About Those Nazi Salutes
Article in The Free Press, and a new Substack show
Two announcements. First of all, I’m going to begin doing a regular livestream at 4ET/1PT every Wednesday from now on starting this week, instead of just winging it. The show was announced on Substack Reads earlier today. I’ll probably have Michael Tracey and other friends on as guests. The focus is mostly going to be on what is happening in the Trump administration. For those who cannot make the livestream, it will be available later on the same day for paid subscribers.
Also, I have a new article up at The Free Press about all of the Nazi salutes MAGAs have been making recently. I argue that the right developed a culture of trolling in response to cancel culture that has created room for people who are genuinely deranged while being ridiculous now that wokeness is on the defensive and the problem of social media censorship in particular has been solved.
I enjoy writing about this issue as it’s personal for me. I have a lot of opinions on what goes wrong in the brains of rightists because I was once one of them before I learned to respect women and people of color. As I point out in the article, they offend me not only morally, but aesthetically. Trolling is supposed to be funny and original. Sloppy Steve in his five shirts throwing up a Nazi salute, as the substance of his messaging appeals to the lowest common denominator and doesn’t even have enough logical coherence to be racist, is pathetic. At least I was never that lame, even in my worst moments.
Nazi—excuse me, Roman—salutes have become all the rage on the American right.
It started with Elon Musk, on the day of Trump’s inauguration. Musk was onstage in Washington, D.C., winding up the end of his speech, and claimed the arm gesture was simply the physical expression of his subsequent statement that “my heart goes out to you.”
Musk’s most strident critics saw it as something more sinister. Most ordinary people, including the Anti-Defamation League, gave it a pass.
Then a local GOP official in Pennsylvania lost her job for recreating Musk’s gesture in a TikTok video. Finally, from the CPAC stage over the last few days, we’ve had two more: Steve Bannon, and Mexican actor Eduardo Verástegui. Jordan Bardella, the leader of the National Rally in France—a country where the use of Nazi imagery and slogans is punished by law—pulled out of the conference as a result.
What exactly is going on here? The standard answer is trolling. This is plausible in light of the alternative explanation, which is that they all really mean it and figures like Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid have been right since 2016 in asserting that MAGA is a fascist movement.
Say what you will about these men: None of them proclaims a Hitlerian worldview. Not too long ago, Steve Bannon was taking a page out of Al Sharpton’s book and denouncing Silicon Valley bosses for not hiring enough blacks and Hispanics, which would make his brand of Nazism quite peculiar. Elon Musk has time and again pledged support for the Jewish people. He visited Israel in late 2023 and wore dog tags given to him by the father of an Israeli hostage in Gaza. Later, he went to Auschwitz with Ben Shapiro.
But it’s too easy to say that these people are simply trolling and leave it at that. A good troll—and as someone who has done quite a bit of trolling myself, I have a deep appreciation for the art form—makes an underlying point, stimulates thought, provokes serious discussion and, best-case scenario, is open to interpretation. Worst-case scenario, it confuses the weaponization of taboos for the taboos themselves, and instead of resisting their weaponization, winds up denying their original purpose.
Wow. So you’re dropping your schtick as the reasonable conservative and going full blue hair? Because the other side is evil? To wit: “because I was once one of them before I learned to respect women and people of color” That’s not just defamatory, it’s incorrect. There’s way way more people like me, lifelong Dem/progressives who got so sick of their shit we changed parties. If you want to build an audience, declaring that everyone who disagrees is racist or misogynist isn’t going to do it.
Maybe there’s something to this. But isn’t it also possible that not all of these gestures are self-conscious trolling? Politicians and other often awkward, uncharismatic public figures, make all kinds of lame or even bizarre gestures on stage. (My favorite is the combination point, pulled back into a thumbs-up.) And it’s not hard to find mini-compilations of Dem politicians making basically the exact same gesture, stiffly extending their right arm on stage. The “Elon is from South Africa and therefore loved Apartheid; Elon musk is definitely a neo-Nazi, his Nazi salute proves it” talking point got a lot of airtime and column inches in left of center and especially “Resistance” media. These are people who had a working class Latino utility worker, of all people, fired for innocently making an “OK” sign while in his vehicle. A (former) fact-checker at the once-enjoyable New Yorker went out of her way to clumsily misidentify a soldier’s tattoo as neo-Nazi. Maybe some more sophomoric people on the right do feel more emboldened and are acting out. But the desire on the Left to find or invent any expression of fascist sympathy among anyone who disagrees with them about anything hasn’t really abated. Democrats and leftwing activists have, I assume unwittingly, been making the same gestures and no one notices or cares. Much like, as Matt Orfalea illustrated in a short clip, Democrats have used some of the same dehumanizing language (“vermin”, umm “Magats”, for example) to describe Trump and other Republicans. And no one really noticed or cared.
I’m also curious if the use of “people of color” was tongue in cheek. It’s such an awful construction and should have been retired long ago. I believe a pro-Dem journalist even advocated for scrapping it, just recently. This is all bizarre to me, as a “lifelong Dem”, turned independent. What was ever wrong or difficult about aspiring to take people as they come and judge them as individuals, based on their own behavior?