Don't Play Nice With Nazis

None of us should care what Elon Musk "really" meant with his Heil Hitler salute. We don't tolerate Nazis, Nazism, or anything Nazi-adjacent.

Image project on the Tesla Gigafactory in Berlin (@ledbydonkeys)

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Three weeks ago, struck by how Elon Musk’s disturbing behavior and increasing advocacy for the global far right is regularly whitewashed by the news media, I posted this on Bluesky:

Musk hasn’t gotten the tattoo yet, but he did throw up a Nazi salute at a Trump rally. The ensuing controversy, which featured passionate bad-faith defenses from Musk’s Republican allies, should stand as a warning. Not surprisingly, conservatives are trying to expand the range of public debate rightward and make extreme ideas more acceptable. That’s what political movements often do. But the fact that in the process they can’t seem to help themselves from trying to normalize the symbolic trappings of not just fascism but literal Nazism should not be ignored. In fact, we should call as much attention to it as we can, not only because it’s a moral imperative to clean up that sewage wherever it emerges — especially when it comes from people with power and influence — but because doing so also happens to be very good politics.

Among Musk’s enthusiastic defenders was Elise Stefanik, Donald Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations. In her brief career, Stefanik has gone through a series of political reinventions toward whatever new version of herself will enable the quickest rise within the GOP, and in the latest she fashioned herself a crusader against antisemitism and protector of world Jewry. Should a left-wing college student anywhere in America don a keffiyeh or suggest that Palestinians deserve self-determination, Stefanik will be there to point a finger in their face, shout “Antisemite!” and demand their expulsion from school. Yet the ambassador-to-be was remarkably forgiving when it came to Musk:

She was not the only one. The Anti-Defamation League, which under its current leadership will call you an antisemite if you say the concessions at Ben-Gurion Airport could be better, bent over backward to give Musk the benefit of the doubt:

The word I keep hearing when referring to Musk’s salute is “exuberant,” which is true as far as it goes; it certainly was exuberant. Of course, so were the crowds at the Nuremberg rallies, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t Nazis. And I don’t know about you, but when I’m feeling exuberant, I don’t naturally toss out fascist salutes. That’s just not where my impulses go. And it wasn’t like he was, say, pretending to throw a football and just wound up with his palm facing down. It was a very intentional movement, one he repeated twice: Start with hand on heart, then slice arm out straight at 45 degrees. Everybody knows what that indicates. Look for yourself:

Am I saying Musk is absolutely a Nazi? No. But it would be easier to give him the benefit of the doubt those like the ADL and Stefanik (and the entire Republican Party) are so eager to grant him were it not for pretty much everything he has done in the last few years. He bought Twitter, then turned it into a sewer of hate, welcoming back all kinds of far-right goons and yes, Nazis, who had previously been banned. (This has been well documented, but I can tell you from personal experience: It wasn’t until Musk took over that the copious hatred I always got on Twitter turned relentlessly antisemitic, with accounts with names like @groyper1488 tweeting “Get in the oven, Jew” at me.) He has promoted the antisemitic “Great Replacement” theory. For a time he changed his avatar on X to a cartoon of Pepe the Frog, a meme often used by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. He endorsed the far-right AfD in Germany, which many consider a neo-Nazi party.

None of which necessarily makes Musk an outright Nazi, but it certainly suggests that when he throws up a couple of Nazi salutes at a rally, one’s immediate reaction might be something other than “Come on, of course he didn’t mean it that way.”

It would also be easier to grant him forgiveness if he had responded to the criticism by saying something like, “I get why people think that was a Nazi salute, but that wasn’t what I intended. Sorry.” But he did just the opposite, treating the whole thing as a big joke:

Not coincidentally, this echoes a strategy that white supremacists and neo-Nazis have used for a long time: Spread hate with a wink and a nod, then when someone calls you out on it, say “I was just kidding, can’t you take a joke?” It’s supposed to make them look fun and rebellious and their opponents look censorious, all while injecting their ideas into the mainstream.

Yes, this demands a response

The truth is that what’s in Musk’s heart doesn’t really matter; what matters is that the world’s richest man is giving Nazi salutes at a rally for the incoming president of the United States. That is not something that should be ignored or explained away. No matter his intent, he is normalizing all kinds of toxic ideas and people (and yes, the actual Nazis were utterly stoked when they saw his salute).

This is why liberals and Democrats absolutely must push back on this, as loudly and emphatically as possible. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explains:

Some on the left responded to her with nuanced historical arguments about support for Nazism and the Confederacy, but that misses the political point she was trying to make. Democrats should respond to this by saying — literally — “Here in America, we don’t give Nazi salutes. Get that shit out of here. Or are you a Nazi?” I have a healthy skepticism about the wisdom of the American public as a collective (see: the 2024 election), but I’m pretty sure most of them would agree that Nazis are bad, and taking the anti-Nazi side in any argument is smart politics.

The same is true of Trump’s affection for the Confederacy, which is going to be returning; he has already promised to rename Fort Liberty to honor Braxton Bragg, an enslaver and traitor to the United States whose incompetence as a Confederate general was matched only by his cruelty to his own troops. When that issue comes up, Trump and every last Republican who supports him should be confronted with “Which other traitors do you want to honor? Why do you hate America?”

Does that strike you as crude, and not the elevated politics we should hope for in a well-functioning democracy? It is. But we don’t have a well-functioning democracy, and another word for elevated politics is losing. When you’re confronted with Nazis — or billionaire far-right purveyors of chaos trying to normalize Nazism — you can’t play nice.