Trump Inauguration: Elon Musk Offers MAGA Rally Nazi-Like Salute, CNN Calls It “Odd Looking”
The world's richest man is strong supporter of right-wing politics, & made gestures today at a rally for Donald Trump's second inauguration that's caused controversy
“This is a man with Aspergers exuberantly throwing his heart to the crowd,” the journalist said, calling Musk “a friend to the Jews.”
Also, Asperger's is no longer a medical term and there is no indication that Elon has ever actually been evaluated. Autism is not an excuse to throw a Nazi salute, for fuck's sake!
For lack of a better term I find it "interesting" that they're using the outdated term named for a Nazi collaborator
Someone should tell Musk what the Nazis did with "Aspergers" kids.
as a matter of fact, Hans Asperger's work during the national socialist years in Vienna can actually be described as dialectic. a rough summary would be that while participating in the evaluation and killing of children he developed his dissertation in order to get some of the kids out of the T4 program. that dissertation later became the base for the diagnosis that was named after him and found its way into popular culture.
Seriously... The fucking irony
Autist here, while I can be awkward and accidentally do or say offensive things not meaning them...
A full on fucking Hitler salute isn't even something we can do on accident.
Closest I've gotten was while getting excited in public shouting "WHITE POWER!"
Context: I was playing a Power Rangers game on my phone, and got Tommy Oliver's White Ranger, my voice went out before I could say "Ranger"... I am very bad at controlling the volume of my voice. Seriously, sometimes I'll say something and it sounds like I'm whispering, but I"m yelling and vice versa. I have no idea what's up with that, people often have to tell me if I'm yelling or not.
Maybe stick with the Green Ranger going forward.
A full on fucking Hitler salute isn’t even something we can do on accident.
Maybe Dr. Strangelove was autistic?
Thank you.
On Twitter, no less — a sycophant whose opinion is a net negative.
with that guy's history of making sock puppet accounts, this eric one is highly sus.
I actually did speculate on neurodiversity yesterday (as a neurodiverse person myself) and I can tell you it was because of shock over the whole thing. I'm not going to speculate.
edit: fixed some spelling
Elon I had well figured for a Nazi, certainly paints a message doing that at the POTUS podium, but CNN just calling it . . . odd? What the fuck is that non response about? I can only imagine that if they managed to open up labor camps CNN would call it 'slightly concerning'. Now more than ever we're on our own, the big club has give up all pretense of being unbiased and unmasked themselves for who they always wanted to be.
edit: And this is the NYTs enlightened take
CNN got a right wing CEO a few years ago IIRC. Late 2020 or maybe 2021 if memory serves. IMO the coverage was almost immediately different.
I'm confident that they are being forced to not compare the current situation to nazi Germany.
All of the "liberal media" (lol, that phrase was always silly and now it's beyond farcical) was already obeying in advance. This is just more of it.
As long as they popularized the term "Liberal MEdia", they could buy up stations and make them far Right without anyone noticing, that was the game.
The fourth estate is complicit and always has been.
everybody‘s ready to put on their new suits
They are looking to avoid libel suits from Musk and Trump.
As social media exploded with condemnation of what some were calling a “Sieg Heil,” with some others applauding the world’s richest man’s gesture, there was also some speculation that Musk’s movement was more like that of an Imperial Roman general in the Gladiator mode.
Do people think the Nazis invented their salute? They took it from the Romans. To say it was actually a Roman salute is to also say it was a Nazi salute because they are basically one and the same.
They didn't, the association with Rome comes from this painting. The author didn't have anything to believe it was historically correct.
It is correct though that Italian fascists had a hard on on everything that was classical Rome-adjacent and they picked the salute from a French painting like a bunch of noobs.
Interesting, so instead of them stealing the actual Roman salute, they stole what they thought the Roman salute was. Sure the Italian fascists used it too, but the Nazis compared what they wanted, a 1000 year Reich, to what Rome had created when they had a massive empire that lasted 500 years for the western empire and almost 1500 for the Eastern years if they include the West and almost 1000 by itself. So they didnt just take it from the Italian Fascists just cause, they did it because they thought it was Roman as well, and associated it with their desire to replicate the Romans.
Thanks for the info!
Edited the years for the Roman empire after being called out for being wrong.
There's sone subtle differences but fascism is modeled after the Roman Republic with intense nationalism thrown in. The salute the Romans did was the fascist salute.
Just saw a video of it, that's not just Nazi like, that is a textbook ENTHUSIASTIC NAZI SALUTE!
I mean, not textbook. It was sloppy and uncoordinated. Dipshits can't even fascism without looking awkward.
Twice.
This is the clincher for me. I could MAYBE give him the benefit of the doubt for being basically an excitable toddler who waves his arms around like a dickhead, but the fact he did the exact same salute, TWICE, shows he blatantly meant to do it. I think he meant to look a lot cooler than it did, and not like Butt-head.
That, and I can't believe the ADL, of all people, was equivocating on it.
Oh, wait, I can, because the ADL has long since stopped giving a shit about antisemitism and has instead started accusing anyone who protests against a genocide of being Nazis.
Magas are apparently explaining this with
“PBS News, which is publicly funded, is spreading propaganda that Elon Musk made a ‘fascist salute’ during his speech at Capital One Arena,” the post said. “Their own video clearly shows that he was motioning ‘my heart goes out to you’ to the audience. DEFUND PBS.”
Yeah, Hitler's heart also went out to all those poor Jews..
JFC
News media is dead. Anyone still in business a year from now will be strictly because they bent the knee for propaganda. We can't even rely on foreign news lately like we always did in America BBC seems gone too.
This will be the most terrifying aspect over the next handful of years.
Our media will begin to become state media. Historically, that's one of the last phases before the end of democracy.
I don't think people want to accept it yet, but this is actually happening here in America. We are on the path. It can happen here. I can happen anywhere.
Dafuq is this unelected dipshit doing at the podium to begin with? That should be the first question to ask.
I mean we all know why but I refuse to pretend this should be the "new normal"
Unelected? What do you mean? He bought his top spot of a kleptocracy fair and square.
Here's the thing, in a normal, functioning society if someone gets caught doing a gesture that is interpreted by some people as being a Nazi salute, that person apologizes.
Even if in their heart of hearts they really didn't mean to do a Nazi salute, they still apologize. They're not necessarily apologizing for Seig Heil, they're apologizing for how the gesture was received and interpreted. In a normal world, in a non fucked country, it's very important to clarify "I'm not a Nazi, I hate Nazis, I would never do that, and I'm very sorry that what I did hurt and scared people." In some countries, merely doing that gesture is grounds for arrest, but someone might avoid arrest if they made it clear it was an accident.
Whether or not it truly was 100% a Nazi salute matters less than the aftermath. No consequences, no apologies, no denials. The US is so fucked now that there are no consequences for credibly behaving like a Nazi in public. He won't be fired or censured by the boards of his companies. Trump and the rest of the GOP will continue to eagerly have him around.
The US is now a place where for about half the population (including a lot of non-white people) being a Nazi is not a dealbreaker.
Not just in public, the richest man in the world, during the inauguration of the President of the United States that he just spent a shit load of money getting elected.
This is terrifying. People should be terrified.
I'm too tired to be terrified
in a normal, functioning society if someone gets caught doing a gesture that is interpreted by some people as being a Nazi salute
But it isn't. All media has clearly told us within minutes that we did not actually saw what we saw with our own eyes and it's just error in judgement on our side to have mistaken his "odd looking gesture" for a nazi salute.
This take i agree with. I still have reservations on what Musk really was intending to do there. There's a slight variation in the way Musk did it and the way the Nazis used to do it, but it still demands an apology regardless of the facts.
