Musks nazi salute

I think this deserves its own thread.

Anybody care to explain why this should be tolerated from the man financially backing European anti immigration parties?

The fact that he recently endorsed a German neo-nazi party, and clearly did the salute multiple times makes it unambiguous to me. But YMMV.

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Awkward geasture my eye

No history leading up to this. No one could have seen it.

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Media is scrubbing it.

My thought it there was plenty of more substantial outcomes from yesterday than this one that we should be worried about. Trumpā€™s J6 pardons move us much closer to fascism than Muskā€™s awkwardness, intentional or not.

We need to be focused Trumpā€™s second term.

Are we calling a nazi salute awkward now? Is that really what weā€™re doing?

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Heā€™s a nazi

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Himmler was awkward

Chinless mass murderer

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Musk is certainly awkward. That probably suggests it being a real intended salute is more likely.

Trumps pen did a lot more damage yesterday.

NSFW due to the image of a marital aid

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The problem isnā€™t what Musk did. It is that the legacy media is working on either sanewashing it or scrubbing it from their footage. There cannot be reasonable opposition when the facts arenā€™t readily available.

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The New York times has video. The new York Post is running a weird article with a headline, ā€œADL defends Elon musk over ā€˜awkward gestureā€™ at Trump inauguration: ā€˜not a Nazi saluteā€™ā€. BBC has an image, Reuters and the Atlantic have images. (I didnā€™t click all of these, they may have video.)

I think i agree with President of the Jewish community of Munich and upper Bavaria that the gesture is irritating but his political statements and actions are much more worrying.

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Andrea Stroppa, a close confidant of Musk who has connected him with far-right Italian PM Giorgia Meloni, was reported by Italian media to have posted the clip of Musk with the caption: ā€œRoman Empire is back starting from Roman saluteā€.

I agree with this. From 2023:

Elon Musk purposefully did a Nazi salute twice. It serves these purposes.

  • It signals to the other Naziā€™s and Nazi adjacent groups that he is with them and considers this victory their victory.
  • It normalizes Nazism for the masses.
  • By being just slightly awkward in the delivery it allows Musk to play ā€œVictim of Left.ā€
  • It is theater to distract from the actual actions of fascism committed by Trump.

The whitewashing of this action is a good indicator for where an organization lies (heh) on the do you support authoritarianism scale. The media at this point are showing (again) that they are perfectly cool with authoritarianism and will play along willingly.

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It strikes me as weird. The Nazi salute starts with the hand to the forehead. Musk started at the chest. Twice. Thereā€™s no denying that the second part looked like a Nazi salute.

Is Musk too dumb to know how to do the salute properly?

Is he deliberately going for plausible deniability?

Was he actually doing something else and if so what and how in the hell is he dumb enough to not think it would come across like a Nazi salute?

Is he cultivating a new ā€œheil Trumpā€ salute that was inspired by but intentionally distinct from Hitler?

I mean I canā€™t even think of a charitable explanation here. The most charitable one I guess is that heā€™s so ignorant he truly didnā€™t know what it looked like he was doing. That just seems highly improbable.

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I think my most charitable explanation is he likes to troll people

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Um, no it doesnā€™t, starts at shoulder.

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Hmmm, my bad. Crap now I have to watch the video of Musk again.