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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
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Enough Musk Spam
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He was trying to reproduce the dynamic of the OK hand sign.
What happened then is that neonazis online thought it would be hilarious to use the innocent sign as an in-joke. Leftists caught on quickly since they are obsessed with fascism coming back and the whole thing was quite public. Then the OK sign spread gradually from online self-professed neo-nazis to real life hard right politicians. Finally, when leftists said "this is a neo-nazi symbol", they got laughed at in the media by these rightist politicians along with the apolitical neutral commentators.
This had two effects : first, it paints the left as a bunch of crazies and the hard right as relaxed funny types by comparison; second, it acted as a shibboleth. What I mean by that is that if became possible to know people's politics by simply showing them the sign and asking "what is this?" โ you'd get either a puzzled look, a denunciation of far right politics, or a knowing chuckle and wink.
Musk tried doing the same thing with his nazi salute : build some plausible deniability with the "I give my heart to you" comment, and then immediately afterward tweeting stuff like "the Nazi attack is sooo tired". The hard right base recognized the drill and started using it as a shibboleth too.
But it was too much too fast, the whole of MAGA wasn't ready to commit to literally Nazi salutes, so it was written off as Musk being a weirdo.
You can tell it wasnt a simple mistake because then Musk would have produced some kind of blabd corporate apology afterward, not immediately made nazi puns on social media