80 Years After Auschwitz, Elon Musk Keeps the Fascist Salute Alive | Opinion

On Jan. 20, Elon Musk delivered a now infamous speech at President Donald Trump's post-inauguration rally in Washington, D.C. Speaking to an enthusiastic crowd of MAGA supporters at Capitol One Arena, he thanked the 77 million American voters who helped re-elect Trump as the 47^th President of the United States.

"This is what victory feels like!" Musk trumpeted. "And this was no ordinary victory," he continued, adding unnecessary hyperbole to an already exaggerated celebratory atmosphere. "This was a fork in the road of human civilization." And for this victory, Musk added, "I just want to say thank you for making it happen."

As the cheering reached a crescendo, Musk aggressively thumped his open palm onto his upper chest and—to the shock of millions of viewers around the Western world—delivered a Roman, or fascist, salute. After briefly scanning the crowd with a swaggerly expression, he turned around and performed the same stiffly delivered one-armed gesture to the supporters behind the podium.

Almost immediately, viewers began reacting on social media. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) commented on Musk's social media platform, X, that this "abhorrent gesture has no place in our society and belongs in the darkest chapters of human history." Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of Italian fascism at New York University, chimed on BlueSky by insisting that it "was a Nazi salute and a very belligerent one too."

As quickly as the critics condemned Musk's shocking Roman salute, MAGA supporters began denying the very existence of any purported "controversy." When asked by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) what she thought of Musk's "Heil Hitler" salutes at the post-inauguration rally, Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Trump's nominee for United States Ambassador to the United Nations, responded: "No Elon Musk did not do those salutes. ... That is simply not the case." Aaron Astor, a professor of history at Maryville College, commented: "This is a socially awkward autistic man's wave to the crowd where he says 'my heart goes out to you.'" Even the Anti-Defamation League added its voice to the conversation by insisting that Musk's gesture was "not a Nazi salute" but, rather, "an awkward gesture [made] in a moment of enthusiasm."

Musk himself waded into the developing controversy a few hours later. In response to a post by the far-right X account, The Rabbit Hole, which insisted that "The salute hoax is just another part of the 'dirty tricks campaign,'" presumably led by the Democratic Party, Musk replied: "Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The 'everyone is Hitler' attack is sooo tired."

For historians of fascism and Nazism, however, the meaning of Musk's one-armed gesture was unmistakable. To understand why, let us briefly review the history of the Roman salute, and the reasons why it was adopted by fascists, and later Nazis, during the interwar years.

While originating in ancient Rome, the Roman salute was appropriated by the poet-turned-Great War hero Gabriele D'Annunzio during his short-lived dictatorship in the Adriatic city of Fiume between 1919 and 1920. Much like many other rituals and symbols innovated by D'Annunzio during his Regency of Carnaro, including the Blackshirt and the leadership label of "Duce," the Roman salute was quickly incorporated into Benito Mussolini's National Fascist Party, which by 1926 had toppled Italy's liberal democracy, replacing it with a single-party fascist state.

Intended to inculcate a "warrior's mentality" among the Italian masses and to prepare them for the coming of the "New Italy" under the Duce's iron-fisted leadership, the Roman salute, in the words of historical sociologist Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, "represented the physical sign of a truly new man, whose gestures reflected his intimate fascist nature." The flawless execution of the Roman salute, she continues, was so important in Fascist Italy that it served as a kind of "sine qua non of the real fascist, the element without which one could not be considered a fascist." Due to these post-World War I appropriations by D'Annunzio, Mussolini, and later Adolf Hitler, the Roman salute's meaning—much like the swastika and other appropriated symbols and practices from antiquity—has irrevocably become associated with fascist political culture.

Musk is, himself, no stranger to far-right politics. Similar to many 20th-century European fascists, Musk has expressed strong anxiety regarding what he perceives to be White demographic "decline" in the West, a disdain for labor unions and left-wing politics in general, and has even dabbled in promoting, however loosely, Holocaust denialism. To Musk, much like far-right thinkers 100 years ago, Trump represents a Strongman approach to "restorative" politics, at a time when, from Musk's perspective, society, culture, and economics are increasingly disjointed and "in decline." Put plainly, like the followers of Mussolini and Hitler in interwar Europe, Musk views Trump and his far-right MAGA movement as a means of "draining the swamp" of "deep state" politics and, by way of association, economics and pursuing a program of "national rebirth." After all, Trump's slogan is to "Make America Great Again."

