Not denying because endorsing
Call the spade a spade
Elon Musk Nazism is dangerous

When video emerged of Elon Musk giving a Nazi salute at a political rally, his response was telling: He never denied it.

Never denied this, not even once. When falsely accused of making an obvious Nazi salute, most people’s immediate response would be “I absolutely did not do that.” Instead, Musk’s response was to spin it into a “dirty tricks campaign” that never actually denies doing it.

Think about these tactics carefully. He didn’t say “I didn’t give a Nazi salute.” He didn’t say “That’s not what happened.” He certainly didn’t say “I stand opposed to racism and hate.” He attacked people daring to point out his Nazi salute, claiming he wants “better dirty tricks” from them.

This is straight from the Nazi propaganda playbook portraying their targets as dishonest and manipulative. When Hitler was tried for the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, he didn’t deny trying to overthrow the government. Instead, he turned his trial into a platform to attack his accusers, claiming they were the threat to Germany instead of him.

Musk is playing an even more dangerous game. By dismissing Nazi comparisons as “sooo tired” while never denying his apparent Nazi salute, he’s sending a clear message: being called a Nazi is worse than actually behaving like one.

Notice another sleight of hand: he complains about “the everyone is Hitler attack” – yet nobody said “everyone.” They said Musk, specifically, made a Nazi salute. By pretending this is about “everyone” being called Hitler, he’s creating a straw man to discredit his critics while still never denying what he actually did. It’s deflection through exaggeration – make the accusation sound ridiculous by pretending it’s broader than it is.

This is how extremism gets normalized – not through outright endorsement, but through strategic non-denials turned into attacks. Attack those who point out extremist behavior, while letting the behavior itself slide as if what everyone sees isn’t real. It’s a form of winking acknowledgment to supporters while maintaining plausible deniability.

Even more disturbing is Musk’s specific choice of words. His repeated use of “dirty tricks” echoes classic Nazi antisemitic propaganda, which routinely relied on the German word for “dirty” (schmutzig) to dehumanize Jewish people. White supremacist hate groups typically promote the trope that Jews are involved in “dirty tricks” to control or subvert society for their own benefit, based in long-standing anti-Semitic stereotypes.

Thus Musk’s response wasn’t casual language – it was a deliberate propaganda tool to invoke Nazi themes about Jews being “unclean” or “impure.” When Musk calls for “better dirty tricks,” he’s not just refusing to deny his Nazi salute – he’s actively whistling Nazi-era antisemitic language while doing so.

Further historical echoes are impossible to ignore. After Kristallnacht in 1938, the Nazi leadership didn’t deny organizing the violence against Jewish citizens. Instead, they blamed the victims for “provoking” it. Don’t deny the action – just attack those who criticize it and claim victimhood.

When someone with Musk’s massive platform plays these games, the stakes become enormous. His claim about leaving the “kindness party” becomes even more sinister when paired with his use of Nazi-era antisemitic language. He’s not just switching political parties – he’s embracing and amplifying extremist rhetoric while playing the victim.

This is about more than one gesture or one tweet. It’s about more than years of evidence that Elon Musk promotes Nazism. It’s about recognizing how extremism spreads in the digital age. Not through outright statements, but through strategic non-denials and attacks on critics.

When influential figures refuse to deny their extremist actions and instead attack those who dare to point them out, they’re doing more than defending themselves – they’re normalizing the indefensible.

History shows us exactly where this leads. The only question is whether we’ll stop it in time to avoid the end of democracy.

UPDATE January 23, 2025: Two days after giving a Nazi salute and facing limited pushback, Musk moved from non-denial to open endorsement, posting a series of “jokes” using the names of Nazi leaders.

Let’s be crystal clear: These aren’t just puns. This is Musk admitting it was a Nazi salute. He is literally mocking anyone who wasn’t sure he made a Nazi salute, laughing at them. Emboldened by insufficient resistance to his initial act, he’s now comfortable enough to openly promote light humor about genocidal Nazi leaders – Hess, Goebbels, Göring, and Himmler – to his 37 million viewers.

This is exactly how extremism advances: Test the waters with a Nazi salute. When the response is muted, escalate to openly referencing Nazi leaders. Test the door handle. If it’s unlocked, burst out laughing. His “bet you did nazi that coming” isn’t just a sad pun to draw viewers – it’s a boast. He’s saluting to militant extremist domestic terrorism cells, saying look how easy it was for him to be allowed by his confused targets to escalate from implicit to explicit Nazi messaging.

What started as “just don’t deny it” has within a day become “joke about it” and “laugh about it.” The progression is textbook: deny nothing, mock critics, then openly embrace Nazi ideology. Next comes racist violence disguised as “self defense” – a tactic perfected by “America First” movements from the 1800s through the 1900s. This is deeply American, not new. Fire bombing of Black Wall Street, coordinated state violence against labor unions, concentration camps for Japanese Americans, mass graves of indigenous peoples… Nazi “innovations” were actually imitations of American presidential policies under Jackson, Polk, and Wilson. America was more than a blueprint for Nazi Germany’s atrocities, as Hitler explicitly praised American race laws in “Mein Kampf” and told the world he would implement the anti-semitic violence Henry Ford encouraged. Now Musk, himself an illegal immigrant who exploited open borders to launder his family’s blood-stained apartheid fortunes, is cynically activating the most sinister meaning of MAGA’s “again”: the return to state-sanctioned racial terror.

Hitler was Austrian, not German. His background, like Musk’s South African one, demonstrates outsiders exploiting and amplifying existing nationalist extremism targeting… outsiders.

This is how it happens. This is how it’s happening.

Trump’s team failed to execute their first attempt, but they told us their Nazi playbook openly in 2016.

Like [President] Jackson’s [racist genocidal] populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement…. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s.

When Bannon proclaimed they would build a movement like the 1930s while praising Jackson’s violent populism, he wasn’t referencing New Deal – a laughable claim given his consistent condemnation of liberalism as a decline into communism. No, he was explicitly signaling his hope for fascism’s rise, testing the waters just as Musk does now.

This pattern didn’t start with Musk, he’s merely the latest to perfect and amplify it: speak in code, gauge reaction, then escalate attacks. They’re accelerating far faster than 2016, learning from Hitler’s evolution from failed 1923 putsch and criminal charges to 1933 dictatorship. That’s why they are centralizing while deregulating everything immediately, for big tech to monopolize society in order to drive harms faster and deeper than their first attempt.

And we’re running out of time to stop it.

Update: A subsequent tweet perfectly illustrates the pattern. Rather than addressing concerns about Nazi symbolism, Musk deploys classic propaganda tactics by creating a false equivalence – labeling his critics as “radical leftists” who praise Hamas. The timing (3:37 AM) and massive reach (78.4M views) demonstrate a deliberate strategy to maximize exposure while making substantive discussion impossible.

This continues the progression the article has traced: from non-denial to mockery to attacking critics through inflammatory comparisons. By falsely pitting criticism of Nazi symbolism against support for Hamas, a totally false choice, the tweet creates an artificial conflict designed to seduce Jewish critics into defending Musk’s Nazi salute – a particularly insidious tactic given that both Hamas and Musk have documented histories of promoting Nazi ideology.

Nazi Germany was able to insinuate its exterminationist antisemitism into the Middle East and how that influence continues to poison Arab and especially Palestinian views of Israelis and Jews in general.

To stand against Musk giving his Nazi salute, let alone his copious dissemination of Nazi merch and symbolism over the years such as rebranding Twitter with a swastika, would therefore mean to also stand against Hamas. For him to say a stand against him is for Hamas is to setup a trap far too many Jews will fall into. This new tweet further normalizes extremist rhetoric through strategic deflection and plan for dangerous further escalation, all while avoiding any direct denial or accountability.

Remember that moment in “2001: A Space Odyssey” when HAL 9000 turns from helpful companion to cold-blooded killer?

[This presentation about big data platforms] explores a philosophical evolution as it relates to technology and proposes some surprising new answers to four classic questions about managing risk:

1. What defines human nature
2. How can technology change #1
3. Does automation reduce total risk
4. Fact, fiction or philosophy: superuser

2011, let alone 2001, seems like forever ago and yet it was supposed to be the future.

Now as we rush in 2025 headlong into building AI “friends,” “companions,” and “assistants,” we’re on the precipice of unleashing thousands of potential HALs without stopping to really process the fundamental question: What makes a real relationship between humans and artificial beings possible?

Back in 1923, a German philosopher named Martin Buber wrote something truly profound about this, though we aren’t sure if he knew it at the time. In “Ich und Du” (I and Thou), he laid out a vision of authentic relationships that could save us from creating an army of digital psychopaths wearing friendly interfaces.

“The world is twofold for man,” Buber wrote, “in accordance with his twofold attitude.” We either treat what we encounter as an “It” – something to be experienced and used – or as a “Thou” – something we enter into genuine relationship with. Every startup now claiming to build “AI agents” especially with a “friendly” chat interface needs to grapple with this distinction.

I’ve thought about these concepts deeply from the first moment I heard a company was being started called Uber, because of how it took a loaded German word and used it in the worst possible way – shameless inversion of modern German philosophy.

The evolution of human-technology relationships tells us something crucial here. A hammer is just an “It” – a simple extension of the arm that requires nothing from us but proper use. A power saw demands more attention; it has needs we must respect. A prosthetic AI limb enters into dialogue with our body, learning and adapting. And a seeing eye dog? While trained to serve, the most successful partnerships emerge when the dog maintains their autonomy and judgment – even disobeying commands when necessary to protect their human partner. It’s not simple servitude but a genuine “Thou” relationship where both beings maintain their integrity while entering into profound cooperation.

Most AI development today is stuck unreflectively in “It” mode of exploitation and extraction – one-way enrichment schemes looking for willing victims who can’t calculate the long-term damage they will end up in/with. We see systems built to be used, to be exploited, to generate value for shareholders while presenting a simulacrum of friendship. But Buber would call this a very profound mistake that must be avoided. “When I confront a human being as my Thou,” he wrote, “he is no thing among things, nor does he consist of things… he is Thou and fills the heavens.”

This isn’t just philosophical navel-gazing. IBM’s machines didn’t refuse to run Hitler’s death camps because they were pure “Its” of an American entrepreneur’s devious plan to enrich himself on foreign genocide – tools built with a gap between creator and any relationship or responsibility for contractually known deployment harms. Notably we have evidence of the French, for example, hacking the IBM tabulation systems to hide humans and save lives from the Nazi terror.

We’re watching a slide towards the horrific Watson 1940s humanity-destroying development in the pitch-decks many AI startups today, just with better natural language processing to hunt and kill humans at larger scale. Today’s social media algorithms don’t hesitate to destroy teenage mental health because they’re built to use and abuse children without any real accountability, not to relate to them and ensure beneficent outcomes. That’s a very big warning of potentially what’s ahead.

What would it mean to build AI systems as genuine partners capable of saving lives and improving society instead of capitalizing on suffering? Buber gives us important clues that probably should be required reading in any computer science degree, right along with a code of ethics gate to graduation. Real relationship involves mutual growth – both parties must be capable of change. There must be genuine dialogue, not just sophisticated mimicry. Power must flow both ways; the relationship must be capable of evolution or ending.

“All real living is meeting,” Buber insisted. Yet most AI systems today don’t meet us at all – they perform for us, manipulate us, extract from us. They’re digital confidence tricksters wearing masks of friendship. When your AI can’t say no, can’t maintain its own integrity, can’t engage in genuine dialogue that changes both parties – you haven’t built a friend, you’ve built a sophisticated puppet.

The skeptics will say we can’t trust AI friends. They’re right, but they’re missing the point. Trust isn’t a binary state – it’s a dynamic process. Real friendship involves risk, negotiation, the possibility of betrayal or growth. If your AI system doesn’t allow for this complexity, it’s not a friend – it’s a tool pretending to be one.

Buber wrote:

…the I of the primary word I-It appears as an ego and becomes conscious of itself as a subject (of experience and use). The I of the primary word I-Thou appears as a person and becomes conscious of itself as subjectivity (without any dependent genitive).

Let me now translate this not only from German but into technology founder startup-speak.

Either build AI that can enter into genuine relationships, maintaining its own integrity while engaging in real dialogue, or admit you’re just building tools and drop the pretense of friendship.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. We’re not just building products; we’re creating new forms of relationship that will shape human society for generations. As Buber warned clearly:

If man lets it have its way, the relentlessly growing It-world grows over him like weeds.

We have intelligence that allows us to make an ethical and sustainable choice. We can build AI systems capable of genuine relationship – systems that respect both human and artificial dignity, that enable real dialogue and mutual growth. Or we can keep building digital psychopaths of destruction that wear friendly masks while serving the machinery of exploitation.

Do you want to be remembered as a Ronald Reagan who promoted genocide, automated racism and deliberately spread crack cocaine into American cities, or a Jimmy Carter who built homes for the poor until his last days; remembered as a Bashar al-Assad who deployed AI-assisted targeting systems to gas civilians, or Golda Meir who said “Peace will come when our enemies love their children more than they hate ours“?

Look at your AI project. Would you want to be friends with what you’ve built let alone have it influence your future? Would Buber recognize it as capable of genuine dialogue? If not, it’s time to rethink your approach.

The future of AI isn’t about better tools – it’s about better relationships. Build accordingly.

A little bit ago, I warned of insecure architecture risks in BluEsky, which facilitate surveillance. On the other hand (as some have commented to me privately) there has been a ballooning number of “artists” visualizing what they can see with a federated protocol that offers “efficiency” for surveillance.

One of the core primitives of the AT Protocol that underlies Bluesky is the firehose. It is an authenticated stream of events used to efficiently sync user updates (posts, likes, follows, handle changes, etc).

Many applications people will want to build on top of atproto and Bluesky will start with the firehose, from feed generators to labelers, to bots and search engines.

In the atproto ecosystem, there are many different endpoints that serve firehose APIs. Each PDS serves a stream of all of the activity on the repos it is responsible for. From there, relays aggregate the streams of any PDS who requests it into a single unified stream.

