As anyone who wouldn’t believe you if you told them that the word “gullible” was not in the dictionary knows, Elon Musk did a Nazi salute at Donald Trump’s inauguration last week. (Seriously? It was only last week?)
The “Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?” claim that it is not a Nazi salute is ridiculous, because if one were to do a “That’s not a Nazi salute! This is a Nazi salute!” demonstration, both gestures would look exactly the same. Well, that and the fact he went to Germany a few days later to tell Germans they shouldn’t feel bad about the Holocaust, a day before Holocaust Remembrance Day, so there’s that. Oh! There was also that time he spent $49 billion to bring neo-Nazis back to Twitter and … well, I could go on, couldn’t I?
So far, we’ve seen one woman have to resign from her job as a town supervisor in Towamencin Township, Pennsylvania, after emulating the gesture and another lose her job as a meteorologist for accurately describing the gesture as a Nazi salute. The scales are starting to tip, however, as a priest just got defrocked for doing it himself during a speech at the March for Life Forced Birth.
Calvin Robinson, a longtime “anti-woke” troll and friend of Tommy Robinson and other far-right extremists, gave a speech at the parade, which he capped off by saying “my heart goes out to you” and then hitting his chest and doing a Nazi salute — a plainly obvious reference to the claim many have made that Musk was simply “sharing his heart” with the audience when he was heiling Hitler.
It’s very clear what’s going on there — it’s the far-right version of itching an ostensibly itchy eyebrow with one’s middle finger. They’re trying to do something transgressive, that will appeal to who it is meant to appeal to (Nazis) while still maintaining plausible deniability to the mainstream.
Robinson was dismissed from his position as a priest in in the Anglican Catholic Church (ACC), as church leadership was able to correctly identify the gesture as “a Nazi salute.”
OK, they were not that direct and were clearly terrified of definitively saying that it was a Nazi salute, but they got rid of him either way.
At approximately 3:00 pm today (1/29) members of the College of Bishops of the ACC were made aware of a post made on X showing the end of a speech made by Calvin Robinson at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington, DC. In it, he closed his comments with a gesture that many have interpreted as a pro-Nazi salute.
While we cannot say what was in Mr. Robinson’s heart when he did this, his action appears to have been an attempt to curry favour with certain elements of the American political right by provoking its opposition. Mr. Robinson had been warned that online trolling and other such actions (whether in service of the left or right) are incompatible with a priestly vocation and was told to desist. Clearly, he has not, and as such, his license in this Church has been revoked. He is no longer serving as a priest in the ACC.
The ACC is not actually a Catholic Church. They are a sect that left the Episcopal Church after they decided to ordain women and are sort of a Church of England/Catholicism hybrid. So, like, the anti-abortion church that hated women enough to start its own religion was woke enough to know that the gesture Robinson made was a bad gesture. That’s certainly saying something, when so many have been doing the “Oh gosh, who can really say? Maybe it was just an awkward gesture?” tango for the last week and a half. (Only that long? Really? Because it feels like it’s been a year.)
The ACC went on to explain it for the Elons in the back:
Furthermore, we understand that this is not just an administrative matter. The Holocaust was an episode of unspeakable horror, enacted by a regime of evil men. We condemn Nazi ideology and anti-Semitism in all its forms. And we believe that those who mimic the Nazi salute, even as a joke or an attempt to troll their opponents, trivialize the horror of the Holocaust and diminish the sacrifice of those who fought against its perpetrators. Such actions are harmful, divisive, and contrary to the tenets of Christian charity.
This is not, actually, the first time Robinson has had trouble holding onto his collar. After attending a two-year theological course, he applied for a curacy in the Church of England and was rejected. He claimed it was because of his “anti-woke” views and opposition to the ordination of women, after discovering a letter in which some priests discussed his “libertarian anti-woke, anti-identity politics, Covid-sceptical” politics and tendency to say inflammatory things on Twitter. The CoE said they had a limited number of positions open and there were none they found suitable for Robinson. We assume that there just were not any available parishes where people wanted to be explicitly insulted by a far-right Twitter troll every Sunday.
After that, he moved onto the Free Church of England, which left the Church of England because they were worried it was getting too Catholic-y. Then he he left that church and joined the even more obscure Nordic Catholic Church, which left the Norwegian (Lutheran) State Church because they opposed “ordination of women to the presbyterate and episcopate, and had come to embrace the Orthodox Catholic faith of the undivided Church of the first millennium.”
He then gave an inflammatory speech at the Mere Anglicanism conference in South Carolina about why he opposed the ordination of women and how Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation paved the way towards Marxism and was subsequently asked to leave said conference. After a lot of sobbing about being canceled, he moved to the US on a more permanent basis and joined the Anglican Catholic Church.
So that’s a lot of getting canceled for just one “giving his heart to you” guy!
There is power in being able to blatantly do something like a Nazi salute and getting away with it, convincing others that they never saw what they saw. That (as well as his actual views) is almost definitely why Musk did it, and certainly Robinson was hoping that he, too, would be able to pull it off.
Guess he was wrong.
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