Understanding the Rise of Milo Yiannopoulis—and What his Political Opponents Could Learn From Him

Like a younger, gayer Winston Churchill, Milo Yiannopoulis (known as “Nero” on Twitter) has made a (long, hard-to-spell) name for himself charging his way ever further into the many present-day crises regarding the frailty and endurance of liberal culture; a culture by whose standards his politics are already far backwards, and nevertheless become a celebrated figure, his witticisms, perkiness and near impenetrable refinement charming even opponents.

However, there is more to the cult of Milo than simply charisma.  These days, your rank-and-file political pundits—right or left—do their best to be amusing, but usually cater only to those whose views they share.  Why, after all, should people pay attention to a political opponent who can turn a phrase when there are political allies to care about who can do it too?  The answer, in the simplest terms, is that Milo is happy to return the favor, and in the process, he has become more than your rank-and-file political pundit.

Despite having become one of the most infamous public faces of the GamerGate movement, the irony is that Yiannopoulis is,

by his own admission, an outsider to it.  As a conservative journalist, he’s not obligated to take a side in what he sees as a civil war among liberals, as a man without a history of playing video games, he wouldn’t seem to have a stake in arguing how they ought to be made, as a Catholic, he’s hardly mandated to stand against the constant charge that the pursuit of pleasure is making modern people sinful, and as a rather flamboyant, immaculate and cushy-living gay Englishman, he’s an odd candidate to defend hot-blooded hyper-masculinity.  Yet in a world of political activism whose big consistency is becoming disgusted at any perceived slights or opponents, characterized by people who are all too willing to assume the worst of those that offend their personal sensibilities and throw up walls against them, Milo has opted instead to build bridges, to jet all over the political landscape in search of conversation, and this breath of fresh air has paid off.

These days, demonization of political opponents has gone so far that it’s even led to scaremongering character-attacks on people like Bill Maher for having slightly different opinions than their technical political allies, and “disinvitation” is halting discourse, but Milo has no such crippling fear and flight. 

As reported by the Los Angeles Times’ David Ng, he was so eager to debate GamerGate with opponent Anita Sarkeesian that he even offered to pay her or donate to a charity of her choice. (Although according to Milo, he actually offered twice the amount Ng declared; maybe there’s an error in conversion rates somewhere?)  Sarkeesian didn’t accept the offer, but some others one would expect to be bitter foes to Milo haven’t just talked to him, but become friends.  

One of these is Carl Benjamin,

better known by his screenname, Sargon of Akkad.  Sargon’s webseries features “This week in stupid” videos, Jon Stewart-esque comedic jabs at absurdities on both the Left and the Right (along with more serious philosophical videos), but also like Stewart, there’s little doubt that he’s a liberal leftist, having taken a survey declaring himself such, railed against the Conservative Party’s misdeeds and proclaimed a desire for cottage industry to return and seize the economy back from large corporations.  One would expect the worst if someone with such views ever chatted with an outspoken conservative, but he and Milo have gotten on fine.  

More recently, Milo reached out to feminist filmmaker Cassie Jaye, whose views on gay marriage and undoubtedly other things are against his.  Jaye had been working on The Red Pill, a documentary investigating the Men’s Rights Movement, her former benefactors had abandoned her once the subject matter was getting too controversial and potentially offensive, and the film was at risk for cancellation.  It is said that lightning doesn’t strike twice, but Milo had learned the ropes from his experiences with GamerGate, and

signal-boosted Cassie Jaye’s fall out of the good-graces of fellow feminists, as well as the last resort crowdfunding she’d begun for the movie.  Within a few days, the film’s minimum was funded, reaching stretch goals soon after, mainstream feminism lost a battle, and Milo and his allies admitted another member to their textbook case of the axiom that politics make for strange bedfellows.

