Bat signal for bigots
By now, I presume nearly everyone who is not in a convent, monastery or otherwise off the grid has seen the footage of Elon Musk performing a Nazi salute.
I’m not going to mince words about this. Too much is at stake. In fact, this too-much-at-stakeness is what I mean to talk about.
Immediately after Musk did his Seig Heil at Donald Trump’s post-inaugural rally / reception, memes were at the ready to call into question if viewers had seen what they just saw. I’ve seen at least two montages of Democrats caught mid-speech, arm raised in the air. None of these are contextualized, just still images.
This serves two purposes. It muddies the waters to give trolls a facetious talking point as to how what those people did is totally what Musk did. It also allows them at the same time to call those Democratic and liberal figures Nazis and fascists, a bonus for those seeking to troll on this point.
I am not on Twitter / X, but it is my understanding that Musk himself put forward at least one of these montages. He even might have originated it, which would underscore his malice aforethought in throwing the Seig Heil in the first place.
It’s clear that Musk wanted to throw the Nazi sign but also not be held accountable for it. The footage, carried live, was immediately softened by commentators who used euphemisms and misdirections to avoid referring to the clear body language Musk enacted. The precise moment in broadcasts was later redacted, replaced by camera shots of the crowd. Newspaper headlines described it as a Roman salute or even a “strange gesture,” attributing this “awkwardness” to Asperger’s.1
Some people are speculating that Musk threw the symbol in order to demonstrate his power, that he could do something so flagrant and suffer no consequences. I think he did it to demonstrate that he could do it and then make people confused as to whether he meant it. Of course, actual white supremacists are not puzzled at all.
I have spent a lot of time over the years avoiding Musk. I always thought he was overblown and didn’t pay him much mind (until his hostile takeover of Twitter), so I don’t know much about him as an individual. But I can tell you what I know of narcissists.
One thing that is true of many narcissists — it’s certainly true of Donald Trump, for example — is a trait called duping delight. Con artists the world over have been engaged in this form of ecstasy. It’s the feeling of joy and charged excitement liars get when they know they’ve got one over on their mark. By deceiving others, they get a thrill.
Consider Musk’s response to the Anti-Defamation League running interference for him by using its reputation to insert into the conversation a fig leaf of plausible deniability.2 Musk replied with a laughing-crying emoji, as though he were ROTFL his AO.
Liars and narcissists aren’t the only ones who derive duping delight. Psychopaths do, too. I’ll leave it to you to determine which category best suits Musk.
So we saw a flurry of articles and news segments covering Musk’s tribute to Nazism, but then the majority of those outlets reeled their coverage back. Now it was unclear what Musk’s sign meant; or it only resembled a Nazi salute; or it was really a Roman salute (which, in the first place, is historically inaccurate); or any number of things.
Musk’s clear signal became a parlor game, a diabolical form of charades. The dangerous thing is that newsrooms across the country went along with this.
If we’re debating about what the signal was, we can’t discuss what it means. This is a way Musk forestalls consequences.
At the same time, it has had life-changing consequences for at least one person exercising her freedom of expression. Sam Kuffel,3 a meteorologist at CBS 58 in Milwaukee (WDJT), was fired for sounding off against Musk’s Nazi salute on her own Instagram account. She used the word ‘fuck’ several times in her pointed remarks, but she is fully in her right to express her thoughts.
A conservative radio host complained about Kuffel’s statements, calling her comments “vulgar.” She was out by Wednesday. The salute just happened on Monday! Do we see the swiftness in which once-permissible speech is now verboten?
The reason Kuffel lost her job is directly a function of this Schrödinger’s cat, is-it-or-isn’t-it status of Musk’s signal. Because people have cemented the idea that it’s unknowable as to what the gesture meant — which is ridiculous — Kuffel was punished for going outside of that consensus. She spoke against Elon Musk! We can’t have that.4
In a democracy, we cannot have individuals who are uncriticizable.
This is our body politic, and within days of Trump’s inauguration we’ve been gagged and bound. The fascists are counting on us to cooperate in our rape, for us to lie back and let it happen. We need to bite, tear, scratch, kick, and yell with all our might. We must rage — rage — against the dying of the light.5
Asperger’s syndrome is a high-functioning form of autism originally included in the DSM-IV, the diagnostic manual used by doctors, psychiatrists and other medical professionals. The disorder has since been removed from the DSM-V, instead folded into the broader category of Autism Spectrum Disorder.
The ADL’s tweet, in full:
The original version of this essay misspelled the meteorologist’s last name. It is Kuffel, not Fuller. My apologies for the error.
More than one commenter from Germany, in the wake of this episode, has exhorted their American counterparts to learn the meaning of Gleichschaltung. This term from the Nazi era has no direct sociopolitical translation, according to Wikipedia, but “as one German citizen visiting London explained, ‘It means the same stream will flow through the ethnic body politic [Volkskörper].’”
Wikipedia adds, “The Nazis also used other similar terms, such as Ausschaltung, which constituted the removal or ‘switching off’ of anyone who stained or soiled the German nation. … if you failed to comply with Nazi ideals of racial and social conformity, you were ‘switched off.’” This is what happened to Fuller.
Dylan Thomas penned “Do not go gentle into that good night” (one of the most famous poems of the twentieth century), with “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light” as its evocative refrain.
This tendency to hide racist views through “irony” (aka its only a joke, bro) has been around since at least the 1990s and probably before that. That, combined with the fact that the mainstream media is falling all over itself to explain away Musk’s clear Sieg Heil gesture illustrates to me that any desire of the past sixty years or so to remedy racism has always been superficial. Once the fairly barebones laws that existed got repealed or gutted, there was no need to keep up appearances. Much like the New Deal and Great Society programs, I believe that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were always meant to be concessions that would be revoked once they lost their propaganda value.
The Democrats have no fight in them to challenge this. Indeed, I’ve always thought that the geriatric Democratic leadership (such as it is), like Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and the Clintons yearn for the old days of the Solid South, and view minority voters as the electoral equivalent of Diet Coke (ie all empty calories that probably cause cancer). Since liberals consider civil and human rights to be transactional, they probably think minority voters deserve to suffer for not being sufficiently thankful for Joe “most progressive president since FDR” Biden.