Apparently, the new and used – sorry, pre-owned – electric car salesman Elon Musk is aching to prove that he is even more of an insufferable braggart than his political dominatrix, Donald Trump.

After leveraging his rancid social media platform to help elect the executive-order-giddy 47th president of the United States, Musk couldn’t resist upstaging him on Inauguration Day – much, I reckon, to Trump’s chagrin.

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After doing an odd jig at a rally celebrating Trump’s return to the White House, Musk congratulated the crowing MAGA rank and file with a heartfelt gesture that reminded several prominent historians of a fascist salute first made popular by Benito Mussolini’s black shirts and later adopted by the homicidal psychopath Adolf Hitler and his legion of brown shirts.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and fascism at New York University, took to X to say that the gesture was a “Nazi salute – and a very belligerent one too”.

The usually apoplectic Anti-Defamation League (ADL) – which considers anyone dining on Palestinian-made hummus while wearing a keffiyeh on a US college campus a rampaging anti-Semite – was a lot more forgiving.

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In an uncharacteristic plea for “grace” and “healing”, the ADL defended Musk, insisting that “it seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.”

For his predictable part, Musk rejected the Nazi-salute accusations as a “dirty trick” unworthy of his time or attention.

“The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired,” Musk wrote.

The brouhaha over Musk’s “awkward” or incriminating act – take your instant pick – will pass as all brouhahas inevitably do.

Still, I think that the charged reaction to Musk’s provocative gesture is a symptom of a deeper and decidedly more unsettling phenomenon that cannot be dismissed as a “tired” canard since the world’s richest man and other preening Trump surrogates have contributed to it – knowingly or unknowingly.

The disturbing corollary to Trump’s resurgence and embrace of fascism is the renewed attempt by repellent figures and forces in the US, Europe and beyond to minimise and sanitise the horrors of Nazism.

The happy, bordering on orgasmic reaction among white supremacists and avowed fascists throughout Europe and the US to Musk’s salute is evidence of how emboldened they have become.

Exhibit A: In early January, Musk had a convivial, 70-minute chat – livestreamed on X – with Alice Weidel, the head of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Weidel has tried to recast the AfD as a conservative, libertarian alternative to Germany’s coalition government, led by the Social Democrats, despite the disconcerting fact that Germany’s domestic intelligence service has reportedly placed “a radical faction” of the party under surveillance for constituting a threat to democracy.

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AfD elders have sought to relativise Germany’s noxious, not-so-distant past by suggesting that “Hitler and the Nazis are just bird s*** in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”

A regional party leader also complained that a Holocaust memorial in the capital, Berlin, was a “monument of shame” that required a reversal of Germany’s remembrance culture, given that “the big problem is that [it] presents Hitler as absolutely evil.”

In this appalling vein, Weidel has often trotted out the discredited trope that Hitler was a “communist” and how the misunderstood National Socialist fuhrer was only tarred as “right wing” to smear modern “conservatives”.

Remember, Musk not only provided an unfettered platform to this obscenity but has also thrown his considerable influence and support behind the surging AfD on the eve of Germany’s federal elections slated for late February.

Exhibit B: Not to be outdone on the I’m-just-enjoying-a-pleasant-chat-with-a-whackadoo-historical-revisionist score, fired Fox News host and titular head of the Trump fan boy club Tucker Carlson invited “amateur historian” Darryl Cooper on his podcast late last year to drone on for two hours.

Ever the puerile provocateur, Carlson described Cooper as the “best and most honest popular historian in the United States”.

Look, I’m not a gooey admirer of Winston Churchill, but Cooper’s labelling of the cigar-chomping leader of Britain’s resistance in the face of blitzkrieging fascists as World War II’s “chief villain” is so absurd that the calumny amounts to an assault on history.

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Yet, as I alluded to earlier, it is consistent with the overt and determined schemes to refashion Nazism’s sickening record to make the grotesque ideology and its marquee personality, Hitler, more palatable.

On reliable cue, Cooper argued that the Holocaust was an unanticipated byproduct of the Nazis’ early and swift military success, not a deliberate design hatched by Hitler and his murderous henchmen to erase a race from Europe.

“They [the Nazis] launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth that they were going to have to handle,” Cooper told a captivated Carlson. “They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there.”

Most of those “people” were Jewish children, women and men. The Nazis “handled” their “unexpected” problem by exterminating the “prisoners” in gas chambers or burning them in ovens.

Musk was so impressed that he shared a post by Carlson including the interview with his 213 million-plus followers on X, writing that the wretched tete-a-tete was: “Very interesting. Worth watching.”

Later, the strutting “free-speech” warrior deleted the post after a deluge of criticism for promoting a Nazi apologist and his agreeable host.

Trump’s vice presidential pick, JD Vance, remained by Carlson’s sullied side, issuing a statement at the time lamenting the “guilt-by-association cancel culture”.

Vance’s reluctance to criticise Carlson’s “conversation” with his egregious guest is a reflection, I suspect, of his likely familiarity with the Republican Party’s long, ingrained attraction to and sympathy for America First populist nationalism and the genuine expressions of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial that go along with it.

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As I have written, the roots of this odious and at times overt strain within the GOP date back to the late 1930s and the first iteration of the America First movement, led by that famed aviator and enduring cultural icon Charles Lindbergh.

Lindbergh had a large and enthusiastic following for his isolationist and pro-fascist rhetoric.

He wasn’t alone.

As writer and editor Jacob Heilbrunn has noted: “Politicians such as Herbert Hoover, who addressed the 1940 Republican convention, lauded Hitler as a force for stability in Central Europe. They claimed that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, not the Third Reich, was the actual totalitarian threat to America.”

That distorted thinking has continued to infect the GOP in the many decades since and was given renewed life with the ascendancy of Trump who, according to his former chief of staff John Kelly, praised Hitler for having done “some good things” and, as commander-in-chief, pined for generals like the Nazis.

More recently, the Nazis-weren’t-so-bad crowd have taken to repeating the old, exculpatory saw that the Allies’ bombing of civilians in Dresden was a crime against humanity on par with the Holocaust to absolve Hitler’s willing and complicit executioners of guilt.

The upshot of this blatant revisionism is to convince the gullible to set the disastrous legacies of fascist charlatans in this or the last century conveniently aside.

The other aim, of course, is to convince the gullible that the “populist” strongman or woman – in Italy, Argentina or the US – can prescribe easy answers to stubborn, complex problems at home and abroad.

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This troubled world ought to heed the ancient warning: Caveat emptor.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.