Watch: Black Pro-Israel Priest Canceled by Own Church After Trolling Lefties with Elon Salute
Calvin Robinson, a clergyman in the Anglican Catholic Church, had his license in the denomination revoked after mimicking the viral salute made by Elon Musk.
At a post-inauguration rally last week, Musk gestured from his heart outward to the audience while saying “my heart goes out to you,” prompting several days of establishment media hyperventilation and wild claims that the multibillionaire Trump supporter secretly has an affinity for Nazism.
Robinson, who is British and has a long history as a cultural commentator in addition to his clerical work, warned at the very conclusion of a speech Saturday at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington that “every country in Europe” is embracing death and exhorted the audience to promote life in the U.S.
He ended the speech on a lighter note by mimicking the “my heart goes out to you” gesture.
“I hope that I can encourage you, and ‘my heart goes out to you.’ God bless,” he concluded.
The crowd immediately broke into laughter, recognizing the good-natured mockery of the leftist establishment, and Robinson himself chuckled as he left the stage to raucous applause.
My heart goes out to you.
Make America Pro-Life Again. 🇺🇸🫡 pic.twitter.com/5bG8Gyy5fH
— Calvin Robinson (@calvinrobinson) January 29, 2025
But the College of Bishops of the Anglican Catholic Church was not laughing.
The entity released a statement on Wednesday saying that Robinson “closed his comments with a gesture that many have interpreted as a pro-Nazi salute.”
“While we cannot say what was in Mr. Robinson’s heart when he did this, his action appears to have been an attempt to curry favor with certain elements of the American political right by provoking its opposition,” the statement admonished.
The bishops added that Robinson “had been warned that online trolling and other such actions (whether in service of the left or right) are incompatible with a priestly vocation and was told to desist.”
Because he did not, Robinson’s “license in this Church has been revoked” and “he is no longer serving as a priest in the ACC.”
The statement also commented that “we believe that those who mimic the Nazi salute, even as a joke or an attempt to troll their opponents, trivialize the horror of the Holocaust and diminish the sacrifice of those who fought against its perpetrators.”
But the entire point of Robinson’s act was that the gesture is definitively not a Nazi salute.
Robinson, an outspoken suporter of Israel, wrote as much in a post reacting to backlash over the stunt.
“The joke at the end was a mockery of the hysterical ‘liberals’ who called Elon Musk a Nazi for quite clearly showing the audience his heart was with them,” the clergyman wrote. “Context is key, but sometimes people ignore context to confirm their own prejudices. People see what they want to see.”
Robinson — who describes himself on his website as “Half English, half Afro-Caribbean, one hundred per cent British” — emphasized that his “attempt at dry wit, in that typical British way, was not a joke at the expense of WWII, nor an admission of my membership in the Nationalist Socialist Party.” He noted that anyone not setting out to interpret his move in bad faith already knows that.
For the record, in case it needs saying: I am not a Nazi.
I gave a talk at a pro-life event that seemed to go down well, I am pleased to have contributed to what I believe to be the most important of causes. The enemy hates that, of course, and the attacks have been plentiful.…
— Calvin Robinson (@calvinrobinson) January 30, 2025
“The people who understand, cheer – those who have eyes to see. The people who do not want to understand, reach for their pitchforks. They have found a new channel for their hated. They remain in my prayers; may the Lord soften their hearts.”
Above all else, he encouraged social media followers to “not let the liberals distract from the real issue, the matter at hand, that we are allowing and enabling infanticide, and it must stop.”
Robinson is exactly right. This entire incident reads like a cancel culture charade seeking to punish him over a specific joke made to an audience he knew would understand the context.
Anyone even beginning to claim that Robinson was trivializing the Holocaust or expressing a tacit sympathy with Nazis, including the Anglican Catholic Church bishops, is just as hysterical and uncharitable as the establishment media he originally set out to mock.
“You can consider my joke crass,” Robinson summarized. “But I ask you to consider if your responses have been proportionate?”
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