🔒 The Arm Thing

Inauguration Day encroached with a darker cloud over it than I remembered. The last time this happened back in 2017 everyone was still numb with shock, but this time everyone was just kind of sad and afraid. That’s warranted, I believe. And when I say everyone, I mean, everyone who didn’t actively want this to happen.

 Those guys are ecstatic. The coup of January 6, 2021, actually succeeded, just not on the day itself. Four years on and the result is a decisive and total victory for the far right. They have the executive, the legislature, and the Supreme Court. They have Silicon Valley and all of the American tech sector. So giddy are they that Elon Musk himself got a little excited and the apartheid kicked in and, well …

Yeah, he threw up a bit of a patriotic salute. I mean, it could be considered patriotic if this were the late 1930s, and he was some distance across the Atlantic Ocean.

Quite a few of the Substack writers I subscribe to had some… some opinions.

I actually woke up to this. The ceremony happened at around 3am my time so I got to do what a lot of Americans probably wished they could do and slept through it. I didn’t know what to expect when I opened my laptop that morning to get the news and just get smacked with a hundred clips of Elon Musk, standing at the Presidential podium, the podium of a position many say he has practically usurped, proud, victorious, and just straight up doing the arm thing. It was surreal, it was far too on-the-nose.

 Let me give you a bit of recent history about the arm thing.

 Late November, 2016. Donald Trump had just been elected to the presidency for the first time. Richard Spencer, the founder and one time leader of the movement commonly thought of as MAGA’s militant wing—the Alt-Right—got caught making this gesture in front of a room full of his supporters, and it instantly ended his public credibility and began the rapid collapse of his career.

 Spencer is and was a neo-Nazi and, with the help of even more mainstream palatable allies like Milo Yiannopolous, he was dangerously close to something you might call public acceptance. Even he knew, back then, despite everything else, it is a bridge too far to flash what is academically referred to as a Roman Salute: From a resting position over your heart, your arm thrust hard and fast outward, palm down, fingers together. Details such as the angle of the arm and the degree tilt of the wrist are largely a matter of personal style or which fascist historical leader you are trying to signal allegiance to.

 For this reason, Spencer did this gesture at a closed conference of his far-right think tank, the National Policy Institute, and it only broke news because a journalist managed to infiltrate the event.

That gesture, not even as passionately expressed as Elon Musk’s effort, and not even displayed in public, earned an official rebuke and disavowal from President Trump. Spencer didn’t lose his most dedicated followers but the episode did sever his movement from the Trump stamp of approval it had once enjoyed, and senior white nationalist figures in the administration like Steve Bannon could no longer launder him to the mainstream.

 Spencer was known for only two things after that: The first was the most satisfying punch ever caught on camera outside of a ring:

The second was Charlottesville. This was not even a full year after the salute incident but Spencer’s public visibility was already diminished to the point where the National Policy Institute was a footnote among as many as a dozen white supremacist groups who put aside their aesthetic differences to quite literally Unite the Right—a unique partnership between the Klan, the Nazis, the Neo-Confederates, and those Scandinavian guys who play black metal and burn down churches.

 It's true that Trump drew heavy criticism for his weak condemnation of the Charlottesville riot, but the point stands that as recently as 2017 doing the arm thing was political poison even for a populist right wing president among his own supporters, and everyone knew this. Spencer’s career is so dead now that he’s reduced to doing podcasts with his former understudy Richard Hanania where they accuse the TikTok Costco Guys of being Jews.

 That wasn’t even the only arm thing that could threaten your employment less than a decade ago. Notorious now is the “OK” sign—touching the thumb to the forefinger—which was successfully planted in the mainstream media as a clandestine white supremacist sign by online reactionaries, sort of a parody of the real arm thing.

 The idea behind the “OK” gesture was that it’s very easy to make accidentally, which led to a lot of people getting fired for getting caught on camera doing up a button or scratching their ear. But then a lot of actual white supremacists started doing it for realsies, used for the explicit purpose the joke of it was intended to mock.

But that’s what’s truly maddening about this, is the ambiguity, both real and manufactured.

The right’s perspective: Nobody is a Nazi

 Elon Musk’s official explanation for what he did was that he was pantomiming “throwing his heart out to the crowd” or somesuch. The most milquetoast conservatives who are willing to admit they can kinda see the problem are eager to dismiss it with this simple explanation and move quickly on.

It’s not impossible that’s what he was trying to do, I guess, but the his fans on the right who don’t actually want him perceived as a Nazi have to contend with the fact that this really, really looks like a Nazi thing! Honest to god, he does a sieg heil accidentally better than actual Nazis can draw a swastika deliberately.

People have done side-by-sides with the real unambiguous thing just to show how perfectly executed it is and how hard it would be to do by mistake.

The most common defences are that (1) He’s really, really excited that Trump won, and/or (2) He’s extremely autistic.

 Now, I don’t know for sure that Musk has ever been diagnosed on the spectrum but the idea is thrown around a lot by online reactionaries who see autism as kind of like a superpower that some people have, and that’s why he’s good at rockets. This is the first time I think I’ve seen Musk’s fans use his purported autism to explain why he just doesn’t know basic shit.

 And you know, I could buy it. In a different context I could totally see myself buying it. Listen, if Elon Musk was a total sweetheart, just like a Mr Rogers level of pure, and he was profoundly neurodivergent, and he got up on stage and in a thrall of love for all of Earth’s beautiful children he grabbed his heart and haphazardly mimed pegging it at the audience like a fucking Olympic frisbee, I would buy that. I think we all would.

 We would still say hey that looked exactly like a Nazi salute. And we would laugh about the absurdity of beloved human treasure Elon Musk doing a Nazi thing, and we would share memes about it, and we would feel kind of bad about doing it.

 But you know who isn’t a total sweetheart and is in fact a far right ideologue who frequently associates with Nazis? Elon Musk.

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