Aspie white nationalist marcher discusses his radicalization

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The road to Charlottesville, 540 miles away from his home in Paoli, Ind., began decades ago for Matthew Parrott, who at 35 calls himself “the first alt-righter,” referring to a small and decentralized movement of extreme conservatives, many of whom profess white-supremacist and anti-Semitic beliefs and seek a whites-only ethno state.

Parrott was socially awkward and had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at 15. So his family pooled their money and got him a computer with access to the Internet — a rarity in his neighborhood of mobile homes — which he came to see as his “secret portal in my bedroom.” In chat rooms, he developed a taste for intellectual combat, always taking the contrarian side, obsessing over how to dismantle progressive arguments until, as he puts it, he “ended up self-radicalizing.”

That radicalization was rooted, he said, in his own feelings of alienation, which intensified when he went to Indiana University and confronted an elite he soon came to disdain. “They made fun of my accent and overbite and they called me white trash and hillbilly,” Parrott said. “I was never able to identify with a single person.”

He dropped out after his first semester, and his disillusionment festered until, at age 23, he went to the national conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white-nationalist organization based in St. Louis. He considers this moment when comparing what white nationalism once was and what it has become. “I was the youngest one in the room,” he said. Old men, “asked me, ‘Whose grandson are you?’ They were baffled. . . . And now those guys are too frail to understand what’s going on.”

I read that NAZI/Storm Front crowd are very DNA-focused, so they reject "mentally ill" people.

I guess the Nationalists are little more accepting.

So this guy was so pissed off at his fellow college students that he figured he show them by becoming a racist? And Aspies are supposed to be rational!

The guy talked about feeling accepted and part of a group. Autistics have had it drummed into us our whole lives that we are flawed people or not fully human for not having "normal" relationships and friends. Just look at the name of this website. After being told they are inferior and beaten up for their "inferiority" some overcorrect by identifying with a group they feel are superior. Some become Aspie supremacists/separatists, this guy became a white supremacist.

The guy talked about feeling accepted and part of a group. Autistics have had it drummed into us our whole lives that we are flawed people or not fully human for not having "normal" relationships and friends. Just look at the name of this website. After being told they are inferior and beaten up for their "inferiority" some overcorrect by identifying with a group they feel are superior. Some become Aspie supremacists/separatists, this guy became a white supremacist.

So this guy was so pissed off at his fellow college students that he figured he show them by becoming a racist? And Aspies are supposed to be rational!

Human beings - autistic or not - don't behave rationally when they are going through emotional agony.

Becoming a white supremacist because you as an Aspie are rejected by your peers is senseless. If anything, being treated like that in my lifetime has made me much more empathetic for the underdog. That, and while I concede when I was younger and much less secure, I had yearned for social acceptance, I have since come to appreciate how I am a weirdo and thus wonderfully unique.

That is too true. But as believers in eugenics, would these white nationalists be so open to him that they would let him go unsterilized, let alone find a mate?

Becoming a white supremacist because you as an Aspie are rejected by your peers is senseless. If anything, being treated like that in my lifetime has made me much more empathetic for the underdog. That, and while I concede when I was younger and much less secure, I had yearned for social acceptance, I have since come to appreciate how I am a weirdo and thus wonderfully unique.

I am taking a guess at explaining his behavior not excusing it. Fooling yourself that you are part of a superior group as a coping mechanism against being part of a disadvantaged minority will help your self-confidence for a time but it does not change the fact you are Autistic and a member of a very disadvantaged and discriminated against group. It is not going to help your social skills. Being a Nazi is going to hurt your chances of getting laid not help it.

I am taking a guess at explaining his behavior not excusing it. Fooling yourself that you are part of a superior group as a coping mechanism against being part of a disadvantaged minority will help your self-confidence for a time but it does not change the fact you are Autistic and a member of a very disadvantaged and discriminated against group. It is not going to help your social skills. Being a Nazi is going to hurt your chances of getting laid not help it.