There is no such thing as an accidental Nazi salute, no amount of gaslighting that will delude people into unseeing it, and absolutely no words to express the horror of seeing Elon Musk throw up a “Sieg Heil” on Inauguration Day at a podium adorned with the seal of the President of the United States.
Whether you want to call it a Nazi salute or a Roman salute, the world’s richest man and most trusted adviser to the American President aggressively signaled (twice) to the world that fascism is cool. The fascist regimes of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler institutionalized an ideology of extreme division, hate, scapegoating and persecution. Fascism resulted in the annihilation of 6 million Jews, the wartime deaths of 70 million people in 6 years, and the utter destruction of the European continent. There is nothing cool, nothing normal, about the abject evil of fascism.
Elon Musk has been known to traffic in white nationalism and antisemitism, including recently and proudly amplifying Germany’s extreme far right political party, AfD. Though he went on an “apology tour” to the Nazi concentration camps and to Israel in 2023 after sharing Great Replacement Theory tweets, Musk has continued to perpetuate antisemitic tropes and ultra nationalist conspiracy theories unabated, and has continued to monetize the mass proliferation of dangerous antisemitic content on the world’s largest platform. Much of the explosion in anti-Jewish hate we are experiencing in real life is a result of the profit-making potential of that hate being spread online. Justifying Musk’s behavior with reference to the Israel trip is absurd.
Paired with the flurry of Trump’s immediately signed Executive Orders targeting trans people and immigrants––and even the American-born children of immigrants––Musk’s access and adjacency to the levers of American policymaking is outright chilling. Millions of vulnerable Americans were desperately hoping that today would somehow be a day of unity and American pride, but were immediately forced to confront this terrifying, but all-too-likely, reality.
Fascism stands in the starkest possible contrast to liberal democracy, which is the only political system that protects individual rights and minority communities such that Jews––a tiny minority defined by unique and distinct cultural and religious practices––could ever be safe. When any vulnerable community is targeted or scapegoated without systemic protection, that system is threatened, and we are all threatened. We are outraged and disgusted and refuse to let this become normal.
There are many who will comment on the extreme danger of Musk’s behavior, the ideology it represents and the consequences it could have in our communities and our society. Some of those who claim to fight Nazism and antisemitism have been silent, or worse, in the face of an onslaught of leftwing antisemitism that calls for the same “final solution” the Nazis did, calling themselves “anti-Zionists” and labeling Jews “white colonizers” rather than “perverters of the white race.”
The hypocrisy and selective solidarity that normalizes any form of antisemitism endangers not just Jews, but all minority communities that need strong and united coalitions in order to fight the threats to our bodies, our lives and our democracy. Our movements will continue to be plagued by dysfunction and collapse until we are consistent in fighting this metastatic threat–not only when it’s convenient or when it’s espoused by those we oppose politically. We desperately hope this will be a lesson heeded by the left as we move into this new American era.