put so much effort into. And it’s true! We can’t know with absolute certainty what Musk meant, especially since nothing he says about his thought process can be trusted. Since we haven’t wasted our energy arguing about this gesture, we can point to the bigger picture. For example, Musk not only supports MAGA in the US; As well as the Alternative for Germany party, a far-right group Who have their leaders They were fined for using Nazi slogans, He denounced memorials to Holocaust victimsand He declared that Germans should be “proud of our achievements of German soldiers in two world wars.” Musk continues to defend the AfD, even though German courts have found that “some AfD members favor a two-class society in which ‘ethnic’ Germans are given more rights than those Enjoyed by “ethnic” Germans. The people are from immigrant backgrounds, NBC News reported.
Some media outlets have wisely avoided debate over what Musk “meant” to focus on a more productive topic: the impact of his behavior. In this regard, there is no debate: the loud and proud Nazis were very happy about the musk salute.
“Right-wing extremists are uproar by giving Musk a straight-arm salute“, declared the headline in Rolling Stone. Wired went with a similar title: “Neo-Nazis love Elon Musk’s Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration.” It is difficult to get away from examples. To thank Musk for the gesture, one white nationalist group tweeted: “The white flame will shine again.” another poster, Who helped create a chatbot named after Adolf Hitlershared the clip with the caption: “Incredible things really happen.” Reporting on this effect is far more useful than discursive debates about the precise meaning of the word “fascist.”
Most people, if they made this gesture innocently, would be upset by a neo-Nazi trying to claim common cause with them. As Ed Kilgore argued in New York on Tuesday“There’s an easy way to explain this, especially for someone who owns a major social media platform and uses it a lot.” All Musk needs to do is “make a gesture of strongly condemning fascism.” He adds that explicit rejection of fascism and white nationalism “should be worth a few dozen tweets, right?”
However, Musk reserves his anger for anti-racists and seems unconcerned by neo-Nazis praising him. This is behavior that is not consistent with an honest mistake, but it certainly reflects the model of left-wing trolling that we saw with white nationalists who made the “OK” sign. In the end, it’s not what’s in Musk’s heart that matters, but how he acts. When someone keeps throwing warm smiles at racists while mocking anti-racists, they are promoting racism. Either way, Musk’s demeanor is friendly and helpful to the worst people in our society. As Ocasio-Cortez said, those who refuse to see his behavior for what it is don’t deserve to be heard.
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