RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/25/the-american-right-needs-to-cut-out-the-vice-signalling/

So having voted out the virtue-signallers, now the good people of America must suffer the vice-signallers? Take Steve Bannon’s salute at CPAC. We all know what he was up to. He was triggering the libs and titillating the Very Online right. It was a massive troll designed to get the CNN crowd fuming and the ironic fascists of X chuckling. So 77million US voters say a firm No to the eccentric ideologies of the faux-virtuous liberal elite, only to see them replaced by the eccentric antics of vice-flirting conservatives? Great.

It was at the end of his CPAC speech that Bannon – a key intellectual player in the first Trump administration – executed a forceful straight-armed salute. Exactly as he will have anticipated, and no doubt desired, the leftish media went nuts. He’s playing ‘footsie with Nazism’, said CNN host W Kamau Bell. Some on the right weren’t happy, either. Jordan Bardella, leader of France’s far-right National Rally, pulled out of his CPAC spot over Bannon’s ‘gesture referring to Nazi ideology’. Listen, when even the National Rally, a party founded by a literal Holocaust denier, thinks you’re a tad too fascist-adjacent, it’s time for some self-reflection.

Bannon says it was just a ‘wave’. Come on, Steve – I regularly wave at friends but I usually manage to do it without looking like Hitler at Munich in 1937. There are two possible explanations for his salute: either he’s a Nazi and he wants the world to know or he is so insanely invested in the tragic virtual sport of ‘owning the left’ that he’s even willing to mimic a Sieg Heil to piss these people off. I think it’s the latter. And while that’s definitely better than his being an actual SS fanboy, it still doesn’t bode well for the new America that such digital conservative frivolity has exploded into the real world.

I have no time either for those shouting, ‘This is proof he’s a Nazi!’, or those saying, ‘It was just a Roman salute!’, a gesture some claim was a customary greeting back in Ancient Rome. The former are just airing their long-held, lazy belief that Trump and everyone connected with him is a fascist. It’s not 2016, guys – the Literally Hitler stuff doesn’t land anymore. But the latter are being disingenuous, too. They must know there’s more going on here than a boyish harking back to the Roman Empire. They must understand the currency of triggering. It matters not one jot how the plebs of Rome greeted their Caesars – the fact is that, since the 1920s, the diagonal raise of a right arm in a heated political setting has meant one thing and one thing only: ‘I’m a fascist.’ Though it now seems to have a new meaning: ‘I’m an edgelord who loves to trend online.’

I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Elon Musk when he did a weird gesture on Inauguration Day. He did seem to be ‘throwing his heart’ at the crowd. But his imitators – whether it’s Britain’s trolling priest, Calvin Robinson, or sworn Musk-hater Bannon – just come off as desperate. They clearly want some of the hate clicks Musk got. They’ve clearly deduced that the fastest way to infuriate the wets of the internet, and get your name in the papers, is by raising your arm rightwards. It’s so juvenile, the political equivalent of a 15-year-old white kid wearing a ‘Fuck tha police’ t-shirt to school. It’s the sacrifice of decency – yes, I’m a bore, I think even tongue-in-cheek Sieg Heils are bad – at the altar of longed-for virtual infamy.

But there’s something more than cultural goading going on here. Bannon’s knowing ‘wave’ also speaks to a crisis of normalcy on sections of the American right. It sometimes feels as though the freaks of political correctness have been replaced by the freaks of political incorrectness. Where the old Democratic elite cosied up to dudes with boobs and BLM hucksters and young radicals who’d weep at the sight of a white man sporting dreadlocks, some in the insurgent new right are nodding and winking at those post-social losers of the online right who have usernames like ‘Big Balls’ and love to say ‘Churchill was the bad guy, you know’. I have just one question: where are the normal people?

The problem with the old Dem establishment is that it was far more interested in appealing to the PC graduate elites than the hard-working men and women of Normal America. Thus the Biden administration ended up employing a bald man in a dress who had a penchant for stealing women’s suitcases and telling black people who voted for Trump that ‘you ain’t black’. That elite held views that felt crushingly alien to most Americans. It spoke in woke tongues, in the correct-speak of the rarefied realm of the overeducated liberal. Are we seeing a mirror version of this in sections of the insurgent right, who likewise seem more interested in sending coded messages to irony-drunk edgelords online than in speaking plainly to working people who want a new, better America?

Bannon and others are in for a rude awakening if they can’t see how naff and alienating their vice-flirting is. The decent majority of America, preferring MLK to BLM, just rejected the politics of racial grievance peddled by Biden and the rest – they’re hardly now going to say: ‘Yay, fascist salutes.’

As someone who respects the American masses’ democratic yearning for a new politics, one that takes their economic needs and cultural beliefs seriously, I hate to see some of their political ‘betters’ behave so annoyingly. Steve, be normal. It’s not hard.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy