Clearly, Elon Musk did a Nazi salute

Two, actually

It was rather difficult to find an acceptable AI prompt for this piece. Credit: Microsoft Image Designer

One of the tedious things about woke politics is that so much energy is spent arguing about what certain words and symbols mean. Terms that had a clear meaning by common consensus five minutes ago suddenly become contested, the argument over what it means to be a ‘man’ or ‘woman’ being only the most prominent of these, followed by the extremely meta debate over whether ‘woke’ is a meaningful term. (It is at least as meaningful as any other descriptor of political tendencies.)

I’m not especially clubbable in politics, but on these issues I roughly align with the rationalist crowd, who often gravitate towards the anti-woke side of an argument. If you are keen to ground your politics in material facts about human nature, you are likely to want words to have as fixed a meaning as possible, rather than taking the approach of the Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland:

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

Such logic is of course infuriating, making it largely impossible to discuss anything, since any attempt is dismissed on the grounds that the words and symbols we use to represent reality can mean anything. It’s clever, but also stupid, an example of the perfect being made a fatal enemy of the good, as well as being reminiscent of a smartarse at sixth-form debating society.

You’ll therefore understand my dismay at seeing people I view as basically sound on culture war flashpoints deploy a similar kind of sophistry when it comes to Elon Musk. As an arch opponent of what he called the “woke mind virus”, Musk at least has the vibe of someone who wouldn’t tolerate this kind of nonsense, even if his record on Twitter is waffly, incoherent and conspiratorial.

Being rational-coded is part of the reason why certain people are making excuses for Musk’s bizarre behaviour at the presidential inauguration on Monday. There Musk was seen throwing what were described by some outlets – no doubt hedging their bets over legal worries – as throwing “odd-looking salutes”.

Let’s be straight here: Musk did the fascist salute, not once, but twice. This is not a comment on his intentions in making the salute, or whether it was deliberate. It is a comment on the fact that there are a series of actions that constitute a fascist salute, and Musk performed those actions, as anyone can verify by watching videos of it. People that claim that Musk didn’t perform a fascist or Nazi salute (or even a Roman one, if you prefer) are simply wrong.

We can of course argue about what it means. Some defenders of Musk say that he was throwing his heart out the audience, noting that he said “my heart goes out to you” as he performed the gesture. Others say he is just a socially-awkward autistic guy who happened to flail his arms about in a gesture that exactly matches that used by the Nazis.

I cannot fully discount either of these explanations, any more than I can discount the possibility that Musk suffered a minor stroke and spasmed in an unfortunate way. The limits of our knowledge are such that there are many things we can’t put beyond ‘reasonable doubt’, which is the exact reason that phrase sets the threshold for guilt in English criminal courts (until they changed it to ‘sure’, which is dumb, but a topic for another day).

My best guess is that Musk thought it would be amusing to provoke people by doing this. As king of the Twitter trolls, he’ll be well aware of the memes and symbols associated with Nazism, and deploying them to antagonise his opponents is exactly in keeping with his previous behaviour and personality. Even his response to the backlash lends weight to this theory: “Frankly, [my critics] need better dirty tricks,” he said on Twitter. “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”

He is not wrong that Hitler comparisons are tired and often silly. Fascists don’t typically burn through their political goodwill after winning an election by arguing for continued migration, as Musk did. Nor were fascists particularly known for supporting the anarchy of a modern social media platform such as Twitter. (Yes hate speech has increased on Twitter since Musk bought it, but this is consistent with the American libertarian tradition on free speech that he endorses, his own hypocrisy on the issue noted.)

More broadly, and as George Orwell pointed out long ago: “The word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.” Almost anything, from the mildest restrictions up to outright liberalisation, can be termed fascism by critics. It is a term too freighted with trauma and too contested to be useful, as would be the case even if hysterical progressives hadn’t mashed the term into pulp over the past decade. Its only proper use at this stage is in describing historical fascist movements, where it can be grounded in something historic and somewhat settled.

All of which is to say that I largely agree with the likes of Andrew Doyle, who claims that “calling people Nazis doesn’t work anymore”. But this does not discount that one of Donald Trump’s top advisors threw out fascist salutes in public, as a matter of fact.