When in Rome, salute as the Romans salute

Mushroom Cock will not be happy that Oolon Apartheid (sorry, Douglas Adams) managed to upstage him at his big day:

Elon Musk waded into controversy on Monday when he gave back-to-back fascist-style salutes during celebrations of the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump.
“I just want to say thank you for making it happen,” the owner of SpaceX, X and Tesla, the richest person on earth and a major Trump donor and adviser, told Trump supporters at the Capital One Arena in Washington.
Musk then slapped his right hand into his chest, fingers splayed, before shooting out his right arm on an upwards diagonal, fingers together and palm facing down.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which campaigns against antisemitism, defines the Nazi salute as “raising an outstretched right arm with the palm down”.
As the crowd roared, Musk turned and saluted again, his arm and hand slightly lower.

There’s been some… interesting attempts to explain this away:

I am reminded of the time someone on Twitter was going on about Jews promoting hatred of white people and about “minorities” invading the West, and this friend to the Jews replied with “you have said the actual truth”. Also, this philo-Semite made this “gesture” twice. Once could’ve been an unfortunate error, The second time had to have been conscious. What was the second one about, Batya? Was he making sure everyone got his heart so no one missed out? Was he giving them his other internal organs as well?

The friend to the Jews is, of course, notably not a friend to the Anti-Defamation League, who offered their own apologia nonetheless:

And he then repeated the “moment of enthusiasm” (weird how well the gesture in the picture matches the ADL’s own description of a Hitler salute as cited in the Guardian article). Again, he knew what he was doing. As a friend of mine said on Bluesky, the problem with Oolon’s “enthusiasm” isn’t that he’s a Nazi but that he’s a troll. He was fully aware of what he was doing, and he did it for the LOLs as much as if not more than any other reason. And in the end it doesn’t matter if it was a real Nazi salute or not: the Nazis are taking it as one.

The response from the neo-Nazi community across the globe was instant and unanimous.
“Incredible things are happening already,” Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, a social media platform popular with antisemites and white supremacists, wrote over a picture of Musk giving the salute.
“The entire neo-Nazi movement seems to be eating it up,” says Nick Martin, an investigative journalist who closely tracks extremist groups and runs the online publication The Informant. “He gave two unmistakable Nazi salutes and they got the message loud and clear.”
“WE ARE FUCKING BACK” the administrator of a Nazi meme channel on Telegram wrote under a clip of Musk giving the salute. Members of the group responded with the lightning bolt emoji, a well-known neo-Nazi reference to the SS.
“I don’t care if this was a mistake, I’m going to enjoy the tears over it,” Christopher Pohlhaus, the leader of the American neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe, wrote on his Telegram channel under a gif of the Musk salute.
Keith Wood, a prominent far-right influencer from Ireland who has repeatedly praised Musk, responded to the actions by writing on X: “OK maybe woke really is dead.”
Evan Kilgore, a right-wing political commentator, wrote on X: “Holy crap … did Elon Musk just Heil Hitler at the Trump Inauguration Rally in Washington DC… This is incredible.” Kilgore later wrote: “We are so back.”
Kilgore, who is a Holocaust denier, has worked as an ambassador for Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. The conservative activist group hosted a pre-inauguration ball on Sunday evening that featured JD Vance, who was inaugurated as vice-president today, and the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr.

Steve Shives nails it: