Elon Musk performs a nazi salute and zionists rushed to defend it

Zionists show once again they are their own worst enemies.

If you like this article, please don’t hesitate to click like♡ and restack⟳ ! It’s a quick way to make sure more people will get to enjoy it too.
And don’t hesitate to subscribe to my newsletter for free to receive my new articles right in your inbox!

On January 20, Elon Musk was brazenly caught in the act of performing a nazi salute, also called the “Sieg Heil”, at President Trump’s inauguration.

The full footage (this one from a fancam at the event) doesn’t leave much to the imagination:

In this video, Elon Musk can be heard saying “Thank you” to the crowd before performing the salute — first mimicking grabbing at his heart, and then forcefully throwing his arm out in the air. Not only that, but he did it twice in a row, each time with zeal and a sense of satisfaction plastered on his face as if he felt like Mussolini in this moment.

Musk is no stranger to fascism or anything adjacent to it. Elon’s father, Errol Musk, is often reported as having owned shares in an emerald mine in apartheid South Africa, but the real story is much more insidious. According to Walter Isaacson who wrote Elon Musk’s biography, Errol didn’t actually own a mine but illegally imported emeralds from Zambia into South Africa to have them cut in Johannesburg. This was happening in the late 1980s, only two decades after Zambia had fought for its independence and freed itself from the other white settler-colonial project known as Rhodesia. The businessman who initially sold the emeralds to Errol Musk was described as a “Panamanian-Italian businessman who owned three small mines in Zambia”.

It was during this time that Errol Musk famously said “We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe.” The business went under after the end of apartheid, but Elon Musk was already grown up — as a privileged and wealthy white South African.

Is it any wonder then that we find Hitler particles in this man? After all, the most notable change on the Twitter platform since his purchase in 2022 is that fascists and other far-right individuals feel much safer on the platform — and not only that, but they make money from the engagement they receive as well.

Since the purchase, Musk has operated in a very deliberate way — if sometimes obtuse — to boost this type of messaging to the public. First, he introduced Premium, allowing anyone to purchase a verified badge (which was originally only given out to notable public figures to confirm their identity). Soon after, profit sharing was rolled out on the platform: people with verified badges were able to start earning money based on the number of views on their posts. This was received with mild applause, as several clients of the Premium feature reported very low earnings (if they made any money at all) despite garnering hundreds of thousands of views on their tweets.

But the plan was only getting started. In February 2023, only four months after the purchase, Musk told engineers to boost his account in the algorithm so that everyone would see his posts. Then, he started retweeting open nazis and other far-right figures on Twitter: (all of these screenshots were taken at the time of writing)

People like David Duke (KKK leader), Andy Ngo and Milo Yiannopoulos, who made their brand on peddling unhinged white supremacist speech under a thin cover of “discourse” had previously been banned from the platform, but their accounts were immediately reinstated in November 2022 under new leadership.

Musk publicizes these people to an audience who has no choice but to see him in their feed, thereby earning them millions in impressions (the Ian Miles Cheong tweet pictured above is currently sitting at 14 million views). The Premium scheme was only ever meant to be a money laundering scheme so that Musk could legally finance people who align with his views, and people paying for the blue checkmark but receiving none of the benefits are inadvertently financing this scheme.

We are not talking here about some nobody experimenting with his hobby website. We are talking about the richest man in the world owning and controlling what is shown to millions of people. Although — Musk is not so different from other media moguls such as Murdoch or Bezos (who owns the Washington Post). Rather, he’s just more blatant about it, perhaps because he’s not as smart as his peers in the industry.

What’s interesting however is that fascists instantly understood Musk’s gesture to be a nazi salute (although Musks’ gesture was pretty blatant, it was also a dogwhistle that allows plausible deniability), but organizations who purport to fight against antisemitism and defamation refused to see it.

Indeed, hardline zionist (and deputy opinion editor at Newsweek) Batya Sargon instantly rushed to the defense of Musk, saying that Musk was “a friend to the Jews” (because he supports “Israel” unconditionally). While positioning herself as a leftist, Batya tried to whitewash zionism as “embodying Jewish values like justice, welcoming the stranger, and equality.” When the grift didn’t take, she later switched to distancing herself from what she considered to be the left while still peddling her zionism — her “why I left the left” moment.