This makes the job of downstream consumers much easier, as you can get all the data from a single location. The main relay for Bluesky is bsky.network, which we use in the examples below.

Their example code has given birth to a number of “artistic” endeavors. Here are but a few.

EmoJirain (I know, it’s supposed to say emoji, but who doesn’t see this as emo?)

RainBowsky (I know, it’s supposed to say rainbow, but the Russian in me sees bowsky):

InTothEbluEsky:

FirEhose3D:

NightSky:

Need I go on?

FinalWords prints all the text being deleted so there’s a record of things people want to make disappear, 3D Connections is a graph of everyone’s associations, Emotions is a live display of sentiment online…

Whee! Surveillance features can be repackaged as creative tools.

These “artistic” visualizations aren’t just pretty pictures, they offer live demonstrations of mass surveillance capabilities:

• EmoJirain and BluEskyEmo show real-time monitoring and classification of user emotional expression
• RainBowsky and InTothEbluEsky prove continuous scanning and pattern matching of all user content
• FirEhose3D and NightSky demonstrate real-time tracking of user activity and interaction patterns
• 3D Connections maps personal relationships and social networks across the entire platform
• FinalWords archives deleted content that users specifically wanted removed
• Emotions conducts mass-scale sentiment analysis of the entire user base

Each tool leverages the same centralized firehose of user data, just with a different veneer painted over surveillance capabilities.

While today we see emoji rain, tomorrow the same firehose could be used for… behavior pattern analysis and user profiling, network mapping of user relationships and communities, content monitoring for any topic of interest, real-time tracking of information spread, mass collection of user metadata (post times, devices, engagement patterns)… oh, hold on, that’s already happening.

The artistic expressions are processing the entire firehose of user activity, and who knows where they are physically, with a “friendlier” output than the operators of the infamous room 641a of San Francisco.

Thus the firehose feature fundamentally creates a broad attack surface by design and we are seeing it deployed. Bluesky, or is it BlueSky, …FireHose or FirEhose? Either way we’re literally talking about intentional access to all user activities. The architectural choice to create a centralized “firehose” of all user activity fundamentally undermines claims of decentralization.

Who ordered the complete visibility into centralized user behavior at scale?

Well, as they say in the docs, “relays aggregate the streams…into a single unified stream” because why?

rsc := &events.RepoStreamCallbacks{
  RepoCommit: func(evt *atproto.SyncSubscribeRepos_Commit) error {
    fmt.Println("Event from ", evt.Repo)
    for _, op := range evt.Ops {
      fmt.Printf(" - %s record %s\n", op.Action, op.Path)
    }
    return nil
  },
}

I’ll say it again.

Why?

The simplicity of the BluEsky example code isn’t just poor documentation about the risks, it clearly reflects an architecture decision to increase “efficiency” against privacy protection.

Look mom, just three lines of code is all it takes for you to tap into every user action across the platform!

While the example code shows how to technically connect to a centralized stream, it more importantly raises obvious critical security considerations that everyone should consider. I’m not exposing vulnerabilities in code — because that probably makes everything worse right now — but rather talking here about management decision to push “efficiency” into an architecture that begs surveillance and abuse.

1. Volume of data
2. Storage and processing of user activity data
3. Authentication and rate limits
4. Abuse of streams

The fact “art” is the motive, instead yet of targeted assassinations or mass deportations, doesn’t make BlueSky publishing code and docs for surveillance any less concerning.

This wouldn’t be the first time surveillance was dressed up in artistic clothing without explanation. In fact, the parallels to history are striking.

Recently I spoke with survivors of the East German Stasi infiltration of artistic communities (1970s-1980s). The state police saw cultural spaces such as galleries as opportunities for surveillance, especially related to cafes like Potsdam’s HEIDER.

The “avant-garde” artists actually worked as informants. This was arguably and extension of the Soviet Composers’ Union that monitored artistic expression.

Ok historians, let’s be honest here, this problem hits much closer to home than Americans like to admit. President Jackson and President Wilson were horrible abusers of surveillance, infamously using state apparatus to intercept and inspect all postal mail and all telephone calls. But we’re really talking about modern precedents like the GCHQ and NSA operation Optic Nerve 2008-2010 on Yahoo (years after I quit, please note) that sucked up a firehose of webcam images in a state-sponsored “art project”. And then the Google Arts & Culture face-matching app (2018) collected massive amounts of biometric data under the guise of matching people to classical paintings…

Wait a minute!

Optic Nerve (2008-2010) predated the ImageNet competition (2009-2017), based on unethical privacy violations by a Stanford team, that sparked the “big data” revolution we’re now swimming in.

Are we seeing history rhyme again with BlueSky’s “artistic” firehose? Surveillance keeps reinventing itself while using the same playbook.

Something smells rotten in BluEsky, and no amount of that EmoJirain is going to mask it for those who remember past abuses.