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ASPartOfMe
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26 May 2023, 6:47 pm

Steve Bannon Says DeSantis Is 'a Little on the Spectrum

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Former White House adviser Steve Bannon described Ron DeSantis as "a little on the spectrum," as the Florida governor entered the 2024 presidential race.

Bannon, who worked for Donald Trump when he was president, made the remarks ahead of DeSantis' formal announcement during a conversation on Twitter with the social media company's owner, billionaire Elon Musk.

After noting that the Twitter Spaces event would only be audio, Bannon said: "I know Elon's on the spectrum. And Ron's a little on the spectrum but it's quite a bizarre launch."

There is no evidence to support speculation that DeSantis has ASD, but some conservative figures on Twitter joined Bannon in suggesting the governor is "on the spectrum."

"Ron DeSantis is 100% on the Spectrum," far-right activist Laura Loomer tweeted on Wednesday. "Can we finally talk about this?"

Grace Chong, CFO/COO of War Room, tweeted on Wednesday: "Trump does it BIGGER, BETTER, and with HEART. Unlike that guy on the spectrum. Trump is so right on this. DeSantis is doing some bizarre things lately and I think we all truly see a loser in him. Trump 2024."

"Elon is quite open about the fact that he is on the spectrum," Brendan Dilley, host of The Dilley Show and a Trump supporter, wrote in a tweet on Tuesday. "We have sound reason to believe that DeSantis is on the spectrum. What could go wrong during their interview?"

With all the reporting about DeSantis's coldness and lack of social skills I am surprised it took that long for the topic to come up including here. This is the inevitable result of how Autism has been portrayed in the media. 35 years after Rain Man that character is still too often the model for how autism is portrayed.


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cyberdad
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26 May 2023, 7:28 pm

Says more about republican's attitudes toward autism



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26 May 2023, 8:08 pm

Heaven help us if we get thrown in with DeSantis.


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colliegrace
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26 May 2023, 8:10 pm

Ugh.


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naturalplastic
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27 May 2023, 6:10 am

As an autism spectrum person who is a Democrat...hearing this epithet being hurled at De Santis by his fellow GOPers is...like watching car jackers drive your new car off of a cliff (you're sad to lose your car but happy to see the guys who stole it die). Mixed feelings.

you're glad that they are abandoning support for him, but you're insulted that they disparage him by saying that he is like YOU (an autistic).

But even more importantly what they are saying is in essence that De Santis "sucks at being a manipulating rabble rouser like Trump" which is something that no one should be praised for being good at. So I for one...have all kinds of mixed feelings about it. Lol!



ASPartOfMe
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27 May 2023, 6:55 am

naturalplastic wrote:
As an autism spectrum person who is a Democrat...hearing this epithet being hurled at De Santis by his fellow GOPers is...like watching car jackers drive your new car off of a cliff (you're sad to lose your car but happy to see the guys who stole it die). Mixed feelings.

you're glad that they are abandoning support for him, but you're insulted that they disparage him by saying that he is like YOU (an autistic).

But even more importantly what they are saying is in essence that De Santis "sucks at being a manipulating rabble rouser like Trump" which is something that no one should be praised for being good at. So I for one...have all kinds of mixed feelings about it. Lol!


My feelings are not mixed. For one thing, I am far from convinced that Trump or another MAGA won't be taking the oath of office on January 20, 2025. It is just a matter of time before Trump says a similar thing. Somehow Autism has managed to not be central to the "cold civil war". If Trump opens his trap that is all over.


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Sweetleaf
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29 May 2023, 1:52 am

Well if he is autistic, he is a sh*t autistic.


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IsabellaLinton
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29 May 2023, 2:52 am

Where are the media reports of Trump being a loser Neurotypical?



naturalplastic
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30 May 2023, 6:09 pm

IsabellaLinton wrote:
Where are the media reports of Trump being a loser Neurotypical?


Its not unheard of to see experts on TV describe Trump as a "narcissist" and or a "sociopath".

DeSantis TRIES to be a sociopath. But maybe he really is too autistic to be the sociopath that his role model Trump is.



ASPartOfMe
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02 Jun 2023, 9:36 am

Autism Advocates Are Dreading a Campaign Season of Insinuations About Ron DeSantis - Politico

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Jessica Benham is a state legislator in Pennsylvania, representing a district that includes parts of Pittsburgh and its environs. A cofounder of the Pittsburgh Center for Autistic Advocacy, she’s one of the only openly autistic state legislators anywhere in the United States.

As a Democrat and the first out LGBTQ woman in the state house, Benham’s politics aren’t exactly those of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Republican who signed the sunshine state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.

But she recently found herself in the somewhat surprising position of pushing back against an emerging line of attack against DeSantis, something that’s been trotted out by supporters of Donald Trump: The attempt to draw attention to DeSantis’ awkward public presence by claiming that the GOP presidential hopeful is “a little bit on the spectrum,” as Trump hatchet man Steve Bannon first put it last week.

It’s not that Benham thinks such a diagnosis would be disqualifying. Rather, she’s troubled by the act of armchair diagnosis as a way of knocking someone. The implication is that the status of being on the spectrum is problematic or shameful or bad — and, at any rate, something intentionally kept secret.

“It’s frankly none of our business until he tells us one way or the other,” she tells me. “But if you want to delegitimize someone as a politician, certainly leaning into those stereotypes that people have about autistic folks is one way to do it. And that’s what’s happening here.”

Within the community of autistic advocates and people who study autism, the development has led to a sort of dread about what lies ahead, particularly as Trump versus DeSantis becomes the major story in primary politics. Though it thus far only involves fringe characters — and, in fact, generated a certain amount of negative feedback even from those characters’ Trump-friendly followers — history suggests this kind of assertion tends to move from the margins to the mainstream.

“My reaction is that, oh, here we go again, perpetuating false myths and negativity about the concept of autism and being on the spectrum,” says Barry Prizant, a University of Rhode Island professor and author of Uniquely Human, a bestselling book about autism. “It’s obviously trying to adhere a black mark to DeSantis. … I think there has to be major pushback against that, because it’s perpetuating the stigma.”

“God give me strength,” says Eric Garcia, Washington correspondent for the Independent and author of the 2021 book We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation. “It’s really f*****g disgusting what Steve Bannon is doing.” Garcia says his group chat with fellow autistic writers lit up on the Bannon news. The refrain: “Are we really going to have to spend 18 months on this?”

In a different context — such as if a political figure were to disclose an autism diagnosis — an open discussion of what we now know to be a very common neurological difference could provide a teaching moment for society, one that could highlight the challenges faced by many people on the spectrum as well as some of the workplace strengths many in that community feel they can bring, including deep focus and an ability to avoid groupthink.

It could also, in theory, be a moment when raw numbers demonstrate that it’s a bad idea to make fun of autistic people: The latest CDC estimate is that one in 36 American children is on the spectrum, a vast population of folks with families and friends and loved ones, and one that’s geographically spread throughout the country, not just in blue states or red.

But that’s not what’s happening here.

“The speculation so far is being done completely in bad faith,” says Devon Price, an autism-focused social psychologist and author of Unmasking Autism his own well-received book on “the power of embracing our hidden neurodiversity.” In the face of that sort of allegation, something like a categorical denial from the targeted candidate would come off as a further statement that a spectrum diagnosis is something bad (even if the denial happens to be entirely true).

Also concerning to advocates: The GOP in the Trump era has rewarded pols who shake off other social taboos against making fun of disabled people. Trump supporters are excited by the “idea that, like, The Man doesn’t want you to make fun of disabled people and so therefore you should,” says Zoe Gross of the Autism Self Advocacy Network. “To just have a disability [is to be] the butt of a joke or the target of insults. We need to be moving away from that, not towards that.”

Still, if ableism is eternal, the specifics of tossing around autism-spectrum diagnoses says something about our moment. Time was when the number of people who might witness, say, an uncomfortable candidate foray into a New Hampshire diner would be limited to the diner’s patrons and the few hangers-on in the press pool. Folks at home would maybe see the 10-second clip spliced into an evening news story. Nowadays, we can stream the whole thing in real-time. After a while it creates a kind of intimacy, allowing all sorts of folks watching from their laptops to venture forth with diagnoses for conditions ranging from the dermatological to the gerontological to the neurological — and then share them with the world.

Trump’s presidency famously saw an explosion of such distant diagnoses as detractors labeled the 45th president a sociopath or as suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder, to the displeasure of psychiatric professional associations. The difference, though, is that most people would agree those labels are bad and even disqualifying. There is no organized demographic of sociopaths or narcissists trying to push back against discrimination and stereotypes the way there now is in the autism community.

“I don’t think there’s anything about being autistic that means that you can’t represent well a constituency, understand a logical argument or advance a political cause,” says Gross, who was a Hill staffer before joining the autistic-led Washington advocacy group. “This feels obvious to say, but to call someone autistic as an insult is insulting, mostly not to that person you’re trying to insult but to autistic people in general.”

Yes, it’s easy to condemn a podcast provocateur for throwing around a diagnostic term inappropriately. But in Washington smart-set media-and-politics circles, making fun of DeSantis’ social awkwardness is a widely shared pastime, with people gleefully circulating videos of the candidate robotically working a room or laughing in strange ways. As with published quotes likening him to a “computer” and recounting baffling emotional miscues, the underlying insinuation — this guy can’t quite relate — lines up with stereotypes about people on the spectrum.

So what’s the line between perpetuating stereotypes on the one hand and, on the other, merely goofing on the foibles of a clearly smart and successful politician who, like Mitt Romney or Al Gore before him, happens not to have the schmoozing skills of a Bill Clinton (or possibly not even of the average local school board member)?

To most people in the autism advocacy world, the ethical difference lies in pathologizing — connecting the mocked behavior to a specific condition that may or may not apply. But maybe it’s also a moment to think about what we look for in elected officials. “There’s a way in which it would be better for all people if the barrier to entry was a little less high in terms of how socially normative you have to be,” Gross tells me. “Or if we focused more on substantive issues, and less on how socially normative a politician is. But I also don’t think that it’s disability-related every time people are saying, ‘Oh, that politician acts weird.’”

It turns out that pressing the flesh in a diner is also not much of an indicator of anything.

“I’m pretty good at working a room,” says Benham, the Pennsylvania legislator. “Because working a room follows a set of rules and social norms that you can learn. But there are plenty of my colleagues who are not good at that and who are not autistic. … Maybe they’re just introverted.“


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“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman


kitesandtrainsandcats
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02 Jun 2023, 10:31 am

Demographics - at this point on the calendar are there even enough Republican voters for any Republican Presidential candidate to win enough states to get elected if Democrats have high voting turnout?


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