(November 15, 2024), Elon Musk showed up to the Madison Square Garden rally of former President Donald Trump in a curious hat. It was black and embroidered with “Make America Great Again,” rendered in blackletter, the jagged letterform style often found in the logos of heavy-metal bands.

“I’m dark gothic MAGA,” Musk told the crowd.

But people had other ideas for what he was trying to evoke with his look. In no time, the internet erupted with opinions about the hat and its lettering. Some on X argued that Musk’s hat displayed Fraktur, a gothic font once used by the Nazis in Germany.

But the reality is even more complicated that that. According to type and calligraphy experts, the blackletter on Musk’s hat wasn’t Fraktur, or any other Nazi-associated font—but it didn’t have to be to have the same effect.

What was that typeface?

Cheryl Jacobsen, an adjunct professor of lettering at the University of Iowa, explains that blackletter was established in Germany as a folk style tied to the Bible. Flavors of blackletter were used throughout medieval Europe and have been used ever since by many other cultures and in many other contexts.

Blackletter has a long history of use in Germany, though it was eventually replaced by Roman letterforms. During the rise of Adolf Hitler in pre-WW II Germany, the Nazi party re-embraced blackletter—specifically Fraktur and Textura letterforms—as a nod to its ardent nationalism. It showed up on propaganda, in newspapers, and on the cover of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

But “the relationship between Nazis and blackletter typefaces is complicated,” says Florian Hardwig, managing editor of Fonts In Use typography archive. “In January 1941, with the war in full swing, they did a 180-degree turn and banned all broken script—commonly known as blackletter—from official communications.” Hitler claimed blackletter was invented by a Jew, although the reality was that the letterforms were simply too hard to read for most people.

Still, blackletter has persisted as a visual marker of Nazi ideology thanks to film and TV, as well as its use by Neo-Nazi groups in Germany and elsewhere. Jacobsen cites the book Blackletter: Type and National Identity, which states: “Fraktur is now perceived worldwide as Nazi script, even after its interdiction by the Nazis themselves.”

Fully agree with Elon being scum and racist, but this hat is not Fraktur font. It’s just some Hot Topic goth font pic.twitter.com/24AY3GvsqT

— tuffy deposter (@LeonardTPants) October 28, 2024

Hardwig says the typeface on Musk’s hat was not Fraktur. “I would characterize the style used on Musk’s cap as a modernized Old English,” Hardwig says. “It is not in the style most commonly associated with Nazism.”

He adds that “members of the general public associate all sorts of blackletter with Nazi Germany, but strictly speaking, the font on the cap is not a Nazi font per se.”

Internet sleuths believe that the hat uses Anemouth, developed in 2021. “It’s such a weird bastardized version of [blackletter],” Jacobsen says.

Why did Musk wear the hat?

Of course, for the 99.9% of people on this planet who are not typeface experts, the differences in blackletter font families are impossible to distinguish. For most Johns, Joes, and Elons out there, the typefaces look so similar that, in our brains, they are interchangeable. Which is why Musk’s choice to wear one on his hat feels so rife with meaning.

Hardwig says that blackletter typefaces are often associated with toughness or even aggressiveness, regardless of their origins. “Choosing such a style for an application outside specific fields such as newspaper mastheads or beer logos is typically done for the sake of provocation,” he says.

Musk is a known provocateur—to put it kindly. For him to wear this hat at this rally, especially after wearing other, less semantically loaded MAGA hats during previous campaign trail appearances, is not exactly a coincidence.

Before the event, Trump’s increasingly vitriolic language led many media outlets to draw a parallel between the MSG rally and a rally held in the same location in 1939, where the pro-Hitler organization German American Bund preached its Nazi ideals camouflaged as pro-American rhetoric. Twenty thousand people attended that rally—with another 100,000 waiting outside—where people spoke against the backdrop of a colossal full-body portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas.

Could Musk have been oblivious to this connection? Perhaps. Was he aware and simply wearing the hat as a proverbial middle finger to his detractors? More likely. The truth is, it doesn’t really matter if the hat’s lettering is set in the official Nazi brand-book typeface or a variation of it. What matters is the message. Even if Musk was simply being daft and felt like dressing up as a MAGA goth on this particular day, he forgot a cardinal rule of design: Objects do not exist without context.