Democrats and their media allies have decided that President Trump is, at least for now, untouchable, having already survived the onslaught and prospered, but for some reason they believe the same overheated rhetoric, rhetoric that clearly devalues the Holocaust as they claim others are doing, will take down Elon Musk.
If you needed any more evidence that Democrats and their progressive constituencies were left completely bereft of ideas, exhausted, and defeated after President Donald Trump’s stunning electoral victory last year and his subsequent inauguration last week, look no further than the recent obsession with insisting the President’s ally and leader of his task force to cut government waste, Elon Musk, is a closet Nazi. While the claim has been made occasionally over the years, it was given new life shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, when Mr. Musk was addressing a crowd of supporters, thanking them for “making it happen” before placing his right hand over his heart and then stretching it outward. He continued to remark, “My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured,” then turned around and repeated the gesture to those gathered behind him. Though it was the sort of thing politicians and public speakers do all the time, progressives, desperate for something to undercut the inauguration itself, almost immediately seized on the gesture, claiming it was self-evidently a Nazi salute and not even a secret one. The notoriously anti-Trump “historian” Ruth Ben-Ghiat claimed, “Historian of fascism here. It was a Nazi salute and a very belligerent one too.” When the Anti Defamation League, not exactly a pro-President Trump or Elon Musk outfit, refused to agree this was the case, progressive firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attacked the group, writing without irony “Just to be clear, you are defending a Heil Hitler salute that was performed and repeated for emphasis and clarity. People can officially stop listening to you as any sort of reputable source of information now. You work for them. Thank you for making that crystal clear to all.” The controversy, such at it was, soon traveled around the world, where an Israeli newspaper claimed Mr. Musk was delivering “a Roman salute, a fascist salute most commonly associated with Nazi Germany.” In Germany itself, Michel Friedman, a German-French publicist and former deputy chair of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, claimed the salute was unambiguous, described the action as a disgrace, and a “dangerous point for the entire free world” had been reached. “I thought to myself, the breaking of taboos is reaching a point that is dangerous for the entire free world. The brutalisation, the dehumanisation, Auschwitz, all of that is Hitler. A mass murderer, a warmonger, a person for whom people were nothing more than numbers – fair game, not worth mentioning,” he explained.
The American media, meanwhile, settled on the notion that it might not have been a Nazi salute after all, but somehow it gave comfort to Nazis, so what’s the difference? As the Associated Press described it, “Musk’s straight-arm gesture embraced by right-wing extremists regardless of what he meant.” “Musk has only fanned the flames of suspicion by not explicitly denying those claims in a dozen posts since, though he did make light of the criticism and lashed out at people making that interpretation,” they claimed. Kurt Braddock, a professor of communication at American University, combined both points of view, insisting “people shouldn’t doubt what they saw.” “I know what I saw, I know what the response to it was among elements of the extreme right including neo-Nazis…And none of it is a laughing matter.” Perhaps needless to say, Mr. Musk wasn’t deterred. In fact, he doubled down on these claims to some extent by addressing Germany’s right wing political party, the AfD earlier this week. In a virtual address to the group, he told an excited crowd what would normally be a completely uncontroversial fact, “children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents.” “It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” he said, adding “There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” The result was another round of outrage from his critics. Though Mr. Musk had clearly said we must move beyond “guilt” for actions perpetrated 80 years ago rather than we must move beyond the reality of the Holocaust itself, many took him entirely out of context. “The remembrance and acknowledgement of the dark past of the country and its people should be central in shaping the German society,” explained Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, on X. “Failing to do so is an insult to the victims of Nazism and a clear danger to the democratic future of Germany,” he added. Charlotte Knobloch, the president of the Jewish community in Munich and Upper Bavaria, who had previously described the faux-Nazi salute as “highly disconcerting,” claimed “Far more worrying are Elon Musk’s political positions, his offensive interference in the German parliamentary election campaign and his support for a party whose anti-democratic aims should be under no illusions.” Back in the United States, the situation reached a climax of sorts on CNN’s NewsNight with Abby Phillip when journalist and economist Catherine Rampell excoriated Mr. Musk and Republicans for being aligned with him, insisting that the faux-Nazi salute was a real Nazi-salute, Mr. Musk had belittled and joked about the Holocaust, and had now spoken to a “Nazi-adjacent” group. When Republican strategist Scott Jennings pushed back on these claims, insisting, rather obviously, that “We’ve moved on from Trump derangement syndrome to Elon derangement syndrome” and “Anybody who is asserting this thing he did on the stage the other day was a Sieg Heil, which I just heard you say, you know, lawyer up maybe because, absolute[ly] ridiculous thing to say,” Ms. Rampell became even more stringent, bizarrely challenging Mr. Jennings to do the salute himself, “Why don’t you do it on TV right now? Why don’t you do it on TV right now if you think it’s so, so banal.” A few moments later, she challenged him to do so a second time when he insisted, “This salute trutherism is outrageous. This is the most–” He added before getting cut off. “So do it right now on TV,” Ms. Rampell interjected. “This is the biggest conspiracy theory–” He tried again, before she repeated herself without letting him finish a second time, “Do it right now on TV. If you think it’s normal, if you think it’s a normal way to greet people, do it right now on TV! Why won’t you?” she said.
