Look, I like about half of what Elon does, was a fan for a long time, recently read his biography, and think he’s the most important entrepreneur of this century (at least), but people aren't blind.
The fact that even Musk supporters are claiming it was a troll makes something very obvious: Musk did a salute that is nearly identical to a Roman salute. If it wasn’t obvious he did it, why would supporters feel the need to call it a troll? It's because they're not fucking blind, either.
He did it for one of three reasons:
1. To signal his fascist sympathies (either intentionally or a slip)
2. He’s trolling
3. He was some how trying express his love/heart to a crowd with that specific motion.
You can make a case that it's #3, but I actually think it's extremely weird to make that assumption. I've lived on this Earth for over 40 years, and I can count on exactly zero fingers the number of times I've seen someone make that motion in a non-Nazi way. It's certainly possible that Elon Musk is the first, but it's a very strange conclusion to jump to. At the very least, it's beyond dumb to talk to other people like they didn't see what they clearly saw.
The guy gave a fascist salute on purpose, as a joke, or on accident, but he definitely did it.
#2 seems the most likely, which is also strangely the most pathetic.
Maybe you found a few people saying it was a troll but that isn't what "supporters" are saying. The average Musk "supporter" (phrased differently: the average sane, normal person) is saying "that wasn't a Nazi salute for gods sake" and leaving it at that. Like this article.
> I can count on exactly zero fingers the number of times I've seen someone make that motion in a non-Nazi way.
Go on X, flick through the default feed, and be amazed to see videos and photos of Democrat politicians making exactly the same hand gesture, including AOC and Tim Walz. There is nothing "weird" about the assumption that a man who has nothing in common with the Nazis wasn't making a Nazi gesture, FFS. The right routinely ignore it when Democrats do the exact same thing, because it doesn't mean anything.
The fact this is your response shows how badly you're missing the point and further proves how big of a mark you are. You're a sucker, man. A dumb one.
You can find still photos of leftists who kind of look like they are doing the same thing as Elon, but not videos. That's because it's a lot easier to catch someone in the split second in which their arm is raised in what appears to be a nazi salute (maybe take a photo in a well-managed 6th grade classroom and you'll see a half-dozen kids doing a "Nazi salute"!) than it is to take a video of someone going through the whole motion.
The pattern of the current rightist modus operondi is:
1. Say/do apparently outrageous things so that the left media will freak out
2. When the outrageous things don't manifest, the media loses credibility (watch for Elon to exhibit some grand public gesture of affection for Jewish people in the next week or so)
3. Do some kind of slightly more feasible thing now that people are assuming that the media is exaggerating everything.
So in this case, Musk supplied just enough deniability with his statements of "giving his heart" while prompting the desired freakout. Mission accomplished. Which is kinda what BB is saying -- don't freak out about the theatrics, save the freakout for actual action. Of course, in a leftist ideology, theatrics and expression are action (your words are literal murder!) do don't expect any discipline there anytime soon.
You can find videos of them doing it too. I've provided examples elsewhere in this thread.
It's nice that you think it's some cunning plan to discredit the left, but really it's not. Everyone could do without this noise. The left freak out and discredit themselves all the time, without any help needed.
Okay. Let's say it was, in fact, a deliberate and purposeful gesture for any or all of the above reasons.
It's still theater -- not even Trump's theater. Theater, however outrageous, is vastly less important than reality. Trump's blizzard of executive orders, that's reality! He pardoned people who stormed the U.S. Capitol, killed police officers, and tried to hang the vice president. He got rid of the inspectors general who are supposed to root out waste and fraud. He tried to revoke the citizenship of millions of people. Now he's frozen funding for everything from health care to law enforcement to disaster response.
Thinking about it, after reading the post, I wonder if he made it precisely because it would get everyone talking about it. Similar enough to the Nazi salute so that everyone who has a reason to view it as such will, yet not exactly a Nazi salute, leaving plausible deniability that people who are sympathetic to Trump could latch onto. Quite the distraction, though I do wonder if I'm giving Elon too much credit for this.
