"you don't owe anyone anything" You are a tar pit. Speak for yourself. I personally owe the cafe employees my dishes put away and my friends a listening ear and small scared insects a cup and a gentle trip outside. Hyperindividualism is a rancid infection borne of capitalism and willfully misinterpreted therapyspeak and I will defy it by continuing to be kind regardless of whether or not it benefits me personally
A Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute
Elon Musk stretches out his right arm and everyone jumps over it. Welcome to the new attention regime.
There's no need to make this unnecessarily complicated at the start. Anyone who zestfully and repeatedly extends their right arm to an upward angle in a political speech on a political stage in front of an audience, some of whom belong to the far right, is doing the Hitler salute. There is no need for “supposedly” or “similar” or “disputed.” The gesture speaks for itself; it is documented in the video. Anyone who wants to reinterpret it, who doesn't want to see the Hitler salute, does so at their own risk. Anyone who, for example, now thinks they have to discover the older “Roman salute” as a supposed Musk reference is demonstrating above all their willingness to make a convenient reinterpretation.
So Elon Musk stretches out his right arm and makes everyone jump through a hoop. The day of the inauguration marks the formal start of Donald Trump's second presidency. The associated attention regime is becoming more visible than ever before.
Because that's what it's all about: Attention. It is the most contested commodity in a world in which, at any given moment, every snippet, every image, video and quote is vying for attention. Trump and Musk are masters in this competition. Especially because they manage to use even negative attention for their own benefit. See the Hitler salute.
What is happening now is foreseeable: Neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists may interpret the outstretched right arm as a gesture of fraternization and encouragement. Moderate, benevolent supporters as an escalated gesture of jubilation. And everyone else is faced with an impossible choice: either to ignore the breach of taboo and thus contribute to its de-tabooing or to mark it as a breach of taboo and thus produce outrage, which in turn invites gloating from the other side. You can lament this, but you have to reckon with the fact that a relevant part of humanity now only sees scandalizing the Hitler salute as virtue signaling.
These are the rules of this attention game that has been going on since at least 2016, and the winners seem to be as certain as the helpless losers.
Journalism, in particular, is also faced with the choice between paying attention to such events and ignoring them. It plays the attention game. Indeed, the media are the traditional arena of this game. This text, too, can be read as evidence of a certain helplessness. So far, no better solution is in sight than to distinguish the small hoops from the Hitler salute-sized ones, and at least try to point out the mechanisms of the game when jumping.
Honorable, but powerless
Political gestures and phrases work like all other stimuli to which people are exposed: They no longer have as strong an effect the second time as the first, and they're even weaker the third time. Humans are creatures of adaptation. Habituation is one of the few constants of human existence, which is why the calls that we should “not get used to political monstrosities” are honorable but powerless.
For Trump and Musk, the political return on their attention-grabbing victories therefore lies not only in the public becoming accustomed to their specific positions and style, but generally in the fact that they are the ones who determine what people get used to. That they have the greatest power over the window of what can be said.
Thirty years ago, the political scientist Joseph Overton invented the concept of the “Overton Window”. It divides political views into the popular, sensible and barely acceptable positions that lie within the window. And into the radical and unthinkable positions outside. Politics is ultimately only made within this window, Overton said, and anyone who wants real change must therefore move the whole window. That is what has been happening for years. Until finally, in January 2025, at the very right edge of the window of what is politically acceptable, the Hitler salute becomes visible.
