Enough!

This Bullshit Has to End

I wrote yesterday a brief note where I said I didn’t have time for the discourse around the Nazi salute. But now that I’ve seen the discourse I think I have to say something. In the Free Press, Bari Weiss’s endeavor, they’ve published a piece by Richard Hanania entitled “I Can Explain Why the Nazi Salute Is Back.” The combination of author, subject matter, and outlet ought to combine to create a major scandal, but it will likely pass with some outraged tweets and newsletters, like this one.

First of all, to reiterate, there can be no ambiguity, irony, or equivocation about the Nazi salute. It has one simple meaning: It expresses lust for mass murder. Any attempt to mitigate or excuse this simple fact, no matter how couched in qualifications, denunciations or mea culpas, is to assist in the spread and normalization of Nazism: It offers cover.

A week ago, the same outlet published Weiss’s speech at the “Alliance for Responsible Citizenship,” a stentorian invocation of Churchill and denunciation of the fascist far-right. Weiss sees in college campus protesters the faces of hardcore Hamas supporters, but apparently is willing to countenance the idea that grown men doing Nazi salutes are just playing around. And most laughably, Weiss is the author of a book entitled “How to Fight Antisemitism.” One would be forgiven for thinking Weiss, of all people, might have some kind of hair trigger, a zero-tolerance attitude to manifestations of antisemitism, no matter how trivial–let alone major figures of the contemporary right just going right about there and doing that.

But should we really expect any different? This two-step from denunciation of the racist extreme to qualified embrace or timid excusal is merely a miniature recapitulation of the history of the conservative movement for the past 70 years. It told the legend about itself that it had created responsible guardrails—purged the loonies—while fostering Pat Buchanans, Joe Sobrans, and Ann Coulters in its midst. One would think that the rise of Trump, an open authoritarian who has curried favor with the extreme right—who has dined with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes—would usher in a new era of moral seriousness on the right, but no, of course not. They are still unwilling or unable to see what’s directly in front of their noses.

The bullshit is so thick in this piece I don’t know where to start. It’s a heap of lies, half-truths, evasions, and bad faith. Perhaps the only way is to shovel through it line by line.

Here's how Hanania begins:

Nazi—excuse me, Roman—salutes have become all the rage on the American right.

It started with Elon Musk, on the day of Trump’s inauguration. Musk was onstage in Washington, D.C., winding up the end of his speech, and claimed the arm gesture was simply the physical expression of his subsequent statement that “my heart goes out to you.”

Musk’s most strident critics saw it as something more sinister. Most ordinary people, including the Anti-Defamation League, gave it a pass.

The bullshitting starts. First, Musk did not make one, but two Nazi salutes. He made one to the flag and then one to the crowd. No reasonable person, without motivation to say otherwise, could doubt what gesture he is making. Did “most ordinary people” give it a pass or did the media and the ADL not deal with it with sufficient alarm? And it did not start with Elon Musk. In 2017, the “white nationalist” Richard Spencer did a Heil Hitler salute at an event in the wake of Trump’s election, creating at that time a major scandal. He also tried to play it off as “irony.” This is an important context Hanania elides: Back then the Nazi salutes were coming from outside, now they are inside: inside CPAC and the administration.

What exactly is going on here? The standard answer is trolling. This is plausible in light of the alternative explanation, which is that they all really mean it and figures like Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid have been right since 2016 in asserting that MAGA is a fascist movement.

Bringing up MSNBC anchors is plainly tendentious framing to bring in his right-wing audience. Many serious people have contended that MAGA has fascist elements, including Robert Paxton in the New York Times Magazine in October. A responsible editor dealing with an issue of this sensitivity would be sure to make a writer include that this debate happens on a level that is beyond mere cable news hysteria. No argument is given: it’s just presented as manifestly absurd, beneath contempt. That’s partly because any argument would have to contend with evidence and the evidence is not good. Again, when the Nazi salutes, go from outside the house to inside, the charge that fascism might be afoot looks a lot less like cable news hysteria than just the plain facts of the matter.

Say what you will about these men: None of them proclaims a Hitlerian worldview. Not too long ago, Steve Bannon was taking a page out of Al Sharpton’s book and denouncing Silicon Valley bosses for not hiring enough blacks and Hispanics, which would make his brand of Nazism quite peculiar. Elon Musk has time and again pledged support for the Jewish people. He visited Israel in late 2023 and wore dog tags given to him by the father of an Israeli hostage in Gaza. Later, he went to Auschwitz with Ben Shapiro.

More bullshit. In a proud neocon magazine the presence of Al Sharpton is now taken as evidence of the absence of antisemitism. You must be shitting me. Thirty years ago half the articles on the front page of the Free Press would’ve been trying to convince their readership that Sharpton and other black leaders were essentially black Goebbels and black antisemitism was a five-alarm fire. Do they really have such short memories? The fact is a reasonable person paying attention to the facts might conclude that Bannon has fascist sympathies or has time for antisemitism. First of all, he is a leader of some kind of nationalist populist anti-liberal revolt that seeks redistributive justice but rails against “globalist elites.” In other words, he is a brownshirt. Anybody with a basic tutelage in the history of the European far-right should be able to see the outlines there. But let’s consider all the direct evidence, as well. I happen to remember that back in 2017, it was a major news story that Bannon cited the writings of Julius Evola, a “philosopher” of mystical ultra-fascism for whom Mussolini was not fascist enough. No for him, the SS was more of the right stuff. He also has professed an interest in the writings of Charles Maurras: an antisemite, anti-Dreyfusard, and Nazi collaborator who greeted the fall of France to Hitler’s army as a “divine surprise.” You want another Maurras quote? How about this one: “Everything seems impossible or terribly difficult without the providential appearance of antisemitism. It enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over, and simplified. If one were not an anti-Semite through patriotism, one would become one through a simple sense of opportunity.” I also remember there was a 2018 interview with the Spectator where Bannon admitted “he adores the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.” Then there’s the story in Jeremy Peters book Insurgency where Bannon saw Trump giving a speech in 2016 and thought to himself, “That’s Hitler!” and “meant it as a compliment.” Bannon has called Peters "my buddy from The New York Times” and, to my knowledge, has never disputed his buddy’s account in the book. To reiterate, a mentally competent adult in possession of these facts seeing a man do a Nazi salute might reasonably conclude that this fellow was, in fact, you know, maybe…a little bit that way. But Hanania’s account naturally ignores all this evidence.

Now to Musk. Of course, Hanania leaves out the key fact. Does everyone else just forget this too? Why was Musk going to Israel and Auschwitz? It was to “atone” for comments on Twitter that were antisemitic. He was on an apology tour, which he denied was one. Once again, anybody who reads the newspaper in the morning should know this: it was in the New York Times. There is other evidence that might lead a reasonable person to suspect that Musk may—in fact—have some Nazi sympathies. First of all, his maternal grandfather Joshua N. Haldeman, a supporter of the Canadian Technocracy movement was a noted antisemite and Nazi sympathizer. Haldeman endorsed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: “…the plan as outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of this generation.” He moved to apartheid South Africa out of ideological sympathy with the regime. But don’t take my word for it—Musk’s father says so, saying of his ex-wife’s family, “They were very fanatical in favor of apartheid…Her parents came to South Africa from Canada because they sympathised with the Afrikaner government. They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff.” Haldeman died when Musk was young, but he was raised by his mother and his mother’s family. Do you seriously not think that some apologetic or sympathetic remarks about the Nazi regime were never uttered in young Musk’s presence? This is not an open and shut case, but when the guy from the Nazi-loving, apartheid family does what looks like a Nazi salute, I think any person with their wits about them should take careful note.

Here’s where the real bullshit begins. In the piece, Hanania writes, “Anyone who spends any time on X today knows that the right has a serious Nazi problem, which those in the broader movement refuse to speak out against for fear of being seen as sympathizing with the enemy.” Okay, so the problem is serious, he admits that. But then he also writes, “With the recent spate of stiff-armed salutes, what we are observing is, in most cases, not sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it’s no longer in the opposition.” Enough with the euphemisms. It’s not a “stiff-armed salute,” it’s a Nazi salute, a Sieg Heil, a Hitlergruß — let’s not play games. Well, Richard, you are telling us the Nazi problem is serious so why should we not take it seriously in this case. They are a “rebel band” still wearing “fatigues?” Oh yeah, and what color are those fatigues, pray tell?

The excuse given for “this oppositional culture”—just say we are clear, and we don’t give in to euphemisms—that means saying and doing Nazi things—is an absurd practice in self-excusal and bad faith:

To understand where this comes from you need to go back to the 2010s. Back then, online rightists reacted to the Great Awokening by leaning into performative racism, sexism, and homophobia through edgy memes and jokes.

I would know. I was one of them.

As the woke fever swept the culture, I began writing for far-right websites under a pseudonym. At the time, my concerns were similar to those that animate many on the right today, although like many of them, I became something of a crude caricature of what leftists claimed to be against. I believed that the left was out of its mind on racial and gender issues. I felt that it denied the important role that heredity plays in human affairs, as if acknowledging the existence of genes meant rejecting the right of individuals to be treated equally. And, like many others, I was alarmed by its tolerance of crime and social dysfunction. I still believe all those things.

Unfortunately, many of the people who agreed with me on these topics tended to believe also that the answer was for white Americans to imitate the identitarian left and form a movement that put race at the center of its worldview. I eventually came to see that this was a moral and intellectual dead end, as white identitarianism was simply the evil twin of the collectivist worldview of the far left that sees whites as the cause of all of the world’s problems.

