The stiff-armed, fascist salute used to have a fairly narrow meaning.
"I think generally most people still find the Sieg Heil to be indicative and reminiscent of World War II, the Holocaust," said Kurt Braddock, a communications professor at American University who studies extremist recruitment.
"It signifies that somebody is, if not physically and socially, part of a far right neo-Nazi group, then they at least ideologically align with them," he said, adding that at times, it's also been used to signal a kind of nihilistic subversion and nonadherence to what's socially accepted.
But after one of the world's richest men, and now a prominent White House advisor, gave two stiff-armed salutes on Inauguration Day with few repercussions, the gesture's meaning has been expanding again for some, to the great alarm of others. After Elon Musk's salutes, NPR has counted at least a dozen other people mimicking the salute, many posting public videos themselves. Some have lost jobs — for others, little has changed.
Musk has repeatedly made jokes after the public outcry, including making puns with the names of Nazi leaders like Joseph Goebblels. He did so again recently as a guest on Joe Rogan's podcast. Musk has endorsed antisemitic tropes on his social media platform X, though he has denied being antisemitic.
Prominent figures on the right have mirrored Musk's example with no serious repercussions, including Steve Bannon and actor Eduardo Verástegui at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.
Examples are also accumulating daily of ordinary people recreating the spectacle. Online, anonymous posters say they're seeing the salutes from coworkers, customers, armed service members and students. This week, an Israeli student was arrested at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland for reportedly trying to spoil a class picture with the gesture.
Some people have been fired or resigned from their jobs over the salutes, including the CEO of an Idaho construction company, a Texas realtor, a county official in Pennsylvania and a priest in Michigan.
"They're not insulated by political power in the same way that Bannon and Musk" are, said Braddock, "so although they might feel as though they're part of this subversive little in-group, they are not going to get the same benefits … that the elites do."
Calvin Robinson, the Michigan priest and right-wing political commentator, had his U.S. visa temporarily revoked and lost his license to minister to Anglican Catholic churches after capping off an anti-abortion speech with the salute. Both he and his supporters have tried to raise money following the backlash. Robinson said he's not a Nazi, but that he's not sorry and described the salute as a joke.
"Yes it was cheeky," said Robinson on his Youtube show. "I am cheeky, first and foremost. But it wasn't immoral. It wasn't unethical. I didn't bring the church into disrepute." Robinson didn't respond to an interview request from NPR.
What is and isn't a joke
The "Overton window" is a concept in political science that describes what public conversation is acceptable in the mainstream in a given timeframe.
"What a joke does is that it throws a brick right through the Overton window and it smashes it. And in doing so, I think it opens up the space for others to say equally provocative and norm-breaking things," said Nick Butler, the author of The Trouble with Jokes: Humour and Offensiveness in Contemporary Culture and Politics. He researches organizational studies at Stockholm University.
Jokes create in-groups and out-groups of those who are laughing and those who are not. Butler described jokes as a kind of sonar that detects like-mindedness.
Butler said humor has been celebrated as a form of emancipation and pushing back against oppressors or authoritarians. But he argued that comedy is a tool that can be used by anyone, including "some pretty problematic actors who want to destroy the key tenets of liberal democracy."
"I think some have tried to kind of put boundaries between: 'Ok, this, we can call humor, because it 'punches up' rather than 'punches down,'" said Butler. "But if someone is laughing, then we have to accept that it is some kind of humorous intervention and it is a joke of some kind."
Part of the power of offensive humor, he said, is also that it lays a kind of trap for anyone hearing it who's uncomfortable or feels motivated to stick up for democratic values.
"You can accuse them of being oversensitive, lacking a sense of humor. Basically you can accuse them of being an insufferable killjoy. And no one wants to be an insufferable killjoy," said Butler.
'We're the fun ones'
Ridiculing critics as humorless is a strategy that's been cultivated for years by figures on the right, said Nick Marx, a media studies professor at Colorado State University and the co-author of That's Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them.
"Part of what you're seeing is an experimentation period — seeing what you can and cannot get away with. But it's all in support of the right's bigger goal of saying: 'Hey, come over here, we're the fun ones,'" said Marx.
He noted that while the right may have seen success in depicting itself as a home for comedy and free expression, Republican policies continue to target LGBTQ and reproductive rights, protestors and hundreds of words perceived as "woke."
Marx said while it's not clear that right-wing comedy is more popular or profitable than more other kinds of comedy, "if we're talking about political outcomes and whether comedy has successfully supported one side or the other's political outcomes, I think the results speak for themselves."
Protestors seize on the salute
Days after Inauguration Day, a still shot of Musk's salute was projected onto a Tesla factory in Berlin along with the words "Heil Tesla." It's one of several examples of the image and Musk's general likeness that have been reproduced as forms of protest against Musk and his companies. More recently, some Tesla drivers have reported seeing Nazi salutes from people expressing anti-Musk outrage.
Regardless of intent, stiff-armed salutes are protected speech under the Constitution. But as for those performing them as jokes, Braddock, the extremism researcher, warned that ordinary people should understand they are far more likely to face social and professional repercussions than the political elites they may be imitating.
"It's not going to matter to your employer," said Braddock. "And unfortunately, it's not going to matter to the hard line neo-Nazis, the hard line right-wing extremists who are looking for an excuse to normalize their ideologies and begin engaging in violence on behalf of those ideologies."
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