You are Gifted, not Autistic

Conservatives need to stop placing themselves as on the spectrum. Being skilled and knowledgeable does not make you weird.

Conservatives often like to poke fun at leftists, particularly the gender-bending Tumblr ones, for being too liberal in their self-diagnosis of mental illness. They (as well as their therapists) label themselves as having ADHD, anxiety, depression, and all sorts of supposedly disordered ailments, when frankly, the vast majority of these cases are either natural quirks of the human condition or natural reactions to sin. In most cases, they are natural.

However, conservatives have become accustomed to doing the exact thing they so often accuse liberals of doing. We often do it ironically, but (to borrow some wisdom imparted by the great Michael Knowles) if you do something ironically long enough, you begin to do it sincerely. Conservatives tend to diagnose themselves with one illness in particular: autism.

Do you know a thing or two about Ancient Roman weaponry? You might be on the spectrum. Did you post a long Twitter thread about Church history in the middle ages? Looks like you did a sperg. When 4Chan bands together, analyzing contrails and uses their knowledge of mathematics and astronomy to track down Shia LaBeouf’s left wing flag — that is called weaponized autism.

The mistake that conservatives make in labeling such activities as being the result of autism is that they conflate “having autism” with “being gifted about a specific subject.” Of course, the latter tends to manifest itself as a quality of the former.

However, actual autism necessarily includes some sort of social deficiency to match. Going on an unwelcome, one-sided-conversation about Age of Empires at a party would be a prime example. But even if you are like this, it is truly no big deal. However, to confuse this tendency with that of socially-appropriate knowledgeable may be funny, but it is a mistake.

I previously talked about this unfortunate correlation of intelligence with awkwardness in a past AdamoZone piece entitled The Nerd-Geek Distinction: People tend to correlate “gifted” with “weird” and “socially unacceptable.”

This mistake is made because it is fashionable: most people do not have, nor do they hang out with, people who are gifted and skilled at impressive things. Then they, out of pride and a desire to fit in with their fellow average-joes, use genuinely geeky and socially inept people as scapegoats to deride the gifted as being odd by nature.

This desire to fit in is also what drives the gifted to ironically bash their own gifts as being silly, or the result of a deficiency in their character. To use a new term that has popped up, the gifted, out of a desire to jive with the “normal,” call themselves “freaks,” laughing along with the crowd at themselves.

In so doing, conservatives turn one of their greatest strengths relative to liberals — actually being wise and knowledgeable about important things — into a perceived weakness, an insecurity. Even if they do it ironically, it still signals to everybody else that being talented is a shameful thing.

Why would you be ashamed of something that is good? Liberals, whose sins and perversions have given them brainworms, cannot handle having cool interests for their own sake. Why do you treat your love of NASCAR trivia, weightlifting, or poetry memorization like they are odd and lame? Who cares if most people do not share your niche interests? Your giftedness is great! It is part of what make you, and the rest of the conservative movement, special and worth fighting to save. Do not let them take it away from you!

The AdamoZone is a column by Luca Adamo, Vice President of Marketing and columnist at The American Postliberal. Published every Friday at 5:00pm EST.

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