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Podcaster Joe Rogan accused liberals of "crying wolf" by accusing billionaire Elon Musk of giving a Nazi salute during a rally for President Donald Trump after his inauguration Monday (January 20) afternoon.
“This is the Donald Trump excuse: You’d do anything you can to stop Hitler,” Rogan said on his Joe Rogan Experience podcast Wednesday (January 22) while referring to the hypothetical situation of killing "baby Hitler" during a discussion with his guest Lex Fridman. “This is why they want to conflate and they always want to pretend that everyone’s Hitler. The problem with that, after a while, it’s crying wolf, and people are like, ‘Oh, this is a bulls–t game you’re playing and you’re just using it as an excuse.”
Musk, 53, claimed liberal pundits "need better dirty tricks" while responding to the accusation on his X account Tuesday (January 21).
"Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The “everyone is Hitler” attack is sooo tired," Musk wrote in response to another account sharing a screengrab in which he previously claimed he switched parties and suspected the Democrats would use "dirty tricks" against him for it.
Rogan, 57, said Musk was "absolutely correct," claiming liberal critics "wrap themselves in this idea to give them virtue, which he claimed gave them a reason to "say the most awful things about other people that have different perspectives."
“People use woke ideology as an excuse to be an a–hole, and it’s really just people that are a**holes that are attaching themselves to things that make them feel righteous,” Rogan said.
Musk gave a speech at the Capitol One Arena to celebrate Trump taking office and got extremely excited while discussing the prospect of landing a man on Mars and planting an American flag, at which point he pounded his chest and threw his right arm in an angular motion toward the sky and claimed he felt it in his "heart" before turning his back to the audience and repeating the gesture towards the American flag hanging over the stage behind him.
“Standing ovation for Elon Musk. By far the biggest reception of the day,” said CNN anchor Erin Burnett during a live broadcast. “You saw him come out with that odd-looking salute.”
“It was odd-looking,” Burnett reiterated before the broadcast showed viewers a screenshot of the incident.
The Anti-Defamation League, a non-governmental organization founded to combat antisemitism, claimed that Musk was not making a nazi saluted, rather "an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm."
"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 group wrote on X, the social media platform owned by Musk. "It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge. In this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt, and take a breath. This is a new beginning. Let’s hope for healing and work toward unity in the months and years ahead."
Musk, who was selected to lead the new "Department of Government Efficiency, was one of Trump's fiercest supporters during his second successful presidential campaign, appearing at numerous rallies and publicly pledging to give away $1 million to supporters who signed his online petition to register voters leading up to the election.