I think you fail to wrestle with Musk’s history of retweeting and replying “So true!” to explicitly antisemitic posts in this piece. (and underrate the explanation that he was trying to “trigger the libs” by making them think he was doing a Nazi salute but was really doing some other gesture, a la past versions od this debate.)
Musk appearing like he did a Nazi salute is in part a big news story because he publicly likes what a lot of literal Nazis say, because he endorsed the AfD, etc.
Can you give examples of his replying “So true” to antisemitic posts? Or where he likes what “literal Nazis” say (other than AfD, who I disagree are Nazis but don’t want to debate about)? I don’t really care about defending Elon per se, but these kinds of vague accusations without evidence are unhealthy esp. because half the time they end up being untrue or wild exaggerations
The most egregious example is obviously when he responded “You have said the actual truth.” to someone saying that “Jewish communties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
His endorsement of Tucker Carlson’s interview with the historian who engaged in light Holocaust denial and whitewashed Hitler’s motives also stands out.
Oh, and now he's telling Germans at an AfD rally that German children should not feel guilty about the sins of their great-grandfathers. (AKA, you know, the actions of Nazi Germany.)
Consistently strong political commentary coming out of this blog since the inauguration. It will be interesting to see if the Democratic electorate rewards strong policy messengers in the coming years, or if the revealed preference for a lot of them is this emotional mode that devotes its focus to expressing outrage at the right's distasteful rhetoric.
You've heard the final standup version of that Norm bit, right?
"Like I'm no expert, but I think probably, most rapists ate hypocrites. You don't meet a lot of guys going 'I like to rape. I don't give a fuck! I know it's not a politically correct thing to say, but I like rapin'. You go, 'Goddamn, at least he's not a hypocrite.' "
Elon's solute is a big deal. It's uncertain whether it was intentional; if intentional, whether he's actually a Nazi; and if he's a Nazi, what it means for him to be so close to the President. But it could have real implications.
You are also too down on liberals focusing on such a visible issue. It's unfortunate that controversies that can be summed up in a single picture get more airtime than legal changes. It's also unfortunate that some of the higher impact executive orders get little airtime. But that's the nature of things. I cannot relate to the general tone of surprise and disappointment in this article.
I think that it's a pretty good synecdoche for what's going on. A rich oligarch signalling that the far right is in charge, and that they believe that there's nothing that anybody can do about it. People want to focus on the Birthright Citizenship EO, but that's nothing more than messaging, given how the courts are and likely will be dealing with it.
The refusal to accept the gesture for what it is, by some, is quite bizarre. I've seen people do the more benign gesture.that BB talks about, and they don't look anything like what Musk did. I suspect that there's a strong component of motivated reasoning here. "One of the most powerful men in the country can't be a Nazi. That'd be terrible
Somebody would do something," and then they don't do anything, because contemplating the alternative is too painful.
Great piece. I've been kind of fixated on the way our political biases lead to people being so sure about different conclusions on the gesture, but either way it's a bad thing to focus on! Focus on things that moderates find convincing, and this is not it. BTW while 80% odds gets your point across, I'd use the phrase 80% likely or 80% probability, odds more commonly refers to the ratio of probabilities.
You are right in one general way and wrong in two specific ways.
Yes, liberals should generally focus more on tangible harm reduction and less on freaking out over superficial symbols. They should focus less on Elon in general.
But no, insufficient focus on policy is not a significant reason Harris lost. Harris' policy proposals were much more concrete than Trump's, and besides, elections are not really about policy. The superficial symbolic stuff is often more important to influencing swing voters, who are wildly uninformed emotional creatures. I wrote about this at length here: https://exasperatedalien.substack.com/p/move-past-the-progressive-v-moderate
Secondly, in this particular case, you are far too credulous about Elon's intentions, which were likely was to troll with a Nazi salute as your friend Amos noted. This is what it looks like when Elon actually tries to give his heart out to the crowd, refuting your point that it's hard to do so without appearing like a stiff-armed Nazi salute. https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i7u5td/elon_musks_gesture_of_giving_his_heart_out_to_the/
Idk - that video of Elon making a different motion doesn’t do that much for me. Yes, it’s different, but people use different motions to mean the same thing sometimes. The fact that he has done a “my heart goes out to you” motion before, involving him touching his heart then extending his arm, actually suggests to me that this was what he intended more recently too. And we know that Elon tends towards big, silly gestures when onstage for Trump - remember the photo of him jumping?
