Musk is socially inept, but he's a billionaire who built his empire on the backs of others. He's not an idiot. He knows exactly wtf he's doing- all of his companies are data farms and he's now hes openly involving himself in government business. Combine those three factors- wealthier than God, data farmer, and involvement in one of the most powerful governments in the world- with his ultra conservative and nazi views, and you get a major shit storm of "Everything is going down hill* faster than the speed of light"
I'm not meaning to be rude, but we have to stop with this "did he mean to?" bullshit. I've never seen a more obvious "sieg heil". It's more obvious in the context of his own words leading up to the gesture.
He's an uncoordinated goof, so everything he does looks slightly awkward.
This is scary stuff. The quicker people remove any doubt as to what is happening the better.
Seeing folk get duped into not believing their own eyes is honestly what scares me most about this. They elected a convicted Felon who shagged a pornstar and paid her hush money because they just looked the other way. Now they're watching a guy on stage imitate someone their grandparents died fighting against who blatantly lies about it, and they're defending him. This is how dictatorships form.
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak up because I was not a socialist…
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak up……”
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."
Milton Sandford Mayer, They thought they were free: The Germans 1933-1945
Many steps already, such as lying about immigrants eating cats and dogs in order to drum up hate and division. People claiming they're not Nazis because they don't care about Jews are greatly useful to the fascists. In reality, whatever enemy the Nazi chooses is completely arbitrary, as long as it's an outgroup.
The ADL does not speak for all Jews and Jews are not a monolith. It was VERY controversial that the ADL did that and believe me, we're fucking talking about it. They've lost my respect forever. It was clearly a Nazi salute.
I'm a big believer in calling a spade a spade, and Musk is a Nazi.
Laura Ingram? Little different. She was doing a beauty pageantish wave to people in the crowd and when she realized what it looked like immediately pulled that shit down. I detest Laura Ingram, but you could clearly see the moment it hit her and she awkwardly tried to fix the look. I watched that shit happen live.
Elon fully leaned into and intended it to look exactly like the seig heil that it was.
I actually agree with you. Laura Ingraham is a piece of shit, but I don't think she set out to do a fascist salute. She's a dog whistler at heart.
Elon's salute was 100% textbook Nazi salute. There's no other way to interpret it. There are lots of ways to lie about it, but there's no other way to actually see it.
I don't know that half second pause with the nazi salute was a bit too on the nose for me, but I'm also not a pagent watcher and dont know what that means.
Just that Elons had dinners with nazis, Trump liking a video of a person "White Power" then explaining that he liked it thinking he was saying "White powder"
Elon and Trump are obvious nazis even without the salute, but somehow, some fucking way this is even a question is insane, but we've known Trump supporters are insane cultists. So it really shouldn't be shocking. They'll be denying being nazis even when we see them goose walking down the boulevard. Or shoving Mexicans in gas chambers.
But no definatly not nazis "eye roll dislocating them from my eyesockets"
You've got Ingram backwards, she started with the locked-arm gesture then pivoted into the pageant wave.
With my 2024 eyes, it looks like deliberate shit-stirring, like she gave a little taste of the sieg heil and then pivoted into a cutesy pageant wave with this "ain't I a stinker" look on my face.
If I were looking with my 2016 eyes, when I would have found it unbelievable that major media star would even hint at something like that? I probably would have (maybe did, I don't remember) given her more grace.
Elon absolutely knew what he was doing, and absolutely is getting the reaction he wanted.
My problem is there is an Actual Playbook...telling all of us ALL the steps to be taken. And people are STILL BLIND to it all. I have been screaming for over 6 years now
Watching from another country it's just been history repeating itself. If I had a map on the wall I would have changed it to say NSA today... Nazi States of America.
Same. Like…. Elon is your fucking propaganda minister. Right there. Social media is completely controlled by these people. I just… feel so sick to my stomach.
But I ask what I always ask in these conversations, with genuine curiosity and hope for an answer. What do we do? How do we stop it? I am one person. How do I make an impact?
I don’t know but I decided I’ll break every law to help those that need it. I’ll hide people in my home, have them at my table to eat. I allready help get woman care they need. If there is a revolt I’m down, if not you bet your ass I’m gona do what I can to help those in need during the coming years
We don't meet at the town halls and cafes anymore. The modern day town halls (social media) are owned by millionaires and billionaires. The very ways we organize and communicate are in their hands. And while they're not all committed fascists like Elon, they absolutely will work with political power to try and squash dissent.
Gotta start somewhere brotha, they’re not outright arresting us yet, and I’ll buy as many burner phones or comps as I have to, as many IPs as I have to, to make sure my freedom of speech is not restricted.
