San Antonio’s Roland Gutierrez beat Pete Flores in a Texas Senate race. Credit: Twitter / epbusiness

State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio, fired off a tweet Sunday telling billionaire Elon Musk and other right wingers who have embraced the Nazi salute to “shove it straight up your ass.”

“I got a message for you fuckers,” Gutierrez said in the minute-and-a-half-long clip posted to social media platform X. “This is the United States of America. This isn’t Nazi Germany. I mean, Hitler killed 6 million Jewish people. He ran over Europe, caused a World War. What the hell do you idiots think that you’re doing?”

“This is America,” Gutierrez wrote in his tweet. “We beat Nazis, we don’t bow to them.”

The outspoken state lawmaker‘s clip, which has racked up 1,500 likes and 13,000 views as of press time, came after far-right operative and former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon, threw up an apparent Nazi salute during an appearance at last week at the conservative CPAC conference.

Mexican actor turned MAGA ally Eduardo Verástegui, also gave the salute during his CPAC speech.

The stiff-armed salute has made a comeback in far-right circles after Musk gave one during Trump’s inauguration rally. Defenders of the world’s richest man have said he didn’t mean the gesture as a Nazi salute, maintaining that it was an accident because he’s allegedly on the autism spectrum.

Other defenders have claimed Musk and others mean their gestures as a “Roman salute,” something historians argue has no actual link to Ancient Rome. German and Italian fascists popularized the salute in the 1920s, and it’s widely viewed today as a symbol of hate.

Whether U.S. right-wing ideologues truly intend their “Roman salaries” to broadcast support for fascism or they think it’s a means to troll the libs, Gutierrez isn’t the only one taking offense. Both public- and private-sector employers and the Anglican Catholic Church have signaled they want nothing to do with it.

San Antonio realtor Yessica Garza was fired earlier this month for emulating Musk’s salute in a now-removed Instagram video, and Michigan priest was recently defrocked for doing the same. What’s more, an official in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania resigned last month after posting a video showing her make the gesture.

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This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2025.

Michael Karlis is a multimedia journalist at the San Antonio Current, whose coverage in print and on social media focuses on local and state politics. He is a graduate of American University in Washington,...