So it seems to me that BB got the probability roughly right, and (although we seem to agree on this) this shouldn’t be driving discourse.
Now, that doesn’t mean there’s no reason to worry about it. A ~20% chance that the richest man in the world and the close confidant of the US president intentionally did a Nazi salute is . . . still a scary high chance.
Wondering if a tweet from Elon himself confirming that thinks he thinks that Nazis are something extremely funny you can use to own the libs updates your belief in either way.
Since there is wide disagreement on whether or not it was a Nazi salute, and the case for Elon being adequately incentivized to let one fly isn’t airtight, I think it’s wise to just admit we don’t know what he intended. If Elon loves Nazism, which is a bad ism due more to the awful policies it favors than the batty salutes, we will no doubt have a better opportunity to reasonably object if Elon actually proposes such Nazi policies, and I think it’s worth keeping your powder dry until then.
Clearly you don't follow Musk's xitter feed. If you did, you would know exactly how strong his support actually is for white supremacy, Hitler-supporting revisionary history, debunked race science and blatant anti-Semitism. The salute was exactly what it looked like, and it aligns with his past words and actions.
"Something has gone badly wrong when Trump can, for instance, open up the unpopular and disastrous embargo on Cuba without much backlash, for liberals are too busy foaming at the mouth in response to an ambiguous hand gesture." I had no clue Trump did this, but doesn't surprise me with Rubio at the helm of foreign policy.
I agree 100%, and it’s astonishing that even here in the comments seemingly intelligent people are wasting time and energy arguing about Elon’s “true” intentions. I’m so heartily tired of people on the left seeming to believe that “Nazi,” like “racist,” is some sort of gotcha that automatically wins them the argument. The term has become so overloaded that it’s nigh meaningless.
Consider the possibility that the left don't talk about policy much because they just can't anymore. The "policy brain" is atrophied because they now view all problems as caused by bad people, so if you identify/shame/exclude/censor/imprison the bad people, everything comes good automatically.
Seen this way, the swivel-eyed attacks on _people_ combined with a disinterest in _ideas_ is expected. Asking them to talk about policy is basically asking the left to change its core nature. The left haven't had any meaningfully new, serious and defensible policy ideas in years. They even sat back and acquiesced as the Democrats adopted wholesale Trump's anti-China stance, after spending the entire 2016 cycle attacking it as racist, because they don't really care about policy positions. The policy was an opening to call someone an evil Nazi, so they did it, and when Biden adopted the same policies they ignored it because they'd already moved on to some other excuse.
Look at any of the threads covering this Musk event. They're overflowing with leftists who genuinely can't understand why everyone else is calling them deranged. It's an excuse to call someone bad, and if you show them a video of someone on the left doing the same gesture then that's totally different. The substance of the thing is irrelevant, it's just a springboard to a destination. It's not a serious politics, but it is a dangerous form.
Show me a video of someone on the left doing the same gesture. People take freezeframes at the exact moment someone looks like their arm is out, but those aren't videos.
The first one, with macron, is quite different from a nazi salute if you see the *full* video not cropped so that his hand is offscreen. The second, she isn't doing a salute motion at all, her arm is bent back and forth in a throwing motion. Neither one is the same as what Elon did.
Look at them side by side and you'll see this is cope.
Listen to yourself. It makes flat earthers sound sane. "You see when my side do it the angle is five degrees different and the fingers are slightly wider spaced, so that means something totally different".
None of it means anything. But heck, if you want to keep alienating the moderates with this kind of unhinged approach, great. Great! We love it. Nothing turns the disengaged off more than this kind of thing.
My "side"? The "moderates"? None of this is relevant.
Elon Musk was doing the same thing with that gesture that he was doing when he named himself "kekius maximus" on twitter and when he went buddy-buddy with members of the Alternativ für Deutchland party. He flirts with neo-naziism all the time these days. You would prefer that it continue to be considered just innocuous joking, because that's *your* "side" winning, but don't kid yourself that intelligent people can't see what he's doing.
