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January 23, 2025 • 28 mins

Hosts Ramses Ja and Q Ward offer reflections on the controversy surrounding Elon Musk and his "salute" during a Trump inauguration event.

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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is the Black Information Network Daily podcast and I'm
your host, ramses Jaw. And sometimes the amount of stories
that make their way to us means that we simply
can't cover everything that comes our way. But from time
to time, a story just stays with me and Bill
compelled to share it with you and give you my thoughts.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
And now one more thing.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
Okay, so you knew we had to talk about it,
and now's the time that we do. I'm going to
share a little bit of background for those that may
not know from Rolling Stone. Right wing extremists, white nationalists,
and neo Nazis are celebrating an alarming gesture made by

(00:43):
the world's richest man at a post inauguration rally on Monday.
Elon Musk thank Donald Trump's supporters with a gesture that
resembled a Roman salute, first putting his palm to his
chest and then extending a stiff right arm toward the
crowd at a slight elevation with his palm down. It
wasn't a one off, he later repeated the gesture. Musk's

(01:07):
sway in the new administration is hard to overstate. The
billionaire spent hundreds of millions to get Trump elected and
has been sitting shotgun for much of the transition period,
helping Trump shape his cabinet and incoming administration. Trump has
tasked Must to lead the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE,
a quasi governmental effort to eliminate hundreds of billions in

(01:29):
federal spending, and in his inauguration speeds, Trump also embraced
Musk's life goal of colonizing Mars as a part of
America's manifest destiny. Regardless of whether the South African born
Musk intended the salute as a sig hail salute favored
by the followers of Adolph Hitler in World War II,

(01:49):
as some online commentators have suggested, it was eagerly received
that way by extremists online. Alternative explanations for the gesture
are plausible. Musk is socially awkward, and he may have
been stiffly trying to throw love to the crowd for
helping put Trump back in office.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
Quick question. Because I'm a little less learned or a
little less us scholarly than you, what does the word
plausible mean?

Speaker 1 (02:16):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Not impossible even likely not to be dismissed?

Speaker 1 (02:24):
Uh? Yes, indeed, now now I think that this part
of the I think this part has written just kind
of facetiously. But but we'll we'll read, We'll read all
the way through it. Okay, here's a quote from Elon Musk.
He says, my heart goes out to you. Uh that's
what he said after he did the gesture a second time.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
However, Musk has a lie allied himself sorry with far
right movements in Europe, including the extremist German party AfD.
After purchasing Twitter, which he renamed X, he welcomed long
band white nationalists back onto the platform in the name
of free speech, and his ex account is sometimes hard

(03:03):
to distinguish from far right extremists. In the late twenty
twenty three year, he went on a so called apology
tour to Israel after responding to a post about an
anti Semitic conspiracy theory on X with the words the
actual truth. He often posts pepe frogs and other images
and memes associated with the alt right, including recently temporary

(03:26):
adopting the handle Kikus Maximus. Okay, so this article, you know,
I felt reputable. You know Rolling Stone, We all kind
of know that Rolling Stone has retained some elite level journalists.

(03:46):
Since you know, a lot of you know, the traditional
magazines have kind of gone online or whatever, Rolling Stone
is still one of the h the magazines that holds
weight in this space.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
And having gone completely to freelance.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
Right right and so. And then this article obviously states
again the plausibility of Elon Musk being sort of socially awkward.
Maybe it made a mistake, blah blah blah, that sort
of thing. So it did speak on that, but I
don't think the article really gave any real credence to
that being as likely, because obviously it the article lists

(04:30):
the fact that Elon Musk has, for all intents and purposes,
embraced a lot of what the far right, Nazis included,
white nationalists, white supremacists included, have come to use frequently

(04:51):
in their communications and so forth. And so, you know,
I think that what they said effectually was that his
Twitter account is indistinguishable from a far right uh like
a like a Nazi account. So when he does this
salute again, it is more likely that that was what

(05:15):
he was intending to do than.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
For what.

Speaker 1 (05:20):
Excuses people are trying to assign to him, you know. So,
and another thing, you know, before I let you lose
because I know that we wanted to talk about this before.
We're just now getting to you.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
I don't have a whole lot, honestly, I don't have
a whole lot on none of this.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
Well, well then I'll say this and then you'll just
get your thoughts. But I wanted to make sure that
I restate the fact that if nothing else, the far
right is loving this. They're they're loving it. They're using it.
They've they've they've gifted and turned it into you know,
some digital assets that they can use to again kind

(06:02):
of suggest, Okay, we got the world's richest man on
our side doing our gesture on the national stage at
the Trump inauguration.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
We're way up.

