If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and salutes like a duck at a Trump rally at the Capital One Arena in Washington DC, it’s probably a fucking duck. Because when was the last time you innocently, sharply clapped your right hand against the fleshy front of your shoulder, and then stiffly thrust your arm out at a 45-ish degree angle with your palm flat?
Oh, it happens all the time. That’s why you and I have always seen people out in public doing it—innocently, of course—at coffee shops, tire shops, and day care centers. Some have dismissed Musk’s salute as merely an “awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm.” The words “Musk” and “awkward” go together like peanut butter and grape jelly, but come on.
Plenty of people aren’t buying it. Among them are the moderators of more than 100 subreddits who’ve banned links to X in protest of Musk’s indefensible salute. Among them are r/NBA (15 million members), r/TwoXChromosomes (14 million members), and r/NFL (12 million members).
everyone is who, now?
“Frankly, they need better dirty tricks,” Musk wrote in a Monday night X post in response to the controversy. “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.” Just watch the video.
After Musk’s entry on Wikipedia was edited to call it a “Nazi salute,” Musk posted on X for Wikipedia to be defunded. How, exactly, he doesn’t say, because Wikipedia is a non-profit funded by donations, which just goes to show how empty buzzwords can be wielded in contexts in which they make no sense.
The section of Wikipedia has since, by the way, been amended to call it an “alleged Nazi salute.” One thing that is not just alleged, though, is that X links now don’t appear across a vast swathe of Reddit.
The X link ban was enacted across some 50 reported subreddits as of yesterday. Today, it sits at more than 100, a number independently verified by the BBC. Hundreds more are reportedly considering enacting the ban, too.
Subreddits are not run by Reddit itself or, in the case of those centered around organizations such as the NBA and NFL, by the organizations themselves. So neither Reddit nor these organizations have enacted the ban on X links. It’s entirely community-driven.
And isn’t that the kind of community moderation that Musk’s X has championed in recent weeks?
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