Snopes, the once-trendy and amusing “Urban Myths” website that morphed quite a while ago into an almost comical Democratic party shill, may have hit peak Poe’s Law status (that’s PPL for short, like in the Barbra Streisand song) this time. I last moved these hacks out of my Julie Principle corner in June after somebody made the executive decision that the Axis site needed more ammunition when someone accused their political factchecks of partisan hackery. That month Snopes decided to point out that “No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People” after ignoring this Big Lie used repeatedly by Democrats for seven long years.
Snopes needn’t have bothered if it was going to stoop to new depths of outrageous bias as it did in a post last week. Climbing on the disgraceful bandwagon of the Trump Deranged who called Elon Musk’s awkward arm gesture as he signified that his “heart went out” to his fans a “Nazi salute,” it gave us “No, These Politicians Did Not Make the Same Gesture as Elon Musk.” A short summary of its intended message: “Apologists for Trump acolyte Musk who found photos of Democrats who also appeared to make a Nazi Salute in photos taken out of context are passing along misinformation, because the Democrats (Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris) are not Nazis, but Elon Musk, because he supports Donald Trump, might be.”
The post could be a Babylon Bee satire on Snopes (which has “factchecked” some of its satire). In truth, Musk’s gesture was exactly like the non-Nazi salutes of the Democrats Snopes always rushes to defend, because he also wasn’t giving a Nazi salute, as any non-Musk-hating, non-Trump Deranged, rational human being with a semi-functioning brain should be able to figure out all by themselves.
Ethics Alarms already covered this despicable smear on the megabillionaire, which PBS and Sen. Chris Murphy, among other partisan hacks, began circulating after Trump’s inauguration parties. CNN’s Scott Jennings perfectly encapsulated the significance of episode, saying, “The only good thing about the Elon salute stupidity is that it adds to the list of people in public life who should never, ever, ever be taken seriously ever again by anyone ever.”
Everyone who works for Snopes belongs on that list, as well as everyone who attacked Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, for firing Snopes and its other biased Facebook censors.
Here is the Snopes conclusion after its “research”: “These still images [of the Democrats] were taken out of context from speeches in which each politician was making an unrelated gesture, including waving or raising their hand to make a point. Their language, demeanor and the wider context of the video shows the gestures cannot be interpreted as Nazi salutes…there was too little evidence to draw a firm conclusion about [Musk’s] intentions even as the neo-Nazi and far-right community praised the gesture.”
False. There is plenty of evidence:
First, Musk isn’t a Nazi.
Second, Trump isn’t a Nazi.
Third, Trump isn’t Hitler.
Fourth, Musk isn’t an idiot.
Fifth, in fact he’s one of the smartest men on Earth.
Sixth, Musk is not insane. Even if he were a Nazi, he wouldn’t choose to broadcast it to the world.
Seventh, the writer, Nur Nasreen Ibrahim, is an idiot: how third parties choose to regard any event or phenomenon after that event of phenomenon has taken place is completely useless in interpreting the phenomenon and irrelevant to it.
Eighth, the “Musk gave a Nazi salute!” lie was only the latest chapter in the disgusting and desperate “Trump is a Nazi and his followers are fascists!” Big Lie that Democrats resorted to with special verve in their desperation to somehow rescue Kamala Harris from her own incompetence.
The previous chapter in this disgusting all-time low campaign strategy, you may recall, was the “Trump is emulating Nazis by holding a rally in Madison Square Garden!” nonsense. Snopes didn’t factcheck that one, but it did try to use the event to smear Trump and his supporters in other creative ways, as in the deceitful post headlined “Was ‘Confederate Anthem’ Played at Trump’s Madison Square Garden Rally?,” another white supremacist smear. (Snopes votes that the claim is “TRUE” because, see, Elvis’s “Southern Trilogy” song was played as entrance music for a performer, see, and “Dixie” is one of the songs in the Trilogy, see, and we all know that Elvis was a racist.)
