Nazi—excuse me, Roman—salutes have become all the rage on the American right.
It started with Elon Musk, on the day of Trump’s inauguration. Musk was onstage in Washington, D.C., winding up the end of his speech, and claimed the arm gesture was simply the physical expression of his subsequent statement that “my heart goes out to you.”
Musk’s most strident critics saw it as something more sinister. Most ordinary people, including the Anti-Defamation League, gave it a pass.
Then a local GOP official in Pennsylvania lost her job for recreating Musk’s gesture in a TikTok video. Finally, from the CPAC stage over the last few days, we’ve had two more: Steve Bannon, and Mexican actor Eduardo Verástegui. Jordan Bardella, the leader of the National Rally in France—a country where the use of Nazi imagery and slogans is punished by law—pulled out of the conference as a result.
What exactly is going on here? The standard answer is trolling. This is plausible in light of the alternative explanation, which is that they all really mean it and figures like Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid have been right since 2016 in asserting that MAGA is a fascist movement.
The more one side pretended that innocuous things were harmful, the more the other side pretended that harmful things were innocuous.
Say what you will about these men: None of them proclaims a Hitlerian worldview. Not too long ago, Steve Bannon was taking a page out of Al Sharpton’s book and denouncing Silicon Valley bosses for not hiring enough blacks and Hispanics, which would make his brand of Nazism quite peculiar. Elon Musk has time and again pledged support for the Jewish people. He visited Israel in late 2023 and wore dog tags given to him by the father of an Israeli hostage in Gaza. Later, he went to Auschwitz with Ben Shapiro.
But it’s too easy to say that these people are simply trolling and leave it at that. A good troll—and as someone who has done quite a bit of trolling myself, I have a deep appreciation for the art form—makes an underlying point, stimulates thought, provokes serious discussion and, best-case scenario, is open to interpretation. Worst-case scenario, it confuses the weaponization of taboos for the taboos themselves, and instead of resisting their weaponization, winds up denying their original purpose.
Nazi salutes are therefore deeply offensive to me on two levels. I abhor the underlying ideology such gestures represent. But also I think they’re incredibly lazy—the cheapest imaginable way to get a rise out of people.
That said, even the crudest trolls have a message. With the recent spate of stiff-armed salutes, what we are observing is, in most cases, not sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it’s no longer in the opposition.
To understand where this comes from you need to go back to the 2010s. Back then, online rightists reacted to the Great Awokening by leaning into performative racism, sexism, and homophobia through edgy memes and jokes.
I would know. I was one of them.