This Is Not A Nazi Salute

There seems to be a common conviction among several commentators in and around the anti-woke sphere that Elon Musk’s ‘awkward gesture’ at Trump’s inauguration on Monday could not possibly have been a Nazi salute and that anyone who thinks it was is probably a) stupid b) nuts or c) a sanctimonious virtue-signalling wanker posturing for woke-points. I find this easy dismissal troubling. I find it troubling in the same ‘the-party-told-you-to-reject-the-evidence-of-your-eyes’-way I found transactivist directives troubling. I find the complacent assurance that it couldn’t have been that because that would be insane troubling. And I continue to find it troubling when people insist that because left identitarians called people ‘nazis’ for saying things like ‘humans are sexed and that matters’ that somehow means that nobody could ever be some kind of supremacist with transparent domination fantasies at all.

First things first. What we are dealing with here is a complete performative gesture. And that gesture has a particular performative form. It’s not just putting your arm in the air any-old-way and stills of people with their arms in the air any-old-way do not remotely resemble refutation. There are side-by-side videos going around the internet which show, quite clearly, that Musk performed the entire gesture in a manner that exactly conforms, from beginning to end, to its performative structure. If you are making the claim that he did not perform the gesture, you cannot actually be claiming that he did not perform the gesture, because he transparently did. If someone sticks out their fist with the thumb held upwards, they have performed a gesture that looks like a thumbs up, and trying to argue that they didn’t amounts to telling people that that didn’t see what they saw, which I thought was something reality-based people were supposed to be against.

The claim that ‘that isn’t what that was’ can’t then be a claim that that isn’t what Musk did, or isn’t what people saw, but rather, a claim that that isn’t what he meant. That is, it’s an interpretative claim, and interpretation can be a somewhat nebulous business, and is probably not something people should be making such cut-and-dried pronouncements about. We don’t, as point of fact, know with absolute certainty what Musk meant. People who insist that that isn’t what he meant have attributed the gesture to his awkward autistic-ness (which is rather insulting to the many autistic people who manage to go around the world day in and day out without accidentally performing gestures that look rather like a Seig Heil), or have claimed on the basis of the words Musk uttered immediately afterwards that it was a ‘my heart goes out to you’ gesture. This is indeed, one contextual clue about his intention, or what he meant to convey, although, as many others have pointed out, it would be a very odd formulation of such a gesture, and the rather belligerent look on his face when he did it somewhat undermines that reading.

However, what is really at issue in this matter of interpretation is the much wider context which frames Musk’s gesture, how that context is being read (or ignored) depending on the political positions people are taking in the culture war, and the way their political investments then inform how they read their ‘opponents’ interpretations. Many of the anti-woke commentators seem confident that people’s professed anxieties about Musk’s gesture are just one more instance of wokeists being hysterical about fascism when there is really nothing to worry about, situating those concerns in a continuum of familiar efforts to shut down people’s speech or free expression by claiming that they’re nazis. The matter of the interpretation of the gesture then becomes a matter of making an ontological attribution to the person who performed it, as if the question could only be settled by seeing if ‘nazi’ runs through Elon Musk’s soul like letters through a stick of rock. This fusing of the qualities of the individual ‘soul’ with political gestures, pronouncements, or affiliations, is one of the curses of culture-war politics dominated by identitarianism on both sides. It has produced a situation in which political action is read only as the expression of individual, or tribal, character, and in which all political critique is immediately, and often viciously, personalised. It is certainly true that over the last decade, the witch-hunting excesses of left identitarianism were motivated by a pious and puritan effort to hunt down and exorcise perceived political sins. But by this stage of play, the flagrant jeering at the character of those who oppose MAGA and hard-right populism is equally pronounced.