She was far from the only one to close her eyes to Musk’s gesture. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who purports to be a watchdog for antisemitism, called his nazi salute “an awkward gesture”.

Indeed, the ADL readily admits that it is a zionist organization that exists not to fight against antisemitism but for the promotion of “Israel”. Only two clicks are needed on the ADL website to find a page titled ADL and Israel [sic], in which the organization states at the very top of the page:

ADL works to support a secure, Jewish and democratic State of Israel, living in peace and security with its neighbors. We work to educate and engage on the challenges and complexities Israel faces at home and around the globe.

Current ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt is even more transparent. In a 2022 speech, he outright said “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism” (my response is instead that zionism is antisemitism). While the ADL has started to count peaceful student protests and sit-ins for Palestine as instances of antisemitism, they instantly took to Twitter to gaslight the public into thinking a nazi salute at a presidential inauguration from the richest man in the world is nothing to worry about. Because he supports “Israel” and has money to finance the zionist project.

In the process of excusing actual antisemitic acts, the ADL loses the veneer of trust they had built for decades under their cover story. While it’s beneficial for antizionism worldwide that the ADL stops being blindly trusted, they are also diluting the meaning of the word. Since October 7 2023, the word antisemitism has practically lost all meaning and any accusation of antisemitism now cannot be trusted at face value, but needs to be further investigated — which nobody has the time for. This puts Jewish people in danger, as much as zionists like to claim otherwise.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that “Israel” has committed false flag terrorist attacks to incite this climate of fear (and in the process committing antisemitic acts but who’s counting — certainly not the ADL!), e.g. the Lavon Affair, Iraq incident in 1951 (no name was given to it), Operation Yakhin — and those are just the famous ones.

It seems zionists truly are their own worst enemies. People like Batya are a dime a dozen: their only goal in life is settler-colonialism and the promise of a free house stolen from its generational Palestinian owners in the West Bank. To achieve this, they will happily align with their mortal enemies — it was after all the same man who made the nazi salute state policy that ethnically cleansed Jews from Europe. They hope to create a climate a fear for Jews so that they will seek safety in “Israel”. Conversely, fascists like Musk align with zionism because it gets more Jews out of the country, paving the way for the ethnostate that they want to create. In this way, their goals align. But one does not suddenly become immune to the venomous snake when they befriend it. Perhaps emboldened zionists feel themselves invincible; yet history shows that there are no immortal people.

We saw the same happen in Rhodesia, the so-called homeland of white ‘Rhodesians’, who instantly emigrated to Australia when their war was lost. For all their posturing about “defending their homeland to the end”, they certainly folded quickly.

But remember: today, nobody talks about Rhodesia. White colonizers also thought their project would be immortal, until it wasn’t. They thought they would live forever in Zambia, until they didn’t. Decolonization is possible, and with it the destruction of all colonial roots. With that, we must remember that zionism itself is a recent invasion. It was theorized in the late 19th century by Theodor Herzl, an agnostic man who still claimed to be Jewish, and presented as a colonial project to Cecil Rhodes (the man who gave his name to Rhodesia). Prior to that, zionism was not a word in Jewish culture — from a Neturei Karta source (antizionist Jewish ultra-orthodox group):

One of the basics of Judaism is that, since our banishment from the Holy Land by Divine decree, Jews are in exile and are required to be loyal citizens in whichever country we reside, not rebel or wage wars against any people, nation, or country. The Torah forbids Jews from having their own sovereignty. Exile can only end miraculously, by G-d alone, without any human intervention.

Neturei Karta members holding Palestinian and Lebanese flags and signs reading “Zionism and Judaism are extreme opposites, “Stop starving the Palestinians”

Your support helps me keep writing these in-depth essays. If you appreciate my work, consider joining the Critical Stack and gain access to our private Discord community!

Ko-fi — Patreon — Liberapay

Bitcoin (BTC SegWit network) - bc1qcdla40c3ptyrejvx0lvrenszy3kqsvq9e2yryh
Ethereum (Ethereum network) - 0xd982B96B4Ff31917d72E399460904e6F8a42f812
Litecoin (Litecoin network) - LPvx9z9JEcDvu5XLHnWreYp1En6ueuWxca

Upgrade your subscription here:

Share this essay: