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Will Elon succeed in making the Roman salute cool again? Reddit is predictably going apeshit over his gesture that can be construed as one. I mean, I doubt he's done that deliberately, it's a natural gesture in the same way a bendy cross is a natural ornament, but I doubt he's the kind of person that will mumble an apology and withdraw from the public eye for a while. If anything, I expect him to double down and insist it's been 80 years and people should be free to reappropriate the gesture.
If you search YouTube for “Nazi salute”, this is also almost every result.
The reason I’m searching is: I don’t actually know what a “Nazi salute” looks like. From what I can tell, it doesn’t really have any specific characteristics other than holding your arm out with your palm flat. But this is basically identical to the way that anybody would wave at a crowd.
The whole thing is so stupid. The bad part about the Nazis was the whole extermination of the Jews thing, not the Hugo Boss uniforms, or the hand gestures.
And there’s really no question that Elon Musk is not trying to exterminate all the Jews. It seems like he was waving in a weird spergy way.
YouTube is very strict, even banning Hitler's political speeches. You can find it here on X though if you want to see what a Nazi Roman looks like, NSFW warning for Hitler speech and Roman salute.
I mean…yeah that’s pretty vague. Yeah if somebody is shouting “heil” and throwing their arm out like that it’s a problem, but I don’t think we should maintain a ban on holding your hand up above chin level or anything like that.
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