Michael Bradley
How did America Nazi this coming?

There is a small but significant difference between being an edgelord dickweed and a Nazi. They are different things. That having been said, it is extremely possible to be both at the same time. And a Bond villain.
This week, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, busted out two casual Sieg Heils on Donald Trump’s inauguration stage.
Or, if you’re embedded inside establishment media and have an allergy to saying the fucking thing, an ‘odd-looking salute’.

We don’t need to play this game here. It’s crucial for our sanity and souls over the next few years that we do not allow hateful men to define the terms of our reality.
By casual Sieg Heils, I mean clear, deliberate signalling to the worst amongst us. Calling this a surprise would be an overstatement. Shocking is a better description.
Within hours of the 45th President of the United States becoming the 47th President – a failed coup and a malignant personality turning out to be quite the vote winner! – the United States had pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords, pardoned the January 6th rioters, ramped up deportations, and signed an Executive Order to outlaw birthright citizenship for people without legal American parents. Trump has even promised to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, with the “full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement”, to deal with foreign criminal gangs. The last time the act was applied was to round up Japanese Americans and put them in camps during World War II.
And amidst all the xenophobia and pomp, Elon Musk stood on a stage and offered the inauguration audience not one but two Nazi salutes.
Here’s the thing: everything is about patterns of behaviour over time. Always. Incidents in isolation often mean less than the weight we give them, but patterns show the world who we truly are. The context around this Nazi salute is important. Context like there were two Nazi salutes, not just one. Context like Musk promoting the AfD in Germany, essentially the resurgent First Order to the Nazi party’s Galactic Empire, and Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s feckless old bigots in blazers party.
That’s a decent amount of Nazi shit just to be starting with, before you mention his notorious boosting of anti-semitic and white supremacist conspiracy theories, transphobia, not to mention his comfy role in the MAGA administration – unequivocally a hate movement driven by fear and white grievance, amongst other things.
Musk, a man who inherited wealth from apartheid South Africa, purchased a social media platform of immense (if sometimes overstated) cultural influence. He then fired most of its staff, gave it a cringe rebrand, tweaked algorithmic levers to amplify hate speech – seemingly out of a sincere conviction that assholes should be enabled at all cost. Tiresome people, racists, pornbots and crypto bros were encouraged to pay for prominence in the discourse™, all the while progressive voices and run-of-the-mill sane people became further alienated, the vibe in the pub further despoiled by all the fucking Nazis.
Wielding this tweaked online Zeitgeist, Musk campaigned fairly effectively for Donald Trump to become US President again.
He does not get all the credit for the outcome, of course. The Democrats deserve their share. The guy that shot Trump, too. Benjamin Netanyahu. A lengthy list of the rest of Silicon Valley and a limp-dicked mainstream press. Decades of vampiric capitalism, the destruction of the welfare state in exchange for truly gross levels of wealth inequality. An eroding education system and the creeping hand of unhinged white Christian fundamentalism. This a noxious mess of historic proportions. Trump’s re-emergence felt preordained.
But even while acknowledging the complex sludge that is the United States’ entropy, there can be no denying that Musk wielded far too much influence for any one man. Especially any one man flipping fucking Nazi salutes, like a Nazi, and who espouses Nazi-like beliefs, again, like a fucking Nazi.
Do not despair, but it is even worse than that sounds. The problem is so much bigger and more inherent, more eternal than Nazi dickweed edgelords like Musk.
We – and by ‘we’ I mean ANYONE that wants a better world than this – need to be reckoning with the fact that the political far-right now owns not only the bulk of traditional mainstream media, but nearly all of social media as well. Whatever dark historic cycle we are falling into, progressive forces need to reconcile that it is inherent that the world’s richest people will never be on our side. Because we think they shouldn’t exist. And with that, in today’s highly addictive world, comes huge disadvantages, chief amongst them: we will forever lack the keys to the world’s most effective brainwashing machines.
In this struggle, however you choose to define it, the fight between hate and love, peace and war, socialism and capitalism, democracy and fascism, this is a gargantuan longer-term problem. And a far, far bigger one than any single individual on stage in Washington D.C..
Someone needs to work out how to counter this more effectively: truth tellers, independent politicians and indie media weirdos are wonderful, but they’re not enough, and they are only part of the answer.
People like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Murdoch do not do these sorts of things for free. They are self-interested, above all else. That is why they are who they are. You are dots on a spreadsheet to the Broligarchy, and each and every one of them would grind your organs into paste if it meant paying 1% less tax.
And, now, they’re on the Nazi train.
And everyone played dumb. Debating the exact angle of Musk’s arm, pondering his intent, fanboys insisting it was ‘autism’ or a way to ‘trigger the libtards’, ho ho ho. The Anti-Defamation League decided it was a little “awkward” but left it there. God help Elon Musk if he walked on stage and waved a watermelon around or called for a free Palestine.
Confined to their bubbles, everyone chose a reality they wanted to live in, real or otherwise.

There is no pretence with American capitalism anymore. And thus, there shouldn’t be any punches pulled with the way we discuss it. It is a vampire, leeching on the environment, on countries outside the imperial core, and on working class people across the world. It is fueled by narcissism, fear and hatred, and if we want to leave a better planet behind for our children we’re going about it in a profoundly fuckeyed fashion.

MAGA is a hate movement. It is white-supremacist. It is dumb, and scared, and running the show right now. The next four years will be long. The next four years if we’re lucky. I’m sure I’m going to smoke a tonne of weed. Do what you need to get by, but whatever you choose, please don’t be a spineless twerp. Don’t appease these pricks. They do not deserve your acquiescence. Don’t play make believe and pretend this is all ok.