Ohhhh, I see. So, it’s wokeness’s fault you became an online Nazi. Again, her e is the erasure of history: Nazis existed long before wokeness, this can’t be put on that. What you are saying, Richard, is, “Nazi propaganda took advantage of the prevailing cultural conditions and I was taken in by it and I also helped to create my own.” This idea that Nazis are “imitating the identitarian left” and “[forming] a movement that put race at the center of its worldview” is an insulting deflection. Once again, the racial nationalism of the Nazis is not some kind of regrettable clone of the woke leftism: it’s its own “tradition” that dates back over a century now. Blaming the left for your own part in becoming a Nazi is definitionally bad faith: refusing to take full responsibility for one’s own actions.

And let’s just stop and reflect now on the absolute clownishness of this piece of writing. This what we are reading: “I can tell you all about Nazis, trust me, I used to be one.” Excuse me one moment, please? You said, what now? Why should we expect this person to be sincere in any way? By his own admission, he says the movement is rife with Nazis and their favorite tactic is trolling, being provacateurs. Is it such undue paranoia to suspect this fellow might be up to something similar? Shouldn’t we ask how “denazified” is Hanania, really? He is still given to passionate demonstrations of racism on his Twitter, like when he wrote in response to Daniel Penny being charged: “These people are all animals, whether they’re harassing people on subways or walking around in suits.” In the very piece, he admits that he still believes in race science, albeit coded with euphemisms again: “important role that heredity plays in human affairs.” Hanania believes that “wokeness” is the result of Civil Rights law, which he would like to be rolled back. He wrote a whole book about it. In Weiss’s London speech, she enumerated a number of “sacred values,” including, “That we are all created in the image of God and it is that—and not our ethnicity or our IQ score—that gives us our worth and that makes us all equal.” That is not a value that Hanania holds, who openly and stridently believes that IQ and race determine human worth.

Let me try to put this is in terms conservatives might understand. Supposing you were an anticommunist, and you invited an ex-communist to lecture about the evils of communism, and in the course of his lecture, he goes, “Now, of course, I reject Stalinism, but the regrettable excesses of Comrade Stalin can be explained due to the necessity of fighting the White Terror and protecting the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat,” you might not ask him back. Maybe he’s not the right guy for that job, because he’s rationalizing exactly what you are meant to denounce. He might be an entryist or just a social climber: “By 2013, I had enrolled in a PhD program at UCLA and left racist blogging behind.” So, when it became politically and socially inconvenient for you to be known as an open racist you stopped being one. I see.

The problem is just that doing Nazi salutes is that it’s too crude and it’s counterproductive. Hanania’s real worry is that racist signaling might get in the way of the serious work of doing racist policies. “Uh, please settle down, guys,” the nerd implores the bullies who are pinning the teacher to the blackboard. But not everyone is a policy creep like Hanania. Many are real brownshirt rowdies, who want to “troll,” that is to intimidate, disconcert, and menace their enemies. Hanania’s appeal to his old comrades will not convince many to be quieter about their true aims. Make no mistake: this is what he’s doing, he’s saying, in effect, just don’t do Nazi salutes because it’s too revealing. Like a good pundit, it’s just all a question of messaging:

Owning the libs is not a philosophy or a winning political strategy. As someone whose brain has undergone the same process as many on the right, I’ve learned that turning into a caricature of what your political opponents are against is both intellectually and spiritually stifling. One becomes as much a mental slave to the censors of the far left as any of their most devoted foot soldiers. It takes away the ability to engage in a measured consideration of issues or social trends, and introduces an intellectual inflexibility that makes one unable to recognize when circumstances have changed. Becoming an ironic Nazi or feeling the need to defend such posturing is little better. It is a method of communication that was almost certainly never productive but under current conditions has become truly grotesque—and should have no place in public life.

Here’s what this says: “Writing as a former moronic zombie in thrall of a totalitarian movement who could only think in terms of reaction, I implore you all to become more subtle.” He then writes, “Becoming an ironic Nazi or feeling the need to defend such posturing is little better. It is a method of communication that was almost certainly never productive but under current conditions has become truly grotesque—and should have no place in public life.” Once again: we are not talking about “a method of communication:” it’s a Nazi salute. It is the passionate, open declaration of hatred and bloodthirst and the only sane, rational response to it is alarm and anger and full-throated condemnation. There is no such thing as “ironic Nazism:” Nazism has always been a movement of bad faith, sarcasm, self-excusal, and lies—the irony is built in. And I agree defenses or qualifications of what we are seeing with our own eyes should have no place in public life. Let’s start with this one, then. It’s long been my contention that people like Hanania have no place in respectable society.

The evidence is easily available for those who would choose to notice. It is not subtle. They are doing it openly now. They are fascists and Nazis. And if they really are not, they must dedicate themselves seriously to the fight against them. It’s as simple as that. But I guess what Orwell wrote was right: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”