The title’s a bit disingenuous, I know: this didn’t come out of nowhere. White supremacism is as American as Manifest Destiny and has been heavily intertwined with Nazism from its inception. That overlap with the Republican party, and their gradual slip into the extreme far-right, is evident.
But Seig Heils? Even the most dense among them must know that blatant Nazism hurts their legitimacy in the eyes of the public, even among MAGATs (as is evident right now if you peek at their echo chamber on Reddit). Surely they would have a much easier time pushing their rhetoric and establishing their agenda by keeping a purposeful distance from that sort of indefensible imagery and symbolism. How do they expect to keep cohesion in the military when you imply to the soldiers that they are Nazis now, seig heils and all.
Why Nazis?
Any theories as to where this is coming from? Follow the ketamine-fueled leader? A directive for operative Krasnov, from Putin himself, to implode the country? True Nazi beliefs among the Heritage Foundation, Proud Boys, etc? I just don’t understand how they thought this would fly. I don’t understand anything anymore lol.
Lots of discussion points here, but let me address two or three in particular:
blatant Nazism hurts their legitimacy in the eyes of the public
Nope. No, it really doesn’t. Trump was never a legitimate contender from his opponents’ perspective (due to dirty foreign money) and his true believers would stand buy him as he ate a live baby on TV.
Take a look at some approval polls that show he still has significant support from Americans. (Likewise with Musk, likewise with DOGE.)
Second point: It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t NEED legitimacy or approval any more. He’s in power, Musk is at his right hand, and the two of them are acting with complete impunity. Seriously, they should both be hauled off in chains and tried for treason, not to mention hate crimes and hundreds of less-sexy crimes. But they’re not, and so it just doesn’t fucking matter.
Thirdly, where did it come from? We’re discovering now that the Christian hard-right has been carefully staging this for HALF A CENTURY! Since not long after Roe v. Wade, they have been laying the groundwork for what Project 2025 is carrying out right now: A ruthless coup backed by religious extremists and foreign opponents. The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973. PNAC was founded in 1997. And there are more.
Fundamentally, Trump’s first term was to see how much they could get away with. When they lost the 2020 election, the Nazis spent four years purging the party of unfaithful (i.e. people with either thoughts or morals, or maybe even both), then won last year, and were finally able to remove their veil: The government no longer needs the will of the people to execute their extremist plans.
It’s always been there. Trump just told them it’s ok to be nazi in public? He’ll protect them. Because he is a damn nazi.
This person has paid attention.
The fact that the salute is so offensive, they did it so blatantly, and their denial was so disingenuous is the point. It’s a demonstration of power. They can do a Nazi salute and their opponents can’t punish them. They can deny that they did a Nazi salute and their opponents can’t control the narrative. If they did something more subtle, then people might think that they weren’t facing any consequences because their opponents were giving them the benefit of the doubt. With the Nazi salute there is no doubt. The only explanation for why they aren’t facing any consequences is that their opponents are powerless.
I wish I could find it now, but there was a quote attributed to someone suffering under an oppressive regime which would blatantly lie, and yet it remained accepted: “The lie is the insult.”
I kind of feel like anybody who can get insulted by the likes of a lying nazi cunt deserves to be insulted. It isn’t insulting if you don’t get insulted. Call them stupid lying bitches and ask them how come tell truth make pee pee smol.
There are many other problems that are harder to solve, but that one’s trivial to solve, and it occupies a weirdly obsessively large portion of what nazis are chasing, so it can waste a surprising amount of their focus.
On one hand, yes, these people are pathetic and have little idea what the symbols they’re playing with truly mean beyond white supremacy. And yes, it is useful (and fun) to mock farcists.
On the other hand, some of these people are (literally) astronomically rich, in bed with leaders of one of the most powerful military forces ever to exist, and the others are those supported by these rich haute-booj oligarchs (just like the original Blackshirts and Brownsharts were supported by landowners and maginates). A Nazi salute, understood with respect to history and the powerplay of today, is personal to many people. If it’s a teenage edgelord fucking around to get a reaction, sure, dismiss them or let them ‘find out’, but Musk and Bannon are people with huge influence over politicians and mass media. Elon Musk, for example, literally owns a pervasive media platform. They can start sizable rallies gathering both the batshit unhinged and the ideologically driven, armed and hungry.
So if you’re someone who the Nazis would have sent to the extermination camps (and there are many, many groups that were, basically most of humanity), then that salute is someone with state power declaring they want you dead. I wouldn’t call it insulting as much as a credible death threat.
There have always been Nazis in America, even during WW2. Listen to Rachel Maddow’s podcast “ultra” to hear about how close they came to a takeover of the US way back then. They never went away, they just went low profile for a while.
Hydra knows how to lay low…
Genuinely, 4chan (Elon uses 4chan terms a lot), then instagram, facebook, discord, and foreign influence campaigns. I barely use social media, seems harmful.
I know people who fall into these rabbit holes. Super sad.
an important historical note is that the Nazis drew a lot of their ideology and argumentation from the American eugenics movement, which has been a major undercurrent in America since the early 1900s and never went away
Hitle was a Mussolini fanboy. He got his ideas from Italy.
given the situation, An International History of Fascism, is overdue.
They’ve been doing Zeig Heils for years.
I wish I could find the documentary, about a woman who dated some alt right weirdo and he started taking her to like Turning Point USA meetings and other groups meetings and she describes how the first time she did Zeig Heils, and they just did this shit like it was normal. She describes going to a book burning, thinking it was a joke, and then it was like an actual book burning.
It’s all nudge nudge wink wink. They’re doing Nazi salute because they are Nazis.
Edit: Believe the documentary is called "White Right: Meeting the Enemy." Available here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ0rhh5mbnA
Makes me think of my younger days hanging out on 4chan, thinking I was having ironic, satirical laughs with my fellow anons until eventually realizing most of them actually believed what they were saying
Reminds me of the Rule of Goats:
If you fuck a goat ironically, you’re still fucking a goat. Same goes with ironic Hitler salutes.
Reminds me of McGregor the Goat Fucker.
Nobody called him McGregor the bridge builder, despite a long and successful career as a bridge engineer. But he fucked one goat…
It’s not a new thing, and while I don’t think it can be easily distilled into a social media reply. I’ll do my best.
This has been a 40-year process, beginning with Ronald Reagan and continuing incrementally with every president since, including Obama unironically. (Remember how he crushed Occupy and ignored Ferguson and legalized torture on New Years Day?) It’s become stronger as people have become poorer and more willing to not give a shit about the quality of our country’s leadership. Now every person not only has personal biases, but a computer in their pocket constantly telling them everything they think is correct and actively angering them. Hitler would have creamed himself at the thought of being able to dictate social media algorithms.
If people can’t afford to feed their kids or see a doctor, they’re not going to give a shit about fascism, and no matter who we elect, most people can’t afford to see a doctor and adequately feed their kids.
It’s going to be worse now than it had to be. In 2016 people were willing to punch Nazis. Now, you can render a Nazi salute twice, in the seat of government, in front of the entire Democratic leadership… and they will fucking clap and smile.
It’s been fairly blatant for a while now. The seig heil is coming out now that they feel they’ve won. The goal is for the US to fall this time.
What you’re seeing is the end of Truth.
Especially in the face of AI generated photos, we’re dealing with a future where the youth can easily be misled about what actually happened in the past, or even in the current moment. There is very much an upswing of young people questioning established narratives of the past, often under the guise of “well you weren’t there, how do you know for sure?”
Reality is perception, and they are busy managing reality to deny any perception of Nazi behavior.
It’s why Musk especially lies so fluidly and easily in the face of hard evidence.
It’s all perception management, and as long as they keep talking and keep repeating the same lies, a significant number of people will believe them.
Musk still claims it wasn’t a Nazi salute, and a significant number of people believe him. It’s kind of like Trump’s statement that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th avenue and not lose any support. It’s all attack, never back down, never admit fault.
