I wasn’t intending to post a full article on Musk’s antics at the Trump Inauguration, because it didn’t seem worth it.
But subsequent media and online coverage of the controversy has prompted it.
Some of the reaction to Elon’s ‘Seig Heil’ moment have been eye-opening. The level of mental gymnastics being engaged in to pretend that the tech billionaire didn’t do a Nazi gesture is extraordinary.
And I don’t mean the enthusiastic social media approval by far-right trolls and the like: no, those reactions make sense and are predictable.
But the defense of Musk’s action in much of the US media has been notable: either pretending he didn’t do a salute or arguing that it was somehow misinterpreted.
More curiously, it actually can be seen that some US broadcasters actually omitted the fascist salute from their live coverage of Musk’s speech on Inauguration Day.
These were clearly edited to not show the moment.
Here are three examples still on YouTube. Two are Fox News broadcasts and one is the Washington Post (which is these days owned by fellow Inauguration attendee Jeff Bezos, remember).
If you skip to roughly the one-minute mark you’ll see that the footage cuts away to the audience at the exact moment Musk does the gesture – and then conveniently snaps back to the stage.
If you had been watching one of these live broadcasts you wouldn’t have known anything controversial had happened at all.
So… why did they do that?
Why were these media broadcasters trying to protect Musk’s image or sanitise the inauguration?
It’s a significant question, surely. I’ll come back to it.
Most right-wing influencers and talking heads online have predictably defended the action too.
So too has, rather notably, Joe Rogan. Look, I know Rogan and Musk are friends: but you really have to watch this clip to see how hard the high-profile podcaster is trying to pretend Musk has been misrepresented.
He and his guest go in conversational circles to avoid engaging in an honest or direct commentary on the subject at hand.
It’s one of the most awkward and telling Rogan clips I’ve ever seen. I often like Rogan’s content, but he has clearly abandoned his former pretense of neutrality and is these days entirely in the Trump/Musk camp.
Which isn’t too surprising, as offering his platform to the likes of Trump, J.D Vance, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg in recent months has made Rogan a significant player in the overall equation – to the point that Trump literally thanked Rogan by name in his election victory speech in November.
It’s questionable whether Rogan is an honest operator anymore.
Let’s be honest: anyone with a brain can see it was a conscious gesture. He did it twice. He even bit his lip and let out an alpha-male grunt when he did it – indicating meaning and purpose behind the action.
It was a fascist salute. Whether he did it as some kind of prank, or some kind of attention-seeking stunt, or whether the action reveals Musk’s real underlying ideology, is open to debate.
What isn’t open to debate is the gesture itself.
And far more problematic than Musk’s attention-seeking antics are the attempts by certain significant parties to provide cover for it.
Here, for example, are right-wing propagandist Megan Kelly and co painfully trying to pretend it wasn’t what it was.
Worse, she actually attacks ‘leftist media’ for trying to suggest it was a fascist salute. What is ‘leftist media’, by the way? Which broadcaster? Which corporation? I haven’t identified any ‘leftist media’: certainly not in the United States.
Some have argued it isn’t a ‘Nazi’ or fascist salute, but a Roman salute.
Which is entirely disingenuous: we know the fascist salute was claimed to be modelled on the Roman gesture – and that historians don’t even believe the gesture was Roman at all, but a later invention.
But, either way, that gesture has been universally associated with fascism ever since it was adopted by Mussolini and by the Nazis.
*No one* does it anymore as a ‘Roman Salute’ – stop kidding yourselves.
And here’s the reality: here’s a billionaire industrialist who has had enormous influence on the election (including possible foul play) – and who has been openly campaigning for the likes of the AfD in Germany and Tommy Robinson in the UK, as well as other far-right entities… and he’s doing a Nazi salute at the inauguration of a US President.
That is very significant. It’s not something you shrug off or brush under the carpet.
In fact, subsequent to the salute controversy, he has addressed an AfD event in Germany, in which he urged Germans to essentially whitewash the Nazis and forget about the Holocaust.
Which clearly indicates his ideological position and the fact that he isn’t even trying to be subtle about it.
Any organisation or media entity making excuses for it or downplaying it is therefore immediately suspect.
The ADL is in some ways the most conspicuous defender of the action. The same ADL that demonises Palestinian solidarity marches by students as anti-Semitism, and generally takes every opportunity to point out possible racism or anti-Semitism, has defended Musk and refuted the nature of the gesture.
This is not surprising, as Musk is in bed with the Netanyahu government: and some could even argue that the massive escalation in Musk’s far-right passions could be traced back to his staged visit to Israel as Netanyahu’s guest after October 7th.
What agreement Musk and Netanyahu entered into at that time is unclear.
I have argued in previous articles that the mainstream media and other institutions in America seem to have largely capitulated to Trump, Musk and the MAGA movement – in a manner that seems conspicuous.
It isn’t simply a case of respecting the election outcome: but that might be part of it.
But I’ve noted several times how significant it is that the entirety of the mainstream media, government institutions and even the Democratic Party, went along the July 13th assassination hoax.
Likewise, no one from the so-called opposition or the perceived establishment flagged up any of the suspicious aspects of the November election – despite plenty of ordinary citizens raising concerns and pointing out problems.
Indicating, to me at least, that this has all been a scripted transfer of power: that Trump’s second presidency was pre-ordained.
Which would explain all the staged theater and narrative-weaving preceding the election – the assassination hoax, the conveniently memed and merchandised Trump mugshot from his arrest, the supposed cognitive decline of Joe Biden, and so on.
In other words, there’s been no real opposition or even disinclination within the establishment for Trump to retain the White House.
That whole idea of Trump as the persecuted or feared anti-establishment figure was all theater. Or, at best, it might’ve been truer in 2016, but not this time around.
And helping provide cover for Elon Musk’s highly questionable actions – and his agenda – is all perhaps part of the same thing.
That would explain why the aforementioned broadcasters tried – eventually unsuccessfully – to hide Musk’s fascist gesture.
Which raises the question of what else they’ll try to hide. The extent of US media sanitisation of Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank, for example, clearly illustrate how carefully managed everything is.
One last thing with this. It is frankly offensive that so many people have defended Musk’s gesture by saying it was because of his possible autism or Aspergers.
Being autistic – if Musk even is – does not make you do fascist salutes at presidential inaugurations. Nor does it make you advocate for the whitewashing of the Nazis.
Nor does it make you interfere in British or German politics, spread misinformation on an industrial scale, or generally act like Lex Luthor.
That’s insulting to people with autism or Aspergers.
But again, it illustrates the mental gymnastics and moral contortions people are engaging in to try to justify things that shouldn’t be justified.
At this point, they’re basically telling people not to trust their own eyes. Which is highly 1984 in itself.
Musk’s own weird defense of his action: which was him tweeting ‘How can I be a Zionist and a Nazi?’ is transparent sophistry.
Modern fascists are not fixated on the anti-Semitism anymore – Jews are not the target. Most of the far-right are Israel fan-boys and most of Israel’s political allies are far-right (a reality we examined here several years ago).
That’s why the ADL provided cover for Musk. And it’s why you totally can be ‘a Zionist and a Nazi’, as Musk puts it.
And that’s not even touching on the Zionist/Nazi collaboration during the 1930s. But that’s a whole different subject.
Elon Musk did a Nazi salute at the inauguration – it’s as simple as that.
You can argue about what’s its purpose or meaning was – but don’t insult people’s intelligence by pretending it wasn’t what it was.
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