At the risk of sounding self-congratulatory, video of me making an apparent Nazi salute has never been recorded. Does this make me a hero? I wouldn’t quite go that far, but this is simply my truth.
Elon Musk has been accused of making a Nazi salute. In addition to being accused of making a Nazi salute, he has demonstrably made a Nazi salute—twice, in fact—at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on Monday. This is not a matter of debate—it is a bland statement of what there is video evidence to demonstrate. One can debate his motivations or his intent with varying degrees of success, but the gesture was made. Let’s put it this way: it is against the rules of the television show Jeopardy! to wager $1,488 because of the number’s association with white supremacist organizations, but let’s say it weren’t. If somebody were to wager that amount, it would be worth asking what their intent was. It’s possible that one thousand, four hundred and eighty-eight dollars was the truly sensible amount to bet, or that they picked a random number, but it’s a question worth asking. It may seem naïve to give the benefit of the doubt, but it’s at least possible. It would be an outright denial of reality to claim that the contestant didn’t actually make that wager. That would be both the basic outline for an I Think You Should Leave sketch and a perfect summation of the Donald Trump era of steadfast refusal to acknowledge absolutely anything.
I have never consciously made a Nazi salute, but I’m sure that my body has gestured in a manner at some context-free moment of my life where it would look that way. Perhaps I extended my arm to swat a fly out of my face. Perhaps I was stretching. If this happened at the exact time a camera was fixed on me, that would be unfortunate timing. If it happened while I was speaking at a presidential inauguration event (well, for a president in the United States, at least), that would be even more unfortunate. But it’s possible.
This is why I would be absolutely mortified to learn that my actions were being interpreted as an endorsement of the Third Reich, as has been the case with neo-Nazi groups who have celebrated Elon Musk’s gestures from Monday. I’m not necessarily sure what all of the steps of corrective action I would take would be, but the first one—apologizing for the appearance of pro-Nazism and condemning Nazis—is an extremely easy one. There isn’t an easier political stance to take in the last century of world politics than “Nazis are bad”—even most overt racists don’t go that far.
But Elon Musk hasn’t done this. There isn’t even the slightest expectation that he would consider even a half-hearted “sorry for how you interpreted things” apology, because the Donald Trump political movement’s entire backbone is built around never apologizing for anything, no matter how small or inconsequential it might be. Instead, everything is an excuse. Disgustingly, Elon Musk’s utterly gullible defenders have tried to argue that the salute was a result of Musk’s autism, an on-its-face absurd connection that still never gets around to the fact that whether intended or not the final result of his gesture was very very clearly a Nazi salute.
The day after Trump’s first inauguration, the White House claimed in press events to have had the largest inaugural crowds in history, a fact that was very, very easily disproven with photographs from his inauguration and the inauguration of the first non-white president in history eight years earlier. It wasn’t some huge mystery why Barack Obama, a historic president, outdrew Donald Trump, the latest in a very long line of white men to hold the office. It is not, realistically, an indictment of Trump. But the desire to soothe Trump’s ego took priority over telling what was reality. Donald Trump adheres to some version of the George Costanza rule of “it’s not a lie if you believe it”, but where he tells lies so frequently that it barely seems worth the energy to fact-check him because it is such a frequent occurrence. And we’re back, like it never went away.
It's NFL playoff season and I live in Missouri—believe me, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen collective delusion about whether an arm movement is racist from the whitest people imaginable. And I might be able to move past what happened with even the slightest bit of contrition, or at least acknowledgement of what we all could see, but Elon Musk isn’t going to do that. He likes that he, the richest man to ever exist, gets to whine about how he has been persecuted. He likes that those who agree with his gesture will gravitate towards him. And he loves that none of this is going to materially impact his extraordinary wealth or his limitless string of government contracts.
I suppose, though, it is easy for me to say that if I did something that could easily be construed as pro-Nazi, I would condemn it immediately and vociferously to anybody who would listen. But this is also coming from the perspective that Nazis are bad. Not everybody agrees with me on that one.
