Is Elon Musk the Haman of our days?

Why is this man sieg heiling?

On Monday, January 20, Elon Musk, standing at the podium of Trump’s inaugural rally, completed his speech with a Nazi salute to the audience and then again to Donald Trump. A month later, not to be undone, the gesture was imitated by Steve Bannon at the Conservative Political Action Conference, better known as CPAC.

Almost immediately, apologists tried to cover up Musk’s acts by suggesting it referenced a Roman rather than Nazi gesture. Sadly, among those defending Musk was the Anti-Defamation League’s executive director, Jonathon Greenblatt, who described the act as “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm.” It is worth noting that Greenblatt’s defense came only four months after Musk, faced with declining ad revenue on his social media platform X, blamed Jews and threatened to sue the ADL. While Greenblatt called the attack “dangerous and deeply irresponsible” at the time, later he warmed to Musk, describing him as an “amazing entrepreneur and extraordinary innovator.” A week later, replying to a post charging Jews with “dialectical hatred” of white people, Musk wrote: “You have said the actual truth.”

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Greenblatt recently tried, in a vague and qualified way, to walk back his description of Musk’s salute on a Haaretz podcast. On February 26, when asked about the ADL’s response to Musk’s gesture, Greenblatt answered, “Now in hindsight, I think it’s fair to say that we could have framed the tweet better in the moment … through the lens of the trauma that’s connected to even seeing something that might look like a Nazi salute.”

It is sad that of all people it is Greenblatt who appears to have become an apologist for Musk. In January 2022, Greenblatt wrote a book, “It Could Happen Here,” a modern update to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 book, “It Can’t Happen Here.” Lewis’s dystopian political novel details the rise of an American fascist dictatorship. In that book, which begins in 1936, Buzz Windrip campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination, running on a populist platform that promises to restore U.S. glory and prosperity — to make America great again — while portraying himself as an avatar of the common man. Though Windrip is charismatic and popular, the force behind his campaign is his unelected secretary and advisor.

In Greenblatt’s book, written 87 years after Lewis’s, the focus is on how antisemitism, racism, and other insidious forms of intolerance can destroy a society, taking root as quiet prejudices but mutating over time into horrific acts of brutality. In this urgent book, Greenblatt sounds an alarm, warning that this age–old trend is gathering momentum in the United States and that violence on an even larger, more catastrophic scale could be just around the corner. Mr. Greenblatt, please reread your book.

With Purim quickly approaching, now is the time to recognize Musk as, like Haman, the evil advisor to an easily manipulated King. An unelected man, sitting at the arm of the president, bestowed with powers to scapegoat and expel as he reshapes our American democracy into an autocratic, racist, ethnocentric and antisemitic nightmare.

Musk’s fascination with right-wing extremism is not confined to gestures, and he is not an anomaly within the new Trump administration. Vice President JD Vance echoed Musk’s support for Germany’s extreme right wing party, the AfD (Alternative for Germany) by visiting party leaders during Germany’s election campaign and calling for German political parties to lift their boycott of the organization.

What is the AfD?

The Alternative for Germany was founded in 2013, primarily by conservative Christian Democrats opposed to then Prime Minister Angela Merkel’s policies favoring immigration and loans to European countries in the grip of financial crisis. The party soon became a magnet for more extreme views: it came to express a virulent anti-Muslim sentiment, hostility toward European integration, opposition to vaccinations, opposition to measures limiting global warming, opposition to NATO, and a fondness for Putin’s Russia, leading many of its original founders to repudiate it.

Today AfD leaders are a mélange of laissez-faire free marketers, conspiracy theorists, antisemites, Christian fundamentalists, agnostics, climate change deniers, and neo-Nazis, vying for the votes of an electorate that includes disaffected citizens.

Elections were held on February 23 in a vote that Vice President Vance, in a violation of norms, attempted to influence in favor of the AfD. While his interference had little effect on polled opinion, the AfD did double its representation, reaching 20% of the vote. Because of extremists within the AfD, however, the other parties continue to block its participation in government. A ruling coalition with a parliamentary majority will likely be crafted again involving the center-right Christian Democrats, which, as the largest party, will choose the prime minister, and the center-left Social Democrats.

