Where were these newsrooms when agitators were roaming the streets of major cities the world over, threatening Jews and calling for Israel’s destruction?
Where were these newsrooms when agitators were roaming the streets of major cities the world over, threatening Jews and calling for Israel’s destruction?
M edia-invented moral panics are nothing new.
What sets apart the modern-day Nazi moral panic, however, is that it has achieved “evergreen” status. It can be easily dusted off and deployed on a whim, then packed away and stored until a later date. Unlike, say, the Dungeons & Dragons panic of the 1980s, the Nazi business has no natural shelf life. There is rarely an organic instigating event that precedes it. It disappears as quickly as it appears. Its only consistent trait is that it tends to be aimed exclusively at lawmakers and other prominent figures disfavored by the press.
Consider, for example, the phony scandal that erupted last week following President Trump’s inauguration, and the context in which it was promoted. Elon Musk, a certified weirdo, allegedly threw out two Nazi salutes during a public address, supposedly telegraphing to the entire world his white supremacist allegiances.
This, of course, is nonsense. The hullabaloo is as absurd as most of the previous allegations in recent decades of Nazi-coded wrongdoing by anyone to the right of Mao Zedong. But this hasn’t stopped our brave Fourth Estate from accusing the South African–born zillionaire of being a Hitler acolyte.
“Elon Musk appears to make back-to-back fascist salutes at inauguration rally,” declared a Guardian headline.
Said the New York Times in a print headline, “Musk Gesture Draws Critics for Similarity to Nazi Salute.”
“Musk’s straight-arm gesture embraced by right-wing extremists regardless of what he meant,” declared the Orlando Sentinel in a particularly grim headline (It doesn’t matter what he did; it matters what we think he did!)
“That salute was evocative of things we’ve seen through history,” mused CNN host Kasie Hunt. (Considering this is a network that just lost, and then settled for an undisclosed amount, a defamation lawsuit after being ordered to pay $5 million, one would think its staffers might have learned something from the experience. Guess not.)
U.S. commentators and journalists, meanwhile, were eager last week to promote a headline that appeared over an opinion article in Die Zeit, which read, “Ein Hitlergruß ist ein Hitlergruß ist ein Hitlergruß” (“A Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute”).
American newsmen argued that if a German newspaper says it was a “Sieg Heil,” it must be true. But all this opinion piece shows is that European journalists are as uninformed and hysterical as American journalists, perhaps even more so.
What a crock.
Musk, infamously awkward, told the crowd that his heart goes out to them. He then pretended twice to rip out his heart and throw it to the audience. For a normal, well-adjusted person, an arm appearing momentarily at a 45-degree angle is not sufficient evidence to accuse a man of being a crypto-Nazi, but what do normal, well-adjusted people know anyway?
The only thing more outrageous than the press’s casual slander of Musk is that it comes within the context of a post–October 7 world, one in which entire newsrooms have looked on casually as bands of demonstrators roam the streets of major cities the world over, screaming for the globalization of the intifada and the destruction of Israel — in short, the death of Jews.
These protesters carry actual Nazi iconography, including the swastika. They throw out actual, unambiguous “Sieg Heils.” They chant explicit calls for ethnic cleansing, including “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” and “We can’t wait for the caliphate.” They tear down posters featuring the faces of Israeli adults and children held hostage by Hamas. They use projectors to display messages such as “GLORY TO OUR MARTYRS,” a reference to the Hamas terrorists killed during the October 7 massacre. Jews in New York City have been told to avoid certain areas for fear of targeted violence. Some Jewish schools in the United States closed on October 13 after Hamas leadership called for a “Day of Rage.” In American academia, some Jewish students have gone into hiding as their classmates hold vigils for the Palestinian “martyrs” of October 7. College administrators have been slow to condemn the pro-terrorist demonstrations that have descended on their campuses. They’ve been even slower to offer protections for Jewish students.
Throughout all of this, the press has kept its beloved Nazi moral panic under wraps. Unlike Musk, the Hamas demonstrators have not been roundly condemned by journalists and commentators, even as the protesters act like actual brownshirts. We’ve yet to be inundated with warnings and wall-to-wall commentary analyzing the protesters’ slogans, body language, and signage.
There certainly isn’t the type of handwringing and breathless commentary we see for Musk’s arm-waving. Sure, one may argue that Musk is a public figure (and a powerful one at that), and these Hamas demonstrators are just college students and foreign visitors. All right, but this brings us to the uncomfortable fact that these demonstrators have enjoyed enthusiastic support from Democratic legislators and school administrators.
Yet when the administrators of Columbia, Harvard, and Yale were allowing their Hamas-supporting students to run wild, intimidating, threatening, and even abusing their Jewish peers, look at where the criticism and scrutiny were coming from. It was largely from conservatives and conservative publications, and from Jewish donors to these universities. Members of the press, meanwhile, fought on behalf of the disgraced administrators, accusing their critics of being racists, misogynists, or both. As for the Democratic lawmakers who’ve spoken out in defense of the pro-Hamas demonstrators, including Representatives Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), media interest in their stance has been close to nil. Journalists would rather not talk about it.
Most damning of all was what occurred during the 2024 Democratic National Convention, as Hamas demonstrators mobilized outside the convention center to protest then–president Joe Biden and his administration for being insufficiently anti-Israel.
Rather than condemn the intifada enthusiasts, Biden remarked during his speech, “Those protesters out in the street — they have a point.” It was a genuine “very fine people on both sides” moment, and yet the press didn’t care. The president’s remarks prompted no media outcry.
Last week, the Washington Free Beacon reported that Columbia University was posting security guards outside of “Jewish studies courses a day after pro-Hamas students stormed an Israeli history class and targeted Jewish students with anti-Semitic flyers.”
Meanwhile, on MSNBC, on CNN, and in the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times, the talk of the day was Elon Musk’s gesture.
We’re back to a Nazi under every doily, and all it took was for the Democrats to lose a presidential election in a year when they and their constituents linked arms with people who want to see Israel wiped from the map.