AfD aren't Nazis either. They fight against the core principles of the Nazis, in fact. He doesn't flirt and he isn't joking. There is literally no connection whatsoever. It's all in your mind because you'd rather go down this conspiracy rabbit hole than debate the issues.
If the most prominent criticism for a few days is an extremely uncharitable and unlikely interpretation of a possible reference to Hitler, then it seriously discredits all the other critiques from the same sources.
There’s only so much credibility any person or institution has with the public. It’s a very long and consistent path to building that credibility, and a very short trip to ruining it. Focusing on this “Nazi Salute”, may build outrage and motivation in the ideologically committed, but it can seriously backfire by making the valid critiques offered later far less credible.
I’m sure Jeff Tiedrich readers are foaming at the mouth because Musk is obviously a Nazi and an existential threat to the nation, but the average person will see this for what it is, and be more sympathetic to Trump and co because of it.
Thousands of people manage to put their heart out there without doing a Nazi salute in the process. If you took fifty people - even all autistic people - on January 19th and asked them to make a gesture to put their hearts out, they wouldn't whip out a Nazi salute. He put the line about putting his heart out there so he could get the joy of trolling the libs with a plausibly deniable Nazi salute.
Look, I like about half of what Elon does, was a fan for a long time, recently read his biography, and think he’s the most important entrepreneur of this century (at least), but people aren't blind.
The fact that even Musk supporters are claiming it was a troll makes something very obvious: Musk did a salute that is nearly identical to a Roman salute. If it wasn’t obvious he did it, why would supporters feel the need to call it a troll? It's because they're not fucking blind, either.
He did it for one of three reasons:
1. To signal his fascist sympathies (either intentionally or a slip)
2. He’s trolling
3. He was some how trying express his love/heart to a crowd with that specific motion.
You can make a case that it's #3, but I actually think it's extremely weird to make that assumption. I've lived on this Earth for over 40 years, and I can count on exactly zero fingers the number of times I've seen someone make that motion in a non-Nazi way. It's certainly possible that Elon Musk is the first, but it's a very strange conclusion to jump to. At the very least, it's beyond dumb to talk to other people like they didn't see what they clearly saw.
The guy gave a fascist salute on purpose, as a joke, or on accident, but he definitely did it.
#2 seems the most likely, which is also strangely the most pathetic.
Maybe you found a few people saying it was a troll but that isn't what "supporters" are saying. The average Musk "supporter" (phrased differently: the average sane, normal person) is saying "that wasn't a Nazi salute for gods sake" and leaving it at that. Like this article.
> I can count on exactly zero fingers the number of times I've seen someone make that motion in a non-Nazi way.
Go on X, flick through the default feed, and be amazed to see videos and photos of Democrat politicians making exactly the same hand gesture, including AOC and Tim Walz. There is nothing "weird" about the assumption that a man who has nothing in common with the Nazis wasn't making a Nazi gesture, FFS. The right routinely ignore it when Democrats do the exact same thing, because it doesn't mean anything.
Your brain is rotten and you're fucking wrong.
You need to realize that you're a mark. A dupe. A gullible motherfucker. You're the dummy.
- A huge, huge percentage of Trump voters are claiming it's a troll
- The pics/videos of AOC and Walz look nothing like that and you're absolutely retarded for thinking they do
Again - you're the mark. You need to own that, you gullible moron.
Who is "duping" me, exactly? The secret Nazis that don't exist? Great.
The fact this is your response shows how badly you're missing the point and further proves how big of a mark you are. You're a sucker, man. A dumb one.
Harsh but perhaps needed.
You can find still photos of leftists who kind of look like they are doing the same thing as Elon, but not videos. That's because it's a lot easier to catch someone in the split second in which their arm is raised in what appears to be a nazi salute (maybe take a photo in a well-managed 6th grade classroom and you'll see a half-dozen kids doing a "Nazi salute"!) than it is to take a video of someone going through the whole motion.