The specific political bed that unites these uncommon allies is their common opposition to censorship and no-platforming.  For certain blowhards, of questionable number but undeniable volume, ensuring the success of their contemporary political goals trumps reverence to the broader liberal democratic traditions of free speech and impartial debate, but Milo’s rise to prominence has led many back to that exciting political climate of the early enlightenment, where political ideas were not yet social axioms, not yet laws, often not even discussed by actual politicians yet, but the source of many interesting philosophical discussions by hobbyists in salons, coffee shops, and fraternal lodges, and as Breitbart Tech launched,

he took to YouTube and hosted a conversational stream lasting over seven hours, to which people from all over the political spectrum were invited.  There were disagreements to be had, and Milo even argued with fellow conservatives over the merits of Donald Trump, but throughout it all, the participants maintained an atmosphere of civility, the likes of which some on college campuses these days might think impossible.

Meanwhile, even as Milo has gone out of his way to find common ground with people who would once be assumed his enemies, he has also upheld his anti-censorship principles by calling to task his nominal allies.  When GamerGate fell into Milo’s lap and gave him a rare opportunity to be a conservative inductee into the ultra-modernist world of electronic entertainment, he could have used the fervor of the moment just to slam left-wing activists who’d run afoul of many people; after all, a huge part of political campaigning is playing up the misdeeds of one’s opponents, while sweeping one’s own side’s dirt under the rug.  Instead, though, he’s acknowledged the Right has a history of anti-pleasure moral crusaders, such as in an

article where he pointed out the similarities in rhetoric and tactics between feminist Anita Sarkeesian and Christian-Rightist Jack Thompson.  Later, as he reflected on more time with the movement, he explained, “The Right hates gamers because it blames games for real-world violence. The Left now hates them because progressives have come to accuse video games, bizarrely, of somehow being able to make people sexist.”  

What this bipartisan criticism represents is, once again, a commitment to freedom of expression—which protects both speech, and the creation of media, like video games--and standing up to all who oppose it, whatever their justification.  This is a value many liberals share, even while some prominent members of the left have gone the other way.  While the press has been willing to characterize GamerGate’s attitudes as right-wing because the people GamerGate harshly criticizes are

left-wing, it should be remembered that they’re left-wing journalists, and it’s questionable how much they represent the overall soul of the left when no less a figure than President Barrack Obama himself has also come out against the alarming trend of no-platforming one’s political opponents.  Does that mean he’ll agree with Milo Yiannopoulis and even the more liberal wings of GamerGate on everything?  Of course not, but agreeing on everything isn’t the point.  The point is to preserve a western culture built on diverse ideas, fight back against presumptuous claims that some of those ideas are not just distressing, but dangerous to some people, and assert that the best policies arise out of dialectic between ideas.  E pluribus unum is a canonized statement in America for a reason.

With all of this overwhelming promotion of Milo Yiannopoulis and his adventures in culture warfare, one may be tempted to believe I am a gung-ho supporter who hangs on and repeats his every word.  This is not the case; in fact, I am a social liberal, economically left-of-center and I share none of his religious ideals.  I cannot co-sign on his regressive tax proposals, and I found it embarrassing to watch him on

The Rubin Report trying to rationalize his Catholic opposition to gay marriage as being in the best interests of the gay community.  Yes; I will share Milo’s articles and retweet his tweets when I think he has a point, but the experience is, rather like a rollercoaster, a twisted mix of empowering and scary.  I’d be lying if I said that at times, I didn’t resent having a man with a fair amount of openly reactionary attitudes fighting on my behalf for what I and many other see as a liberal value, and there are no-doubt people on the Left (or even on the Right) who suspect that Milo is simply trying to carpetbag nerds into becoming more right-wing.  