I don’t claim to know what is in Elon Musk’s soul. All I, and other concerned observers, can do, is interpret the performance of a particular gesture within its political context, and be explicit about why we are reading the context in a certain way. That context is enormous, and unpicking its strands is one of the main things I want to do with this project. It involves, among many factors, Musk’s turning of Twitter into an engine of far-right radicalisation, to the extent that the last two years have been like watching a lot of people you thought had their heads screwed on being slowly boiled in increasingly fascist-flavoured water. It includes his many recent interventions in European politics, his support of far right and populist parties, his efforts to whip up racially motivated civil unrest, and to undermine the democratically elected government of Britian (twice!). It includes what we know about the anti-democratic, techno-feudalist, anarcho-capitalist, white supremacist, neo-reactionary ideologies that inform the worldviews of Silicon Valley’s broligarchy, many of whom lined up, literally, behind Trump on Monday. And it includes Musk’s central role in an incoming administration that has already set about rounding people up, shredding government departments, threating other sovereign nations, and releasing convicted criminals who were involved in trying to violently overturn the results of a democratic election.

None of this is normal. The fact that Joe Biden’s last act on his way out of the door was to pre-emptively pardon government officials because Trump has threatened to wreak vengeance upon them is not normal. In this context, dismissing Musk’s gesture and flatly suggesting it couldn’t possibly be what it appeared to be because that would be crazy makes no sense whatsoever. Our political situation and discourse is crazy, it has been crazy for well over a decade, and it is getting crazier by the day. One significant part of this craziness is that much of our social-media-saturated world is now overrun by a shitposting ethos that has been channelled straight out of 4Chan, whose vicious, racist and sexist intent is not ameliorated or exculpated by its pose of ironic ‘for the lulz’ deniability. As explored by Feels Good Man, a 2020 documentary on how Pepe the Frog became an alt-right meme, 4Chan culture – along with the QAnon conspiracy it also birthed – has played a significant role in far-right radicalisation and the MAGA phenomenon. Which is to say, to my eyes, what Musk did on Monday looked a great deal like shitposting behind a presidential podium, an instance of the extent to which the trolling norms of some dark corners of the internet have now consumed our political culture IRL.

This does not suggest that we can say with any certainty that Musk did not mean it. Trolling is basically a form of bullying, a form of bullying which, like most bullying, consists of a flagrant display of viciousness or domination, which then disavows itself as such, in order to get away with it. The point is getting away with it, while laughing at people for taking it seriously, although it is, in fact, an entirely serious effort to bulldoze boundaries. The fact that such a gesture upsets, indeed, in this case, scares, a good number of people, is part of its purpose. On X, genuine expressions of concern about Musk’s gesture were greeted with the obligatory ‘cry harder libs’ sneer which is now, notably, as ubiquitous as the ‘white women tears TM’ assholery common from the woke side circa 2013. It turns out that neither left nor right identitarians have exclusive rights to being bullying dicks to their perceived opponents when they find themselves in the ascendent. But the extent to which the assorted forces of anti-wokeism persist in denying this fact, endlessly recycling done-to-death narratives about wokeist piety and virtue signalling that fail to reckon with how the pieces have moved on the political board in recent years, and the evident displays of authoritarianism and reality-bending from the hard right, is tiresome and indeed, rather frightening.

Much of the anti-woke side has now sealed itself up and immured itself from self-interrogation in a refracting inversion of the techniques used earlier by the woke. Both sides reduce critics to emissaries of a corrupt status quo (‘whitecispatriarchalcapitalism’ / ‘globalist elite’), ‘everyone I don’t like is a Nazi’ has been flipped into ‘everything I don’t like is woke,’ while effacing the untruths or twatishness of your own ‘team’ has turned into a cult-like imperative on the populist side as well. In this process, pretty much everyone, and everything, positioned in between is ground into oblivion. And while many of the champions of free speech and heterodox opinion style themselves as independent thinkers lacking loyalty to a given tribe, they have mostly failed to turn their forensic on the lies and coercion coming from the anti-woke side, or even acknowledge the process of hard right radicalisation transparently underway. Most of the denizens of X will tell you confidently that Bluesky is full of authoritarian pronoun people policing minor linguistic infractions, whereas my experience is of a range of activists, analysts and academics grimly documenting what they take to be a clear and present threat to Western democracy. You may disagree with their assessment of the seriousness of the situation, but, given the political facts, it is cavalier and irresponsible in the extreme to flatly dismiss their concerns, or equate them with the worst excesses of wokeist zealotry.

Only time will tell if people’s worst fears are unfounded. But they are not pretending to be scared by what they see.