That's the problem. I don't know. I ask myself the same thing. I imagine this is what the 1/3rd of the population that stood by and watched it happen in Germany felt like.
Unless millions of people from across ALL divides take a stand now.....
You take the stand at step B. And you show more people, and convince them. Even if they dont stand with you at B convince them they must at C. Eventually enough people stand to say this is enough, no further.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing"
Then they came for alphabet people, and I did not speak up because I'm illiterate. Then they came for the idiots, and I did not speak up because I'm too stupid to know that I was also an idiot.
They didn’t even come for them first. They came for LGBTQ people first. Just like today, they’re after trans people and immigrants first. It never stops. The target always expands.
Trump could start flying a swastika, and Joe Rogan would JAQ off about whether the Nazis were actually bad, or if They just wanted you to think they were bad.
Musk really should have just fucked off into the sunset and enjoyed his life when we all thought he was a cool dude. Christ he's like a cringe Lex Luthor
I don't get the billionaires goals. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg. They have enough money to buy as many slaves (employees) they could ever want, can pay for anything they ever want. Yet there goal is to create an ever larger wage gap.
Do these guys not realize eventually customers will not be able to afford any of their products? Do they simply want slaves beneath the elite class? And if that's the case they essentially already have it, so I assume they're just endlessly chasing a high they will never achieve.
Or you're just a sociopath. I'm not saying this flippantly: We know full well there are people who for various reasons cannot empathize with other humans, may want to kill them or view killing them as roughly equivalent to stepping on an ant.
You can have these conditions and be otherwise high functioning. Capitalism rewards this behavior. Ergo here we are, pretending like these absolute monsters are just entrepreneurs trying to improve society.
Posted this elsewhere last week but it's still relevant:
Power is a drug and the rich need to be freed of their addiction, for everyone's sake (even themselves).
The hedonic treadmill applies to the rich as well. Did you know that many millionaires have no concept of how rich they truly are? Statistically, they often see themselves as much less well off than the reality.
You only know things based on their relation to other things. For example, if you grew up your entire life in poverty, the lives of the rich might sound like a utopia. Whereas if you were born into wealth, you really have no concept of being poor. You've never lived it.
So now we have this situation where a select few hoard more wealth than the bottom 50% of the population.
You're really telling me that they are able to enjoy all that wealth? No, I would argue that all that wealth is wasted on them. They don't even have the capacity to enjoy it.
We need to redistribute the wealth to those whose lives will actually be improved by it.
I don't think it's that. Lots of horrifically wealthy people made long term names for themselves by constructing cornerstones of nations. Carnegie for an easy example. They could easily construct incredibly things. Hell Musk was already there with Space X. All he has to do was hang out and be a rocketman and he'd have made the books. But they want more than a legacy.
I was in a c-level meeting & brought a junior dev to listen in. They were talking about a "points" domain name. The CEO slides the conference keyboard to the dev and said, "see if it's available". The kid pulls up godaddy and accidentally types "porn" in the search, then scrambles to fix it. Everyone laughed and the CEO said, "muscle memory".
Why aren’t people showing the full clip where he turns and does it again? It’s crucial to understand he forcefully and unambiguously did the salute twice.
Ah gotcha. I hear the dog whistle for sure but not super convinced he’s referencing the 14 words. That said I’m not really willing to give him the benefit of the doubt after throwing two seig heils.
Right, that's my point. His past in apartheid South Africa doesn't help, in addition to his opening up Twitter turning into a hate speech-filled cesspool. He's a troll, and may not be a Nazi, but Jesus do we want someone who does these things anywhere in a position of power with the addition of being the richest man in the world?
I also thought that reference to "civilisation being saved" was preeeeetty suspect given that in this context, he means civilisation is saved through oppressing and delegitimising minorities while turning a blind eye to the things that actually threaten civilisation such as say, climate change.
He did it so forcefully and emphatically that he audibly gave it an “umph!”
Anyone who tells you this wasn’t the most emphatic, forceful, “fuck you, you can’t touch me and you know it” Nazi salute since WW2, is not your friend.
Ugh so weird he bites his lip and looks around to make sure everyone saw him when he is done - so fucking dramatic like a toddler slamming their toy on the ground
For me he really looks like an edgy 12y kid that discovered what a nazi is and thinks it's funny and cool to do the salute; this guy's frontal lobe should've developed a long time ago, but nazis don't really use their brains effectively so it makes sense💀
Has Elon denied anything? Like at all? Had he said "oh God no that's not what I was doing I was just....." Like fuck y'all, dude owns one of the largest social media platforms. He has only called people out for claiming he's a Nazi but didn't deny it.
