Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is threatening to bring news outlets that accurately report on Elon Musk’s horrific Sieg Heil before Congress.
PBS News shared an unedited clip on X Monday of the billionaire technocrat speaking at a post-inauguration event for Donald Trump, when he did “what appeared to be a fascist salute,” the outlet wrote.
Musk “[put] his hand on his chest and then [raised] it in a salute that appeared similar to the ‘Sieg Heil’ used by Nazis at their victory rallies,” PBS wrote.
And Musk didn’t just do it once; he did it twice in a row.
But PBS’s reporting includes the essential word “appeared,” which is typically used by journalists to indicate that while describing something cannot necessarily determine its nature, one can understand something’s nature through describing it.
One might write that it was a Sieg Heil because that’s clearly what it was. But many outlets are declining to do so, for a slate of reasons that range from an abundance of caution to blatant cowardice. Fox News, for example, suggested that Musk—who previously voiced his support for Germany’s far-right party and a British neo-Nazi—had simply made a “questionable salute.”
Greene, who has pushed her own antisemitic conspiracy theories from time to time, came to Musk’s rescue from the dastardly American public broadcaster.
“As the Chairwoman of the Oversight Subcommittee on DOGE, I look forward to PBS @NewsHour coming before my committee and explaining why lying and spreading propaganda to serve the Democrat party and attack Republicans is a good use of taxpayer funds. We will be in touch soon,” Greene wrote Monday night.
Greene would have PBS testify to the dispassionate description of Musk’s apparent triumphant fascist salute, as if Congress doesn’t have enough of its own problems right now.
Not only is it not surprising that Greene would defend Musk from allegations of Nazism, it’s also not surprising that a MAGA Republican would target PBS. Trump has previously attacked publicly funded media such as NPR and PBS, and ye olde authoritarian playbook for Trump’s incoming administration, Project 2025, called for the government to strip federal funding and licenses for noncommercial education stations.