ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Elon Musk's stiff-armed salute on Inauguration Day sparked days of debate. Was it a Nazi salute or just an awkward arm flail? What did he mean by it? Here's what's not up for debate. In the weeks since, at least a dozen other people have tried out the gesture publicly. Some have lost jobs, but for others, nothing's changed. NPR's Lisa Hagen reports on what's happening and why some people think it's a joke.
LISA HAGEN, BYLINE: The stiff-armed salute used to have a very narrow meaning.
KURT BRADDOCK: I think generally, most people still find the Sieg heil to be reminiscent of World War II, the Holocaust.
HAGEN: Kurt Braddock is a communications professor at American University, who studies extremism.
BRADDOCK: It signifies that somebody is, if not physically and socially part of a far-right neo-Nazi group, then they at least ideologically align with them.
HAGEN: But after Elon Musk faced no serious consequences for his Inauguration Day salutes, the gesture's meaning, like it or not, began to shift for some people. Musk himself has made jokes after the public outcry, most recently on Joe Rogan's podcast, things like making puns with the names of Nazi leaders like Joseph Goebbels.
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ELON MUSK: I did Nazi it coming.
JOE ROGAN: (Laughter).
MUSK: It's a classic.
ROGAN: (Laughter).
MUSK: People will Goebbels anything down.
HAGEN: Prominent figures on the right have also mimicked Musk's salute with no apparent repercussions, including Steve Bannon and another speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference. In other cases, people less insulated by power have lost their jobs, including Friar Calvin Robinson, a priest in Michigan, who capped off an anti-abortion speech with the salute. He very clearly described it as a joke on his YouTube show.
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CALVIN ROBINSON: Yes, it was cheeky. I am cheeky, first and foremost, but it wasn't immoral. It wasn't unethical.
HAGEN: Robinson didn't respond to an interview request. He lost his license to minister to Anglican Catholic churches and then had his U.S. visa temporarily revoked. He has said he's not a Nazi and he's not sorry.
Robinson isn't the only example of people grinning as they do these salutes, so how did we get here? Why do people think throwing what, to many, looks like a Nazi salute is a joke? Nick Butler is the author of "The Trouble With Jokes," a book about offensive humor. He teaches at Stockholm University.
NICK BUTLER: A joke is kind of like a sonar. It emits a pulse and, you know, listens out for laughter and detects affinities among those who laugh at it.
HAGEN: That's how jokes create ingroups and outgroups. You're either laughing, or you're not. Butler says humor is a tool. It can be used by anyone.
BUTLER: I think some have tried to kind of put boundaries between, OK, well, this we can call humor because it punches up rather than punches down, but if someone is laughing, then we have to accept that it is a joke of some kind.
HAGEN: He says offensive humor also lays a trap for anyone who's uncomfortable when a joke smashes through a social taboo.
BUTLER: You can accuse them of being oversensitive. You can accuse them of being a insufferable killjoy. And no one wants to be an insufferable killjoy.
HAGEN: Ridiculing critics as humorless is a strategy that's been cultivated for years by popular figures on the right.
NICK MARX: Saying, hey, come over here. We're the fun ones.
HAGEN: That's Nick Marx, a media studies professor at Colorado State University, who's been studying right-wing comedy. He says blending politics with the ambiguity of jokes is all part of a bigger permission structure that Donald Trump has built over years.
MARX: That sort of tendency to just blurt out freeform whatever's on his mind - and we've seen that excuse on his behalf a handful of times - well, clearly, President Trump was just joking. I think now you see that sensibility playing out pretty routinely among his inner circle and his representatives.
HAGEN: He predicts we'll continue to see people experimenting with what you can and can't get away with. The salutes are an extreme example of that. They're also constitutionally protected speech. But Braddock, the extremism researcher, says regular people will likely face more repercussions than the elites they may be imitating.
BRADDOCK: It's not going to matter to your employer. And unfortunately, it's not going to matter to the hard-line neo-Nazis who are looking for an excuse to normalize their ideologies and begin engaging in violence.
HAGEN: He says it'll remain useful to highlight examples of people facing real consequences for doing the salutes, regardless of their intent. Lisa Hagen, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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