Elon Musk is a cretin. Let’s get that out of the way up front. The world’s richest man is a purveyor of racist conspiracism, has helped turn the internet into an extremist cesspool, and is, according to at least one of his children, a terrible father. But is he a Nazi? Sure! At least in the colloquial sense in which the term has been employed in the last few decades to mean a supporter or apparatchik of authoritarian far-right political movements.
Elon Musk is, of course, not a literal Nazi. Those guys were mostly taken care of by 1945, and the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei does not have any current members. In the colloquial meaning of the word, though, Musk cleared the bar ages ago. He peddles antisemitic dreck, has a penchant for race science, and is a vocal supporter of an actual far-right German political party. By the time he volunteered to serve as Donald Trump’s propaganda master – his personal Goebbels, if you will – there was no real reason to doubt Musk’s affinity for far-right, authoritarian politics.
So why, when the spastic oligarch threw out two weird, Nazi-esque salutes during Monday’s inaugural festivities, did almost all of Musk’s and Trump’s most avowed political opponents treat it like news? Sure, I can understand the shock factor; for all the degradation in American politics over the last decade, we still don’t see a lot of sieg heils. But we already knew what he is, and the problem with Nazis is not that they salute.
On day one of a new administration – which those to the left of center should rightly be resisting – an enormous mass of them instead dedicated their attention and efforts to a sideshow. Instead of focusing on and writing about and organizing against the flurry of Executive Orders issuing from the Oval Office, millions of liberals and Democrats focused on scoring a quick gotcha. In doing so, they showed that their understanding of this current moment in American politics is lagging years behind. There are no gotchas anymore.
If we cannot learn to resist the shiny objects, the trolling, the distractions, we will be pulled off-mission every 72 hours for the next four years. In an attention-driven media economy, reserving our attention for the significant, substantive damage the new administration is doing – the things which can be actively opposed – is the first step we need to take in the right direction. To get there, we have to break ourselves of the instincts that served us well in a different era.
Like many of my fellow left-of-center Americans, I loved Jon Stewart’s incarnation of the Daily Show during my formative years. Stewart’s well-spoken sarcasm influenced the style of my own nascent political discussions, and those of many of my peers. We loved the references to Fox News as “Bullshit Mountain,” the annual parrying and mocking of the right’s “War on Christmas” narratives, and the constant flow of gotchas. More than anything, gotchas are what Stewart’s Daily Show trafficked in: a clip of a Republican saying one thing, juxtaposed with a clip of the same Republican saying the opposite. A politician saying the quiet part out loud. Things like that.
In 2007, this was dynamite. “He’s a hypocrite!” “He’s a flip-flopper!” “He said something inappropriate!” These were things politicians at the time actually worried about being hit with. And, because those gotchas could have an impact, they became the left’s go-to means of making their opponents look foolish.
Until it stopped working, right around 2015, and they kept trying it anyway. The older I get, and the worse the nation’s political reality becomes, the more I realize that Stewart’s gotcha-style politics did not equip liberals for the situation we are now facing.
Trump’s first term was the death knell for the gotcha. By the time he reached his 100th day in office, the jumped-up real estate heir had survived dozens of gotchas, none of which actually got him. It became clear that the rules had changed. Shame had left the building entirely – and there can be no gotcha in the absence of shame.
It was not just Trump, or other elected Republicans, who shed their sense of shame early in that first term. Many of their voters underwent the same metamorphosis, taking their cues from the top. In the past, even a genuinely shameless politician had to worry about the judgment of his voters. He might not blush over a scandal, but he still had to worry that they would, and that it could cost him a job. As conservative voters chose not to punish Trump and his boosters’ worst behavior – and, in many cases, chose to reward it – the incentives changed. Unfortunately, most liberals failed to notice, or to update their playbooks accordingly.
So when Musk awkwardly stiff-armed his way through a couple of apparent Nazi salutes on Monday, they leapt into action like Jon Stewart going after Karl Rove, certain that the gotcha would land.
But where was it supposed to land? What impact was it supposed to have?
Like many, I raised two whole eyebrows when I saw the clip of Musk’s gestures – then I lowered them, and the rest of my face, into my palm when I saw the left’s response, muttering something about having learned nothing.
What was the theory of the case here? Because, from where I sit, the entire premise of the Nazi salute gotcha was based on magical thinking. Was the idea that the national news media – which has entered into a symbiotic relationship with Trump, Musk, and their noxious authoritarianism in pursuit of ratings – would suddenly realize the error of its ways, and Rachel Maddow would be airing in prime time on every network forthwith? That didn’t happen after Charlottesville, when Trump referred to literal neo-Nazis as “very fine people” (for which Musk defended him). It didn’t happen after January 6th.
Or was the idea that conservative voters, loyal to Trump beyond anything we have seen in U.S. electoral history, were suddenly going to have the scales fall from their eyes and repent? “Oh my god! They’re Nazis! Thank you for liberating my mind, @ResistanceDeborah12345! I will never vote Republican again! God forgive me for what I have done!” Because that has not happened yet either.
Whatever the idea, it was wrong. While many of my fellow liberals were indulging this fantasy, Donald Trump was signing orders to deploy U.S. troops domestically, target the LGBTQ+ community, and end birthright citizenship, among a raft of other initiatives which are more reminiscent of the relevant parts of Nazi rule than their signature hand gesture.
The problem with the Nazis was not that they saluted: it was that they persecuted minorities, cracked down on civil liberties, and eventually unleashed bloodshed like the world had never seen, killing 6 million Jews in concentration camps and scarring a wide swath of Europe for decades to come. While Trump was making good on those first two steps, the “#Resistance” was distracted.
The gotcha is not just dead, it is a wasted effort by the people eager to fight back in meaningful ways. I understand the impulse, but we have to move past it. We already know Elon Musk is a “Nazi.” No new information was provided, and there was no real action to be taken. But attention was given anyway, so we are now on day four of a “was it a Nazi salute?” news cycle. This is not 2017, when every aberration warranted a round of action-less pearl-clutching before moving onto the next one. This is 2025, and we don’t have time for that anymore. We barely have time to do the necessary work of organizing and building resilience in our communities, and that’s where our attention and efforts need to be.
I am not saying that Musk’s salute was not shocking. It was, and it should be. I am not even saying that wasn’t a Nazi salute — it takes effort to pretend it was anything else. I am saying that it does not matter: the actual authoritarianism was occurring down the street, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’d already taken our eyes off the ball.
It’s going to be a long few years if we can’t do better than that.
