Nobody accidentally does a Nazi salute.

Hello, subscribers. Word has reached me that some, perhaps all of you have not received a single solitary edition of this newsletter over the past three weeks. I want to offer my sincerest apologies for this unanticipated hiatus, along with an explanation I suspect you will, to a person, find intensely relatable:

I handwrote all twelve of the missing posts in an absinthe-induced euphoria, then immediately departed with Julia for the Azores (as is our annual custom), leaving them in the care of my latest valet, a Mamluk of indeterminate European origin bearing the Christian name Bellworthy. Well, this was foolish of me, for although he is highly skilled with both saber and lance, as well as an able barber, Bellworthy knows little or nothing of content management systems. (I'm told by other members of the household staff that he had to have the simplest functions of the computer, like copying and pasting, demonstrated for him at some length.) So he flubbed the delivery, obviously. To be clear, this was a management issue—I should not have left so crucial a task in the hands of so unprepared an individual. You will be pleased to learn I have taken steps to ensure such a mistake will not soon be made again: As of this writing, Bellworthy has been standing at attention outside our home in Madison, in the below-zero temperatures, clad in naught but loincloth, Isotoner gloves, and balaclava, for almost fourteen hours. I expect in ten more, when he comes back inside, finishes drawing my midnight bath, and at last has time to truly contemplate the experience, he will thank me for this lesson in amends-making and stick-to-itiveness.

No doubt each of you has a similar story. The posts in question representing quite likely the finest work I have produced as a professional man of letters, I hope to have them transcribed and published on this site in good time, once the Mamluk's eyes have fully unfrozen and healed. In the meantime, since they were inarguably written—on vellum and with a fountain pen, no less!—I am glad to inform you that Having a Normal One will retain its status as the country's longest-running uninterrupted daily email newsletter since 1989.

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Well, Donald Trump was inaugurated as president for the second time yesterday. And the big news from the event was that Elon Musk did a sieg heil—twice!—while giving a speech there.

This generated some frankly insane reactions from the press and other institutions. The New York Times said that Musk's "hand gesture" was "drawing comparisons to the Nazi salute." The (aggressively Zionist) Anti-Defamation League—founded in 1913 to combat antisemitism—posted that Musk had "made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm." The deputy political editor of the Financial Times said on Bluesky it "probably wasn't a Nazi salute."

So in case you haven't seen it, here is Musk making the "awkward gesture" that is "an attempt to punch the air like a sportsman":

Then he turned around and did it again for the folks behind him, as you can see here.

Let's be serious. The gesture in question involves multiple specific steps, performed in sequence and timed just so; nobody does this by accident, twice or just once. Certainly the white billionaire from the most famously racist country in my lifetime—the billionaire who has turned Twitter into a white nationalist breeding ground, and who has recently been cheering on a far-right political party in Germany—did not do it by accident. Actual neo-Nazis definitely didn't think it was. You either have to believe Elon Musk doesn't know what a Nazi salute looks like but then happened to mimic one by mistake twice, at an inauguration for a president frequently labeled a Nazi, or you have to believe it was a Nazi salute. There's no secret third possibility. And it doesn't matter what was in Musk's heart when he did it. If I grabbed my crotch and humped the air repeatedly at Academy Award–winning actor and national treasure Anne Hathaway on live television (and we weren't performing a hilarious skit), nobody would defend me with "Well, we can't say for sure whether he was being a giant creep unless we know what he was thinking." The bar shouldn't be lower for Nazism. The best-case scenario is that Musk was making a bad joke—but it didn't look like a joke, and he hasn't said he was joking. (For that matter, Musk hasn't even denied it was a sieg heil. People were rushing to explain it away before he even commented on it.)

None of this is surprising, and we shouldn't give it too much attention, because we already knew Elon Musk was a bigoted attention hog with authoritarian proclivities and a middle schooler's aptitude for theater. But do notice all the folks who are so eager to run interference for him, the journalists and officials with the gall to claim Americans and the rest of the world didn't see what we saw. Way, way too many of our fellow human beings are willing to make excuses for the rich and powerful.

😎 The Fun Part

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