Speaker 1 (06:11):
You know, the white flame is burning right again and
all that sort of nonsense. So so, yeah, we're here.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
They are way up, you know what I mean, Like,
this isn't even one of those moments where we confront
like they're not. They are way up, super up. They
are running the world literally as a collective. And as
we look left and right at each other and blame
each other for everything that's wrong, as we look at

(06:41):
them and see them somehow as even in some way
an answer to some of our problems, which is insane.
And I don't mean we as a collective, but many,
too many, even if it's not a majority, even if
it's not close to majority, it's too many. It's not none.
And it's some people with some influence. You know, for

(07:03):
most of our lives, those who reached a level of affluence,
a level of financial independence, wealth, and celebrity have all
just been that. Celebrities, famous people, you know, entertainers, and
because of that, they've had the most notoriety and the
most influenced, you know, the richest among us and the

(07:24):
most popular and famous among us. Hasn't always been our
orators and our scholars. It's been our athletes and our
singers and our rappers and a lot of them put
on their tuxedos and went and performed and toasted and
celebrated with the other side. And you know, Nelly says,

(07:45):
prove it, y'all say her white supremacist prove it, y'all
talking about back in the eighties when he wouldn't rent
to black people, Like that's not enough because he said
it like that, like y'all talking about that old stuff.
So I wonder if the salute helped to calibrate his

(08:05):
head a little bit as to what we've been pointing to.
And like I said before, Man I pinned a comment
in the Live everything that man said he was going
to do, he's doing from right now, not in months,
not in weeks. That man took his oath, not on
the Bible, because of course not, and then took out

(08:26):
his pen and started writing executive orders for all of
the most divisive, disgusting, evil, mean spirited things that he
could to offend and hurt the most people as possible.
And people are like I even saw somebody trying to
big him up and the comment was, Man, he's doing

(08:46):
more on his first day than any other president's ever done. Well, yeah,
when you have unchecked power, you can do that. When
you have all three branches of government have packed and
will over pack the Supreme Court with people who owe
their position to you and who don't even pretend to
be unbiased, Yeah, you can from day one throw the

(09:12):
Constitution away. Yeah you know what I mean. So, yeah,
I don't have a whole lot like it's watching people
do mental gymnastics and be just intellectually dishonest with themselves
and with us and it's more insulting when you do
it to me. If you lie to yourself, that's cool.
Lying to me is mean, especially when you're telling me,
I don't see what I see if it's my imagination,

(09:33):
which is not. Some of my friends know that I
have a disdain for Trump, so they feel like eye
color the racism and the bigotry and the ignorance and
the evil into the things that he does. I'm like, no,
that's not me. I don't like him because he's that way.
Y'all acting like I paint him that way because I
don't like him. I don't know the man, so all

(09:55):
I know is what I see, and almost all of
it is disgusting. If your mom was dating that man,
you wouldn't like it. If that man was teaching your
children to school, you wouldn't like it. So why are
you gonna pretend to me because he helping you get
to the bag? So you think that he's somehow some
decent human that I'm supposed to respect and look at
the good side of it. There's no good side. There's

(10:18):
no silver lining. There's no thing that he's doing that's
going to be beneficial to us in any way. So
it's really really hard for me.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
Man, let me do this. Let's say there is a
Nelly right or people that think like Nellie Man, you
know Trump, Trump did all that stuff back and then
like he's a Trump apologist, right. So this hypothetical person
who might be listening to this episode right now, it

(10:44):
was like, Yo, these two guys are always giving Trump
a hard time. They might say, well, that was Elon Musk.
That wasn't even Trump that did that. So I want
to say there's a saying in Germany because obviously yeah,

(11:07):
but but it's it's it'll make sense in a second.
This saying came about after World War Two, and the
saying I can't like translate it directly, but it's it's effectively.

