Neither Neurodivergence Nor Mental Illness Made Them Bigots—They're Just Awful People
It's hard to admit your heroes are jerks, but the mentally ill and neurodivergent shouldn't be collateral damage.
I've been autistic my entire life, but I wasn't diagnosed until I was 40. I've written before about how my autism manifests.
In retrospect, my autism spectrum disorder (ASD) seems obvious, but in the early days of ASD awareness, the disorder was largely considered exclusive to boys.
A girl in the 1970s would never be evaluated for autism spectrum disorder.
Prior to that, I was diagnosed with and treated for a variety of mental illnesses: obsessive-compulsive disorder, chronic acute depression, anxiety, and panic disorder.
There is a higher-than-normal level of neurodivergence in my paternal lineage. There's only one or two members of my Christnot family that aren't somewhere on the spectrum or don't have ADHD.
From a young age, I recognized I struggled with social interactions that other people—including my two Sisters—found easy to navigate. So I decided to force myself to become adept in two areas: public speaking and customer service.
I took every opportunity I could to do both. I became a lector in my Catholic parish, participated in theatre, and took jobs requiring professional interactions in person and on the phone.
I got extremely adept, but it wasn't easy.
There were a lot of meltdowns and panic attacks—which for me usually manifested as hysterical crying, heart palpitations, and catatonia.
Still, at one point in my early 30s, I volunteered to establish a customer service phone line and email process for the Department of Defense agency I worked for. It took a lot of pharmaceutical intervention—Ativan—and a great therapist to clear that hurdle.
Do you know one thing I never did to cope or in response to my autism?
Repeatedly fire off a Nazi Roman salute.
Sorry, folks. Autism doesn't make you a fascist.
Oh, and beginning around 1919, the “Roman salute”—copied from artwork depicting ancient Rome—was widely used in Italy by Benito Mussolini's Fascist Party. Their Roman salute was informally adopted in 1921—then formally in 1926—by the National Socialist Party and Adolf Hitler in Germany.
The Roman salute is the Nazi salute.
So any Elon apologists who use the “it was a Roman salute!” excuse…
Mental Illness Made Them…
Because my family won the genetic lottery, or maybe because we're Indigenous Americans, there's also a higher-than-average level of mental illness in both my paternal and maternal lines.
I've lost too many relatives to self-medicating with alcohol or drugs or to suicide.
My parents rarely drank and never to excess, but the generation before my Father's were almost all functioning alcoholics. There were several on my Mother's side as well.
My Father was a mostly harmless narcissist.
He was an intellectually gifted toddler his entire life, requiring a caretaker to keep him alive, but able to grasp complex science and engineering and spout endless facts about anything that interested him. Never diagnosed—he didn't believe in such things—there was some ADHD and maybe ASD there.
My Mother could be erratic and volatile.
When she reached menopause, my Mother became increasingly manic. She began getting into confrontations everywhere she went, spending excessive amounts of money—including buying several cars under my name—obsessing over my and my Sisters’ safety, and using profanity.
She would show up in my driveway at 1am and yell for me—she no longer had a key to my house after she decided to paint my living room one day while I was at work. If I didn't respond, she'd call the police to do a welfare check on me—then get in an argument with the police.
This was someone who never swore, had always been frugal, and always followed the rules. It was extremely different from her normal behavior.
It was like all her inhibitions were gone. She suddenly did everything she would never have done before, but had always wanted to do.
Eventually, I had to file blue papers on her and have her involuntarily committed as we feared a confrontation with police might lead to an arrest, injury, or death.
She was diagnosed and successfully treated for bipolar disorder. With daily medication, she got her life back on track and lived the rest of her life productively and peacefully.
Do you know one thing my Mother never did because of her bipolar disorder?
Post racist messages…
…or spout antisemitic rhetoric.
Sorry, folks. Mental illness doesn't make you a bigot.
The Blame Game
Even if the perpetrators of bigotry, racism and White supremacy don't use neurodivergence or mental illness as an excuse for their reprehensible behavior, their supporters do.
And that harms people who have been diagnosed with these conditions.
Elon Musk claimed in an SNL monologue to have Aspergers, but was there an ulterior motive?
Was it the truth, or just another lie to bolster his carefully crafted public image? Musk’s virulent fans declared him exempt from consequences for his problematic behavior because of autism years before Musk ever embraced that narrative.
But every socially awkward jerk isn't on the autism spectrum. Some of them are just spoiled, entitled Peter Pans that their mom overindulged and who miss the good old days of apartheid when being a White male was all they needed to achieve a higher status.
What's the difference between Elon Musk and a sexual predator and self-professed alpha male like Andrew Tate? A few billion dollars. Yet the public doesn't clamor to label Tate autistic.
But because the Musk hype has proclaimed him a genius, an inventor, an engineer—he's none of those things—people have labeled his bad behavior the result of autism. All you have to do is listen to Musk's bumbling double speak to realize he's a con artist like Donald Trump, relying on propaganda about himself to get by.
Remember, Trump's handlers got millions of people to believe he was a brilliant businessman. Musk's publicity machine has done the same to prop up an investor who buys successful ideas and then takes credit for them.
Twitter is the best example of Musk's so-called genius unleashed. After purchasing the social media site for $44 billion in 2022, in late 2024 it was valued at just $12.3 billion, a staggering 72% reduction in value.
And now his complete ineptitude with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has fully exposed that Musk is nothing but a liar who grifted his way into his obscene fortune.
He's not a brilliant businessman—he's a gifted conman.
Maybe Musk is autistic, but that isn’t why he's such a self-absorbed ass.
And every White male mass shooter isn't mentally ill. But it's the first thing the media and Republicans point to when a mass shooting occurs involving a White male.
It’s never about guns, it’s always “a mental health crisis.”
Some surely have some mental health issues, but they also have been taught violence as a solution to not getting what they want. They've been exposed to a toxic form of masculinity. They've been told repeatedly that they're the innocent victim of women, minorities, and authority.
Online activist TizzyEnt shared a news item about a viral video where a White male harassed, threatened, and detained a group of men because their skin was darker than a pumpkin spice latte and they had accents.
The man's family blamed his aggressive, racist, violent behavior on mental illness and alcohol.
You can see TizzyEnt's response to that excuse here:
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While TizzyEnt points out his own experience with people with mental illness or issues with addiction doesn't include aggressive, violent racism, I'd add another important point.
Due to generational trauma, Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada have a high incidence of mental illness. And while numbers have improved greatly, substance abuse is still a problem Tribal Nations are actively battling.
So why are the overwhelming majority of mass shooters and violent bigots White males?
Shouldn't Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and Asian people with mental illness or addiction be proportionately represented in the statistics for these crimes?
The reason they aren't is that BIPOC lack the entitlement that White males in the United States are indoctrinated with since birth to demand. The entitlement that creates White nationalism and bullsh*t social issues like The Great Replacement conspiracy theory and the War on Christmas.
These violent bigots captured in viral videos are cut from identical cloth as the people who marched on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 to exact violence against anyone who opposed their sense of entitlement to power and privilege.
This disconnect is why Columbia University's extensive study on the mass shooters found that “people with mental illness account for a very small proportion of perpetrators of mass shootings in the United States.”
Turns out it is a gun issue—and a White supremacy issue—not a mental health issue.
But What About People With A Diagnosis?
Entertainment mogul Ye has vehemently denied his bipolar disorder diagnosis, but family, friends, and business associates have confirmed an assessment was done, leading to the diagnosis.
My Mother denied her mental illness when she was manic. In the height of her mania, everyone else was crazy and Mum was the only sane one who had all the answers.
Ye's out-of-control behavior does remind me of my Mother's manic episodes.
But the racism, misogyny, and antisemitism he spouts are the result of his lowered inhibitions, not anything created by any mental illness.
Ye is just saying what he really thinks.
His filter is off.
As was Roseanne Barr's in her on again, off again, on again racist rants interspersed with her feeble excuses and weak apologies.
A Danger To Others
Painting every volatile or problematic individual as helpless to curb their behavior due to neurodivergence or mental illness stigmatizes all people with those conditions, who already struggle to find and retain employment and community acceptance.
People with mental illness and neurodivergence are often killed during wellness checks by law enforcement.
Contributing to that impulse by police to use deadly force—on often unarmed people in crisis—is the characterization of these people as violent, out-of-control killers.
Police in Salt Lake City shot an unarmed 13-year-old autistic boy five times for running away from them after his mother called 911 during a meltdown.
Police always claim they feared for their lives or the lives of others.
The 13-year-old survived, but is permanently impaired.
15-year-old Ryan Gainer, 19-year-old Isaiah Trammell, 26-year-old Chantel Moore, and 29-year-old Zachary Bear Heels were not as fortunate.
All were killed during wellness checks by police.
Studies have shown that police deploy deadly force more readily against people stigmatized as violent or out of control.
The unarmed Black “thug” gets shot and killed while the armed White shooter who just murdered multiple people is taken into custody “without incident.”
Blaming problematic behavior on neurodivergence or mental illness—especially when no diagnosis exists—paints a target on all people who have those conditions.
Don't jump to find excuses for killers or the corrupt.
And when you see the mainstream media or friends and family doing it, push back on the narrative.
Sometimes people are just horrible humans.
No excuse needed.
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My neuro-divergent grandson said to me, "I may be neuro-divergent, but that doesn't make me want to stim by throwing a Nazi salute."
What a great article. Thank you for sharing your story and for all the important information in this article.