I was at the gym this afternoon when I saw out of the corner of my eye Elon Musk giving an exuberant speech at one of the Trump inauguration’s events. This was at the gym and I was listening to something else on my AirPods. Then only a few moments later in a moment of exuberant disinhibition he gave what was unmistakably a sieg heil! salute. Then he did it again. He actually appeared to do it three separate times. I took out my AirPods and tried to see if there was going to be any comment on CNN on what we’d just seen. I wondered whether this might somehow have been a weird angle or something. I commented on BlueSky asking, rhetorically, if we’d all just seen what we just saw. It wasn’t a weird angle.
This is one of those cases where it’s helpful to have been to this rodeo one time before.
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[image or embed]— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 20, 2025 at 2:58 PM
Back in the first Trump presidency Trump’s critics spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get Trumpers to admit they’d done this or that, to apologize, whatever. This was always a mistake. I don’t need anyone to validate what I saw. I saw it. I don’t care what the explanation is. These are just twisted anti-American degenerates. We know this. Just what level of exuberant disinhibition led Musk to this moment or why this unmistakable gesture came so naturally to him … well, that’s really not my problem. Everyone knows what they saw here.