EDIT: It’s also Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” strategy at work, too. We’ve been in an Attention Economy for a long time now (at least since 2007 when the iPhone put a screen in everyone’s pocket), and they know people’s attention is limited, so they work to force themselves into people’s limited time and attention spans. If your message is the only one they have time to hear, they’ll probably be more likely to consider yours true. This, for example, is why Musk forced himself into everyone’s Twitter feeds, he’s force feeding himself the limited attention of millions.
So how do we combat a DDOS on truth.
Clearly the previous orders of “truth” were not perfect either, and it’s discontent at the elite and coverups which Musk and Trump and other neofacist populists have manipulated to fuel their attacks on the establishment’s regime of truth. Ironically they are replacing something bad with something far worse.
How can leftists take the discontent with the current elite’s regime of truth and use it for the better ie. recruitment?
Regime of Truth Definition
Regimes of truth is a term coined by philosopher Michel Foucault, referring to a discourse that holds certain things to be “truths”. Foucault sought to explore how knowledge and truth were produced by power structures of society.[
Nazis didn’t come around all of a sudden, either. People have always, on the whole, been horrible. What changes is what is culturally acceptable to talk about.
If people had always been horrible on the whole, the human race would have died out hundreds of thousands of years ago.
I knew this was coming after 9/11/2001. That was my first brush with how absolutely vile, ignorant, and racist most US citizens could be.
I used to always say eventually they would bring the tools of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars home and use against their own citizens and god damn it, it sucks to be right.
Nazis are a symbol of power and authority for the far right the same way every international dictator has used hilters style of government to rule and oppress. They aspire to build a country similar to the one of the Nazis. Elements of this include: “christian” values, centralisation of power, uniting of the country, removal of “impures” (trans people).
Eugenics and the idea of a ‘chosen’ race is also powerful - you might be genetically destined for greatness, and the fact you have not achieved it is due to systematic oppression by a hidden conspiracy. People love that shit.
I think OP is asking why narratives around that theme keep coming back to the Nazi narrative, specifically. Why not another example of populist authoritarianism, unburdened by the systematic murder of millions of civilians? Why not invent a new narrative rooted in their own national history?
I think the answer to that is: creativity is hard. Once people have a successful first draft, they tend just to edit that draft rather than pitch it and come up with something completely new. People recognize any borrowed elements and return to the archetype. If you’ve every tried to write anything by committee or group project, you’ve probably seen people choose to edit a horrible first draft, retaining the same basic structure (however flawed) rather than start over. Committees where someone finds an existing, related text online, which then becomes an anchor for whatever the committee had planned to draft.
In short, Nazis serve as ‘best practices’ example for any new ethnic nationalist group by the simple fact of their existence.
It has always been there, but until Trump’s first term the Nazis were at least cautious about things. They were afraid to openly and publicly spout their BS, unless they were in large groups. Because they knew that if they held up swastika signs on the street corner, that they’d very quickly get punched in the mouth.
But Trump changed that. Depending on how old you are, you may remember the “he tells it like it is/he’s not afraid to say what’s really on his mind” types of support for Trump during his first term. What a lot of those people were really saying is “he makes me feel empowered to say what’s is on my mind.” And what was on their mind was white supremacy and nazism. When the highest office in the land is tacitly (and sometimes directly) supporting white supremacists, they feel emboldened. And when they feel emboldened, they escalate.
What used to be whispered racist jokes escalated into passive racism. What used to be passive racism escalated into active racism. What used to be active racism escalated into openly hostile racism. And what used to be openly hostile racism escalated into nazism.
And the issue is that Trump/Musk have given Nazis a forum to meet other Nazis. Before, being a Nazi was a fairly lonely hobby. Finding other Nazis carried a lot of risk, because it meant potentially exposing yourself and getting your life ruined. But with Musk buying Xitter, Trump building Truth Social, etc… Yeah, suddenly the Nazis felt empowered to actually start talking to each other. The same way flat earthers used to just be your crazy uncle who smoked too much in his garage. But now that crazy uncle is part of a Flat Earth Society that regularly does large “experiments” to try and prove the earth is flat. By finding a forum to connect with other like-minded individuals, people feel emboldened as their views feel more normalized.
It’s always been there, it’s just now coming to the surface.
Like shingles
“suddenly”