Speaker 2 (11:32):
If you.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
If there's a table with three Nazis at the table,
and you sit at the table with the three Nazis,
then now there's four Nazis at the table, right. And
so the idea was because Germany really wanted to distance
themselves as a state, as a nation state from the
Nazi Party. So this was the thinking and this was

(11:57):
this is a common saying, which is why I know
it here in America where they like the people distanced
themselves from Nazis and from that party and from that
way of thinking. Yeah, And that statement in and of
itself suggests that by even associating with people that feel

(12:21):
this way, behave this way, think this way, whatever that
you are supporting them, you are giving them license to
continue to exist out in public with their idea. Whatever
you're you're validating them somehow. Right. So to the to
the Nelly in this example, or people that feel like

(12:41):
Nelly that would apologize for or they would apologize, but
Trump apologists would say, or Trump defenders that would say, well,
Donald Trump didn't do that. Well, his best friend did,
roll intents and purposes, and then Trump goes and sits
down at the table with this guy. Now we've already
established that Elon Musk's Twitter feed is indistinguishable from a

(13:03):
far right Twitter feed, and we know bewelded Nazism falls
right on the fault on the far right. The reason
that we don't you and I we don't use Twitter anymore,
we deleted our accounts is because Elon Musk. First order
of business, let the N word come back to Twitter.

Speaker 2 (13:22):
We've got to get all these far right white Christian nationalists.
Hate groups back on the app. Right, that was the
actual goal, because it's free speech and they deserve to
be here.

Speaker 1 (13:33):
Too, unless you're saying something bad about Elon Musk, in
which case you'll ban your account. Yes, so he's not
a free speech absolutist. He is. I don't know what
the word is when a person has a lot of
power and they wield it how they so choose, not
according to any real moral standard or with any real consistency.

(13:55):
But that's what he's been. So we decided that that's
not for us, but that needs to be stated to
the NELLY in this hypothetical situation. Also, I think that
it's important to interject that it is not impossible that

(14:19):
Elon Musk might harbor some of these feelings genuinely legitimately,
because Elon Musk's father is on record saying that Elon's
grandparents were Nazi sympathizers and they were part of the
like the Nazi Party in Canada. Right, So all of

(14:43):
the connective tissue is there.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
And very connected to apartheid in South Africa.

Speaker 1 (14:46):
Thank you, which so so so what let me so,
let me stick to landing. So again we're back at
the point where Nelly, you have to ignore all of
this stuff. I keep hitting this, but you have to
ignore all this does in order to make your version
of reality likely. And then you're trying to convince everyone

(15:09):
else that we're tripping when we actually saw it happen.
And he did it twice. And so again for all
the people that are you know, Elon Musk's fanboys that
you know, for I mean for some people, for people
on the far right, sure it looks great. You know,

(15:29):
you have this white man who is the richest guy
in the world, and he has achieved all the things
that you'll never achieve, and he's done it for the
white race or whatever, you know what I mean. He
talks how he wants to talk, he whatever, what. Somehow,
this guy represents something to you.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
He represents strength to them. Right. But even if he's disgusting,
he has shown that he can do whatever he wants right.
And and that's not a's not a false sense of power.
That's power. I don't rock with, dude, but that's power.
I can do whatever I want in front of every
in front of everyone, get convicted of it, and nothing's

(16:10):
going to happen to me. As a matter of fact,
I'm going to run for president again and win. That's
there's no bigger flex. So if you have the same
mindset as him, y'all just won the championship of the
world forever, forever, you know what I mean, There's no
bigger flex than that. So I can get how all

(16:32):
people who have a little bit of toxicity in their
mind can see that and be like, damn, yeah, dude
really can do whatever he wants and can't nobody say nothing? Sheesh,
Maybe I should get down with that.

Speaker 1 (16:51):
I still think that there are more of us who
push back against a re chronicling of a narrative, a
retelling of a story that we witnessed with our own eyes.
There's a significant number of us that push back against fascism,

(17:12):
that pushed back against all this sort of stuff. And
for those people, for those people, I think it's important
for me to say you are not crazy and you're
not alone. Because for all the people that jumped on
TV and says, well, Elon musk is he has a
mental whatever his mental thing is, and he sometimes gets
hyper stimulated and does thing. Okay, okay, the reaching you

(17:36):
know what I mean is often enough for people to
question themselves like, am I crazy because I saw him
do it. He did it twice. He did it to
the crowd and turned around, did it to the flag,
And there's a different way to do it. And to
all those people that would apologize for him. If what
Elon Musk did was okay, then you do it. Do

(18:01):
it next time you're in front of a crowd. If
what he did was okay, then you do it. Do
it at your children's school. If what Elon must did
was okay, do it in a public space because it's okay. Right.
If you're going to say that what Elon Musk did
was all right, then you do it. Prove it, stand
on it. And as you're going through you know the permutations,

(18:25):
the mental exercises of where could I do this, and
you realize that there's nowhere you could do it because
it is wrong. I want you to ask yourself, why
is it that you're trying to make it right for
Elon Musk.

