The Daily Populous Wednesday January 22nd, 2025 morning edition
Authored by vanityfair.com and submitted by michkennedy

If a person did not mean to make a Nazi salute, but made something that looked just like a Nazi salute in front of a giant crowd and a worldwide television audience, a logical first step to clarifying the situation might be denying that that gesture was a Nazi salute. Elon Musk has not done that. Instead, he called the characterizations of a certain Sieg Heil-flavored gesture he made multiple times at the bizarre indoor “inaugural parade” for newly sworn-in Felon-in-Chief Donald Trump Monday afternoon “sooo tired.” He included a snoozy emoji too, in case those extra o’s weren’t doing it.

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On X (formerly Twitter), the social media platform that he owns, Musk responded Monday evening to the brouhaha over the full-arm gesture, which he made multiple times from the stage of the Capital One Arena, but did not offer a nein to the Nazi accusations.

“Frankly, they need better dirty tricks,” he wrote. “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”

The thing is, people weren’t calling him Hitler. They were saying that he made a gesture that people who really dig Hitler typically make. It would be very easy to just plainly say that that wasn’t the intention, but Musk just let that pass.

Holocaust deniers and openly self-identified Neo-Nazis were thrilled to see the tech mogul and DOGE Head DOGE-er appear to acknowledge them.

Far-right political commentator Evan Kilgore tweeted a clip of the moment Monday, writing, “Holy crap...Did @elonmusk just Heil Hitler at the Trump Inauguration Rally in Washington D.C...This is incredible.” He added two fire emojis for good measure, and followed up in another tweet: “We are so back,” appending a—wait for it—saluting emoji. Oh.

In his replies, Kilgore repeatedly insisted that “it’s a joke” and that “we all know that wasn’t his intention.” Do…we? Also on Monday, he tweeted, “Elon Musk is autistic. He was excited. We all know his intentions weren't to make a Sieg Heil. It looked much more like a Roman Salute. Can we all have a sense of humor for 5 seconds?”

The twist: The Roman Salute was also known as the Fascist Salute, and was later adopted by—you guessed it!—the Nazis.

On Tuesday morning, Kilgore posted again, insisting that the motion “was out of excitement and autism” and called those conflating it with the Nazi gesture “retarded.”

The Anti-Defamation League also leaped to Musk’s defense in a post on X, hedging and calling the times “a delicate moment” and urging followers to give him “the benefit of the doubt.”

“It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge,” the anti-hate group wrote on Monday afternoon.

WhaleFactory on January 21st, 2025 at 22:10 UTC »

It's really something that the same people who felate Elon at every opportunity defend it by saying they think it just seemed like an excited person who is on the spectrum.

Nuh uh, you don't get to be the "smartest person on the planet" and also get a "on the spectrum" pass for doing a fucking sieg heil at an American Presidential inagural event. After endorsing a nazi political group in Germany. Fuck you.

sugarlessdeathbear on January 21st, 2025 at 21:58 UTC »

It clearly was.

Also, stop going to X. Don't let a Nazi make money on ad revenue.

Foreign-Repeat9813 on January 21st, 2025 at 21:58 UTC »

It was a Nazi salute, and it comes as no surprise to anyone who has studied Musk. Seth Abramson in his essay The Truth About Musk, From His Biographer dispels the flattering, everchanging, myth Elon Musk carefully tends and shamelessly peddles on his Twitter/X. Here's an excerpt detailing the Musks' white supremacist activities:

> A significant amount of the Musk fortune Elon enjoyed growing up, and which his dad used to support him in Canada and America-and this will explain why Elon for years lied about his father’s support, even to the point of falsely implying he had written his father out of his life entirely-came from illegal apartheid-era mines in Zambia that exploited their Black workers but made the Musks fantastically wealthy.

> The Musk Family refused to pay taxes on these mines or reveal their interest in them for a reason that makes sense if you know that the Musks comes from generations of white supremacists and some of them-e.g., Elon Musk’s grandparents-were even open Nazi sympathizers.