Unpopular Opinion

Posting this to sticky it in the comments.

This post is somewhat in the realm of rule 1 (no politics), but it's highly topical (for better or worse) and not specifically political. So as long as the discussion remains civil and without devolving into endless volleys of Godwin's Law, I'll allow it. Please don't make me regret this lol.

Family was literal Nazi's, has been known to speak positively of Nazi policy, now does the actual salute, twice...

Yeah.. your not gonna convince me man... if it looks like a Nazi and smells like a Nazi...

made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm

Twice. Once, maybe it was an unfortunate, awkward moment. Twice? Ehhhhhh, doubtful.

The most charitable thing I can say is that if he's not literally one, he's signaling the ones who do identify as such.

Corporate wants you to find the difference between these two pictures

Funny that you use the wording of the ADL…

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/10/nx-s1-5252473/elon-musk-germany-election-afd-candidate-alice-weidel

He only supports a far right wing german party that has used nazi slogans and symbols

https://apnews.com/article/germany-far-right-politician-conviction-nazi-slogan-ccda2b9beef36efd124c2ae610681bf8

dO yOuRe OwN ReSeArCh!!

Seriously, actually do it instead of being fed propaganda

You're not going to convince me that he's not a nazi even if he somehow didn't intentionally perform a nazi salute - he IS awkward, after all, but everything he's saying and doing shows that he's a rightwing extremist, i.e. a nazi.

Dude, this isn't an unpopular opinion, it's rage bait.

Everybody who denies that this was a Hitlergruß denies a wall is a wall because it isn‘t 100% vertical.

America is a Nazi country now. Simple as it is.

Pro-genocide ADL:

"It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute"

Weird that you're using the exact same wording.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5097676-elon-musk-defended-salute-criticism/

Flat out wrong. You're naive and evidently a nazi sympathizer. No one asked you to come out and try to give Elon cover for doing the salute... twice but you took it upon yourself to do exactly that.

If it looks like duck...

I doubt he's stupid enough to not write and rehearse his speech

That's my take, but it's perhaps slightly more complicated. Here's Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic, who just wrote a whole article about it. He's a good journalist, a bit woke-adjacent, which should give him some credibility around here:

What’s left out of much of the discussion is that Musk is supremely, almost cosmically, awkward and stilted. All close observers of Musk—and I am one—know this. [...]

Musk’s X has given a megaphone to bigots and restored the accounts of banned racists. I’ve argued that Musk has turned X into a white-supremacist website. Musk himself has spent recent weeks enthusiastically endorsing Germany’s far-right political party, Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD. Members of the party have had documented ties to neo-Nazis; in 2018, the co-leader of the AfD downplayed the significance of the Holocaust and the crimes of the Nazi regime. Musk has endorsed posts about the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. Even those inside the MAGA movement have voiced concerns about Musk. This month, the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon called Musk “a truly evil guy, a very bad guy.” He used the word racist to describe Musk and others in Trump’s Silicon Valley inner circle who have South African heritage: “Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”

All of this informs how one might interpret Musk on the stage today. Above all else, Musk is a troll, an edgelord. He delights in “triggering” his ideological enemies, which includes the media. And his gesture—whatever the intent—has done just that. In a way, the uproar online over Musk is reminiscent of an incident in the first months of the first Trump administration, when two pro-Trump influencers were photographed in the White House press room making the “OK” hand gesture. The photo was interpreted by some media members as a white-power symbol. Reporters and organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League traced it back to racist message boards like 4chan’s /pol/ board. Eventually, however, the gestures appeared to be part of an attempt, by 4chan, to trick the mainstream media into overreacting and turning the handiwork of a few trolls into national news. The whole affair was exhausting and difficult to follow. A message board that trafficked in hate speech created a fake hate-speech symbol to try to trick the media into calling something racist. (The ADL, it is worth noting, has extended Musk the benefit of the doubt, issuing a statement that Musk made an “awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute,” and encouraged everyone to “give one another a bit of grace.”)

None of that is to suggest that Musk’s salute wasn’t genuine. A practiced troll consistently crosses redlines because they want to offend and trigger. They also swaddle their actions in enough detached irony and cynicism that allow them to relentlessly mock or harass anyone who dares take them seriously. There is every reason to take a right-wing troll at face value, and yet doing so often means giving them what they want: an intense reaction they can use against you.