When Words Are Superfluous (Especially These Ones)

I’ve seen this go around and be shared, as if it was real. It is not; he did not tweet this. And yet “it’s fake, people were fooled” doesn’t quite catch what is going when people treat it as if it is real. Were they fooled? By what? This image was first posted in a subreddit officially devoted to fake news, which not only tags it as fake, but states that the default is for images there to be treated as fake: “All posts in this subreddit should be considered ironic/parodic/satirical unless they are flaired as \*REAL\* *and* have a relevant, trustworthy source in the comments (which should be your standard for all internet content anyway)” And yet, if you scroll the comments, you find people in that subreddit responding to it as if it’s real, as if he said that, and as if they think that he did.

They do this, I think, because even if Elon Musk didn’t say these words—and it is, in that narrow sense, “true” to say that he didn’t tweet them—those words admit what the gesture was and means, in a way that’s more true than all of the winking, douchey coyness with which he has basically confirmed it. The words in that fake post are accurate to reality in the precise way that the blank space where he didn’t tweet them would be untrue. When someone does something, and then insists that they did not do it, their lie might be “true,” in the sense that they did say that lie. But if the thing they are not saying harmonizes better with observable reality than the lie, then is “false” the best word for it?

Elon Musk did a Nazi salute. He just did. We could talk about the aggro grimacing, the 14-words-adjacent “the future of civilization is assured” thing, the American History X chest slap and the precision of the angle; you can line it up with actual Nazis doing it, and note that there’s not a thing he could have done that would have made what he did more of a Nazi salute than it was. You can explain what Elon Musk did for someone who didn’t see it by saying “picture Elon Musk doing a Nazi salute.” If what he did wasn’t a Nazi salute, then there is no such thing as a Nazi salute.

What’s the point of pretending this isn’t obvious? It is incredibly tedious when people—especially in the part of media that most craves elite respectability (and which is therefore most captured by the far right)—pretend that there is some kind of ambiguity about this. But they are just being dumb assholes. There might have been some ambiguity about what he meant had he insisted that it was an accident and clarified that he didn’t mean it like that; had he acknowledged that the gesture was what it was, but insisted that that’s not what he meant it to be, then, sure, maybe one could entertain the possibility that he wasn’t, on purpose, doing a Nazi salute. If he had done almost anything afterwords but smirk and wink, endlessly, depthlessly, and make infantile Nazi jokes—after making an extremely unambiguous gesture—then you could allow some ambiguity back into what would not, otherwise, be particularly ambiguous.

When a far-right guy makes a Nazi salute—an extremist who manifestly shares as many Nazi beliefs as he does with Nazis, who is literally supporting a Nazi-apologist party in Germany, who bought twitter in order to fill it with open anti-Semites and Nazis, who tweeted this—it’s not the gesture that makes people say “hey, maybe this guy is a fucking Nazi.” What makes people suspect him of being a Nazi is all the Nazi-adjacent shit he does and says. That the gesture feels like a confession of what so many people deny, on his behalf—while he cannot even be bothered to deny it—comes as relief for people who are tired, so tired, of having his shit poured into their ear. And so, because they know that what he doesn’t say is actually true, they find themselves acting as if he did say it, as if he did confess. Unlike his defenders, for whom reality is superfluous, that feels more like living in reality than vociferously insisting that they didn’t see what they saw (it even offers a pretty solid speculative articulation of the kind of neo-nazi he seems to be).

I had better things to do that write this; you had better things to do than read it. And in the end, “is Elon Musk a Nazi?” is just not a very interesting question, if what we mean by it is “in the secret recesses of his heart, does he harbor Hitlerite beliefs, convictions, and ideals?” Who the hell cares. We don’t need or want a confession from him, because Elon Musk’s inner life should, ideally, stay that way. If he must be a Nazi, then “buried fucking way down deep so it never comes up” is a slightly better place for him to put those beliefs. But his beliefs are not important. What is important is that he has put those beliefs into action in a variety of ways. He has thrown his weight, his wealth, and his words behind a project whose goals and ambitions are all out in the open to be seen. What he says about it is, by comparison, not a very useful thing to pay attention to. And yet here we are.