People Are Actually Defending Elon Musk’s Nazi-Like Salute as Him Just Being Neurodivergent
Even if Musk did "accidentally" make the Nazi-like salute, multiple neo-Nazis gleefully embraced the gesture at face value as a Sieg Heil, and proclaimed, "We are so back."
Photo: Getty Images Politics
As anyone could have predicted, Inauguration Day was a clusterfuck. Still, one thing managed to cut through the fascist noise. During a characteristically bizarre post-Inauguration speech at the Capitol One Arena, Elon Musk appeared to deliver not one but two Nazi salutes before tens of thousands of cheering Trump supporters.
Even as eyeroll-inducing online debate rages on about whether this was accidental and Musk was simply signaling joy pouring from his heart (lol, sure!!!), the gesture, in practice, pretty clearly resembles a Nazi salute; if he didn’t intend for this, a reasonable person would apologize by now—so, it should speak volumes that he hasn’t! Instead, he simply wrote off the backlash as liberal hysteria, tweeting on Monday night, “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”
Since Monday, all the usual suspects—Musk sycophants, right-wingers, and online “free thinkers” (AKA right-wingers)—rushed to give Musk cover and convince us we didn’t see what we saw. Batya Ungar-Sargon, the Opinions editor at Newsweek, blamed the apparent Nazi salute on Musk’s diagnosed Asperger’s syndrome, which is a developmental disorder on the autism spectrum.
“Elon Musk is a friend to Jews,” Ungar-Sargon wrote, despite Musk’s website, Twitter/X, being a hotbed for neo-Nazis, some of whom Musk personally unbanned after buying the app, allowing pro-Nazi accounts to explode across the platform. Musk also often shares posts advocating for the white supremacist, anti-Semitic Great Replacement theory, among other anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Earlier this month, he hopped on a friendly livestream with Alice Weidel, the chancellor candidate for the far-right Alternative for Germany party, during which they pushed disinformation about Adolf Hitler. Nonetheless, Batya Ungar-Sargon continued, “This is a man with Aspergers exuberantly throwing his heart to the crowd. We don’t need to invent outrage.”
This seems to be the talking point that Musk’s apologists are running with: that we’re all being ableist if we believe Musk would perform a Nazi salute. This disingenuous line of defense would be stupid under any circumstance, but it’s all the more so since Musk openly used the ableist slur “retarded” throughout 2024.
Aaron Astor, a history professor at Maryville College in Tennessee, later posted in Musk’s defense, “This is a socially awkward autistic man’s wave to the crowd where he says ‘my heart goes out to you.’” The Anti-Defamation League, an organization that claims to combat anti-Semitism and promote civil liberties while instead backing Israel’s genocide and targeting pro-Palestine voices, shamelessly defended Musk’s salute, too. The organization similarly suggested that Musk is just an awkward, bumbling oaf who, at 53 years old, didn’t know better than to (allegedly) perform two Sieg Heils. “It seems that [Musk] made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge,” the organization wrote in a widely panned tweet. “In this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt, and take a breath.”