Nazi salutes are not "just trolling"

A "reformed racist" isn't so reformed after all

Growing up, we looked for pain points in friends. Jabs to throw at our disposal— sometimes to get over on someone, sometimes to react to a jab coming your way. It wasn’t only a boy thing because some of the nastiest jabs were thrown by girls.

With the hindsight of decades, I realize it was cultural. Not that ribbing friends as a form of camaraderie is exclusive to the eighties in Jersey—the British mercilessly wield some of the best sarcasm in the world—but there are people from other times and places where such bonding is not a form of currency and who, to be frank, loathe it.

I can’t help people from other times and places, which is to say we haven’t really caught up to the internet yet. So many people madly typing into the sky can’t possibly coordinate well, much less understand one another’s time and place.

Even with all the ways we relate to one another (and all the ways we fail to relate to one another), certain communication styles should, even on a global level, be well understand. For example: Nazi salutes.

If there was ever a gimme in the broad spectrum of bodily contortions, it’s this one. Though apparently I’m apparently, or so I learned after reading Richard Hanania’s recent article in the Free Press, “I Can Explain Why the Nazi Salute Is Back.”

Someone screenshotted Free Press founder, Bari Weiss, positively promoting it, which is how I discovered it. She merely copy-pasted the first line of the article, “Nazi—excuse me, Roman—salutes have become all the rage on the American right,” before concluding with the question, “What’s going on?”

Fine if you want to pretend to transcend politics, or reality, for the sake of the vaunted opinion section of a newspaper, something we learned Jeff Bezos is unwilling to do with his new MAGAfied op-ed section of the Washington Post. Coming from the author of “How to Fight Anti-Semitism,” Weiss’s tweet seemed rather rich. Or, poor.

So I have to rethink my thesis: Nazi salues should be obvious. But to Hanania, they’re really just a troll. Hanania used to write “race realism” under the pen name “Richard Hoste.” What does that even mean? Things like eugenics and forced sterilization for “low IQ” folk, who just happen to be Black. Race mixing is a no-no. Hanania was also a fan of a forthcoming sci-fi race war written by a neo-Nazi to justify his belief that Black people can’t govern themselves. But now, he’s supposedly reformed, which is how he can write an article claiming Nazi salutes really aren’t that bad.

John Ganz put this into perspective with a paragraph-long synopsis of the growing Nazi salute trend last week, writing,

This is serious stuff. You cannot play around with these symbols without summoning hell and all its demons. They will not be able to control them.

This was written before Ganz read Hanania’s piece. The next day, he published a much longer article on the topic, which I’ll conclude with. First, Hanania.

To begin with, it’s not a fucking Roman salute. In fairness, I did call it an Elon salute a few weeks ago, but that was tongue in cheek and before it became even more of a trend in right-wing politics. You know you’ve lost the plot when white supremacist Nick Fuentes tells these dudes to knock it off. Little man was responding to Steve Bannon and actor Eduardo Verastegui of — checks notes — Mall Cop 2 fame throwing their arms high (well, about 45 degrees) into the air.

Back to Hanania:

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.

Throwing shade at left-leaning anchors is trolling; Nazi salutes are not. Some people might have jumped the gun on screaming fascism a decade ago, but they were also identifying signs that could lead to a tipping point. Even the noted scholar of fascism, Robert Paxton, said the point had been tipped back in October—a few weeks before Americans decided to fuck around and find out with a second Trump administration.

Hanania claims to be allergic to Nazi salutes, calling them “incredibly lazy.” He goes on:

Even the crudest trolls have a message. 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.

The salute is the message, Richard. That’s the whole point of a symbolic gesture—to represent a whole bunch of words that have the force of meaning behind them. This isn’t irony in the sarcastic sense, which, depending on context, can be used to punch or hug. To return to where I started, even jabs among friends serve a social purpose: they remind the receiver to not take themselves too seriously. The best sarcasm is layered, revealing multiple meanings at once, and all are true.

I return to sarcasm because trolling is a lowbrow form of sarcasm, one only intended to punch. This is why trolling is never actually funny: it’s decontextualized from real-world relationships in which such ribbings are earned. Words can have multiple meanings and need to be contextualized before criticized, which is really hard to pull off online. A Nazi salute has one meaning. You can’t troll with it because there’s only one context in which it can ever be understood.

