Your comment comes off as alarmist, but then I realized the content of the article, and think that you may be right.
I still stand by my point that most of our politicians have done this to us, on all sides of the political spectrum. And that we would be better off empathizing with our neighbors rather than any politician.
But the scale of the jump from previous actions to this one is enormous and shouldn’t be dismissed at all.
It seems alarmist until you consider that Musk is a Nazi. He did the Hitler salute, live on national television. His followers tried to downplay it, but his own answer to the question "Are you a Nazi?" was "I bet you did Nazi that coming!"
People joke that he went from being the Henry Ford of our generation to being the Henry Ford of our generation.
I don't know whether I would say that Trump is a Nazi*, but the fact that he put a Nazi in charge of firing govt employees that don't follow orders does not bode well.
EDIT: * If only because he has never publicly admitted to being a Nazi like Musk has.
You're asking the wrong question. If it wasn't a Nazi salute, why doesn't he say so?
I've seen enough gleeful comments by real, actual, self-proclaimed Nazis to know that they saw it as a Nazi salute. If I ever did any gesture that could be interpreted this way, I wouldn't hesitate a second to denounce them and apologize for the gesture.
Why has Musk still not done any of this, even though he knows that Nazis consider his gesture a Nazi salute? Why not come out and say "it wasn't meant to be a Nazi salute"?
> If it was, why wouldn’t he just say so? What would be the point in doing it in the first place?
Because he wants Nazis to support and like him, while giving non-Nazis "plausible deniability". He gains support from the base of the president he's working with while not really losing much.
Again, let's turn the question around: if it wasn't a Nazi salute, why wouldn't he just say so? He'd lose the support of Nazis and gain the respect of everyone else. Seems like an absolute no-brainer.
I still stand by my point that most of our politicians have done this to us, on all sides of the political spectrum. And that we would be better off empathizing with our neighbors rather than any politician.
But the scale of the jump from previous actions to this one is enormous and shouldn’t be dismissed at all.