Now here is the mystery: how does Snopes survive? Its dishonesty is undeniable. True, it doesn’t lie all the time, but if a factchecker can’t be trusted not to always be factual, it’s useless. Snopes is useless, dishonest, biased, partisan, incompetent and stupid. It is worse than MSNBC: at least that House of Lies doesn’t pretend to be trustworthy or unbiased. Snopes makes the corrupt factchecking industry look even worse than it is…which, I supposed, is an accomplishment.
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Pointer: Willem Reese
Ethics Alarms 
The eye sees what it wants to see! denial is an ego defense mechanism that Snopes and others use frequently.
Logically, to rule that the other gestures are not the same as Elon’s requires starting with the assumption that Elon’s is a Nazi salute. Otherwise, you’d just have to say they are all the same…not Nazi salutes.
Snopes also completely misses or ignores the fact that aporoximately 99.999% of the posts showing democrats making similar gesture are not seriously suggesting that they’re Nazis, but mocking the idea and the different treatment by the press.
In their separate article on just Elon’s gesture, Snopes can’t bring themselves to make a true/false ruling as they did covering for the democrats. Even though they noted his accompanying statement“Thank you. My heart goes out to you….“, Snopes absurdly concluded “We cannot read Musk’s mind to learn precisely what he intended by it. It’s possible it was a purposeful Nazi salute; it could also have been entirely innocent. The available evidence is too scant to draw a solid conclusion.”
They noted they considered information from Wired and Rolling Stone (eye roll) to make their call.
I think Snopes remains in business because of the first two premises in Abraham Lincoln’s analysis of lying liars who lie. While you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, if you can fool some of the people some of the time, keep doing so, because they are useful idiots. And if you can fool all the of the people some of the time, do so when it is advantageous. If you keep a base that will always look to you for information, especially if most of the time you do present unbiased analysis, then when you need to spread the lie, you have an audience that will gratefully gobble down what you present.
Worse, remember Wizard’s First Rule (credit Terry Goodkind for putting some good Greek philosophy into fantasy stories): People are stupid. They can be made to believe a lie either because they want it to be true, or they fear it is true. If enough people spread the lie that Musk is Nazi, and you keep hounding that lie no matter the response, no matter the debunking, no matter how much common sense says it must be a lie, there will be a group of people into whom the cankerous seed of doubt will sprout. That might only make them hesitant, enough to sit out the next election, but it might also finally sway them. After all, how could people keep making these endless claims if there weren’t some basis of truth?
In the aftermath of a particularly damning failure, when all credibility even with the base is under threat, you can’t back down, but have to double down, because only the doubling down will keep the true believers in line. It was a miscalculation, after all, that Jesus was coming in March of 1843, but he would definitely return by October of 1844. Well, we were mistaken about his return, because the cleansing of the temple that we assumed would be Christ’s coming, purifying the earth, was actually the purifying of the Heavenly temple, which absolutely did start in 1844, and will continue until the world ends.
In any paradigm, there will be absolute, diehard adherents that will provide any ad hoc excuse necessary to maintain the paradigm. Those paradigms themselves don’t die off until the last of the diehard adherents do. No, we don’t hold to the epicycles of the heavenly bodies or the retrograde of Mercury, and the reason isn’t so much that everyone was convinced the new model was better, but that the old model could no longer attract any supporters, and the old supporters dwindled away.
Snopes will continue to persist as long as there are sufficient adherents who need Trump to be a Nazi, and as long as no other better model challenges Snopes’ niche. How Snopes (and CNN and MSNBC) will fare once Trump is no longer in the picture is anyone’s guess. Maybe all the hate will spill over to the next Republican candidate, or maybe it will all finally deflate and they all simply die, like Roger Chillingworth after his wife’s paramour public confessed his adultery and died.
The context of these various gestures appears to simply be the people making them. Musk is bad, Democrats are good. That’s the “context.”