The Musk Rorschach Test

LinkedIn is not a good platform to display your inability to assimilate facts and reason through issues.

I don’t usually post political positions or get engaged in comments on political posts on LinkedIn – I broke that rule today, but I did so to explore the logic used in how the commenters arrived at their positions.

The reason I don’t engage in political discussions is that politics is highly polarizing over things that are often unfalsifiable matters of opinion and interpretation – and sometimes the thinking and positions are emotional, illogical, irrational and rest more on personal bias than fact.

I would also caution anyone on LinkedIn from engaging in such discussions, especially if they are interested in looking for a career change – you are giving potential employers insight into how you handle ambiguous situations and your logical processes and if I were hiring today, there would be a many of whom I would be concerned about effectively operating in management and problem-solving roles.

Whether Elon Musk gave a Nazi hand signal is sort of a Rorschach Test.

This is an entirely falsifiable event that has been transformed into an unfalsifiable one by some. We know it falsifiable because Musk gave live commentary when he did it defining it as “my heart goes out to you.” No friend of Musk or the right wing in America, the “fact checker” site Snopes even noted:

“During his brief speech — available in full on YouTube — Musk said to the crowd gathered in honor of Trump's victory, ‘And I just want to say thank you for making it happen. Thank you.’ He then briskly extended his right hand from his heart to the crowd in front of him. He repeated the gesture for the people behind him. Then, in a moment omitted from the users' videos, he said, placing his hand over his heart, ‘Thank you. My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured, thanks to you.’"

The important aspect of that quote is that people can go to YouTube and see what Musk said and did for themselves. You may still believe he is a secret Nazi, but if you do you are basing that on opinion, not facts.

And yet, one of the reasons given on LinkedIn for the gesture being a Nazi salute was that “some Nazis believe it is.” I made the point this is like saying “You know Hitler drank water, right? Well, Musk drinks water, too - ergo he is a Nazi.”

Purely in the aid of the argument, I will openly state I am a conservative and born in Mississippi, not necessarily a Republican, more of a classical liberal, but because I am defined as a conservative and from the American south, I’m automatically considered a racist in the minds of some.

I believe the first time the charge of racism was employed as a national political tactic was in the 1964 presidential elections. Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate was a conservative and since clearly racist Democrats had also promoted conservative values, he had to be a racist. Speaking of racist Democrats, the fact remains that without the leadership of Republican Senator Everett Dirksen, the Civil Rights Act would not have passed.

Democrat Senator Robert Byrd filibustered the bill. As to the votes, in the Senate, 82% of Republicans voted for the bill vs. 69% of the Democrats, similarity in the House, 80% of the Republican representatives voted in favor vs. 63% of Democrats. At the same time Goldwater was campaigning, Democrats were fighting against the Civil Rights Act and the newly elected Alabama governor, Democrat George Wallace, was giving his “Segregation Forever” speech.

George Wallace’s speech is instructive for a few reasons.

First, it is instructive of what real racism looks like. Real racism isn’t disagreeing with Barack Obama, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar. It isn’t calling for lower taxes and smaller government. It isn’t stating that reparations are unwarranted and unworkable, and it is not calling for border security or voter ID.

Racism is thinking and acting as if a particular race is superior to another based on nothing but skin color and instituting policies that reflect those views.

Secondly, if you look at Wallace’s speech, there are many conservative points in there – individual liberty, states right to determine their own fates, free market, limited government, faith in God – but none of the specifically conservative principles in Wallace’s diatribe are racist in nature. They do not require a person to believe in the supremacy of the white race, to force blacks or other minorities to be discriminated or oppressed or for anyone to propose or enact race-based laws or regulations. They are the principles our nation was founded upon and anodyne – innocuous – with respect to race.

As racism is not a required for conservative ideals to exist, those ideas were “severable” from Wallace’s racist ideological position. Severability is a legal term that means those aspects of Wallace’s speech are capable of being divided into legally independent rights or obligations.

My point is that there are always people in the tails of any Bell Curve who agree with the people within plus and minus three standard deviations of the mean – but that doesn’t mean those within those limits share are beliefs of those in the extreme tails of the curve.

Another argument was that Musk supports AfD, a political party in Germany that opposes open borders and the importation of radical Islam. The German government has declared AfD members to be “right wing extremists,” so some are saying that means Nazi and that Musk is a Nazi sympathizer – but that ignores the fact the German government has already tightened their borders because they are dealing with a sharp, persistent increase in migrant crime. Does that make the German government the next coming of the Third Reich?

Of course not.

No more than the gesture of thanks Musk performed was a Nazi salute.