The pattern of the current rightist modus operondi is:
1. Say/do apparently outrageous things so that the left media will freak out
2. When the outrageous things don't manifest, the media loses credibility (watch for Elon to exhibit some grand public gesture of affection for Jewish people in the next week or so)
3. Do some kind of slightly more feasible thing now that people are assuming that the media is exaggerating everything.
So in this case, Musk supplied just enough deniability with his statements of "giving his heart" while prompting the desired freakout. Mission accomplished. Which is kinda what BB is saying -- don't freak out about the theatrics, save the freakout for actual action. Of course, in a leftist ideology, theatrics and expression are action (your words are literal murder!) do don't expect any discipline there anytime soon.
You can find videos of them doing it too. I've provided examples elsewhere in this thread.
It's nice that you think it's some cunning plan to discredit the left, but really it's not. Everyone could do without this noise. The left freak out and discredit themselves all the time, without any help needed.
Okay. Let's say it was, in fact, a deliberate and purposeful gesture for any or all of the above reasons.
It's still theater -- not even Trump's theater. Theater, however outrageous, is vastly less important than reality. Trump's blizzard of executive orders, that's reality! He pardoned people who stormed the U.S. Capitol, killed police officers, and tried to hang the vice president. He got rid of the inspectors general who are supposed to root out waste and fraud. He tried to revoke the citizenship of millions of people. Now he's frozen funding for everything from health care to law enforcement to disaster response.
Thinking about it, after reading the post, I wonder if he made it precisely because it would get everyone talking about it. Similar enough to the Nazi salute so that everyone who has a reason to view it as such will, yet not exactly a Nazi salute, leaving plausible deniability that people who are sympathetic to Trump could latch onto. Quite the distraction, though I do wonder if I'm giving Elon too much credit for this.
I think you fail to wrestle with Musk’s history of retweeting and replying “So true!” to explicitly antisemitic posts in this piece. (and underrate the explanation that he was trying to “trigger the libs” by making them think he was doing a Nazi salute but was really doing some other gesture, a la past versions od this debate.)
Musk appearing like he did a Nazi salute is in part a big news story because he publicly likes what a lot of literal Nazis say, because he endorsed the AfD, etc.
*past versions of this debate, apologies
Can you give examples of his replying “So true” to antisemitic posts? Or where he likes what “literal Nazis” say (other than AfD, who I disagree are Nazis but don’t want to debate about)? I don’t really care about defending Elon per se, but these kinds of vague accusations without evidence are unhealthy esp. because half the time they end up being untrue or wild exaggerations
The most egregious example is obviously when he responded “You have said the actual truth.” to someone saying that “Jewish communties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
His endorsement of Tucker Carlson’s interview with the historian who engaged in light Holocaust denial and whitewashed Hitler’s motives also stands out.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/23/business/elon-musk-nazi-jokes/index.html
Thanks for clarifying!
Oh, and now he's telling Germans at an AfD rally that German children should not feel guilty about the sins of their great-grandfathers. (AKA, you know, the actions of Nazi Germany.)
https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/elon-musk-bei-afd-wahlkampfauftakt-in-halle-saale-zugeschaltet-a-b21db243-26ca-468e-8715-927c26a73178
Why would anyone feel guilty about sins they didn’t commit? That’s just basic common sense.
Hypocrisy is worse than murder because it causes libs to spend all their time criticizing hypocrisy rather than murder. >:(
Agree with your take here. Whether intentional or not, Elon has sucked media oxygen way away from where it should be.
Consistently strong political commentary coming out of this blog since the inauguration. It will be interesting to see if the Democratic electorate rewards strong policy messengers in the coming years, or if the revealed preference for a lot of them is this emotional mode that devotes its focus to expressing outrage at the right's distasteful rhetoric.
You've heard the final standup version of that Norm bit, right?
"Like I'm no expert, but I think probably, most rapists ate hypocrites. You don't meet a lot of guys going 'I like to rape. I don't give a fuck! I know it's not a politically correct thing to say, but I like rapin'. You go, 'Goddamn, at least he's not a hypocrite.' "
Elon's solute is a big deal. It's uncertain whether it was intentional; if intentional, whether he's actually a Nazi; and if he's a Nazi, what it means for him to be so close to the President. But it could have real implications.