During the past five or so years, Musk has cultivated relationships with a variety of far-right politicians and organizations, including Trump and his MAGA movement, Georgia Meloni and her allegedly "post-fascist" Brothers of Italy party, and Tommy Robinson of the anti-immigration Reform UK party, to name just a few. In December 2024, Musk announced his support for the fascistic German party, Alternative for Germany (or AfD), writing: "Only the AfD can save Germany." Endorsing anti-Muslim immigration bans in Germany and harboring Nazi Party apologists among its leadership, the AfD, to put Musk's endorsement into ideological perspective, is widely viewed as "too extreme" by many of Europe's other far-right parties, including Marine Le Pen's National Rally party in France. When one considers these affiliations between Musk and far-right parties in the U.S. and Europe, the intended meaning of his gesture in Washington D.C. comes into view.

However, one does not need to appeal to scholarly analysis or even to political associations to recognize the significance of Musk's one-armed salute. Indeed, all one has to do is consider the way in which Musk's gesture was interpreted by card-carrying neo-fascists and neo-Nazis across the Western world. As Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the Global Project against Hate and Extremism, has rightly explained, among far-right extremists "There is no question ... that Musk was making a Nazi salute."

One user on the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront, for instance, posted a screenshot of Musk's Roman salute along with the caption, "Heil Hitler," while a chapter of the neo-fascist street militia, the Proud Boys, shared a video clip of Musk's fascist salute along with the similarly-worded comment, "Hail Trump!"

Andrew Torba, the founder and CEO of the far-right social media platform Gab, which features a slew of neo-Nazi and Holocaust-denying AI-powered chatbots, commented that "Incredible things are happening already," while Evan Kilgore, a far-right American political commentator and Christian Nationalist with more than 100,000 followers on X, rhetorically inquired: "Did @elonmusk just Heil Hitler at the Trump Inauguration Rally in Washington D.C.", adding: "This is so incredible." In a follow-up post, Kilgore reposted a critical article from The Jerusalem Post, commenting: "The Jews are already seething."

Even Italy's neo-fascists immediately recognized what Musk's gesture was intended to signify. In a hastily published, and quickly deleted, post on X, Andrea Stroppa, a far-right activist in Italy with connections to both Musk and Meloni's Brothers of Italy party, commented: "The Roman Empire is back, starting with the Roman salute." After deleting the inflammatory—and, one might say, revealing—post, likely as a result of pressure from some of his political partners, Stroppa completely reversed his previous interpretation: "That gesture, which some have mistaken for a Nazi salute," Stroppa explained, "is simply Elon, who is autistic, while expressing his feelings by saying 'I want to give you my heart', and that is exactly what he communicated into the microphone. Elon does not like extremists!"

The evidence, however, speaks for itself. Musk delivered an unmistakable, and reprehensible, fascist salute. And in doing so, he emboldened the far-right community in the United States and beyond, which now views itself—much like it did between 2016 and 2020—as increasingly mainstream and irrepressible.

It is high time that we confront this neo-fascist menace within our society before it metastasizes, like the social cancer that it is, and completely overtakes our increasingly fragile body politic. Because if we do not loudly condemn the popularization of fascist values, ideas, and practices in broad daylight, the next four years of a far-right Trump administration could very well quickly transform into a 20-year single-party dictatorship.

To quote the influential historian of fascism and Nazism, George L. Mosse, "By the time many earlier fellow travelers woke up to fascist reality, it was too late to resist, except by martyrdom."

Brian J. Griffith is an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at California State University, Fresno. He is the co-curator for the digital archive, Where Monsters Are Born: Documenting a Fascist Revival in the Streets of Rome, 2018-2019, and is currently completing a monograph-length study on industrial-scale winemaking and national identity in interwar Italy, titled Cultivating Fascism: Wine, Politics, and Identity in Mussolini's Italy.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.