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.

Here’s where context is key, because Musk isn’t some random apolitical autistic person who can’t be expected to know what types of arm gestures to avoid. Every time the man logs into his Twitter account he’s neck deep in groypers. If you’re someone who is diagnosing Musk with autism you have to decide which kind of mind you think he has—whether he has the kind of autism Isaac Newton had, or whether you think he’s Ralph Wiggum. You can’t really have both at the same time.

 The most common port of call for defending Musk from the right is generally to try to just downplay the significance of the gesture altogether, no matter who is doing it. And that’s how we somehow, bizarrely wind up here: The rehabilitation of the arm thing.

Look! Look at all these liberals doing the arm thing. It’s fine!! It’s fine. All he was ever doing was just waving in the exact same way that all of your beloved celebrities do when they’re expressing themselves or pointing at something.

You should never fall into the trap of thinking these people don’t know the difference. They have seen the video of Elon doing the arm thing, they’ve watched it a million times because they get off to it. And they’ve seen the videos of everyone else doing what they want you to believe is the exact same arm thing because they have to watch the videos to take the still capture at just the right time.

 It's flooding the zone, and it’s damage control. It’s trying to dampen  and clog the discussion, propagandizing to anyone who might not have seen the videos by reducing it to still images, so it’s easier to claim that AOC pointing out to the crowd and saying “who among you” is the exact same thing as Elon Musk doing something that looks like John Wick trying to crush a very tall man’s windpipe.

 But here look, learn some history: It’s actually called the Bellamy salute, you ignorant serfs.

Far from being some sort of white supremacist pledge, Musk is simply trying to get America back to its roots. I guess for those two things to be mutually exclusive you have to clarify whether you consider America’s roots to lie before or after the Civil War.

 The most disturbing examples of attempting to rehabilitate the arm thing, in my opinion, come from some right wing Zionists who think that Musk’s public advocacy of the anti-Palestine cause is worth accepting a certain amount of Hitlerish stuff.

This horrifying and bizarre tendency to try to rehabilitate Hitler himself, at least a little, by the very people who should be absolutely the least inclined to do that, goes up as far as Benjamin Netanyahu, who has made suggestions that Hitler was actually kind of tricked by the Palestinians into trying to exterminate the Jewish people, suggesting that Hitler was kind of a Zionist himself who merely wanted to send the Jews home, but the Palestinians wouldn’t let him.

 When you look at it this way, Elon isn’t a Nazi because nobody is a Nazi. Even Hitler isn’t a Nazi. But you know who are Nazis? Islamists.

Here’s where I get to talk about Ben Shapiro. Ben is able to find it in his heart to forgive blatant and explicit anti-Semitism to some degree in so far as its perpetrators are politically far enough to the right for his tastes.

Here’s Ben expressing his opinion on the matter via the proxy of… Stonetoss, an actual, notorious, open Nazi.

Ben is here pathetically assisting an actual well known neo-Nazi in their shared(!!) goal of rehabilitating Nazi iconography in the social consciousness. Those guys were just waving their arms around, it’s no big deal, you do it all the time.

 And we know it’s no big deal because Elon visited Auschwitz.

Yes, we remember when Elon went to Auschwitz. Do we remember why Elon went to Auschwitz?

 Related question: Do we remember why Prince Harry visited Auschwitz?

Do we remember advertisers fleeing Twitter in droves after Musk agreed with a tweet that said “Hitler was right” about the Jews hating white people?

 Kind of puts the arm thing back in a proper perspective. But no, Ben, I’m sure Elon learned an awful lot about the horrors of the Holocaust during the damage control PR stunt you frantically arranged for him. We can read all about his penance from Holocaust survivor descendant Julie Gray who was there with him.

The left’s perspective: Everybody is a Nazi

I’m not letting my side of the aisle off the hook here completely and you could say I have somewhat of a new year’s resolution to hold my tongue less about stuff I think is true. I already waded into the tempestuous waters a couple of weeks ago when I begged the left to stop falling for stupid conspiracy bait and I didn’t get yelled at so now I’m emboldened.

 We were all feeling like shit when inauguration day arrived and the year we lost Bowie, Cohen, Prince, and Carrie Fisher flashed before our eyes. When Elon Musk took that stage, triumphantly, giggling like a fuckwit, and then in full public spectacle did the god damn arm thing, that’s when the melancholy broke and turned to anger, and then the same thing we see almost every time something like this happens—prominent and unknown voices on the left started attacking each other. Just went to town ripping each other the fuck to shreds.

