After concluding a weekend speech in Los Angeles, where he addressed the California Democratic Party, Booker put his right hand over his heart. He then raised his right arm to wave at the crowd.
If that gesture sounds familiar, it’s because billionaire Elon Musk did the same gesture – hand over heart, then a wave – back in January. He did so January 20, on Donald Trump’s inauguration day, when speaking to supporters at Capitol One Arena.
“I just want to say thank you for making it happen. Thank you,” Musk tells the crowd of Trump supporters. “My heart goes out to you.”
Musk’s right arm had barely come down before news outlets, such as PBS and CNN, reported on the gesture. The story by PBS (pictured at left) alleged Musk gave “what appeared to be a fascist salute,” while CNN danced around the accusation. Its anchors called it an “odd-looking” gesture and “evocative of things that we have seen throughout history.”
Joseph Vasquez, of the Media Research Center, tells AFN the Musk wave was criticized at The New York Times and The Washington Post, too. All totaled, he says, more than eight mainstream news outlets reported on it while Booker’s gesture has yet to produce a single that-looked-like-a-Nazi headline.
“How the media can be so brazen,” Vasquez observes, “and twisting what Elon Musk did to try to make him some sort of symbol of Nazi white supremacy.”
Meanwhile, since Sen. Booker is a Democrat, his allies in the liberal news media don’t see any issue and don’t consider his gesture worthy of a news story, Vasquez concludes.
In the news cycle this week, it appears only Fox News reported on the media’s disinterest in Booker compared to how Musk was treated back in January.
Asked by AFN how liberal journalists seem to shrug off their blatant hypocrisy, Vasquez says he believes they know they are failing at their profession. Many of them cope, he guesses, because they depend on alcohol and liquor to make it through the day.
Musk himself noticed the lack of media interest in Booker’s gesture, too. “Legacy media is one big psy op,” he wrote on X.
