Elon Musk, Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing
Elon Musk is reportedly done. As of today he took his penultimate victory tour and is supposed to be returning to his shattered car company. It can’t be happening a moment too soon. A twitchy, spasmodic self-proclaimed savant has finally (forever?) closed out his tenure. All of us should be down on our knees in gratitude.
But before that happens, I have one final word. A hundred days in, I’m still obsessed with that salute. It was the thing he did on the night of the inauguration that felt somehow like The Return of Kristallnacht .
I know what your thinking and you’re probably right. There are lots of important things still going down. The economy has been ripped into tiny little pieces. Our personal investments are off by double digits and I have just begun to retire in earnest. Our imbecile president is still talking about Canada barely days into his very public humiliation. He has still not returned Abrego Garcia, and agents of his regime terrorized a family in Oklahoma City, taking their electronics and their little pile of cash on the assumption that they were candidates for deportation. In other news, there are no funds for local food banks.
I care about all these things, and many others. But my self-appointed job is to listen for echos. Third Reich echos. Mein Kampf echoes. I patrol these borders like a bona fide Nazi hunter, like Simon Wiesenthal’s younger brother. If you’re a Nazi, if you have ever been a Nazi, you will be found and brought to justice. There are a lot of us out here and we’ll never give up. I may be the only one you know who took time to rejoice when Irmgard Furchner was convicted at age 97 for the crimes she committed in the Stutthoff concentration camp, but it’s the least I could do for 10,000 dead Jews. They asked so little. Only to be remembered.
Which means, of course, that I’m still interested in the salute. Three months in, there are still people who defend him. What was that thing he did in January? A nothing-burger gesture, a nervous tic, the awkward body language of an awkward man? Among the astonishments of that astonishing day, the ADL gave him a pass.
For those who may not yet speak the language, the ADL is the God of defamation. It is the first and last word on who is a racist. If anything, the organization might be too reactive, but there it was, for several days afterward, soothing the feathers of the ruffled Jews and currying favor with the new administration. An anti-Semite in the White House, at the right hand of the president? Keep moving, folks. Nothing to look at here.
But that’s exactly what happened. That’s exactly what we saw, and no amount of gaslighting can expunge the image. I’ve watched the footage a hundred times. Musk pounds his chest and offers a stiff-armed salute, braying his thanks for Trump’s triumph in the election. Survivors saw it and so did Germans. Two out of two can’t possibly be wrong.
And then, as if to clinch the deal, Mr. Musk took his Nazi predilections to their source. Speaking by video to the AfD, Musk offered his view that it was time for a change. “Too much of a focus on past guilt,” he said. Just in case you don’t yet speak the language. the AfD members are bona fide neo-Nazis who just won their first elections in postwar Germany. It doesn’t get much Nazi-er than that.
You will argue, reasonably, that I should worry about other things. If anti-Semitic sympathies were a bona fide crime, it wouldn’t take much to send many people to jail. But unless you act in a very bad way, having anti-Semitic sympathies is not a crime.
What it tells us, rather, is who is worthy of our trust. Authoritarianism begins with gaslighting and deception. It starts with people telling us that what we can see for ourselves is not real, or reliable, or worthy of attention. I tell you that this case is exactly the opposite. Musk’s anti-Semitism is as visible as a swastika. For many reasons, Musk is a very bad man, who is rightly detested by more Americans each day. Not the least of those reasons is that he hates the Jews. I hope when you think of him, you will think of that.