Washington, D.C. — During his three-minute speech at President Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration, Elon Musk performed a Nazi salute multiple times while emphasizing how this election “really mattered” and thanking the crowd “for making it happen.”

While some news outlets avoided describing the clear gesture as a Nazi salute, various scholars and activists named it as such, describing the nod to fascist propaganda as a grim signal of what Musk and the incoming administration hope to accomplish in this country.

The Nazi salute, also known as the Hitler salute or Sieg Heil, consists of raising an outstretched right arm with the palm downward. In Hitler’s Germany, it usually coincided with chanting or shouting “Heil Hitler” meaning “Hail Hitler,” or “Sieg Heil” meaning “Hail Victory.”

Some mainstream news outlets dampened Musk’s gestures as Hitler salutes by simply describing them as “salutes” or by not addressing them at all. The Associated Press, in their video description for Musk’s speech, mentioned how he “pumped his fists as he spoke,” but didn’t say anything about the Nazi salutes.

USA Today said Musk “crossed his right arm over his chest before forcefully extending it out in front of his body in an apparent salute.”

In their video description for Musk’s speech, NBC News wrote: “Musk then forcefully touched his heart, before raising his hand and saluting supporters.”

Time referred to Musk’s Nazi salute as a “salute-like movement.”

However, as the scene played out on live television, CNN anchors immediately noted what had just happened — Musk did an “odd looking salute.” Although they didn’t explicitly name it, they said how the salute was “evocative of things that we have seen throughout history” and how it’s “not something you typically see at American political rallies.”

PBS News didn’t shy away from the “fascist salute” and described it as a “salute that appeared similar to the ‘Sieg Heil’ used by Nazis at their victory rallies.”

“We need to state the obvious, of course: it was a Nazi salute,” Cindy Barukh Milstein told Unicorn Riot. Milstein is a diasporic queer Jewish anarchist, writer, and longtime organizer. Milstein added that the denial of what Musk did is “one more sign — among so many others — of the calculated use of propaganda to normalize and reify christofascism by trying to convince people not to see and especially believe what’s right in front of their eyes. And not to act on what they see.”

The Nazi salute, in and of itself, was among those propaganda techniques used to normalize loyalty to the Nazi party and pacify the German public into thinking that they were all united and empowered under Hitler’s reign. By 1934, the dictatorship created specific courts to take punitive action against those who refused to salute, with punishments ranging from imprisonment in concentration camps to fines. (The Nazi salute is now illegal in some countries, including Germany.)

After doing the Nazi salute, Musk made light of it and effectively gaslighted the accurate news reporting by saying on his platform X that “[t]he ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”

The downplaying and sidestepping of the issue, Milstein says, is part of a rhetorical strategy that seeks to normalize fascist propaganda.

“He made himself into a meme, into a source of ridicule, before anyone else could,” Milstein told Unicorn Riot. “Because he and his dangerous fascist bedfellows know that we’re deep into christofascism in the United States.”

“It’s as if he’s mockingly saying, ‘The joke is on you’ — all of you who are still in denial that the United States isn’t a neoliberal ‘democracy’; all of you who still are demanding ‘rights,’ or think legislators, laws, or courts will save us — or won’t kill us.”

Cindy Barukh Milstein

The founder of the far-right social platform Gab, Andrew Torba, posted on his platform expressing the value of what Musk did in its ability to further desensitize the public: “The name of the game here is clear: delegitimizing the credibility of our enemies in the mainstream press while simultaneously shifting the Overton window—the range of ideas deemed acceptable in public discourse—further in our direction.”

Two historians of fascism, one specifically a scholar of Nazism in the U.S., posted their responses to Musk online. Claire Aubin wrote on X that in her “professional opinion” everyone on social media who called Musk’s gesture a Nazi salute was correct: “You’re all right, you should believe your eyes.”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat agreed on Bluesky: “It was a Nazi salute and a very belligerent one too.”

Fascists recognized the gesture for what it was, too. Far-right Hitler-fan Nick Fuentes praised Musk for doing “a straight up like Sieg Heil, like loving Hitler energy.”

After Musk threw the Nazi salute, politicians inside Trump’s orbit began defending the clear nod to ascendant christofascism.

Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene responded on X to PBS News’ post reporting on Musk’s Nazi salute, saying she’s going to bring the nonprofit, educational media company before the newly formed Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) subcommittee, which she was recently appointed to chair. Greene, who calls herself a Christian Nationalist, used her new seat of power to condemn and threaten PBS News, saying she’s going to bring the outlet before DOGE for using taxpayer funds to lie and spread “propaganda to serve the Democratic party and attack Republicans.” The DOGE subcommittee will operate underneath the Department of Government Efficiency, which Musk is a co-leader of.

Greene’s threat aligns with the broader plan spelled out in the highly controversial “Project 2025,” and may signal intentions to follow through on other parts of those blueprints for consolidating power under a far-right executive branch.

In Chapter 8 of the Heritage Foundation-created plan for restructuring the federal government, it recommends cutting public funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which means cutting federal funding to media companies which “do not even bother to run programming that would attract conservatives.”

“Stripping public funding would, of course, mean that NPR, PBS, Pacifica Radio, and the other leftist broadcasters would be shorn of the presumption that they act in the public interest and receive the privileges that often accompany so acting.”

Chapter 8 of Project 2025

Similarly, Project 2025 recommends that the federal Department of Education should be “eliminated,” arguing that families and students “should be free to choose from a diverse set of school options and learning environments that best fit their needs.” Yet, in the section that provides guiding principles for how to redistribute the educational programs, it recommends “rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory” because, according to Project 2025, those harm civil rights.

Scholars have warned that upending the education system and defunding public media are fascist tools and possible outcomes of Trump’s authoritarian plans. Musk’s Nazi salute seems to be a nod to that future.

Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley wrote in his new book on fascism that there’s a “link between authoritarianism and attacking education.”

Stanley told Democracy Now! that Trump’s ideology on education is in-line with Project 2025: “Trump has repeatedly said he’s going to target critical race theory, which, let’s face it, is simply Black history.”

Bradley Onishi, a former Christian nationalist who’s now a professor of religion, spoke to NPR in 2024 about Trump’s role in the rise of Christian nationalism in the U.S.: “You don’t just need somebody who’s going to go to church on Sunday and talk a good talk. You need somebody who will destroy in order to rebuild. So Donald Trump, yeah, doesn’t go to church a lot. Donald Trump, been married a couple times. But you know what he promises in ways that no one in our lifetimes has? He promises to punish those who have caused this country to go the wrong way.”

“And so eight years later, we have a base that is more rabid to make him their barbarian king than ever before.”

Bradley Onishi

Onishi told NPR that the goal of Christian nationalism is to “institute people at every level of government who will either act as Christians carrying out God’s mission on earth, this mission to colonize or take dominion of every part of human society, or to elect and work with those who are going to carry out that mission.”

In his inauguration speech, President Trump touted his incoming administration’s goals of expanding the U.S.’s territory and carrying the American flag into “new and beautiful horizons,” including pursuing “manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.”

And Elon Musk, the richest man on earth who now has direct influence in the U.S. government, is someone who has the ability to take dominion over U.S. society (and Mars), and even have strong influence internationally.

In December 2024, Musk endorsed the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which has some ties to Neo-Nazis, and on Jan. 9 he hosted its candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, on X to have a one-on-one discussion.

Milstein said that when Musk did the Nazi salute, they didn’t see “a caricature of Hitler ascending to power in Germany, but instead what his gesture is attempting to mask in terms of the neofascism we’re up against in the United States, and how it threatens all life, human and nonhuman, around the world.”

And with some news outlets and politicians refusing to directly name what Musk did, they are in turn implying that doing the Nazi salute is acceptable and not worth mentioning, which serves christofascism by normalizing and placating these actions and behaviors.

“I saw in that salute not merely a culminating ‘hail to victory’ for christofascism but crucially the challenge to us — all of us who are on the side of life — to abandon any delusions we may still harbor that these sadistic victors will ‘play by the rules’ of state, capital, or national borders. We, too, need new playbooks of resistance and solidarity.”

Cindy Barukh Milstein

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Cover photo features an image by Heinrich Hoffman, Hitler’s official photographer. Accessed through the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

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