You are also too down on liberals focusing on such a visible issue. It's unfortunate that controversies that can be summed up in a single picture get more airtime than legal changes. It's also unfortunate that some of the higher impact executive orders get little airtime. But that's the nature of things. I cannot relate to the general tone of surprise and disappointment in this article.
I think that it's a pretty good synecdoche for what's going on. A rich oligarch signalling that the far right is in charge, and that they believe that there's nothing that anybody can do about it. People want to focus on the Birthright Citizenship EO, but that's nothing more than messaging, given how the courts are and likely will be dealing with it.
The refusal to accept the gesture for what it is, by some, is quite bizarre. I've seen people do the more benign gesture.that BB talks about, and they don't look anything like what Musk did. I suspect that there's a strong component of motivated reasoning here. "One of the most powerful men in the country can't be a Nazi. That'd be terrible
Somebody would do something," and then they don't do anything, because contemplating the alternative is too painful.
Great piece. I've been kind of fixated on the way our political biases lead to people being so sure about different conclusions on the gesture, but either way it's a bad thing to focus on! Focus on things that moderates find convincing, and this is not it. BTW while 80% odds gets your point across, I'd use the phrase 80% likely or 80% probability, odds more commonly refers to the ratio of probabilities.
You are right in one general way and wrong in two specific ways.
Yes, liberals should generally focus more on tangible harm reduction and less on freaking out over superficial symbols. They should focus less on Elon in general.
But no, insufficient focus on policy is not a significant reason Harris lost. Harris' policy proposals were much more concrete than Trump's, and besides, elections are not really about policy. The superficial symbolic stuff is often more important to influencing swing voters, who are wildly uninformed emotional creatures. I wrote about this at length here: https://exasperatedalien.substack.com/p/move-past-the-progressive-v-moderate
Secondly, in this particular case, you are far too credulous about Elon's intentions, which were likely was to troll with a Nazi salute as your friend Amos noted. This is what it looks like when Elon actually tries to give his heart out to the crowd, refuting your point that it's hard to do so without appearing like a stiff-armed Nazi salute. https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i7u5td/elon_musks_gesture_of_giving_his_heart_out_to_the/
Idk - that video of Elon making a different motion doesn’t do that much for me. Yes, it’s different, but people use different motions to mean the same thing sometimes. The fact that he has done a “my heart goes out to you” motion before, involving him touching his heart then extending his arm, actually suggests to me that this was what he intended more recently too. And we know that Elon tends towards big, silly gestures when onstage for Trump - remember the photo of him jumping?
So it seems to me that BB got the probability roughly right, and (although we seem to agree on this) this shouldn’t be driving discourse.
Now, that doesn’t mean there’s no reason to worry about it. A ~20% chance that the richest man in the world and the close confidant of the US president intentionally did a Nazi salute is . . . still a scary high chance.
I agree with you
Tried it. Didnt look like the nazi salute.
Wondering if a tweet from Elon himself confirming that thinks he thinks that Nazis are something extremely funny you can use to own the libs updates your belief in either way.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1882406209187409976
Seems like trolling followed by more trolling. It's kind of elons whole thing.
Since there is wide disagreement on whether or not it was a Nazi salute, and the case for Elon being adequately incentivized to let one fly isn’t airtight, I think it’s wise to just admit we don’t know what he intended. If Elon loves Nazism, which is a bad ism due more to the awful policies it favors than the batty salutes, we will no doubt have a better opportunity to reasonably object if Elon actually proposes such Nazi policies, and I think it’s worth keeping your powder dry until then.
It's not wise to admit we don't know. He said what he intended at the moment the made the gesture: to illustrate "my heart goes out to you" visually.
It’s certainly a point in his favor.
Clearly you don't follow Musk's xitter feed. If you did, you would know exactly how strong his support actually is for white supremacy, Hitler-supporting revisionary history, debunked race science and blatant anti-Semitism. The salute was exactly what it looked like, and it aligns with his past words and actions.
