Elon Musk, fresh off accusations of monkey torture, goes for the Hitler meme

Time to Log Off is a weekly series documenting the many ways our political figures show their whole asses online.

Here’s a useful rule of thumb: Unless you’re talking about an deliberate government effort to enact industrialized genocide against a marginalized community based solely on their ethno-religious heritage or sexuality, then you should probably take a beat and ask yourself, “Is it really a good idea to make a glib Hitler joke right now?”

That goes double if you’re the richest person in the history of the human species who just so happens to have gotten your leg up in this world because you were born into spectacular wealth thanks in part to your family’s apartheid emerald mine.

Nevertheless, against my good advice, that’s what Tesla boss and alleged monkey torturer Elon Musk did in the wee hours of Thursday morning, when he compared Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. Why? Because Trudeau had the gall to tell Canada’s banks to stop facilitating the crypto trades funding the white nationalism-adjacent anti-vax trucker protests that have spread chaos and dysfunction across the country — largely with non-Canadian financial backing. This, it seems, was enough for Musk to hop on Twitter at 1:46 a.m. to post a “actually you’ve gotta hand it to Hitler” meme, which he left on his timeline for the nearly 12 hours before finally deleting it Thursday afternoon.

The fact that Trudeau actually has a budget didn’t seem to enter into Musk’s pre-dawn crypto freakout, which was clearly less about being “correct” and more about being the sort of weirdo rage spasm Musk is prone to from time to time. The point here is no more complicated than the wealthiest man alive saying “Trudeau Hitler hur hur hur” and assuming that this is a good and worthwhile way for him to spend his limited time on Earth.

Indeed, even after deleting the initial, wildly inappropriate Hitler meme, Musk couldn’t help but keep the Nazi comparison stuck in his billion-dollar craw, sharing a link to a Wikipedia entry about a book about the economics of the Third Reich, which is a totally normal thing for a totally normal guy to do. Nothing weird here!

And, look, I get it: Nazi comparisons are all the rage these days among the conservative reactionary weirdo elite. Just this week, Turning Points USA founder Charlie Kirk claimed that buying a muffin at the bakery was basically the same thing as living in the concentration camps. But maybe, just maybe, if you’re the sort of person whose company is crashing down around him on both the branding and legal fronts, you should stop and think to yourself: Is tweeting Hitler shit the very best thing I could be doing with myself right now, or should I just log off instead?