One thing that's easy enough to see about Elon Musk's infamous hand gesture from Donald Trump's inauguration celebration is that he acted with deliberation. As the video from the event shows, he threw his back into it, taxing himself enough that he grunted from the exertion.
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 20, 2025 at 2:58 PM
And then he turned around and repeated the gesture in the other direction, in case anyone missed it.
Elon Musk gave two back to back Nazi salutes at the Trump inauguration parade
— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes.bsky.social) January 20, 2025 at 3:07 PM
I'm not here to litigate what mainstream media outlets, always wary of defamation lawsuits and angry MAGA emails, used as descriptors of this gesture, so familiar to anyone who has ever seen a film reel from WWII. Instead, I want to flag that we've been down this road before, during the first Donald Trump administration, when white nationalists appropriated the "OK" hand gesture to troll progressives.
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To recap: Pretending it was a "joke," white nationalists, starting around 2015, started flashing the OK hand gesture as a sign of racist solidarity. This wasn't the OK sign in the casual way most people do it. They usually exaggerated for effect, sometimes flipping their hand upside down to make it look especially odd and therefore noticeable. The goal of this was twofold: First, to signal fascist sympathizers to fellow travelers. Second, to bait liberals into ugly, divisive debates over the "true" meaning of the gesture.
The OK sign was just the most prominent version of fascist peekaboo, but there are plenty of other ways the far-right trolls progressives with coded language, only to declare innocence and feign outrage when called out on it.
The troll worked beautifully. Every time some Proud Boy or cop or local GOP official or online troll or Brett Kavanaugh aide flashed the exaggerated OK hand gesture, progressives who understood the tactic called it out as fascist signaling. In response, mainstream journalists and moderates eager to prove their resistance to hysteria were quick to scold progressives as "paranoid," insisting these people weren't "real" racists — despite their love of Trump! — but were instead pretending to be racist to get a reaction. They rarely paused to ask why someone who isn't racist would be fine with merely "pretending" to be racist, especially since acting like a racist tends to mean people see you as a racist.
The pretzel logic phase ended a couple years in, when one of those "ironic" racists shot up a mosque in New Zealand, killing 50 people. He flashed the OK hand gesture during his arraignment. Since you can't murder people "ironically," the mainstream media had to finally admit the gesture was both a troll and a sincere symbol of white nationalist beliefs. No apologies were made to those who didn't need 50 murders to get to the obvious truth, but hey, at least the scolding stopped.
The OK sign was just the most prominent version of fascist peekaboo, but there are plenty of other ways the far-right trolls progressives with coded language, only to declare innocence and feign outrage when called out on it. It's not just about baiting the left, though. It's a recruitment tactic. Having provoked progressives into yelling at them, authoritarians will appeal to centrists with some form of, "Don't you hate these paranoid leftists?" Once the hook is in the mouth, they draw their prey in with, "But you know, fascists did have some good ideas. Would you like to read some Curtis Yarvin about the need to get past dictator-phobia?"
Musk spends all his time on Twitter, chatting with far-right trolls, so the odds he's unaware of how this works are approximately zero. His behavior follows the standard script. Having made the obnoxious public gesture, he's now baiting the "liberals are paranoid" hook, tweeting, "The 'everyone is Hitler' attack is sooo tired."
But what is actually tired is this exhausting "Who me?" act. The good news is much of the reaction shows that progressives have learned how to deal with peekaboo trolling. The first step is to refuse to get sucked into "debates" about the "real" meaning of a gesture. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., modeled how to do it, as she often does. After the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which has drifted towards Trump apology, insisted Musk merely made "an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm," she responded curtly on Twitter, saying, "People can officially stop listening to you as any sort of reputable source of information now."
A huge part of the peekaboo troll is provoking extensive arguments, by preying on the often misplaced faith among progressives in the power of reason and evidence. These go-nowhere debates exhaust progressive energies and make it easier for the right to paint the left as "shrill." As counterintuitive as it may seem, this "whatever dude" response can make it easier for people, especially fence-sitters, to be open to reason. Instead of feeling brow-beaten, they are invited to trust what their own eyes and ears are telling them. That's a more inviting approach to persuading people to look at evidence.
By not wasting too much energy doing a frame-by-frame analysis to determine if something meets an exacting definition of a "Nazi" salute, progressives and smart journalists have learned to spend time on what really matters: the context and impacts.
Perhaps someone feels unconvinced that Musk meant the gesture he put so much effort into. And it's true! We can't know what Musk meant with absolute certainty, especially since nothing he says about his own thought process can be trusted. Having not wasted energy arguing about the gesture, one can point to the bigger picture. For instance, Musk backs not just MAGA in the U.S., but also the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, a radical, far-right group whose leaders have been fined for using Nazi slogans, denounced the monuments to Holocaust victims, and declared Germans should be "proud of the achievements of the German soldiers in two world wars." Musk persists in championing AfD, even though German courts found "some AfD members favor a two-tier society in which 'ethnic' Germans are given more rights than people from immigrant backgrounds," NBC News reported.
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Some news outlets wisely sidestepped the go-nowhere debate about what Musk "meant" to focus on a more productive topic: the impact of his behavior. On this, there is no debate: Loud-and-proud Nazis were over the moon about the Musk salute.
"Right-Wing Extremists Are Abuzz Over Musk’s Straight-Arm Salute," declared the headline at Rolling Stone. Wired went with a similar headline: "Neo-Nazis Love the Nazi-Like Salutes Elon Musk Made at Trump's Inauguration." The examples are hard to wiggle away from. Thanking Musk for the gesture, one white nationalist group tweeted, "The White Flame will rise again." Another poster, who helped create a chatbot named after Adolph Hitler, shared the clip with the caption, "Incredible things are happening already lmao." Reporting on this impact is far more helpful than digressive debates over the exact meaning of the word "fascist."
Most people, if they made this gesture innocently, would be upset about the neo-Nazis trying to claim common cause with them. As Ed Kilgore argued at New York Tuesday, "there is an easy way to clear this up, particularly for someone who owns a major social-media platform and uses it very often." All Musk needs to do is "make the gesture of denouncing fascism aggressively." He adds that explicitly rejecting fascism and white nationalism "should be worth a few dozen tweets, wouldn’t you say?"
Musk, however, saves his ire for anti-racists and seems unworried about neo-Nazis praising him. That is behavior inconsistent with an honest mistake, but it certainly echoes the model of trolling the left that we saw with white nationalists who flashed the "OK" sign. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what's in Musk's heart, but how he acts. When someone keeps casting warm smiles at racists while mocking anti-racists, they are promoting racism. At every turn, Musk's behavior is friendly and helpful to the worst people in our society. As Ocasio-Cortez said, those who refuse to see his behavior for what it is aren't worth listening to.
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