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These are not good optics on his part, it works because he is seen as a well-meaning dorky guy who likes jews so cannot be bunched with ss sympathisers but it did make me chuckle. When you are rich, famous and powerful, they let you (Roman salute) and get away with it - Trump pfp anons today. Other jokes too
Though Naval Ravikant of all people had a good response. The world war 2 happened close to 80 years ago, we cannot wholesale let all the things the ss co-opted stay untouchable forever. White nationalists, the kind most dont wish to associate with due to their tendencies to wish to play into the evil stereotypical trope make this kinda hard.
Plenty of Norse symbols mean well, holy symbols and they get co-opted for low-brow culture war that exists either online or in the lower rungs of society. I am not against identitarian beliefs, every people have a right to wish for what they want, having people who act out badly using these symbols sours them. Elon is a high-status competent man, even if you believe that he is just a front who is a deadbeat dad, drug addict midwit which he clearly is not but even if he literally is all those things, he still did extremely well in life and is super high status for everyone. Him doing a roman salute works partly because of that. The ADL clarified that Elon did not mean it, all the folks of the Jewish faith who are not lefty did the same because he likely did not mean it.
Symbols, images, gestures, vernacular, and rituals make up a big part of any cooperative movement, whether a formalised real religion like Hinduism, where you remove your footwear, bow to the divine deities, and thank them for letting you experience life, or online, where people use terms like "based," "redpilled," and "chad." A decoupling of the Roman salute, the word Aryan, and other things from the time is a good step in that direction. My take on this is a little different, I grew up around extremely online cultures or at least saw them unfold. This seems like a step in a good direction to me.
Any identitarian movement is conflated with you trying to establish the third reich no matter where you are if you are not a bio leninist. Maybe this is a break where people can stop being burdened by the ghost of the second world war.
You are greatly underestimating the power of motivated reasoning.
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