The Meme is reality: we are all nazis

Elon Musk performs a Roman salute at Trump’s inauguration ceremony. Or does he? It doesn’t matter. All that matters is the meme.

Donald Trump has been sworn in as President of the United States, but anyone who’s spent at least five minutes in the current timeline knows that Trump is not the real protagonist. It’s Elon Musk. During the ceremony, Musk placed his hand on his chest and extended his arm like an ancient Roman commander or, according to some, like a Nazi at a NASDAP rally.

For hours, fact-checkers (the ones who were bullied as kids) have been analyzing every frame of Musk’s gesture: “Was it really a Roman salute? Did he get carried away? Has he been awake for too long? Is he on drugs?”

The answer is irrelevant. We no longer live in an era where reality is something to be verified. We live in a world where what appears to be real is real. The hybrid algorithmic-human neural network that thrives on social media has already decided: it was a Roman salute. And that, too, is irrelevant.

Trying to decipher the present with 20th-century frameworks? Foolish, delusional.

You live in a timeline where the President of the United States launched his own memecoin, $TRUMP, two days before his inauguration, reaching a $10 billion market cap in just a few hours. The new U.S. Department of Government Efficiency is called DOGE (yes, like the dog meme from the cryptocurrency of the same name), and among Trump’s first Executive Orders is one declaring that the world consists of males and females.

This is the world we live in, yet some people still believe nothing has changed in the last 80 years. What must it feel like to not understand the world you live in?

Musk’s gesture and the Nazi symbolism fit perfectly into this context: reality is a meme. Or rather, the meme is reality.

The web is overflowing with Nazi symbolism recontextualized into memes. Nazism doesn’t exist. These two statements are not contradictory. Nazism is both an idea that inspires extreme emotions (on either end of the spectrum) and an empty vessel. Any narrative can fit into it today.

Anyone can be labeled a Nazi online, regardless of context or convictions. The word no longer refers to a specific ideology or historical event but has become a universal label. Everything is Nazi, and nothing is Nazi. Nazism and its symbolism are the perfect memetic objects.

Nazism is the perfect simulacrum in the Baudrillardian sense. It is no longer tied to historical reality but is a semiotic vessel that no longer represents historical Nazism but what the meme (and society) decide it should represent.

Nazi symbolism is evoked (in the strictest sense of the term) to shock the masses and make them laugh or to create viral semiotic viruses capable of stimulating reflection and introspection more effectively than any documentary or history book.

The 60-second schizo-videos with dance music, kawaii anime references, and a lightning-fast sequence of images of the Third Reich and the Roman Empire are precisely this.

Since December 31, 1999, humanity has been adrift in a space without time—or a time without space. Everything exists and does not exist at the same time. There’s no direction, no coast to reach. Just digital waves enveloping us in an endless flow.

Today, we need fixed points. The viral videos that mix kawaii anime, dance music, and images of the Third Reich or the Roman Empire are not historical nostalgia. They are the manifestation of humanity’s need to cling to clear and permanent archetypal symbols in an era where past, present, and future continuously collapse into themselves in the eternal digital flow, and nothing truly makes sense. Admit it: how many times a day do you think about the Roman Empire?

The purpose behind these memes is certainly not the restoration of the NASDAP; those times are gone and won’t return. The purpose is intrinsic to the meme itself. If you’re asking what the purpose of a meme is, you haven’t yet understood that the meme is the message, and the message is the meme. The meme lives a life of its own and sometimes takes on human form, as in the case of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Musk and Trump are not Nazis nor Roman emperors but avatars of this new contemporary schizo-paradigm, with the power to manipulate and ride memetic simulacra that are then adopted by algorithms and collective perception.

If the meme is reality and reality is the meme, then you too—watching, sharing, reacting—are part of this collective eggregore. Musk isn’t the Nazi: you are the Nazi; I am the Nazi; we are all Nazis and not Nazis at the same time. Victims and perpetrators of this grand memetic spectacle.

What matters is understanding the logic of the memetic reality into which we are projected. There’s no way out because there was never a way in.

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