Awkward, Loveable Elon Musk

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself." ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

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At the risk of losing all my subscribers, I’m writing this follow up to my post Elon Musk’s “Nazi Salute.” I posted the video without making any comment about it, interested to see what people thought. I cannot respond to every comment on that post, it’s more efficient if I just make my response here.

As one person said:

Thanks for outing yourself as a hate persoon. Don’t worry, not going to waste more time on you.

I’m even being accused of being a leftist, which is a new one.

Someone else advised me to delete my post.

So that's where we are at now? It’s like I’m right back during the pandemic when I was vilified for questioning the Covid vaccines. Or the vitriol I regularly get for standing up for Israel.

I thought to myself, Karen, just drop it. But I didn't start Break Free to shut up for fear I would lose subscribers. Even if every single person unsubscribes, I will have said what I believed in good conscience I should say.

Before I go on, if you wish to see a comparison between Nazis saluting and Musk’s salute, you can see it here.

I was watching the inauguration, when more than one Jewish friend messaged me about Elon Musk’s gesture. It was only Saturday that the three young women hostages were released by Hamas into the arms of their families. It has been a very emotional time for Jews. A Jewish friend said she was going to comment on my post, but she was too weary, too discouraged by the comments she saw there, and she couldn’t deal with any more hate.

I'm not too surprised that the accounts on X that defend Israel and have hundreds of thousands to millions of subscribers and make massive amounts of money off of those subscribers, are defending Elon Musk. No one dares criticize him or they will lose their “free speech” platform. And I’m not just talking about this particular faux pas gesture. I'm talking about anything and everything. How much worse will this demand of loyalty get?

Andrea Stroppa, a close confidant of Musk, posted "Roman Empire is back starting from Roman salute". He later deleted that post and said, "That gesture, which some mistook for a Nazi salute, is simply Elon, who has autism, expressing his feelings by saying, 'I want to give my heart to you’.”

I would suggest to people who are saying it was no big deal: Do it. Make the gesture. But nobody is going to make that gesture at their work or their church or anywhere else because they know exactly how it would be interpreted. Elon Musk, himself, has told us that we will no longer be able to believe what we see with our own eyes. And here we are.

I asked my German acquaintance who is a prominent psychologist and expert witness in court to look at the video. Not the one being circulated now that only shows the first time he did it. But watch him do it once and then turn around and do it again, with deliberation. He said, “That's a Nazi salute. In Germany you go to prison for that.”

But then, a German commented on my post that no, it was not a Nazi salute, he was being awkward and enthusiastic.

And the ALC defended him: "It seems that Elon Musk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.”

It is convenient for the second most powerful man in the world (next to Donald Trump), who is also Trump’s right-hand advisor, who is also the richest man in the world and set to be the first trillionaire in five years’ time, to be able to excuse himself every time he does something or says something awkward. Or for people to say he is just acting like a big, overexcited kid, or it’s some sort of schoolboy prank.

People are saying autistic kids could make this gesture. I don’t know, I guess that’s possible. I can only say that in my entire life, I have never seen anyone, child or adult, make this gesture, in jest or due to lack of self-control or otherwise. I have never seen a misbehaving child in a classroom, or a child giving a speech, or performing in a play do this. I could never have imagined my own son who was diagnosed with ADHD (a diagnosis I fought against with all the “experts” at the school) making this gesture. I never saw a single troubled youth in juvenile hall that I worked with over the course of ten years make such a gesture.

In all honesty, would you ever do it, let's say, at a birthday party because you just got so excited and somehow it happened as you were expressing your love for your friends?

Elon Musk didn’t get where he is by being unaware. He is a master manipulator. There is no one savvier at marketing himself and his products than Elon Musk.

He couldn’t just be MAGA, he had to be “Dark MAGA.”

During his speech yesterday, he plugged his favorite bitcoin, DOGE, saying he would “take it to Mars”. D.O.G.E. is also the acronym for the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, which Musk will run.

Everything Musk touches is branded with an “X”. Even his son’s name is “X”. Even his child is used as an advertisement for his products. He brings “X” with him everywhere and makes sure to say his name and that is no accident.

Yesterday, as I said, I was watching the inauguration, taking notes and preparing to write about it tomorrow. I was feeling really good about what I was seeing. Feeling hopeful. Thinking of all the ways that our nation could now heal.

And then, I watched what Elon Musk did, and my spirit crashed. In the most important moment, on Trump’s first day, at his inauguration, Musk managed to create another controversy that immediately divided people whose hearts were just beginning to open to one another.

I have been warning of the rise of fascism in Europe, of the extremism that has been encouraged over the past four years and that has divided us, of the Christian Nationalist “Christ is King” movement that is doing its best to gain a footing in the United States.

Maybe for most of my subscribers, this gesture is no big deal. They will forget about it tomorrow. But for millions, perhaps billions of people who live in a different world than conservatives because of the prisons the algorithms put us in so that we only see content that reflects our own viewpoints, it is a big deal.

It was no small gesture for the left that is ready to pounce on any tidbit they can use to dig into Trump and what better way than to say, see, this proves Trump’s a Nazi. And no, I do NOT think Trump’s a Nazi. But it’s a disaster that his right-hand man is causing more division when Trump needs as much support from the other side of the aisle as possible.

It was no small gesture for all those who actually are fascists. They have seized on this and are celebrating it. Those who might have still been hesitant will be emboldened to come out of the shadows, just as so many already have over the past year, since Oct 7th.

And lastly, this gesture normalizes one of the most visible signs of Nazism. Whether you think he did it intentionally or not, that is what will happen. For people saying, oh, it was just a Roman salute, Romans used it before Hitler. That’s like saying let’s resurrect the swastika, paint it on buildings, put it on t-shirts, or whatever, since in the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit, swastika means "well-being.” And a lot of people on X are actually making this argument.

As just one example of far-right gloating, Andrew Torba, the founder of the far-right social network Gab, shared a photograph on his platform of the billionaire making the gesture, adding the caption, “Incredible things are happening already.”

I pray for President Trump. I pray for our nation that we stand firm against the rise of fascism, the rise of antisemitism. We cannot let it get any more of a foothold than it already has.

I mentioned in an essay a while ago, and it bears repeating today, when I was in seventh grade, I think it was, I had an excellent social studies teacher. This must have been around 1970, when communism was the terror of the Western world. Everyone feared that communism would take over America. But my teacher disagreed. He said, “Mark my words, it’s fascism that will rise again, not communism. It is fascism that will destroy us.”

Everyone thought he was wrong; it seemed impossible at the time. But for some reason, I never forgot what he said. Somehow, his words rang true.

I started with Franklin D. Roosevelt, and I end with his words, “Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.”

We would do well to heed what he said.

For anyone interested, here are a couple of my previous essays on Elon Musk.

Who Will Win the Power Struggle? “Donald Trump and Elon Musk are the two most powerful men in the world. They are joining forces, but for how long?”

Is Elon Musk the Anti-Christ? "The thing that people, I think, don’t appreciate right now is that they are already a cyborg...I think people—they’re already kind of merged with their phone and their laptop." ~ Elon Musk