Sometimes a Nazi Salute Is a Nazi Salute
When I was in fifth grade, some classmates got into trouble on the playground. Three boys during recess marched around and shouted “Sieg heil!” while performing a certain motion with their arms. I remember thinking this was wrong, with only a vague idea why it was wrong. A teacher intervened. She explained to the boys that what they were doing was very offensive. The boys were ashamed, and one explained they were playing like soldiers they saw in a movie. The incident, and the teacher’s reaction, quickly spread throughout the school.
Most of us have stories like this. Because everybody learns, from a pretty young age, that the Nazis were unfathomably evil, and they performed a “Nazi salute,” and this is something you don’t copy in your everyday life. As an adult, we flail our arms in endless ways, making gestures both conscious and unconscious. But after soaking up countless depictions of World War II in popular entertainment, we inherently understand there’s one arm wave you don’t do. This is, thankfully, something that’s also easy to avoid. It’s not like we walk around feeling like Doctor Strangelove, constantly having to grab our rebelling Führer-saluting arms and then yank them back to our sides. Most of us manage to go our whole lives without ever looking like we’re attending a Nuremberg rally.
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Now to Elon Musk.
Musk is one of the most fascinating people of our age. What he’s accomplished with SpaceX and Tesla is extraordinary. When Musk’s salute onstage at President Donald Trump’s inauguration rally went viral Monday, I initially just saw a story and a photo of Musk with his extended arm. I thought: There goes social media again, trying to make a big deal out of nothing. Then I watched the video (below). Musk’s movement was so ridiculously emphatic, such a precise expression of what is so notorious and burned into our collective memory, and performed with a clenched look on his face, that it was hard not to think: Wow, that tech billionaire just did a Nazi salute … twice!
Musk’s defenders point out that he said, “My heart goes out to you!” So Musk was just expressing this sentiment in a strange way. But Musk said that after the salute. And in the context of his speech, the line doesn’t quite gel. “This one really mattered,” Musk said of the election. “I just want to say thank you for making it happen. Thank you!” [The salute and a pause.] “My heart goes out to you! It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.”
“My heart goes out to you” is what you typically say to express sympathy to somebody. You say to wildfire victims, “My heart goes out to you.” It’s not something you say when you’re thanking a roaring audience for supporting a politician. It was an ill-fitting line, combined with a jaw-drop gesture.
Musk, naturally, has been dismissive. “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks,” he posted on X. “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.” Musk also has a history of doing weird gesticulations onstage. The Anti-Defamation League has even defended Musk: “It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge. In this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace.”
To some extent, this is a Rorschach test: If you believe Trump is a fascist, then you probably think Musk did a “seig heil,” especially given some recent context: Musk has endorsed far right parties in Germany, Italy and the U.K., with Germany’s AfD being accused of deliberately using Nazi rhetoric. And under Musk’s watch, Twitter/X has reportedly seen a dramatic increase in racist and antisemitic groups and comments. So it’s easy to understand why some would believe this was intentional — especially when he’s onstage at a rally for a politician who has plenty of extremist followers. All those Hitler criticisms, if anything, should make a speaker less likely to bust out any Third Reich-looking moves, or so one would hope.
While if you’re MAGA, you likely think critics are once again making a big deal out of nothing. The media has a track record of anti-Trump bias and has also been “the boy who cried Hitler” for some eight years now. From this perspective, any criticism of anything remotely questionable is just more pouncing for clickbait.
And then, I suspect some fall into yet another category: Those who cannot believe anybody would intentionally do such a thing, so they assume he didn’t — especially given that Musk is so bright and accomplished, and also rather awkward and theatrical.
Notice all this debate is around what Musk intended, which is ultimately unknowable. Here’s another idea: What if it doesn’t matter — at least not that much — what Musk intended? Books teaching communication have a rule: If somebody is misunderstood during a speech or conversation, it’s the fault of the communicator, not the listener; it’s the responsibility of the person speaking to ensure they’re correctly understood. Give Musk the benefit of the doubt, and he still wasn’t correctly understood by many. Trump has extremist supporters who might take this gesture as a shout-out. The salute is causing an uproar in Europe. And Musk’s refusal to simply and clearly state “That is not what I meant” — or, better yet, “f–k Nazis and f–k Hitler, that’s what that gesture meant!” — has left it feeling like a wink and nod. Those kids marching around in fifth grade didn’t mean any harm by their playacting, but it still didn’t make it a good idea to do it.
Let’s put this in a different, Nazi-free context. If I’m moderating a Comic-Con panel and emphatically give Hall H my raised middle finger, 6,000 people are going to think I’m flipping them off. Many will be offended. How much does it matter if I somehow didn’t intend that? “C’mon, guys, I just said, ‘The Witcher fans are No. 1!’ Geez!” Their reaction to my gesture is my fault, not theirs.
A raised middle finger is another gesture you learn about in grade school. We all know what that means. We all know not to do it. We all know it’s offensive and how it will be perceived. Which is why, when you execute a near perfect-looking Nazi-esque salute onstage at a Trump rally … guess what? Whether you intend it or not, or think the reaction is silly or not, it doesn’t necessarily matter. Because when nobody can truly know what you’re thinking and an image or video circulates online forever, and can be used in all sorts of ways … what merely looks like a Nazi salute can, fairly or not, get turned into a Nazi salute.
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