Closing out the segment, Mr. Jennings repeated the point that Democrats and the mainstream media have spent most of the past decade saying the same thing about Donald Trump and Republicans, why would anyone care now? While this point should be more than obvious and indisputable to anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention, it’s worth noting that the entire closing message of Vice President Kamala Harris’ failed presidential bid was that Donald Trump is an unrepentant admirer of Adolf Hitler, if not a wannabe Hitler himself. Marine Corps General John Kelly, Trump’s former Chief of Staff turned critic, told The New York Times shortly before the election that then-former President and candidate Trump met “the definition of a fascist,” “looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy…So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America.” At the time, General Kelly also took the opportunity to recycle old stories about supposedly disparaging remarks President Trump made about US soldiers along with positive remarks about the Third Reich. “He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,’” he claimed. “First of all, you should never say that,” he described his response to these supposed occurrences, “but if you knew what Hitler was all about from the beginning to the end, everything he did was in support of his racist, fascist life, you know, the, you know, philosophy, so that nothing he did, you could argue, was good — it was certainly not done for the right reason.” The Vice President herself immediately seized on these remarks, holding a press conference that same day. “This is a window into who Donald Trump really is from the people who know him best,” she insisted, declaring it “deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler.” Later that evening, at a CNN Town Hall, she was asked if she considered President Trump a fascist, “Yes, I do,” she said. “I also believe that the people who know him best on this subject should be trusted.” If anything, this meme, for lack of a better word, reached a climax of its own when President Trump closed the campaign with a rally at Madison Square Garden, which was promptly compared to a Nazi rally that had occurred at the venue in 1939.
Of course, the entire Trump as Hitler canard was nothing new then or now. There has been, indeed, a sort of cottage industry around it for years. Former MSNBC host Chris Mathews infamously described his first inaugural address in 2017 as “Hitlerian.” In 2022, Politico reported on “The One Way History Shows Trump’s Personality Cult Will End,” where none other than Ruth Ben-Ghia herself, described as an “expert on autocracy,” assessed “how far America has slipped away from democracy, and what it will take to get it back,” Ms. Ben-Ghiat, you see, had “seen enough of Donald Trump’s behavior over the preceding five years to know how neatly he lined up with other strongmen she had studied and how his autocratic tendencies would influence his behavior whether he won or lost.” At the time, she professed “even more concern that Trump’s sway over the GOP has permanently transformed the party’s political culture.” “He’s changed the party to an authoritarian party culture,” she told the publication. “So not only do you go after external enemies, but you go after internal enemies. You’re not allowed to have any dissent.” During the campaign, the media repeatedly recycled this criticism, even before what passed as a closing argument. The Washington Post ran an opinion piece titled “Don’t scoff at the Hitler comparisons. Trump’s rhetoric is that bad,” The Guardian asked, “Is Donald Trump a fascist?” Vanity Fair referred to Donald Trump as “America’s Hitler.” The media wasn’t alone, either. There are entire books devoted to the topic, “Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying” and “Trump and Hitler: A Responsible Consideration.” That particular tome is in its second edition, where Horace Bloom “analyzes the personalities, careers, and ideologies of Hitler and Trump. The result is a nuanced portrait of the political moment we find ourselves in, acknowledging the importance of both similarities and differences between these two fascinating figures” according to Amazon’s summary. Even the academic community has gotten in on the comparison, where Gardner-Webb University has awarded an honors thesis to “Rhetorical Demagoguery: An Exploration of Trump’s and Hitler’s Rise to Power.” After citing a “void of scholarly work that highlights the similarities between the two leaders’ use of grandiloquent language to stoke the passions of their perspective nations,” “This study argues that Trump and Hitler ascended to power in very similar ways, but primarily through a variety of rhetorical exploitations and appeals.”
Apparently, Democrats and their media allies have decided that President Trump is, at least for now, untouchable in this regard having already survived the onslaught and prospered, but for some reason they believe the same overheated rhetoric, rhetoric that clearly devalues the Holocaust as they claim others are doing, will take down Mr. Musk. They were wrong then. They are wrong now, but sadly, it seems simultaneously that they have nothing else and they believe the American people are so stupid they won’t recognize the same recycled rhetoric simply aimed at another target.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 