“Heil Tesla!”: Autistic Gestures and the Demirhetorical

• In Event: CDSC Sponsored Panel: Disability in an Age of Fascism (HYBRID)

Abstract

On January 20th, 2025 Elon Musk had only just begun his speech at an inaugural celebration in Washington, DC’s Capital One Arena when he threw his right hand to his chest and then flung it out and up to the side, palm down, to the crowd. He turned around and did it again. Rather than condemnation for what many considered an obvious Sieg Heil salute, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in a social media post asserted that Musk had “made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute,” seeming to reference Musk’s autism. Here, disability identity becomes the means through which fascist iconography is covered over as “awkward” but benign. This perception of disability as a minority that must be protected and their differences accepted misaligns with the eugenics project historically integral to fascism. Other prominent disabled conservatives, Greg Abbott as a highly visible example, have also risen the ranks of the Republican party and its larger conservative ecosystem. This paper takes up Musk’s gesture to interrogate the formation of disability identity under neoliberalism and the seeming ease through which it can be co-opted by ableist forces. The paper proposes, by way of this interrogation, an expansion to Robert McRuer’s foundational concept of the queercrip to propose strategies of resistance for disability studies when the face of fascism is another disabled person.

Within 72 hours of Musk’s salute the British activist group Led by Donkeys, with the support of the satirical Berlin based Center for Political Beauty, projected an image of Musk mid salute onto the Tesla gigafactory in Berlin along with the word “Heil” next to the Tesla sign such that the building now displayed “Heil Tesla” above Musk and his outstretched arm. Despite the ADL’s explanation, Led by Donkeys are being investigated because the projection, DW News reported, “may have breached German laws on the use of symbols linked to illegal organization.” The ADL positions Musk’s gesture as a perverse instance of what M. Remi Yergeau defines “demi-­rhetoricity,” the belief that autistic people copy gestures and movements rather than having their own intention behind them. In the face of the ADL’s attempt to foreclose any possible meaning making for Musk’s salute Let by Donkeys seize on the capacity of gesture, namely, that, in the words of Juana María Rodríguez, “gestures never fully establish interpretive closure. They are never absolute…the gesture is an invitation to guess its aspirations, and like any invitation, it contains a risk.” Ultimately this paper interrogates how Led by Donkeys’ repositioning of Musk’s gesture explicitly within the legacy of Naziism rather than medicalized conceptions of autistic people opens opportunities for coalitional work against a resurgent necropolitical ideology bent on eliminating certain forms of human difference from any future world irrespective of identity.

Author

• Brady James Forrest, Georgetown University