The Ret@rd
On Elon Musk, The "Bad" Autistic, and The "Good" Nazi
“My heart goes out to you! It is thanks to you that the future of civilisation is assured. Thanks to you. We’re gonna have safe cities, finally safe cities. Secure border, sensible spending. Basic stuff. And we’re going to take ‘Doge’ to Mars.” — Elon Musk, in between Sieg Heils, Jan 20 2025
“I’m not a nerd, Bart! Nerd’s are smart.”— Millhouse Van Houten, S13E18, 2002
I am autistic. That may or may not surprise you, depending if I’ve ever cornered you at a party to rant at you about Kurosawa’s filmography, Evel Knievel’s stunt jumps, or the design history of first gen Pokemon. Or maybe you’ve bumped into me at a supermarket, where I look like a WW1 soldier trying to suppress memories off the Somme while attempting to find my preferred ‘flavour’ of Vita-Weats. Heck, maybe you were sat across from me at some dinner party, where I failed to make eye-contact with you once while rocking back and forth in my chair and spewing rapid-fire jokes that run from goofy to rude to cruel in under a minute.
That’s me, I guess. I’m kinda autistic, I’m kinda a prick, the line blurs, as lines do.
I am not, however, a Nazi, despite them being one of my earliest “special interests” (when I was 11 I got hung-up on how Auschwitz and Kermit the Frog can exist in the same timeline, idk man, it started a whole thing). Aspergers himself was a Nazi, of course, and, until very recently, a lot of the conversation around autism — its form and function, if you will — sat on a bedrock laid by a man who quite literally helped select some of the first victims of the Holocaust. The innate otherness inherent to autism, as it was originally studied, and dare I say, “encouraged,” in the pre-Nazi years of the Medical University of Vienna, made it a clear and obvious target, a threat of sorts, to Nazism as both philosophy and project, Nazism being fuelled by a refutation of facts, logic, and imagination, charged versions of which form the cornerstones of most autist’s ways of being.
What it means to be “autistic” in 2025 — the idpol commodification of the term, its rapid generalisation, its tedious role as both brand and marketing tool (which I’ve cynically exploited when necessary [see: a career in the arts]) — has generally seen me drift away from a conversation I once found kinda, sorta, interesting. “Everyone’s a little autistic,” the dipshits like to say, being, as they are, dipshits, and so self-diagnosis is both de rigueur and delicious. We’ve certainly reached a point of mass-psychosis where you may as well staple the DSM to your forehead, just so people know why you cross the street the way you do, or why you’re rude on ZOOM calls, or why you can’t get a Hinge match etc, it’s all content baby, get on board or get cancelled, you ableist dog.
The sad truth is, we’re not allowed to call ourselves “stupid” anymore, despite the fact the majority of us clearly are, and are made to be while existing in what is arguably the “stupidest” (don’t) moment in history.
So it goes that I circle these conversations like an old stray dog eyeing a dead pigeon that’s being run over again and again in traffic. Why risk the nibble, even if your gut insists you’re starving? Better to lay down and die at this rate, perhaps besides the pigeon, for all your gore and splatter is worth.
And yet…one individual keeps pulling me back into that turgid swamp we call “discourse.” A man so venal, dull, perverted, and cringe, that I cannot look away from his Daffy Duck style splutterings without feeling like Elmer Fudd (in want of a HUGE gun.)
That man is Elon Musk — a Nazi, a nonce, and a nincompoop — a “bad” autistic — a ret@rd — who I hope [REDACTED], violently, soon.
The Bad Autist
What is a “bad” autistic? Me and a fellow spectrum-traveller were texting about this a while back, as part of an ongoing conversation we’ve been having off and on for a few years re: autistic personalities in fact and fiction. We have a jokey list of “good” autists: David Byrne, David Lynch, Gregg Turkington, Helen DeWitt, Agnes Varda, Bob Dylan, Dale Cooper, Hank Hill, Paulie Walnuts etc etc etc absolutely silly guff, just two freaks riffing, no harm no foul.
But when I suggested a list of “bad” autists, things got dicey. Musk, being the epitome of this ‘phenomena,’ was at the top of the list, having inspired the conversation with his paunch-jiggling star-jumps. Who else? Trump, I suggested, his love of trucks and solipsism and gentle swaying being sure-signs. Tony Abbott (“you’re not saying anything, Tony!”). The Minecraft guy. Gina Rinehart (wealth breeds its own strain of autism, it’s hard to tell an intellectual disability from inherited fortunes, tbf). Mel Gibson (I mean, have you seen Apocalypto?) etc etc etc more dumb interrogations of things we kinda half-care about, tongues firmly in cheeks, just too spectrum surfers being scamps etc.
But I couldn’t stop pondering the “bad” autist/autistic, what it means, who they are, and whether I’m amongst them. Musk remained my focalpouint, him being the apotheosis of the “bad” autistic as most “high-functioning” autists have come to “define” it. That is, an embarrassment. A freak.
