July 2023 an artist famous for political commentary dropped his work on social media.
Ai Wei Wei’s artwork hit different from most – this was someone who had been jailed and banned from Twitter for speaking truth to power.
Yet when he called out clear Nazi connections, there was no denial and barely a whisper of restriction (Elon Musk censored Wei Wei’s animated X by deleting it). The silence spoke volumes.
He’s particularly scathing about Elon Musk, who received multiple favours from the CCP to set up his Tesla factory in Shanghai and sings the praises of the Chinese government. Musk owns X, the platform that used to be Twitter, and Ai has on his phone an animation he created, the X spinning and turning into a swastika. It was deleted from X but was still available on Instagram. ‘It’s so creepy. I mean it looks so ugly,’ he said.
Fast forward to 2025 and the pattern is painfully clear. While some still debate whether to call a spade a spade, Musk has moved from dog whistles to bullhorns, now openly making Hitler salutes at political rallies that spark “we’re back” celebrations across social media.
“Maybe woke really is dead,” white nationalist Keith Woods posted on X.
“Did Elon Musk just Heil Hitler …” right-wing commentator Evan Kilgore posted on X. “We are so back.”
Today’s Nazi groups aren’t hiding anymore – they’re celebrating how their messages have gone mainstream, just as Ai Wei Wei warned us through his art years ago. The path from his Twitter critique to American political rallies is as straight as it is terrifying.
And here’s where history rhymes with a vengeance. Our language “experts” stand in rising floodwaters, watching the dam crack, telling us to wait for “concrete evidence” of danger. By the time they admit the obvious, the flood will have already swept us all away.
“I’m skeptical it was on purpose,” said Jared Holt, a senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which tracks online hate. “It would be an act of self-sabotage that wouldn’t really make much sense at all.”
Self-sabotage doesn’t make sense? My Jared, it’s the very definition of Nazism. To understand Nazis is to understand self-destruction because it’s their entire endgame. Every time. The proof is in history, as artists painting on Musk’s own factory have depicted:
This isn’t about academic caution – it’s about the deadly paralysis of overthinking while fascists build real power. They don’t need your perfect analysis. They just need your hesitation.
Remember: While scholars polish their dissertations on “the nature of rising authoritarianism,” extremists are seizing actual power. They don’t play by academic rules. They never have.
We’ve seen this playbook before. We know how it ends. When people say “we’re not Germany in the ’30s,” they’re reporting something today potentially even more dangerous — classic racist “show me your papers” mixed with modern technology that we need to call out as immoral and illegal. Millions of explosive racist killer robots descending on cities is not out of the question right now.
After all, the Nazis themselves studied and borrowed from American systemic and industrialized racism to build the European genocide machine. History doesn’t repeat, but it echoes – and right now, those echoes are extremely clear.
The only question is who among us will act on the warning signs this time.
Wei Wei was right.
Related: I coincidentally wrote on this blog two days after Wei Wei’s tweet, how the Twitter rebrand is a swastika on top of Tesla already being steeped in Nazi messaging.