A Milwaukee weatherwoman who criticized Elon Musk’s inauguration salute has since been stripped of her professional responsibilities.
Sam Kuffel, 31, made two posts to her personal Instagram story in the wake of the inauguration, torching Musk for making a gesture that millions of people around the world recognized as a Nazi salute.
“Dude Nazi saluted twice. TWICE. During the inauguration,” read one of Kuffel’s posts. “You fuck with this and this man, I don’t fuck with you. Full stop.” In the second post, Kuffel shared a meme from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, in which one of the show’s characters is subtitled as saying, “Screw that old bitch. He’s a Nazi.”
But that was, apparently, too far for the meteorologist’s station, WDJT-TV (Channel 58), which notified staffers by email on Wednesday that the popular weather forecaster would no longer be employed by the network.
“Meteorologist Sam Kuffel is no longer employed at CBS58,” news director Jessie Garcia wrote in a staff memo obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “A search for a replacement is underway.”
The Anti-Defamation League, a hate-speech watchdog that considers pro-Palestinian activism to be antisemitic, sided with Musk amid the backlash, claiming that the Trump adviser had simply made an “awkward gesture.”
“This is a delicate moment. It’s a new day and yet so many are on edge. Our politics are inflamed, and social media only adds to the anxiety,” the ADL wrote in a statement on X Monday. “This is a new beginning. Let’s hope for healing and work toward unity in the months and years ahead.”
But not everyone agreed with that analysis of Musk’s double salute—least of all the Germans, who quickly pointed out that making such a gesture on the continent is plainly illegal.
“Whoever on a political stage, making a political speech in front of a partly far-right audience, elongates his arm diagonally in the air both forcefully and repeatedly, is making a Hitler salute,” journalist Lenz Jacobsen wrote for the German paper Die Zeit, in a piece titled “A Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute.” “There’s no ‘probably’ or ‘similar to’ or ‘controversial’ about it. The gesture speaks for itself.”
Others argued that Musk’s increasingly far-right politics were a better target for the Nazi label, claiming that the rhetoric around the salute had gone too far. Musk, meanwhile, fanned the flames of the controversy by refusing to deny the allegations over dozens of posts as to whether he intended the gesture to resemble Hitler’s Sieg Heil salute.
The moment was only cluttered by Musk’s family history, which descends from Nazi sympathizers—at least according to his father, Errol Musk, who told the Podcast and Chill Network in November that the billionaire’s maternal grandparents supported Adolf Hitler and were members of the German Nazi Party in Canada before moving to South Africa in support of apartheid.
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