There’s jokes, memes usually, you see in autistic circles (my algorithm?) that revolve around introducing autistics to one another always being dicey, as they mate instinctually loathe each other for seemingly imperceptible reasons, at least as far the “normies” are concerned. In the memes etc, the joke is usually that the two autistics are so similar that one’s mirroring of the other both horrifies and repulses them, or, more commonly, one is slightly “less” functioning, or “bad,” and the comparison/contrast between them and the “higher” functioning, or “good,” autistic is, naturally, a source of frustration and, yeah, embarrassment.
I have never read Diary of a Wimpy Kid (I am 34) but it seems to form the backbone of a lot of these memes, with the character ‘Rowley’ being slightly too autistic for his ‘friend’ (?) Wimpy Kid, aka Greg, who, by association, is embarrassed by, and thus kinda loathes, Rowley. Then there is their mutual friend Fregley, who I gather is on a whole other level, re: autistic vibes.
For simplicity's sake, and for fear of infuriating the Wimpy fandom, I’m going to stick to Rowley as my rhetorical device going forward (with apologies to Fregley).
Fact is, I have been both Wimpy Kid and Rowley on many occasions. There’s nothing like the cool kids seeing you with the kid a degree weirder than you are, who maybe knows you from some specialised class or, worse, hobby, and having those cool kids naturally pair you together, because of “how you are.”
Rowley is The Bad Autist, and The Good Autist wants to keep their distance, at least in front of the cool kids, or, as the lame kids say, “normies.”
So what is The Bad Autist, as defined by The Good Autist’s gaze? Well, the Bad Autist is cringe. The Bad Autist is loud. The Bad Autist is clumsy. The Bad Autist is dorky. The Bad Autist is a nerd. The Bad Autist smells a bit. The Bad Autist doesn’t get it. The Bad Autist can’t hang. The Bad Autist is rude. The Bad Autist is mean. The Bad Autist is a goddamned Nazi.
As with all things in this arena, it's a slippery spectrum, running purely on invisible, greasy, ever-shifting vibes.
Going off these vibes, however, we can see Musk as a Bad Autist.
Most “GOOD” autists instinctually recognise Musk for what he is: The “BAD” Autist to the nth degree — a Super-Saiayn autist, mega-evolved, the Crazy Hand to Master Hand, a cringeocalypse of infinite, unspooling, ungodly embarrassments — someone you pray doesn’t approach you with a “hey man” in the lunchline.
For a non-American, SNL plays out like an experimental form of torture the CIA (1st evil) would weaponise at some black-site prison — that is to say, it’s bad enough without someone like Musk front and centre. That performance, those images, that diabolically unfunny black-market, black-acid, black-souled hyper-cringe, was akin to seeing the other weird kid take his willy out at assembly and go wild in front of the whole school. It was a level of bad and unfunny that made me feel physically sick, and, if things were fair in this deeply unfair world, Lorne Michaels would stand trial at The Hague for crimes against comedy, television, and the soul.
Since then, having turned twitter into a Boer racebait forum, and having gone mask-off white-supremacist crypto-currency crypto-fascist, we’ve had to see a lot more of Elon Musk. His performances on the campaign trail last year were a study in anti-charisma — a blackhole of charm and likability, blithering and bloviating like the ketamine and speed that keep him going were running a train on his already fragile frontal lobe — a gelatinous prolapse of chinless grotesquery, detonating dumbfuckery as his cars detonate their passengers, a balls-to-the-wall nimrod of the first order, whose impossible wealth and incestuous mothering has left him slack-jawed, malformed, and rotten, like a Hapsburg princeling raised on Stormfront, web rips of fatal industrial accidents, “barely legal” totally illegal pornography, Adderall, CoD, and, worst yet, Afrikaans.
He is a repugnance ripped straight from a Troma movie, a gormless Cenobite, who makes the jump-scare ghoulies of the late David Lynch’s filmography look downright huggable.
He is, in short, a capital “R” Ret@rd.
Now hold-up, we can’t say that, can we folks? That slur, hateful as it is, has had a major comeback in just about all circles these past few years. Our collective irony poisoning, and too many coke-fuelled-Bushwick-based serial-masturbator podcasters, have brought the old war horse back with a vengeance, there’s no denying. Being born in 1990, I went through the first 20+ish years of my life with this word totally normalised within my immediate circumstances and the culture at large, bandied about casually by yours truly, my peers, my teachers, everyone but my saint of a mother (who taught the severely disabled for nearly thirty years), as if it meant next to nothing, like its then contemporaries and compatriots “gay,” “f@ggot”, “homo,” “poofter” and co.
It returned to my vocabulary, post-post-post-ironically (???), around the time I began engaging with my autistic “identity” more, and yucking it up in deep and personals with fellow autists. We’d all been called ret@rded to varying degrees of sincerity and accuracy our entire lives, so why not reclaim it? Was this our N-word? Our f@ggot? I remember my black, gay, autistic friend Simon (not his real name, you can’t cancel him) partaking in this particular riff like he held a Royal Flush — and why not? As he said, he’d earned it.
It crept back in for two other reasons, also: I had a cool leftist girlfriend, and I started work as a disability support worker.
Like my pals in my short-lived autist group chat (we got bored), my clients, whose disabilities ranged from barely noticeable to screamingly obvious, used this word with abandon, often in reference to themselves, but more interestingly, in reference to the other disabled people in their circles, who they often saw themselves as unjustly lumped together with (Rowlands everywhere, for those with eyes to see!). One in particular, a 19 year old metalhead, used it willy-nilly, but especially in relation to his White Lodge/Black Lodge like obsession with internet personalities called “lolcows,” who, as I learned through him, were generally deeply troubled, semi-homeless, sex criminals, with clear intellectual disabilities, often not unlike his own (grim grim GRIM stuff!).
A favourite client of mine, a middle-aged bloke with a head injury from when he was hit by a truck at 18, a very charming-if-loud but unquenchably and uncomfortably vocally horny chap, weaponised the word as a sorta shield. One day, during one of our many rounds of mini-golf, I asked him how he’d react if one of the women he constantly shout-whispered cartoon-wolf level horndog catcalls at turned around and told him off for being such a sleazebag. He just laughed, shrugged, and said, “oh, I’d just do this!” then scrunched up his face, curled his arms into wings and hands into claws, then began banging his head, aping exaggerated version of his already unique drawl, and shouting: “duhhhhh…buhhhhh…I’m ret@rded…buhhh…I’m ret@rded!!!” before laughing at my stunned expression and putting a hole-in-two.
This is all to say that this undeniably evil word is simply everywhere again, and I’m not the one to hop on a high horse and pontificate the rights and wrongs of it. All I know is this: it reigned at the peak of the Bush years — an epoch so dumb and ridiculous that we’ve been made to collectively forget how dire it was, or else — and has returned for the Trump/Biden years, years named for, and ruled over, by two mean who definitely, for lack of a better way of putting it, fit the bill re: that word’s (im)proper usage.
Yet we can not, we must not, use it. It’s evil, and that’s that. And yet…and yet…Elon Musk…ELON “Lolita Express” MUSK…that jumping-jack, jack-booted, jack-off…forcefully coaxes it out of you. For what else is a “Bad Autist” but a “Ret@rd”, really, at the end of all things? You see Musk up there, sieg heiling like a chorus girl in The Producers, and you just want to shout: YOU STUPID FUCKING RET@RD, DIE ALREADY, YOU DUMB FUCK! FUCKKKKK!!!
But you can’t. You musn’t! That would be bad.
The Ultra-Rowley
This week is truly putting Good Autists to the test, however. In all the tumbling dipshittery that has been the response to this Nazi-Nonce sieg-heiling to an auditorium of Nazi-Nonce supporters, we’ve had to endure a solemn round of “it’s because he’s autistic, not because he’s a Nazi” quote unquote conversation from our lickspittle/lackwit commentariat.
The truth is, we will never know if Musk truly is autistic. This, the Good Autist suspects, is the trait at the molten-Molochian-core of the Bad Autist, a suspicion held furiously and ashamedly: that the Bad Autist is not autistic at all, they simply fucking suck.
This suspicion can lead the Good Autist to a revelation. This comes painfully, usually, after you reckon with the fact you are someone else’s Bad Autist, that you are, as I am, a little cringe, a little stupid, a little embarrassing, a bit of a ret@rd, perhaps a lot of one, from where they stand, anyway. It’s only in realising this domino-chain of accusatory and recriminatory self-flaggellating freakdom that you come to accept something very basic in its straightforwardness, but very true nonetheless: there are no good autistics, there are no bad autistics, there’s just good and bad people, and that’s that.
We do know, with complete certainty, that Musk is a Nazi (and a nonce), who publicly quotes, retweets, and platforms fellow white-nationalists on the daily, who espouses Nazi philosophy, ethos, and aesthetics, and who, like the Nazis, moronically believes in both his invincibility and inevitability. Like Hitler, amphetamine abuse had blinded Musk to the fact he’s just another evil dead-end goon who’ll die hated and whimpering, probably at his own hand, fated to be remembered fondly only by the stupid, the crap, the cruel, and the cringe, who we, out of fear of being at all like Musk, should never label, no matter how tempting or accurate said label seems.
He is the Ultra-Rowley, at the end of the day, and one must take comfort in the fact his very existence is nothing but embarrassment and (again, haven’t read the books, 34 etc) agony, and that we’re one laced ket bump away from being free of his [REDACTED], rancid, energy, forever.
Thank you, Patrick. Welcome back.