While the very smart people in the Coastal press stroke their chins and ask, “What could he have possibly meant by that?”, Musk goes ahead and addresses a Neo Nazi pep rally.
Carol Cadwalladr in Broligarchy Substack:
Zero days into the second Trump term and America’s most august news publications stumbled at the first hurdle. When Elon Musk made his speech at the inauguration rally and pumped his arm, twice, in a Nazi-style salute, the New York Times Pitchbot, a spoof account that proposes ridiculous-but-plausible headlines for potential NY Times stories, saw Elon Musk’s speech and tapped out the following post:
Minutes later, the New York Times’s actual headline dropped. The NYT Pitchbot had got it wrong: the real headline turned out to be even more asinine.
The Washington Post and New York Times and BBC are all, it goes without saying, brilliant newsgathering organisations doing critical work and while the rules-based order held, so did this model. But in this new reality, neither “Elon Musk Ignites Online Speculation Over the Meaning of a Hand Gesture” nor “Elon Musk stirs controversy over hand gesture at Trump rally” gives us any clue of what actually happened. On what may turn out to be one of the most pivotal days in US history, the two US newspapers of record failed to reflect the actual record.
So much has happened this week, so fast, and so many people are “taking a break” from the news. And that’s why this feels so singularly dangerous. Because these headlines are meant to reassure us of their strenuous commitment to fairness and truth but do the opposite. They suggest people shouldn’t actually believe their own eyes. And it’s either too early, or much too late, to point out that this George Orwell said was the final ultimate demand: to reject the evidence of your own eyes and ears.
Musk is who he says he is. This was him yesterday, delivering a speech at a far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) rally in Halle in eastern Germany.
If newspapers can’t say out loud that a man who supports the far-right successor party to the Nazis in German made what pretty much everyone watching thought was a Nazi salute including actual Nazis, then we are in a whole new place of danger.
Neo-Nazis are celebrating Elon Musk making two Nazi-like salutes during a speech to tens of thousands of Trump supporters on Monday.
“Elections come and go. Some elections are important, some are not, but this one really mattered,” Musk said during his address inside the Capital One Arena in Washington, DC, hours after Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. “And I just want to say thank you for making it happen. Thank you.”
At this point, Musk put his right hand on his chest before extending it straight out with his palm facing down and his fingers touching, a gesture widely recognized as the “Roman salute.” Adopted by the fascist movement a century ago, it was most famously used by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany, and is to this day associated with the fascist right, especially in Italy.
After he first made the gesture, Musk then turned around to members of the crowd who were seated behind him and, with his back to the camera, repeated the gesture.
“My heart goes out to you,” Musk added.
Musk subsequently shared a clip of his speech on X, but at the point where he makes the first salute, the clip posted by Musk cuts away to a shot of the audience before returning to show him making the second salute.
Musk, X, and the Trump administration did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but after this article was published Musk responded to the backlash in a post on X, writing: “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”
The response from the neo-Nazi community across the globe was instant and unanimous.
“Incredible things are happening already,” Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, a social media platform popular with antisemites and white supremacists, wrote over a picture of Musk giving the salute.
“The entire neo-Nazi movement seems to be eating it up,” says Nick Martin, an investigative journalist who closely tracks extremist groups and runs the online publication The Informant. “He gave two unmistakable Nazi salutes, and they got the message loud and clear.”
“WE ARE FUCKING BACK,” the administrator of a Nazi meme channel on Telegram wrote under a clip of Musk giving the salute. Members of the group responded with the lightning bolt emoji, a well-known neo-Nazi reference to the SS.