It's quite consistent with immature edgelord behavior, he probably concocted how to "almost" do a Nazi salute get people all riled up and then say we are all dumb for taking it as a Nazi salute because his hand was open, and he tossed in a "my heart to you all" as a rationalization.
Like back in middle school a kid said "The teacher is a bitch" and the teacher overheard and called him on it and he said "the teacher is a fish, you know, glub glub" and thought he was so clever. That's the general energy of Musk.
I'm of the opinion that Musk didn't do an actual nazi salute. He did what he thinks is the nazi salute because he himself isn't a real nazi. He's just an insecure little man who wanted some approval and acknowledgement from actual nazis, so he did the salute as a "look, I'm totally one of you guys". He's a wannabe nazi. Not that there's a big difference because whether you're an actual nazi of a wannabe nazi, you're still a piece of shit. But I think him being a wannabe nazi fits with his public persona of being wannabe everything. He's a wannabe engineer, he's a wannabe tech bro, he's a wannabe gamer and now he's a wannabe Nazi.
Journalist in the middle of a highway road as a truck driven by elon musk barrels down towards them at blistering speed: IT IS UNCLEAR WHAT MUSKS MOTIVES AR-
Yeah. So weird, this Nazi salute. From the actual President of a fascist admin. Odd. Odd looking, even.
You could tell he's been waiting for the opportunity to do that for ages. He almost did it early and when it came time, he did it as hard as he could.
So who wants to take bets on how long it'll take Musk to say the N-Word?
And justify it because he's African American.
Yeah, claims are already going around that this is just must being clumsy
You don't clumsily accidentally make a Hitler salute, especially after cosying up with far right politicians that love what Hitler did.
There must be consequences for this. Anyone who is not a neo nazi should stop doing anything with any of the products from musk. You work at Tesla? Congratulations, you work at a neo nazi factory, you might want to reconsider your career future. Same goes for those at SpaceX; do you really want to be that guy who, ten years from now, has on their record that they worked at the neonazi rockets company?
People should leave Twitter in droves now, and so should companies. They should all stop buying Tesla shit, sell their Tesla stock, and get with the normal folks.
Fuck musk, let there for once be real consequences that he'll at least feel in his wallet.
I am legit worried about him so brazenly display his fascist tendencies. If this goes anywhere how it went 80 years ago, and I fear it may very well be, then at the end of it, let's please make sure we get rid of the Nazi scour forever.
I grew up with "never again never forget" and within a decade that went to "well this is cool man!" Clearly we didn't do enough to teach people and we've been way, WAY too lenient with those that love fascism
I was one of those who kept their twitter account because it was a good source for weather updates and breaking news. I wanted to leave but I justified it by not posting, and only interacting with my feed. Today I reached my breaking point when a comment chain on a non political post on my feed devolved into blue checkmarks saying why the platform owner was allowed to do a Hitler salute. I realized that the weather and niche news I got from the platform was VASTLY devalued by the sheer amount of racist and hateful commentary on everything. Yeah, I'm not being part of any of that, this man is a danger, and anyone who still follows or defends him is dead to me.
We're at the "normalizing fascism" stage.
Historically there's no way out of this. We're going to have to push through a very sad, very deadly phase in American history and see what happens on the other side.
Buy a gun.
I think he was practicing it in the mirror, too. There is no way that this is a coincidence or a mistake.
Not odd at all. Very specific in fact.
Odd looking is a kind way of looking at it.
You only get three hots and a cot for doing that salute in my country.
A sign of weakness.
This is the fourth or fifth post I have seen, again, without a video anywhere to be found
Finally a link that works in Australia, thanks
Were you under the bizarre impression this was photoshopped? It was broadcast internationally.
No I literally just want to see but no news site, post or otherwise had a video accessible at time of commenting
The video doesn’t help his case at all, he does the same gesture multiple times.
There are two videos linked in the article. One clip, and one full speech.