Hanania laments his racist blogging past, thinking those ideas would die out, expressing his confusion when they didn’t, which makes me wonder why he left them behind in the first place—and how many of them did he really abandon? Because, by his own admission, it occurred the moment he realized—wrongly—that being an online Nazi wouldn’t turn out well for him, not because he had a change of heart.

To that end, Hanania recently wrote an essay titled “Letting Palestinians Move Is Not ‘Ethnic Cleansing,’” which was published around the time when Trump started floating the notion of a US-owned Mediterranean beach resort. His proof? An Armenian woman who moved to Southern California. He goes on:

Instead of arguing about the definition of “ethnic cleansing,” it’s better to get beyond word games and address the underlying concerns people have. Many operate based on the assumption that not many Palestinians would leave voluntarily, as Glenn Greenwald recently asserted without evidence. Yet a poll conducted before the war showed that about a quarter of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza wanted to emigrate. Among the under 30 in Gaza, the number was 44%. Since the territory has been leveled, those numbers are surely higher now.

Hanania seems incapable of realizing that he calls out Greenwald for not citing evidence, then goes on to do the same. Then again, the whole essay is just a vibe, man, the sort of post-racial drivel the right luxuriates in.

Hanania, the reformed racist, doesn’t seem that reformed after all. Sure, he’s using his own name now, but he also gives off big “The Bell Curve has some valid points” vibes. Oh wait, he uses it to argue against affirmative action.

Let’s jump ahead to his conclusion. After acknowledging that X “has a serious Nazi problem,” he warns:

For those trying to form political coalitions and have an influence on public policy, Nazi salutes are obviously a hindrance to their goals—and they give leftists new life.

The real issue is that Nazi salutes pose an image problem for the right, not the fact that some people on the right are actual Nazis. I don’t know how many really are. While some of these cretins are doing it for attention capture, it’s impossible to reduce the action to trolling, especially when so many MAGA stans defend the action. Hanania isn’t defending it per se, but he’s also not calling it what it is: a symbol calling for the elimination of a group of people.

He winds down by saying that “owning the libs is not a philosophy or winning political strategy,” which from a meta perspective is true, but it’s also the exact fuel that has propelled MAGA forward for a decade. Hanania might be cosplaying Willam F Buckley here, but he has to know he doesn’t have the chops for that. Throwing a Sieg Heil out at CPAC, he concludes,

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.

I would almost golf clap for his flaccid ending if I wasn’t aware of how he arrived there. That includes blaming “wokeness” for him becoming an online Nazi in the first place. I’ve repeatedly expressed my own reservations around tone and language policing on Conspirituality. But my disagreements with certain framings didn’t naturally drive me to the right. They actually did the opposite: make me examine my positions, consider my blind spots, and strengthen my positions.

It’s always a bit too convenient whenever former Democrats claim the party “left them.” It just sounds like you just found an excuse to be who you really want to be.

The best framework I’ve found for explaining my position is longtime activist Loretta Ross’s circles of influence. She came up with it sometime after working with the Nation of Islam on a school bussing program during the Civil Rights era. Well aware of the Nation’s misogynistic views, Ross’s friends told her not to work with them. But she saw an opportunity: implementing a shared goal, to make an education more accessible for Black children. So she held her breath and didn’t focus on their disagreements, but rather their shared interest. And they won.

Ross knows you’re never going to agree with anyone 100% of the time. In fact, the first tier of her framework is 90-percenters. You agree with someone 90% of the time. That’s an ally. Though even she recognizes that problems arise there, when she says,

I think that the 90-percenters spend too much time trying to turn people into 100-percenters.

Which is why most people are allergic to purity tests. Ross advises to not hold them in the first place.

The framework then goes 75-percenters, 50-percenters, 25-percenters, and 0-percenters. At each step, you agree less with someone, and you have to really consider if working with them is worth it. At 50% you have to think hard. At 25%, it probably isn’t worth it. The 0-percenters are, she notes, fascists. In other words, Nazis. And there’s only one way to deal with them.

I don’t think I have any common ground with them and do my best to overpower and overwhelm them.

You have to overpower Nazis, literal ones and those who cosplay them for attention or whatever other bullshit excuse someone like Richard Hanania imagines.

I’ll leave the final word to John Ganz, who sums up his critique of Hanania’s essay eloquently.

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.”