“Promise I will never go blonde like Kanye!” -Kanye West collaborator JPEGMAFIA, “Baby I’m Bleeding”

I was somehow surprised to learn about Elon Musk throwing up a Nazi salute. I was not surprised to see several headlines too cowardly to call it what it is, trying to go into the lineage of the hand gesture, and reporting on his retorts to the criticism. This isn’t a piece about journalistic cowardice though, enough has been said about that. This is a piece about Kanye West, Elon Musk, and equivocation.

Equivocation is an old rhetorical term used to refer to an ambiguous manner of speaking, the use of logical fallacies to hide ones own true thoughts. For example, Kamala Harris saying she'll "follow the law" when asked about her policy position on trans people. It’s a common tactic of political speech, one that allows a lot of seedy discourse into the public square under the guise of “just asking questions.”

Elon Musk, a man who is decidedly not good at talking, consistently betrays his position if he can manage to articulate a complete sentence without re-starting multiple times. At the inauguration, this Nazi salute sparked a riotous hour on Twitter and dozens of cowardly headlines. Let’s compare that to Kanye West’s journey as an alt-right ideologue.

West quickly said the quiet part very loudly in his segment on Info Wars which quickly got him exiled from a growing right wing institution of talking heads. I recall having similar conversations with friends as I am with you now: that Kanye could’ve held on to this clout if he was a more careful conversationalist willing to let the explicit motivation stay implicit. I won’t go so far as to say it’s a guarantee that Musk is on the same path of exile, but if he keeps embarrassing himself and making the Republican party look too eager to revamp the swastika, we may see his role in the upcoming administration lessened greatly. It’s nowhere near our biggest problem, but any indication that the new administration is faltering, picking bad actors that need to be weeded out, or just trying too hard to speedrun fascism could give resistance to Trump’s regime a necessary step forward.