 Straight off the bat—I would be downright baffled if anyone with even a passing familiarity with me accused me of being sympathetic, let alone in favour, of anything that Elon Musk stands for. He’s one of the worst people on the planet, he makes society in general worse, and he might even rise to what I would call evil, but I’m extremely frugal with that term.

 That said, the salute surprised me. Because I’ve always been clear: Whatever far right ideology Musk subscribes to, I do not believe it is, specifically, Nazism. I believe in categories and specificity. I believe in understanding your enemy. I believe it is a mistake to refer to everything bad people believe as Nazism because it either dilutes Nazism to the point where it ceases to be a useful word, or else you wind up defining Nazism as the only bad ideology.

 I believe that the tendency to call everything bad “Nazism” largely comes down to the fact that Nazism is one of the worst things anyone can think of, and to object to calling someone a Nazi is in some way defending them, rather than how I prefer to think of it: Properly categorising them.

So—the inauguration day salute. That’s egg on my face then, right?

 You know what? Maybe! None of the right’s defences of this thing stack up for me. I can’t reach into the man’s big fat allegedly potentially autistic brain and directly touch what’s happening in there, but I still don’t get the impression that he believes in the tenets of National Socialism. Given all we know I’m forced to lean toward the idea that he’s just…kinda…trolling?

I’m not the only fierce critic of Musk who was thrown by the salute. Ryan Mac is the co-author of Character Limit, the definitive and best-selling book about Musk’s incompetent reign at Twitter. When Musk did the arm thing at the inauguration, Mac did his due diligence as a reporter: He investigated and tried to get to the bottom of whether this really was a “sieg heil” moment.

After all, remember: The right does this to us all the time. They screamed for months about how this image was reminiscent of Hitler:

We should hopefully be able to agree that those are ludicrous accusations, so we need to be careful that we are not making ludicrous accusations ourselves.

 But the very fact that Mac implied that he wasn’t instantly declaring this a five alarm Fourth Reich situation in Washington led immediately to something that’s becoming all too common on the shrinking and fragile left corner of the internet:

A.R. Moxon, who is a great writer and someone I agree with more often than not, is still, I gotta say, someone who tends toward laying the simplistic blanket of Actual Nazism over everything that smells off, and true to form he had a diagnosis for Ryan Mac:

The fierce and ostensible enemy of both Elon Musk and his incredibly racist mother is secretly a Musk ally and an Actual Nazi, evidenced by the fact that he had to watch the video of the arm thing more than once before still coming to the same conclusion that everyone else did.

 The exact same fate befell professional Nazi researcher Steven Monacelli, who makes a living exposing Nazi accounts, and who initially and momentarily thought Elon’s arm thing was likely a stupid accident.

Big mistake, Steven. Or should we call you Adolf?

Monacelli soon decided that his initial reaction was probably wrong and that there was more to the gesture than initially assumed. This just made people angrier, for some reason.

We’re still in the very early stages of what’s likely to be many years of political hell for the left, a worldwide trend which began before Trump’s election and there more years of it ahead of us than behind. To survive it we need crucially to ensure that we don’t fall into the same trap of anti-intellectualism that’s bread and butter for the right.

 We need to insist there is no shame in fact checking—ever—and we’re not somehow ceding ground to our enemies in doing so. That’s insane. And while we’re deferring to the experts…

The Nazi perspective: Elon Musk is a Nazi

While the mainstream left and the mainstream right argue over whether Elon Musk’s inauguration speech gesture counts as a Nazi thing, it’s probably worth it to see what the Nazis are saying.

 The anonymous Twitter account @iamyesyouareno is probably the most openly neo-Nazi account that Musk follows, regularly interacts, and agrees with.

He’s “very impressed” with the Holocaust and was super stoked to see Elon finally doing the arm thing. He’s excited by the thought that Donald’s Patrick Bateman cosplay of a son is paying attention. 

Andrew Torba, administrator of Gab, the Nazi version of Twitter (in so far as Twitter isn’t the Nazi version of Twitter) concurs:

America’s most prominent neo-Nazi and leader of the groyper movement Nick Fuentes thinks it’s totally a Nazi thing and he’s ready to welcome Musk back into the fold after the whole unfortunate H1-B visa clash.

Andrew Tate, white supremacist sex trafficking turbo-rapist friend of Nigel Farage, thinks it’s actually time we bring back the Hitler salute.

And Richard Spencer, to bookend this piece, is over the moon. Vindication at last. He feels the meme energy.

My favourite arm thing is still the one that ended at Spencer’s face.