However, those who allege Milo’s carrying out some diabolical, terrifyingly effective conspiracy hatched in secret are, in fact, giving him far too much credit.  Milo’s “recruit the ronin” policy really depends on the existence of ronin, and in many cases, that existence is due to their being disowned by former left-wing allies on the basis of far lesser disagreements than Milo has with them.  The most disturbing thing about the runaway success of Milo Yiannopoulis is that there’s nothing about his successful modus operandi that liberals couldn’t do themselves, and given their far greater alignment with modern culture, it’s very arguable they could be even more effective at gaining support—and yet, many have opted not to do it.  Speaking as a liberal leftist (though admittedly becoming more uncomfortable with the latter designation), who does, in fact, have a vested interest in promoting my politics, I openly declare that the Left could use a lot more people like Milo Yiannopoulis.  By this, I do not mean people opposed to gay marriage, abortion, feminism, and progressive taxes, but simply people who don’t treat their own political bias as so high and mighty that it warrants a dehumanizing and silencing embargo against anyone who disagrees, even when they disagree only a little bit.  To be sure, there are plenty on the Left who agree with that, but not enough of them in high places.  A few have stepped up, such as David Pakman and Jonathan Chait, but we need more; including, preferably, people who up until now have engaged in counter-productive othering.

The following is a challenge to all the high and mighty on the liberal left alarmed by the rise of Milo Yiannopoulis: Open the gates.  If your positions are so obviously correct, intelligent and broadly-supported as you maintain, then surely you wouldn’t have anything to lose from meeting with those people you’re currently ostracizing and starting to discuss things.  Your zero-tolerance tactics have backfired and more and more people are sick of them.  If you keep your ideals on this self-destructive course, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Is "Meritocracy" An Irreparable Talking-Point? Only if You Let it Be One.

This was inspired by a series of Twitter posts, although one was also inspired by a rather long Facebook post made by famous Dirty Jobs host, Mike Rowe.  Then, as with other times, Mike has come off as potentially controversial for taking a stand to suggest that an individual's success in life is equivalent to the burden he or she is willing to bear--a view many have come to suspect is ignorant and essentially right-wing.  To that, I have a few things to say.

First, I get it; okay?  I get it not just as somebody who considers himself somewhere left-of-center economically, but as someone who, like many other autistic men, has known tremendous discrimination in the job world, and who knows that my group is not unique; in some states, it's still legal to discriminate against homosexuals in the workforce.  Unfair bosses are a reality.  It's understandable that people are skeptical when someone of a political bent talks of meritocracy; political people, after all, have their beliefs, their vision of what beliefs and characteristics makes a better or worse person, and it's hard to buy such people put aside such biases to base their definition of a hard worker strictly on objective qualities like efficiency, precision and tenacity.  Furthermore, there's no doubt that some prominent people on the right, among them Margaret Thatcher, have become well-known, and variously-regarded (depending on one's own political bias) for promoting a meritocracy as the solution to all society's woes; nor is there much doubt as to why.  The existence of that outstanding worker who can grab the bull by the horns, and go from rags to riches of his or her own device, is a talking-point for those who allege that no compassionate help from above is necessary, and no major hindrances to worker advancement are built into companies.  Are such workers and their inspiring success stories typical?  Expect that question to be argued for decades to come, with very little hope of a satisfying answer arising, as that would hinge on the absurd presumption that all workers and all employers are equally as ethical or corrupt as their peers.

The second thing that must be said, however, is that following this healthy skepticism through to preemptively belittling anyone who dares to stress the value of hard, meaningful work, is, as Rowe suggested, doing people no favors.  Leftists may be correct in identifying why more Right-leaning thinkers place a high value on hard work--because it puts the burden of proof on workers, rather than their wealthy constituents--but to presume this is the case with every person who says such things is not in actuality reigning in unfair considerations; it is merely allowing the political Right, with its comparatively low respect to the underdogs, to be the exclusive venue wherein such things are discussed, with all the bias that entails.  Today, vocal people on the Left are making the same mistake with "meritocracy" as vocal people on the Right have been making for decades with "liberalism"; that is, surrendering the term to the opposition, to be fed back to people in skewed form, when both ideas as they were originally conceived contributed to tremendous citizen growth on a sub-political level.

