Call It What It Was: A Nazi Salute.
Shortly after President Trump’s swearing-in yesterday, Elon Musk made the Nazi salute (a.k.a. the Fascist salute) in front of a packed audience at Washington D.C.’s Capitol One Arena. Here is the video:
This statement should not be controversial. We saw Musk do it before our own eyes. This isn’t the Zapruder film — no detailed analysis is necessary. This is Elon Musk, the man who effectively purchased the presidency of the United States for his friend Donald Trump, saluting his leader in the same manner that the Nazis saluted theirs — right arm raised up. End of story.
Except it’s not, because in today’s bifurcated reality, you can hold an apple in your hand and some will insist that it’s really an orange. Unfortunately, many of the “it’s an orange!” crowd are journalists, who have given Musk a benefit of the doubt he doesn’t deserve. Whether they’re doing so out of a desire to be objective or because they’re politically right-wing is less important than the fact that they’re doing it at all, and their reasons for doing it all fail to pass muster:
- “Elon Musk has Aspergers/Autism!”
This defense pops up often when men are accused of bad behavior. Yes, Musk has talked about having Aspergers, a neurological condition closely associated with autism. But I know PLENTY of people who either have Aspergers or are spectrum-adjacent, and none of them have ever made a Nazi salute. Period.
2. “It was the Roman salute.”
Some history is necessary to explain why calling it “the Roman salute” keeps Musk’s gesture at a historical remove. The idea of a “Roman Salute” is an anachronism because the Romans never did it. No Latin art, literature, or historians have ever described them as raising their arm outward in deference. Orson Welles blamed Cecil B. DeMille for inventing it, but although the salute appears in the silent film epics of the 1910s, he gave DeMille too much credit.
If Welles had done his research (and it’s no surprise he didn’t) he’d know that the earliest known artistic depiction of the Roman salute appeared in 1784, when the French artist Jacques-Louis David painted Oath of the Horatii, which depicts three brothers pledging to fight for Rome. The panting shows the three brothers doing a version of the salute before their father, who holds a group of swords.
Fascists, who obsessively adopt the trappings of a mythological past to justify their present actions, glommed on to this gesture in the 1920s, most notably Mussolini’s brownshirts and the Nazis. Even a painting depicting something that, if it did happen, did not look anything like how David portrayed it, was justification enough for it to gain traction.
3. “It was just an awkward gesture!”
To call it an “awkward gesture” deliberately robs the image of its context. Musk, whose website has been overrun with Nazis since he bought it, appeared at a rally for a man who once said “Hitler did a lot of good things” and made a movement historically associated with the Nazi Party — but it was just an “awkward gesture” according to the ADL. The ADL may not be a journalistic organization, but as far as spreaders of misinformation go they are among the worst. Jews have spoken out against them for years over the way it conflates all criticism of Israel with antisemitism, so this explanation proves they are is morally derelict when it comes to combating actual antisemitism. (Imagine their response if Musk had said “Free Palestine.”)
4. It only “appeared” to be a fascist salute.
It’s not inherently wrong to give people plausible deniability, especially when you plan to write about someone making a heinous gesture, but the use of the word “appears” feels weak when applied here. Given that PBS is a government-funded entity, some caution on their part may be justified, but they’re not the only ones. Here’s The Guardian doing the same thing:
Here’s Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper:
Here’s Gizmodo:
The Washington Post didn’t even bother to comment on the gesture, calling Musk’s speech “exuberant” in the headline and cutting away from the moment he raises his arm up.
And just this morning, Musk stenographer and once-respected journalist Walter Isaacson defended him on Morning Joe:
None of these entities are government-funded and even they’re falling into the same trap that PBS did: couching their language to give someone a benefit of the doubt that he has made clear he does not deserve. The man made the Nazi salute and to offer any plausible deniability means he and his followers can use that doubt and turn it against us, accusing us of overreacting or reading into things that aren’t there. If journalists are to report on this administration accurately, they will have to acknowledge that in this new reality, there can be no hedging stories with inadequate, wishy-washy language. The old rules no longer apply. To quote Oliver Stone’s JFK, “we’re through the looking glass here... Up is down, and black is white.”