Apr
21
2026

When is a Nazi Not a Nazi?

Hey, kids! Remember the Elon Musk Nazi salute? Google does! 487,000 hits! And, in fact, one of the top results points you to the relevant Wikipedia page!

Yes, an entire Wikipage devoted to a gesture that lasted maybe a couple seconds back in 2025! With 130 as-I-type Wikireferences! It was a huge deal!

For a compare-and-contrast exercise…

And, as I type, the relevant Google search gets a mere 7,840 results. And most of those do not refer to this recent Sieg Heil, instead referring to Platner's Nazi "Totenkopf" tattoo, usually pointing out that he got it "covered up" a few months ago. Literally "nothing to see here."

And, almost needless to say, there's no Wikipedia page about his salute, and I would make a small wager that there will never be one in the foreseeable future.

I hasten to say: neither Musk nor Platner is a secret Nazi. Because if you're a secret Nazi, you do not give Nazi salutes in front of a lot of cameras.

I'm just pointing out the disparate treatment. And giving you, reader, yet another reason to (1) distrust the mainstream media and (2) not give Wikipedia another dime.

Also of note:

  • Carville is pretty terrifying without saying a word. But Charles C.W. Cooke notes his recent episode of saying the quiet part out loud: James Carville Gives a Terrifying Glimpse of Democrats’ Future Governing Agenda. (NR gifted link)

    Perhaps determined to confirm once and for all that there is no longer such a thing as a moderate Democrat, the famed political strategist James Carville recently advised his party that if they obtain a trifecta in Washington, D.C., in 2028, they should try to abolish American politics. “If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress,” Carville proposed, “I think on day one, they should make Puerto Rico and D.C. a state, and they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. F*** it. Eat our dust.”

    These ideas did not occur to Carville ex nihilo. Still, it is rather jarring to hear them from someone who once insisted that “to be a contrarian, you’ve got to be a contrarian against your own people.” At best, Carville is engaging in cheap fan service for his own people. At worst, he has become as unhinged as they are. If indulged, the course of action that he endorses would break our politics and cause dysfunction that would take decades to fix. Does the man have nobody at home who can dig him gently in the ribs?

    There's a "gifted" link up there, so read the whole thing, and note CCWC's use of the word "presbyopic" later on.

  • But a "packed" SCOTUS could probably find one in a "living" Constitution. After a careful 1A reading, Brad Smith concludes The First Amendment Does Not Contain An Election-Year Exception.

    In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission (NRSC v. FEC), now before the Supreme Court, Republican committees are asking the justices to strike down limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with their own candidates, arguing that those limits violate the First Amendment. Democratic Party committees and their allies, by contrast, are urging the court to uphold the restrictions — not primarily because the Constitution requires it, but because changing the rules now could disrupt elections and undermine what they call a “stable” campaign finance system. The court heard oral argument in this crucial political speech case in December and should issue its decision soon.

    You can peruse a whole bunch of briefs via the SCOTUS Docket Files page. I like the Cato one.

  • Note to self: Next time, get a real bear. Kevin D. Williamson's headline quotes (inaccurately) biologists with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife: It Was Clearly a Guy in a Bear Suit. (archive.today link)

    Yes, it's clickbait. But you might want to stick around for how he gets from there to yet another master class in Trump-bashing, specifically matters Iranian:

    Donald Trump is a habitual liar, a fantasist, and delusional, and he is surrounded by sycophants who are habitual liars, fantasists, and delusional. The moral and ethical degradation of American government by Trump and his cronies is not only, or even mainly, a metaphysical matter, something to think about in terms of the afterlife and the last judgment—it is a problem, and a very expensive problem, in the here and now.

    There is a strong argument, many of them, for U.S. action against Iran, but the United States is not engaged in this war (and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth will whine if you call it a war) because of any of the good arguments for it: The United States is engaged in this war because Donald Trump is a vain nitwit who is easily manipulated by his inner circle, some of whose members apparently convinced him that a series of wars, starting in Venezuela and moving on to Iran and possibly to Cuba, would be a good way to distract from Trump’s troubles in the Jeffrey Epstein matter. And—mission accomplished! Of course, Trump now has troubles much worse than those likely to have been presented by his longtime, intimate association with the sleazy trafficker of underage girls. Trump probably wasn’t messing around with teenagers on Epstein’s island, but what if he was? The members of his deranged little personality cult would forgive him a little recreational sexual abuse of teenaged girls the same way they have forgiven his adultery, his porn-star diddling, his own appearances in pornographic films, etc. 

    For the nth time: Well, we'll see what happens today.

  • Serf City, here we come. Eric Kober looks at NYC Mayor Mamdani’s Grocery Store Boondoggle.

    New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has announced the first location for one of the five promised city-owned grocery stores. The 9,000 square-foot store will be built on a city-owned vacant site under the Metro-North railroad viaduct at La Marqueta, near Park Avenue and East 116th Street, in Manhattan’s East Harlem neighborhood.

    The city will finance the store’s construction with $30 million from the capital budget. The store will have no debt service. Though privately operated, it will pay no rent or property tax.

    Mamdani’s plan proposes, in essence, that the city will compete with local grocery stores—using public subsidies to lower the cost of staple foods—and that it will do so while paying store employees union wages.

    Also revealed in the article: a new chapter in How to Lie With Statistics:

    The mayor’s rationale for his public grocery-store venture, as stated in a recent press release, is that “[g]rocery prices in New York City have risen nearly 66% over the past decade—significantly outpacing the national average.” That’s a bogus statistic, and we can trace how the mayor’s staff made that error. The press release links to a report from New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who indeed finds that something increased by 66 percent: New York metropolitan-area consumers’ spending on food eaten at home, from 2012–2013 to 2022–23. That statistic, which includes spending by affluent people in the suburbs who shop at premium stores, says nothing about prices.

    And in fact, when you do look at prices, using easily available data, the NYC grocery price index "tracks the national index closely."

  • "And Trump said, Let there be Diet Coke: and there was Diet Coke. Gerard Baker reads from the Not-So-Good Book: The Book of JD, King James Version. (WSJ gifted link)

    And it came to pass at that time that a man named Donald came forth from the land of Queens, across the great East River from the city they called the New Jerusalem.

    Now this Trumpite was a master builder and a skilled storyteller, but he was not at first a man of God. He built vast temples to Mammon, some of which, heavy with debt, collapsed in a heap. He had lain with many women, numbering more than his wives. It was even said that he had kept company with a man from Sodom known as Epstein the Onanite.

    As someone who still recalls the days of Lutheran Bible Study classes: I was amused.


Last Modified 2026-04-21 10:14 AM EDT