It is important to note that while politicians are frequently obnoxious for the things they spout over and over again, sometimes the issue isn't that those things aren't true, so much as that they're almost never the whole truth.  The unfortunate factor underlying this trend is that their career depends on appealing to certain sorts of people and convincing those people to look down on other sorts, and that means playing up some people's faults while sweeping others under the rug.  Most people outside of politics, though, should have the ability to think about things more deeply.  Most of us by now have come across (among many other types of people) both obnoxious finaglers in high places who place unreasonable demands on people in lower places, and irritating slackers who don't even put demands on themselves that most others see as no-brainers.  We should be able to make multi-factored analyses based on such experiences, but too often people who are passionate about things fall prey to what could be called "political cooties"; that is, knee-jerk reactions against the sort of ideas they deem hostile to their interests, and in this case, the real victims will be workers, unable to form a whole picture of the world important to them when led by people who only focus on select parts of it.

What the work world (including that part of it concerned with why certain types of people are lagging behind others) actually needs are dialogue and analysis by people who aren't so full of themselves that they let mere words get to them and shut them down.  Before the reductive binary bore of Right Vs Left got involved, our culture's politics had already embraced the more meaningful idea that there is wisdom in crowds, and none of us is as smart as all of us.  Let's try to bring that back and face these problems together.

Throwback Thursday: Why GamerGate is Important to Me; the Full Version of My Rise News Article

I've been meaning to post this for a while, but lately I've gotten busy with two demanding college classes, plus an indie game project, and some other things.  Still, better late than never.

Shortly after a debate with GamerGate and the Society of Professional Journalists was halted by a bomb threat in Miami, which also caused the whole neighborhood to be evacuated, local interest in the controversial consumer watchdog group surged, and the news organization Rise invited people with a stand on it to post op-eds.  I sent mine about a month ago, after a bit of time refining its thesis, and Rise quickly printed it here.

Unfortunately, the editorial was quite a bit watered down from the version I submitted.  It seems Rise has a policy against calling people out; they allow links to sources the author states an agreement with, but not links criticizing their subject.  While this is somewhat understandable, on the grounds that a lot of people have been threatened for discussing GamerGate and then being signal-boosted by opponents, it unfortunately led to an article that seemed more presumptuous than it should have been.  By only leaving in links to the work of people with whom I agreed, and removing the links--or in some cases, even unlinked naming of names, where I called out specific left-wing journalists for unfair behavior, they created the impression that I have a deep bias toward the thoughts and opinions of the political Right, and to top this all off, they gave the piece a new title calling out the Left. (Also, a header image of a person playing XBox360 who is not me, as my XBox360 has been broken for a while, now.)

An article that seems to have this bias could be taken two very undesirable ways, depending on the bias of readers.  Those of a leftist bent may see what appear to be groundless scolds to their side and dismiss the article as just another bunch of paranoid, neo-confederate drivel; the likes of which conspiracy-fueled survivalists have subjected them to too much.  On the other hand, readers that lean (or sometimes smash) to the right could see it as vindicating their own bias and motivate them to rail against leftists in general, in which case they'd end up going against me and most of my friends.  The article needs to keep callouts to specific leftists to keep from seeming both alarmist and slanderous of leftist principles as a whole.  On that note, here is the article; critical links and all, that I actually submitted:

Unseen Minority: Why GamerGate is Important to Me

By Thomas Fairfield (Twitter: @BahmoFairfield)

Describing the values shared by much of the GamerGate movement, and detailing those points on which they do and don’t disagree with the opposition, is a worthy but daunting process; and within a short opinion piece, perhaps an impossible one.  So many people have brought in so many axes to grind (on both sides), that arriving at a list of “core” tenets in one document would at least require peer review and survey.  However, I can detail a large personal stake here.

