Was One of Elon Musk's Recent Twitter Posts a White Supremacist Dog Whistle?

Over the past few months, and especially since he has become ingrained in the MAGA world, Elon Musk has not exactly been shy about sharing his more controversial beliefs. He is an X (formerly Twitter) power user, and his posts include commentary on American politics and on the rest of the world.

He caused controversy after the inauguration for imitating what appeared to be a Nazi salute, and he's also expressed interest in Germany's AFD party, which is more than a little Nazi-curious. Following a recent Twitter post in which Musk shared 14 flags, however, some are wondering whether that post had a deeper meaning. Here's what we know.

This latest mini-controversy around Musk bubbled up after he reposted Donald Trump's assertion that he is above the law, writing, "He who saves his country does not violate any Law." Over that post, Musk added 14 American flags, which may have just looked like a symbol of patriotic fervor. Those who thought about the post more carefully, though, began to wonder if that was all there was to it.

Fourteen is a significant number in many white supremacist circles. It refers to the "14 words," a sort of manifesto in miniature that has been floating around the movement for years.

Those words are: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." The term was first coined by David Lane, a member of the white supremacist terror group The Order, and describes the modern movement's belief that white people are headed for extinction.

We have no evidence that definitively proves that Musk intended for this post to be read this way, but that would obviously be part of the point. Fourteen flags could be a coincidence, but if it was intentional, it still offers Musk plausible deniability. Dog whistles are often designed to encourage those who understand the meaning, and to leave the rest of us questioning whether there was any message there to begin with.

Although he has never explicitly espoused anything like the great replacement theory, Musk has long been in circles where those kinds of ideas were in the water. He grew up in apartheid South Africa, where racism was government policy, and his very public war on DEI has already resulted in the rollback of programs and initiatives that were designed to address structural inequalities.

So, of course, we don't know what Musk's intentions were in posting specifically 14 American flags. It could have been a dog whistle or just a coincidence. What's important, though, is that we know what Musk thinks regardless of whether the move was intentional. A person can only suggest their admiration for Nazis and Nazi-adjacent groups so many times before we have to simply take them at their word about how they see the world.