Speaker 2 (18:37):
I just wish right and wrong still existed. Yeah, like
I'm not about the kid. Nobody, Sure, go do it
at your job. What's going to happen? They fire you,
You sue them, they win, you appeal, they win you appeal,
they win, you appeal. Now you're at the Supreme Court.
Who you think they're going to side with? Right? So
if there's more of us than them, then where were we?

(19:00):
Why did we stop participating? Why did we let this happen?
We keep talking about this like it's about to happen. No,
it happened already, I said to Joy and read on
Instagram the other day. This is the post credit scene.
This is not the trailer leading up to the movie.
The movie just ended. So this is the post credit scene.
And now the sequel is about to start. And any

(19:23):
levers we could pull to have any type of control,
to make any type of difference, those levers don't exist anymore. So, Yeah,
if you do that at a synagogue, if you do
that at your church, there might be some well meaning
people who look at you crazy. And if there is
a such thing as shame, still, maybe you'll be ashamed
of yourself when actually decent people look at you crazy.

(19:46):
But what the decent people keep showing is we're not
gonna do nothing. Nobody gonna put no hands on you.
There's not gonna be no accountability, You're not gonna go
to jail. And again, worst case scenario, you lose a job,
so then what because they're making it now, or they
can't even then stop people from discriminating against you at work.
Another thing that he wrote into law on day one. Right,

(20:08):
so the white boss who all of his And here's
the thing that makes it so much worse and why
things like affirmative action and DEI needed to exist in
the first place. Racism has made itself such a part
of the systems that we all rely on. All of them, education,
healthcare are corporate infrastructure that even people who aren't intending

(20:30):
to be racist are Right. I live in a white neighborhood.
All of my friends are white, All of my colleagues
are white, so all the people I'm going to hire
are white. That didn't sound like a person being racist
until you realize that sixty years ago they made it
so only white people could live there. Where you live,
like people don't even there's no safeguards and there's no
guardrails anymore.

Speaker 1 (20:51):
And nothing to bring about equity rather than equality.

Speaker 2 (20:55):
Right, So if you don't even have to consider clients
that don't look, pray, love, and think exactly how you do,
you won't just out of comfort.

Speaker 1 (21:03):
The NFL is going.

Speaker 2 (21:07):
Just out of comfort, right, So here we are again,
man like, it's I feel bad for women, for all.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
Women because they were the biggest benefit.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
Because the largest beneficiaries of such programs were white women
who have no idea that they just supported the system
that's going to make life harder for them, except some
of them are completely okay with that because they vote
in the best interest of their patriarch loving, white supremacist husbands. Anyway,
if my husband's going to be stronger and more powerful

(21:38):
than by nature, so am I so sorry, sisters. I
know it was women's solidarity for that one month, but sorry.

Speaker 1 (21:46):
And there's no self determination in that equation. So as
your husband cheats on you and abuses you or whatever,
you're stuck there because you've made that bed.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
Oh what about when you when your husband's mistress gets
pregnant and they can't hide the baby with the abortion anymore.
And listen, what about when the handsome black kid on
the basketball team gets your teenage daughter pregnant and you
don't want to be ashamed at church when she shows
up sixteen and pregnant, So you're getting abortion and you
can't do that anymore. There's all these you know, a
really good friend of mine just started to bring all

(22:16):
of these unforeseen consequences that are going to start hitting
people who didn't even realize that they would be impacted
by the decisions that they want this man to make
for them. It's going to be a really scary couple decades.
Everybody keeps saying four years, like they really think at

(22:36):
the end of this term, do gonna be like, all right,
I'm done. Appreciate you guys. Yeah, right, in what world
he was trying to hold on to the power when
he didn't have every lever working for him. Y'all think
now at the end of this term, we're gonna have
a fair election. When he goes on stage after this
one as he's getting inaugurated and tells the world, Elon,

(22:58):
you're good with those vote those votes in computers, like
they're not even pretending anymore, saying all the quiet parts
out loud, because what what are you going to do?

