You Need to Learn the Difference Between Autism and Nazis

Spoiler alert: they have nothing whatsoever in common

This post is about just what you think it’s about.

And it’s not breaking my promise not to write about the inauguration, because it isn’t about the inauguration. It’s about Elon Musk, whom nobody voted for for president.

Because there seems to be some controversy about this point, I’d like to remind my readers that it is not a symptom of autism to give a so-called “Roman Salute,” deliberately, two or three times, in front of an audience and on camera, while biting your lip in a determined way with a defiant expression on your face. Autism doesn’t make you do that.

I’m autistic. I am extremely awkward and strange. I do often make those eye-rolling faces that Elon was making at the inauguration speech. I will sometimes wave awkwardly at you and then realize you’re waving at the person behind me and turn it into a hair-smoothing gesture. I sometimes make the Sign of the Cross while entering a movie aisle because I’m used to doing it when I go into a church pew. Once in awhile I curtsey instead of shaking hands. I’ve been known to make the Vulcan live-long-and-prosper gesture or the hand-kissing gesture from The Hunger Games. There is a pretty gesture of greeting that Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan makes to a bartender exactly once in the entire four-year run of Farscape, and there’s a chance I’ll make that gesture at you because I’m obsessed with Farscape. But I have never once accidentally sieg heiled while meaning to throw my heart at the audience. That’s not a thing.

It’s actually very offensive when a performative fake ally who isn’t on the spectrum runs to the assistance of someone doing something horrible by chiding us, “How can you make fun of that poor man! That’s ableist! He’s not being awkward on purpose! He has Asperger’s Syndrome!” You might as well call us the R-word while you’re at it, because that is patronizing and gross. Autism doesn’t somehow take away our ability to know about Nazis.

When I was in the fourth grade, I wanted to know more about the situation the Johansen family faced in my favorite chapter book, Number the Stars. So I did a classic autistic hyperfocus deep dive on the Holocaust. I read a disturbing amount about it: all about the eugenics program and the ghettos and the concentration camps, the testimonies of survivors. I recited these facts at my friends and family and alarmed all of them. Autistic people know about Nazis.

Autistic people can sometimes make an evil moral choice to BE Nazis, because autistic people are people. A lot of us are very nice and some of us are wicked, not because of our autism but because we’re humans, and some humans are wicked. Some wicked humans become Nazis. But that’s not an autism thing.

And speaking of Nazis, you should stop saying “Asperger’s.” If an autistic person prefers the term “Asperger’s” to describe themself, you shouldn’t correct them, because that’s their business and none of yours. But most of us find the term “Asperger’s” to be offensive. You’re supposed to say “autism spectrum disorder,” or “autism,” or don’t call it anything but accept that sometimes people act strangely and that’s not a disease.

You see, Asperger himself was a Nazi. “Asperger’s” isn’t a very good clinical term. It’s an old fashioned designation between “good autism” that can be useful to others, and “bad autism” that makes us less useful. It’s not about us and how we experience the world. It’s about whether evil people want to exploit us for our ability to work, or euthanize us because we’re not of use to them. This seems awfully relevant when a man who may or may not be autistic made a Nazi salute on television.

Nobody is angry with Elon Musk because he’s autistic. I don’t know whether he’s autistic or not, but if he is, it would be the only pleasant thing about him. I don’t care whether or not he’s awkward. If he was jumping up and down in a black t-shirt with his belly sticking out at the food pantry while donating thousands of cans of soup and yelling “I AM DARK CANNED GOODS,” I would find him endearing. If he was addressing an audience after donating a billion dollars to re-forestation and helping subsistence farmers and made that silly heart gesture with his hands, I would say he was adorable. If he was obsessively putting his favorite “Doge” meme sticker on every nice warm sweater he was donating to homeless people, I would smile.

We’re angry with Elon Musk because he is a eugenicist, because he seeks to control the world like a dictator, because he’s bigoted against queer people, because he promotes far right ideologies, and because he chose of his own free will to make a stiff-arm salute at the audience last night.

There’s a name for someone like that, and it’s not “Asperger’s.”

The name for that, is “Nazi.”