What’s with Trump and the AfD?

Trump administration support for the AfD is an attempt to build power for extreme right-wing movements abroad in order to bolster his own very similar assemblage of ideologies here in the U.S. While antisemitism may not be at the core of this ideological mix, it is closer to the center than the periphery, as Musk has clearly shown.

What all these right-wing movements share with the Trump administration is a white racialist, anti-Muslim ethnocentrism and national chauvinism. Most of them also are fundamentally anti-democratic.

That makes the European Union an ideological target for these new right-wing parties. Born in the aftermath of World War II, the European Union is both an economic and a political creation. After two devastating wars within 30 years, the hope was that its program of economic integration, the free movement of people, democracy, and the rule of law across Europe would make another war on the continent unthinkable. And for much of a younger generation a European and democratic identity did emerge, layering over respective national identities.

The new right and Putin

Some of these new right parties targeting the EU find inspiration in Putin’s Russia. Never mind that Putin’s kleptocracy has hollowed out Russia’s economy and drained it of a vigor that it might have been able to attain through the riches of its natural resources. The new parties see in Putin’s Russia a chauvinistic, autocratic model they each would like to implement within their own countries. Putin is using and manipulating such fawning admirers for his own purposes. For Putin, the invasion of Ukraine is only the first step in rebuilding a Russian empire. Putin seeks to extend Russian control into central Europe once again, and to increase Russia’s military presence and political influence globally as a competitor to the United States.

Trump and the new American right

Trump has worked to create an American political right wing, with many similarities to its European counterparts. It is fundamentally autocratic and contemptuous of the rule of law. The political coalition Trump has created involves religious fundamentalist and secular wings, free marketers and anti-capitalists. Racist and ethnocentric elements within the coalition are targeting immigration and multiculturalism for either racial or chauvinist reasons. What unifies this contradictory mix is an economic discontent, a program targeting non-white immigrants, social conservativism, a call for tax cuts, and a taste for autocracy. For various and sometimes contradictory reasons, much of this coalition sees the federal government as an enemy.

The risk for Jews,
the risk for everyone else

To the ethnocentric and racist elements, Jews are foreigners.

To the religious fundamentalists, Jews are heathens.

For Jews, a small ethnic/religious minority, civil rights and the rule of law are vital protections.

For the autocrat, civil rights and the rule of law are obstacles to be dismantled.

Personal liberty and the rule of law may be abstractions, but they have profound practical implications. American scientific, industrial, and cultural advances, the very best of U.S. society, are the fruits of our freedom of thought, democratic government, and the rule of law.

The political funders who helped place Trump into power may believe that now the government of the oligarchs, by the oligarchs, for the oligarchs will give them everything they desire. But as the oligarchs in Putin’s Russia have discovered, personal property is strictly a creation of law and the rule of law. Take that away, and personal property is the President’s whim.

In 1933 it took Hitler 18 months to dismantle democracy and make absolute dictatorship happen.

In 1935 Sinclair Lewis warned that the idea that “it can’t happen here” was an illusion.

In 2022 the warning was that it can happen here.

In Shushan it took a brave man and his niece to make sure it didn’t happen. That is a story we tell ourselves each year.

Unfortunately, the dangers we face today are not a story.

What we tell ourselves on Purim can, however, inspire us. To tell truth to power, we must begin by telling truth to ourselves and each other, instead of evading or normalizing or diminishing. The Nazi salute is sending us a message. We ignore it at our real peril.

Dr. Mark Gold of Teaneck holds a Ph.D. in economics from NYU. He is on the executive board of Partners for Progressive Israel, a member organization of the American Zionist Movement and an affiliate of the World Union of Meretz.

Hiam Simon of Englewood is the past chief operating officer of Ameinu, the leading progressive Zionist membership organization in the United States. He lived in Israel for many years, where he was the dean of students at what is now the Alexander Muss High School, and he served in the IDF as a noncommissioned officer in the artillery.