I am likely violating the spirit of the post just prior to this one. And I will admit that I have mentally debated whether to even write this since it focuses on the outrage machine that is the current administration and its allies. Further, it is the kind of thing that some will see as an overreaction (although I think the topic to be very serious). At any rate, here we are.
So, I noted Elon Musk’s arm gesture on Inauguration Day. There is a debate as to whether or not it should be described as a Nazi salute. Musk has claimed that he was just sending out his heart to the crowd (although I think that there are more obvious ways to do so, as does Musk). None of us can know for sure what he was doing. I still maintain pretty much anyone knows what that gesture, delivered the way it was, looks like.
Of course, I could just take Musk’s word for it, but then we get stuff like this:
On one level, this is just trolling that uses Nazi jokes (as one does) as the basis. I will continue to point out my view on the “just joking” defense, which includes the fact that content and context matter and that assertions of people being humorless or not getting the joke don’t create infinite defenses of poor taste (or worse).
I think that it matters, and is worth noting, that a man of Musk’s wealth and influence behaves very much like a denizen of 4chan and like places. I scrolled through his Twitter feed to find the above (that I had originally seen via Bill Kristol). His feed is full of xenophobia and the same kind of juvenile edge lord behavior one finds in many online forums. He clearly likes to troll, which is behavior bad enough for anonymous randos but quite a bit more serious by a person with his wealth, influence, and access to the President of the United States.
There is also a question as to whether trolling and riling people up is truly harmless. I am not so sure that it is, especially at this scale. And the more that Musk and similar trolls make talking about Nazis seem cool/funny/edgy/unimportant, the more we are all diminished.
As such, I concur with Kristol.
But I think it’s noteworthy. Musk is a very wealthy and powerful man. He has an office in the West Wing of the White House. He controls, and aggressively uses for his own purposes, a major media platform. He has used that platform, that perch, that proximity to power, to trivialize the Holocaust with a supposed attempt at humor. His reluctance to quickly clarify what he meant with his salute has had the effect of further callousing us to such displays in the future.
Adding to it all is Musk’s clear embrace of the alt-right.
Pepe the Frog is a prominent alt-right symbol. A “Kek” is gamer slang that also has been adopted by the alt-right when combined with Pepe as per the above. See the SPLC for more details than you probably wanted to know: What the Kek: Explaining the Alt-Right ‘Deity’ Behind Their ‘Meme Magic’.
Musk is not rejecting this association; he is embracing it. Such an embrace rather enhances the chances that, at a minimum, he is dismissive of those who see Nazi symbolism as problematic. At the worst, it suggests he is sympathetic to those symbols.
And, let’s not forget his support of the AfD in Germany, which is far-right party that has been seen as neo-Nazi adjacent, if simply neo-Nazi. Or, as Kristol put it, “at the very least, anti-anti-Nazi.”
As I continue to be concerned about what appears to be at least a fascism-lite* within the current administration, it seems worth noting Musk’s behavior and views.
*Of course, that is kind of like talking about drinking “poison-lite.”
