There Is No Such Thing as Ironic Nazism

Bari Weiss has made a career out of vigilance against antisemitism. For two decades, she has been in the news alerting the public to its presence in every critique of Israel she encounters. She famously spent much of her time at Columbia University at the forefront of a McCarthyite campaign against Arab professors that led the New York Civil Liberties Union to express its “grave reservations” that it “runs a severe risk of intrusion by administrators into academic content and political ideology.” In 2019, she wrote a book entitled “How to Fight Antisemitism.” When campus protests erupted against the Gaza war, Weiss turned her media company, The Free Press, into a cannon battery to attack student protestors not only as antisemitic, but possibly terrorists. 

Given this history, one might assume that Weiss would have no patience for the recent spate of Nazi salutes by conservatives, including two at this month’s Conservative Political Action Conference. Alas, the vigilant watchwoman against antisemitism has chosen to endorse a measured response, assigning and promoting a piece by Richard Hanania, “I Can Explain Why the Nazi Salute Is Back,” that excuses and dismisses the phenomenon as unhelpful, but fundamentally unserious. “Say what you will about these men,” writes Hanania,

None of them proclaims a Hitlerian worldview. Not too long ago, Steve Bannon was taking a page out of Al Sharpton’s book and denouncing Silicon Valley bosses for not hiring enough blacks and Hispanics, which would make his brand of Nazism quite peculiar. Elon Musk has time and again pledged support for the Jewish people. He visited Israel in late 2023 and wore dog tags given to him by the father of an Israeli hostage in Gaza. Later, he went to Auschwitz with Ben Shapiro.

Within minutes, the essay and Weiss’ decision to publish and promote it was being excoriated on social media. But the most comprehensive response is from a righteously furious John Ganz, who responded on his Substack, Unpopular Front. The blistering essay, “Enough!” takes Hanania’s essay apart piece by piece. “You must be shitting me,” wrote Ganz, 

Thirty years ago, half the articles on the front page of the Free Press would’ve been trying to convince their readership that Sharpton and other black leaders were essentially black Goebbels and black antisemitism was a five-alarm fire. Do they really have such short memories? Bannon … is a leader of some kind of nationalist populist anti-liberal revolt that seeks redistributive justice but rails against “globalist elites.” In other words, he is a brownshirt. Anybody with a basic tutelage in the history of the European far-right should be able to see the outlines there. … In 2017, it was a major news story that Bannon cited the writings of Julius Evola, a “philosopher” of mystical ultra-fascism for whom Mussolini was not fascist enough. He also has professed an interest in the writings of Charles Maurras: an antisemite, anti-Dreyfusard, and Nazi collaborator who greeted the fall of France to Hitler’s army as a “divine surprise.” You want another Maurras quote? How about this one: “Everything seems impossible or terribly difficult without the providential appearance of antisemitism. It enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over, and simplified. If one were not an anti-Semite through patriotism, one would become one through a simple sense of opportunity.” I also remember there was a 2018 interview with the Spectator where Bannon admitted “he adores the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.” Then there’s the story in Jeremy Peters book Insurgency where Bannon saw Trump giving a speech in 2016 and thought to himself, “That’s Hitler!” and “meant it as a compliment.” Bannon has called Peters “my buddy from The New York Times” and, to my knowledge, has never disputed his buddy’s account in the book. To reiterate, a mentally competent adult in possession of these facts seeing a man do a Nazi salute might reasonably conclude that this fellow was, in fact, you know, maybe … a little bit that way. But Hanania’s account naturally ignores all this evidence.

As for why Musk was in Israel to begin with, Ganz reminds us, 

It was to “atone” for comments on Twitter that were antisemitic. He was on an apology tour. … There is other evidence that might lead a reasonable person to suspect that Musk may — in fact — have some Nazi sympathies. First of all, his maternal grandfather Joshua N. Haldeman, a supporter of the Canadian Technocracy movement was a noted antisemite and Nazi sympathizer. Haldeman endorsed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion [and] moved to apartheid South Africa out of ideological sympathy with the regime. But don’t take my word for it — Musk’s father says so, saying of his ex-wife’s family, “They were very fanatical in favor of apartheid. … Her parents came to South Africa from Canada because they sympathised with the Afrikaner government. They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff.” … This is not an open and shut case, but when the guy from the Nazi-loving, apartheid family does what looks like a Nazi salute, I think any person with their wits about them should take careful note.

Ganz next proceeds to the core thesis of Hanania’s essay — that the “stiff-armed salutes” do not represent “sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it’s no longer in the opposition.” 

First of all, enough with the euphemisms. It’s not a “stiff-armed salute,” it’s a Nazi salute, a Sieg Heil, a Hitlergruß. It is the passionate, open declaration of hatred and bloodthirst and the only sane, rational response to it is alarm and anger and full-throated condemnation. There is no such thing as “ironic Nazism”: Nazism has always been a movement of bad faith, sarcasm, self-excusal and lies — the irony is built in. … Defenses or qualifications of what we are seeing with our own eyes should have no place in public life.

The whole piece, like Ganz’s Substack newsletter generally, is worth reading and can be found here.