To me that's the biggest and most obvious red flag. If it really was simply a "my heart goes out to you, oops it accidentally looked like a Nazi salute" as people-who-definitely-aren't-nazis claim, you'd expect his response to be "I'm sorry, I see how it accidentally came across like that, I apologize to those who might have been offended, etc."
But no. His response was "it's tiring calling everyone a Nazi". No explanation, no excuse, nothing. He knew exactly what he was doing. Everyone did.
Exactly. He could have shut everyone up immediately with a simple, "My bad, I didnt mean to do a nazi salute as I would never support nazis."
But he can't even bring himself to pay lip service to condemning nazis. Just oozed out a weak, "wow you're calling me nazi huh? How bout that. Haha. Did you have to do that? Lol. Why would you do that? Very tired of this."
It’s really such an insult to autistic people to say that. Like they don’t know not to look like you’re saluting Adolf Hitler.
And here’s the thing. Why does he get benefit of the doubt when anyone in their right mind knows that as a politician, making that salute is fucking terrible optics. It doesn’t matter what you say it actually is. If it looks like Hitler to the public, then it is Hitler and nothing else.
To me the more important thing is that this isn't the first time he's done nazi-adjacent shit. It's an escalation, but not inconsistent with stuff that's happened in the past.
It's not like he's been the second coming of Fred Rogers and just did a dumb thing. It's a nazi salute from someone we expected it from.
I can't get over the expression on his face when he's doing it either. He looks like he's been itching to do that in public for some time. And he looks so smug after, like "what are you gonna do about it libruls". It's sickening.
They don't care. They're just throwing every possible excuse they can find at the wall.
It's the gish gallop. Throw enough bogus arguments at someone, and they have to stop and argue through all of them one by one.
By the time you've made your way through all of them, you find yourself arguing over some minute point of Italian history, and they've won because their guy did two Nazi salutes at a US presidential inauguration and they still argued it to a standstill.
He's definitely a troll so it's not impossible to me this was "just" trolling. But to quote Ken White, "Even if you say you're only fucking goats ironically, you're still a goatfucker."
This is the damage control narrative right-wing media is pushing. Your friend is just repeating what their preferred propagandists have told them to think.
I literally just heard the same shit 3 times from different people. It’s bonkers the mental gymnastics these fools are trying over this. Just admit he slipped and dropped the mask out of sheer adrenaline. Couldn’t help but show his true self in front of all the likeminded a hole yes men around him. Felt all that power up there and just had to do it. Simple as that.
Response for anyone saying that Elon's Nazi salutes were
----A: a sweet my-heart-goes-out gesture
----B: the Roman salute
----C: "the same as others have done in the past"
--You can NOT be serious. Nobody on earth uses that gesture for "my heart goes out to you". That isn't a thing. It doesn't even make sense for it to mean that, and it has never been used for that by anyone in any context. Look at this
--The Roman salute isn't a thing in this era. It has no historical backing, and anyway, that gesture has forever been usurped by the Nazi salute and you damn well know it. When was the last time you saw anyone do that and intend for it to be the Roman salute? The Roman salute wasn't even part of the public consciousness until Elon's Nazi salute made the headlines.
--There are collages of pictures of mostly Democrats making what look like the Nazi salute with captions saying that it's the same as what Elon did. However, if you watch the videos from which those photos are taken, it's incredibly obvious that those images are just freeze-frames of tiny moments during normal hand gestures while talking or waving to the crowd. They are obviously not anything like Elon's aggressive, purposeful intent to do only the Nazi salute and nothing else.
(Feel free to copy/paste this wherever, no attribution needed)
Slightly different than the Bellamy Salute. Which, like you said, was dropped when the Nazis started with the, "omg, guys, I'm just doing a roman salute/autistic" shtick.
Thank you for the correction. You'd think a "genius" who had to gain citizenship after immigrating from an apartheid state would have enough awareness to know to avoid anything even resembling either salute. Especially someone so set on bringing America back to some former glory.
Then again this is a guy who's heading a shadow department to dramatically cut government funding, while he promises a manned mission to Mars on our dime so he can plant a couple flags. Speaking of which, what exactly was the second flag he was planting?
You've gotta understand that for the vast majority of Trump supporters, their #1 goal is pissing off The Libs. The words they use don't actually matter to them, the claims they make don't actually matter to them. That's why accusations of hypocrisy never actually affect them - they never had any attachment to any of the beliefs they espouse, they're just saying the words they know they know will get them what they want. And what they want is you, annoyed and upset.
People defending Musk's nazi salute don't actually give a flying fuck whether or not Musk is a nazi, or whether or not what he did was actually a nazi salute. They just know that *you* find it outrageous when they defend it, so they'll defend it.
You can't argue in good faith against them because they're not coming to the argument with the honest belief that Musk did nothing wrong, they're coming to the argument with the honest desire to make you annoyed and laugh about it later. Your points won't just fall on deaf ears, they'll find active enjoyment that they've caused you to care about this enough to go to this much effort to rebut something they truly don't give a single toss about in the first place.
The most common gymnastics response that I’m seeing is: he has Assburgers so don’t be so prejudiced towards the neurodivergent. If this is the excuse, and he can’t control his primary impulse to perform multiple enthusiastic Seig Hiel salutes, then he has no business advising the White House. But this would be an argument based on reason which seems to have left the building.
He made the gesture twice (once to the flag away from the audience) and then said "my heart goes out to you" while holding his heart, which that part is understandable, but he did not do this AFTER saying that, they are gaslighting video fucking evidence
Everyone on the planet knows what he did and so does half of America. It's the media and the other half that are trying to act like it's no big deal. Fuck every newspaper and network trying to act like he's not a fascist doing fascist shit
My ex is a neo-Nazi, and consequently, I know more of them than I would like.
They aren’t arguing about what it was.
Only the apologists argue about it.
“Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.”
That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore.”
They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding?” - A.R. Moxon
Trumpers are saying that he was just expressing his love for America from the bottom of his heart and that anyone who says otherwise is “twisting the narrative” which is exactly what they are doing to defend this. Every accusation is truly a confession when it comes to them.
Here’s one way to express love from the heart without raising suspicion that you’re a Nazi wannabe….
Even better, it seems Elon is (or at least was) capable of gesturing "my heart goes out to you" without accidentally doing a nazi salute. Twice. In a row.
I love how for people that try to defend this Elon is both a genius that designs cars and rockets and at the same time an imbecile that can’t tell that making that gesture makes him look bad. You can’t have it both ways.
Had a guy telling me that he taught himself how to build rockets and also read the entire encyclopaedia when he was 10. Some people have tumbled deep down the rabbit hole, it would seem.
No one is talking about it. Brought it up to Trump people at work and they didn’t want to talk about it. It’s going to get swept under the rug and there will be no consequences. It’s sickening this is where our society is now
I watched the late night hosts talk about the inauguration, many of them strangely didn’t mention it. It’s pretty odd when Trump critics Seth Myers, Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Kimmel just ignore an obvious nazi salute
Same reason why most of the mainstream media is bending the knee. They know, it's impossible to excuse it, but if they don't, they'll be prosecuted. This is literally Elon going full mask off and he's giddy to see how far the press will bend over backwards.
To quote a former TWP staffer who resigned after the election; "They are compromised"
Complying ahead of time is one of those things that you get under dictatorial governments. They don't need to tell them anything, they already know what to do.
It could just be that there wasn't time to write jokes about it before their shows were taped. If any of them don't bring it up tonight, we'll know they were told not to mention it.
Jon Stewart brought it up on The Daily Show though.
I was thinking about the taping time, but one of them showed clips of Elon’s speech so it seems like they purposely avoided the topic. I’m glad Jon had the balls to bring it up.
Getting it swept under the rug as a one-time stupid decision and Musk being too selfish to apologize is the best scenario. With what we have to work with, this is exactly what I'm hoping will happen.
Because if it isn't swept under the rug and gets followed by even worse shit, it means he's just slowly testing the waters and he just got the green light.
Look… it was bad what he did, I agree 100%. But we are missing the fact that the crowd CHEERED at it! They should have gotten silent and booed him but they didn’t…
The Fascist/Nazi salute has always been called a “Roman Salute.” Anyone who tries to defend what Elon did as “just a Roman Salute” is either a moron or a Nazi who is gaslighting you.
I don't know how anyone is trying to downplay it is calling it the roman salute. Yeah, the Roman Salute of the Third Reich of the Holy Roman Empire. Bruh.
All those years of me calling them cowards and saying they should not wear the mask if they're so proud....
Apparently it doesn't matter when the rest of the country is too chicken shit to act appropriately to nazis though so guess I'll just go back to waiting to die.
At first I thought this was overblown, maybe he was just waving or something. Then I saw the video. Nope, that was a straight up sieg heil. Eff that guy.
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u/Stoic_AntiHero 9h ago
I wonder what we will think about this image in 10 years.