Speaker 1 (23:09):
Well, one thing that we can do for those of
us who are who have kind of brought Elon Musk
into our homes, our worlds, our garages, whatever is understand
the truth in this moment. You know what I mean, like,
we don't have to support the people who are harming

(23:36):
us or who are emboldening those who would harm us,
because again there's people that are like, well, Elon Musk
didn't harm us, you know, he makes a good car
or truck whatever. No, no, no, no, no. If you're black,
this we're at the end of the conversations that we're
willing to have. We're at the end of the black
negotiations in terms of us being all.

Speaker 2 (23:58):
Another moment that hit close the home for you and
I specifically, we had conversations with these people. The Anti
Defamation League jumped on Elon muscusescuus, I don't know how
you say Musks in the possessive on Elon Musks to

(24:19):
defend him, bro, the organization whose entire purpose for existing
is to keep people from defaming Jewish people. As he
hails Hitler, y'all going to explain to us that that
was just an awkward moment for him twice. Well, again,

(24:45):
there are no guardrails anymore, Bro. Everybody has sold out everyone.

Speaker 1 (24:52):
Well I didn't sell out, and Q didn't sell out.
So if you like me and Q, you know what
I'm saying, Like, we're here to tell you that you're
not crazy. Another thing I'm going to say though, while
we're here, is that I saw some people posting some
stuff on like Facebook and whatever. Right, and it would
be a picture of Kamala Harris with her hand stretched out,
and it'll be a picture of like Hillary Clinton or

(25:14):
Barack Obama or all these other like democrats, right, and
former presidents will not with their hands stretched out like
Elon Musk. But nobody posted videos. They just posted the
still shots, right.

Speaker 2 (25:25):
They just when you're waving at a parade, it looks
like this, Yeah, you can.

Speaker 1 (25:28):
You can catch somebody in that pose. You can, like
if you want people to settle down, you know, the
first part of the settle down parade, it looks like this. Yeah. Yeah,
But but that's why they didn't have any videos. So again,
you're not crazy. Don't let anybody convince you that you're crazy.
And if you feel like this sort of behavior and

(25:50):
this sort of person that would allow the nword back
on and all these white supremacist groups and then share
their content with his millions of followers and then do
us a salute on top of it. A person that
that attacked DEI. He was the one that the first
time I heard thee I must die came from Elon
musk At these If this is the person that you

(26:12):
and and the type of thinking that you push back against,
don't support him. It's very very simple. You don't got
to buy his cars. You don't. You know what I'm saying, Like,
there's other options. I mean, I know Henry Ford was
a was a what's the word when you don't like
Jewish people? What's that word?

Speaker 2 (26:29):
Anti?

Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah? Yeah, he was as well.

Speaker 2 (26:32):
Really show us, buddy, but well not people who he's
offending to their faces, don't think.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
But listen for those of us who still subscribe to
the same shared reality and haven't given into the Maga delusion. Again,
it's important for us to have these conversations just to
let you know that you're not crazy. You didn't you
know you saw what you saw? You did not see it.
That's funny how that sounds. And you know what we

(27:01):
can do? We will And for me that means no Tesla's,
no Tesla support. Whenever I see somebody in the tesla
buying a Tesla anything, I'm looking at you, like, are
you any we gotta we gotta help A close friend
of ours. Get we got a couple of friends. But yeah,
I know what, I know what you mean. It's a
bad look, especially now. So yeah, elon musk with the

(27:22):
Nazi salute. Of course, as always, we open the floor
up to you. If you have something to add, or
if you want to try to change either of our
minds you can't, you can do so using the red
microphone talkback feature on the iHeartRadio app, or you can
hit me on all social media. I am at Rams's job.

Speaker 2 (27:40):
I am q Ward on all social media as well.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
And until we talk peace. This has been a production
of the Black Information Network. Today's show is produced by
Chris Thompson. Have some thoughts you'd like to share, use
the red microphone talkback feature on the iHeartRadio app. While
you're there, be sure to hit subscribing down. With all
of our episodes, I'm your host, us this job on
all social media. Join us tomorrow as we share our

(28:03):
news with our voice from our perspective right here on
the Black Information Network Daily Podcast
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