"Something has gone badly wrong when Trump can, for instance, open up the unpopular and disastrous embargo on Cuba without much backlash, for liberals are too busy foaming at the mouth in response to an ambiguous hand gesture." I had no clue Trump did this, but doesn't surprise me with Rubio at the helm of foreign policy.
I agree 100%, and it’s astonishing that even here in the comments seemingly intelligent people are wasting time and energy arguing about Elon’s “true” intentions. I’m so heartily tired of people on the left seeming to believe that “Nazi,” like “racist,” is some sort of gotcha that automatically wins them the argument. The term has become so overloaded that it’s nigh meaningless.
Consider the possibility that the left don't talk about policy much because they just can't anymore. The "policy brain" is atrophied because they now view all problems as caused by bad people, so if you identify/shame/exclude/censor/imprison the bad people, everything comes good automatically.
Seen this way, the swivel-eyed attacks on _people_ combined with a disinterest in _ideas_ is expected. Asking them to talk about policy is basically asking the left to change its core nature. The left haven't had any meaningfully new, serious and defensible policy ideas in years. They even sat back and acquiesced as the Democrats adopted wholesale Trump's anti-China stance, after spending the entire 2016 cycle attacking it as racist, because they don't really care about policy positions. The policy was an opening to call someone an evil Nazi, so they did it, and when Biden adopted the same policies they ignored it because they'd already moved on to some other excuse.
Look at any of the threads covering this Musk event. They're overflowing with leftists who genuinely can't understand why everyone else is calling them deranged. It's an excuse to call someone bad, and if you show them a video of someone on the left doing the same gesture then that's totally different. The substance of the thing is irrelevant, it's just a springboard to a destination. It's not a serious politics, but it is a dangerous form.
Show me a video of someone on the left doing the same gesture. People take freezeframes at the exact moment someone looks like their arm is out, but those aren't videos.
https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1882553556093571563
https://x.com/Bubblebathgirl/status/1881818048455438721
Just two examples.
The first one, with macron, is quite different from a nazi salute if you see the *full* video not cropped so that his hand is offscreen. The second, she isn't doing a salute motion at all, her arm is bent back and forth in a throwing motion. Neither one is the same as what Elon did.
Look at them side by side and you'll see this is cope.
Listen to yourself. It makes flat earthers sound sane. "You see when my side do it the angle is five degrees different and the fingers are slightly wider spaced, so that means something totally different".
None of it means anything. But heck, if you want to keep alienating the moderates with this kind of unhinged approach, great. Great! We love it. Nothing turns the disengaged off more than this kind of thing.
My "side"? The "moderates"? None of this is relevant.
Elon Musk was doing the same thing with that gesture that he was doing when he named himself "kekius maximus" on twitter and when he went buddy-buddy with members of the Alternativ für Deutchland party. He flirts with neo-naziism all the time these days. You would prefer that it continue to be considered just innocuous joking, because that's *your* "side" winning, but don't kid yourself that intelligent people can't see what he's doing.
AfD aren't Nazis either. They fight against the core principles of the Nazis, in fact. He doesn't flirt and he isn't joking. There is literally no connection whatsoever. It's all in your mind because you'd rather go down this conspiracy rabbit hole than debate the issues.
If the most prominent criticism for a few days is an extremely uncharitable and unlikely interpretation of a possible reference to Hitler, then it seriously discredits all the other critiques from the same sources.
There’s only so much credibility any person or institution has with the public. It’s a very long and consistent path to building that credibility, and a very short trip to ruining it. Focusing on this “Nazi Salute”, may build outrage and motivation in the ideologically committed, but it can seriously backfire by making the valid critiques offered later far less credible.
I’m sure Jeff Tiedrich readers are foaming at the mouth because Musk is obviously a Nazi and an existential threat to the nation, but the average person will see this for what it is, and be more sympathetic to Trump and co because of it.
Thousands of people manage to put their heart out there without doing a Nazi salute in the process. If you took fifty people - even all autistic people - on January 19th and asked them to make a gesture to put their hearts out, they wouldn't whip out a Nazi salute. He put the line about putting his heart out there so he could get the joy of trolling the libs with a plausibly deniable Nazi salute.