Elon Musk gets awkward

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What Kind of Salute Does a Nazi Supporter Make?

THERE WAS A game the fascists played back around the start of the first Trump administration, where in the name of pulling a prank they put out the claim that the hand-gesture for "OK," rotated a certain way, shaped the letters "WP," for "White Power." They began flashing the OK sign in public, and outrage-hunting liberals began looking out for it, and the joke was that the liberals could be baited into claiming to see racist signals anywhere, when all they were really seeing was a...hand signal that White Power enthusiasts had chosen to show off their affiliation and to demonstrate their contempt for antiracism. Get it?

Earlier this month, at a campaign event in Saxony, supporters of Germany's neo-Nazi party, Alternativ für Deutschland, welcomed their candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, by chanting "Alice für Deutschland"—a slogan that coincidentally happened to sound exactly like the long-banned Nazi slogan "Alles für Deutschland." It was just her name, after all. 

On Inauguration Day in Washington D.C., at a rally for the far-right anti-immigrant president whose campaign he had just spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting, Elon Musk did something with his right arm. The New York Times reporter Ryan Mac, drawn into political coverage from his position covering Musk and other tech oligarchs, described the moment fairly accurately. After Musk thanked the crowd, Mac wrote: 

The billionaire then grunted and placed his hand to his heart before extending his arm out above his head with his palm facing down. After he turned around, he repeated the motion to those behind him.

The dissociative house style of the Times prevented the writer from directly naming the thing that the story was reporting; instead, the coverage had to move from the person who made the gesture to the gesture itself to the public reaction to the gesture before it got around to the word "Nazi":

The motion soon drew comparisons online to the salute popularized by Adolf Hitler, and others interpreted it as a Roman salute, which is also known as the “Fascist salute” and was later adopted by the Nazis