Since Donald Trump’s rise to power, some liberals have developed a bad habit of seeing secret Nazi imagery everywhere on the right.

Be it Laura Ingraham allegedly sieg-heiling at the 2016 Republican National Convention, a Justice Brett Kavanaugh clerk being called a covert white supremacist in 2018 because of her resting hand position, or concerns that the furniture at a 2021 conservative conference was arranged in the shape of a Nazi division’s emblem, these charges almost always end up looking kind of absurd.

So when I say that Elon Musk gave a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration on Monday, I am doing so only because I can see no other plausible interpretation of his gesture.

I watched the footage from as many angles as I could find. He stuck his arm straight out, palm down, and pointed it toward the crowd in a gesture of tribute. He put his hand on his heart first, a variant of the Adolf Hitler salute popularized in American History X — a critical film about neo-Nazism that some on the far-right have reclaimed as a celebration. And he did it twice.

If that’s what you saw — well, I’m with you. And it’s what neo-Nazis themselves saw; Nick Fuentes, the Hitler admirer who dined with Trump in 2022, described Musk’s gesture as “a straight-up sieg heil, like loving Hitler energy.”

But maybe you saw things differently.

Maybe, like the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle, you are inclined to give Musk the benefit of the doubt — suggesting that he was merely trying to mime his heart going out to the crowd. Maybe you’re skeptical of viral video clips on principle, a reasonable attitude given how easy they are to edit deceptively. Maybe you think we ultimately can’t know what’s in someone’s heart, and it’s not worth trying to guess — especially given Musk’s dismissal of the charges.

But whatever you believe was in Musk’s heart on Monday, it is hard to deny that his history suggests he’s entirely capable of something like this.

Musk has a long and extensive track record of extreme-right politics, flirtations with antisemitism, and juvenile trolling. This assessment does not hinge entirely on one gesture but on the totality of his public behavior. Just a few years ago, someone this radical wouldn’t be anywhere near a presidential inauguration.

Musk’s presence there, and his ability to avoid even a hint of contrition for doing something that has already emboldened America’s neo-Nazis, is a sign of a deeper rot.

Since Trump has risen to power, Americans’ shared notion of public morals — the idea that there are certain standards for conduct that shouldn’t be transgressed — have been blown to bits. Some of those standards, like strong prohibitions on doing anything that even resembles an endorsement of Nazism, are some of our most important bulwarks against a return to the worst political moments in modern humanity’s long collective history.

And that, more than anything else, is why what Musk did — both from that stage and long before — matters. Even if leaders and elites have abandoned any pretensions to a moral code, we as citizens still need to insist on it. Instead, even institutions created to banish bigotry and contain cruelty are bending the knee.

We don’t need a Hitler salute to know who Elon Musk is

It’s true........

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