I am a nerd.  More specifically, I have Asperger’s Syndrome.  It is classified as a “mild” or “high-functioning” branch of the Autism Spectrum, but at a glance it’s often mistaken for more debilitating disorders.  It led to immense bullying at school, where I was called things like “retard” and “faggot” (Bigots saw homosexuality as a disorder); among other sorts of insults.  I was derided as babyish because I still loved Nintendo while others were “growing out of it”, and seen as frighteningly psychotic because I laughed at certain shows that others didn’t.  Even faculty who wanted to help me often didn’t understand me, and I got stuck in Special Education classes with the genuinely mentally-challenged or even insane; such as in third grade, where (in an eery forewarning of last year’s nerd-scare) I got stuck with a child who gleefully talked about killing.

Even as an adult, I have suffered; my voice and mannerisms unnerve people who don’t understand Asperger’s, my wallet ails from the horrendous personality bias entailed in the hiring processes of many major companies, and I am humiliated by the continued inability of even caring persons to assume by default I’m a functional being.  After so much discomfort and ignorance, I figured that the political left would offer me a way out; who better to fight business corruption and add one more unprivileged minority to their liberation record?  I was wrong.  Even after multiple attempts, the multifaceted leftist group Forcechange.com gave me the same cold-shoulder the corporate world did.  Then, almost a year ago now, leftist journalists collectively smeared nerds, and GamerGate roared to life.

While I would not become aware of this until a few months later, many others, such as Mytheos Holt and Liz Finnegan, immediately noticed familiar anti-autistic/anti-introvert misassumptions in these zealous calls ironically against perceived bigotry, and when I finally looked into GamerGate I found plenty of common ground.

Mind you; GamerGate is not simply an autistic issue, and as stated, journalists are just the latest tip of a larger prejudiced iceberg, but GamerGate’s fight is my fight, because a new intolerance has seized mainstream society; an intolerance not of inherited outward features, but of mindsets, which drives activists to mass-shame people who’ve said—or sometimes, worn--trivial things that even debatably smack of discredited old ideas.  With egalitarianism and tolerance reconfigured as the new social axiom, they have also become the new excuse to condemn the socially-inept, who can get labelled reactionaries or even potential criminals for as little as their desires to ogle beautiful fictional women, cosplay as game characters (both tarred by Leigh Alexander), or play war-games with mock-aggressive buddies (tarred by Devin Wilson).

As has happened for literally centuries, the as-yet unproven suggestion that pleasure-centric culture makes people sinful has been dredged up once more, and this time it is aimed at those of us who by nature are introverted and prefer activities set in The Great Indoors.  Still, maybe it’s not just this time that Autism and the like were involved; I can’t help but wonder how many past victims who got labeled as “witches”, “demons” and the like might’ve just had mental conditions unrecognized as such at the time.  The point is that, when it is socially-acceptable, or even desirable, to shame thoughts in the name of social harmony (and adjusted for different values, it has been at many points in throughout history), people whose thought-patterns are obviously “off”, and whose desires unique and pronounced, become tempting targets; much as they have been many times before.  For myself and many others, all of this “gamer”-bashing is just the same “Ew; you like X terrible thing?!  You must be Y terrible thing!” dreck of the sort we’ve suffered at many points in our lives.  That it is painted in the trendy new language of progressivism matters little, and I’ve yet to hear GamerGate’s feminist opponents remark on the irony that their supposed war against the patriarchy is in practice attacking the sorts of men who’ve suffered themselves for not living up to the macho ideal.

Yet what is different now (besides that this time it’s the Left leading the old “pleasure is sinful” charge), and for the first time, is we’re fighting back and hard.  We no longer have no response when any given situation’s de-facto bullies ask “You and what army?”  We now have an army, and it is GamerGate.  It is not composed solely of autistic people, and left-wing and right-wing people rub shoulders in it; their actual thoughts may differ drastically, but they all (mostly) work together because almost anyone who has been thought-shamed for any reason can now fall in and march alongside others who at least agree with them that rampant thought-shaming stinks, at a time when many in the mainstream press, including some self-proclaimed tolerance advocates, remain in favor of it on some level. 

If such people are to continue this sort of knee-jerk-driven character assassinations, without allowing the characters in question a chance to represent or debate their ideals on neutral territory (not to mention stifling said representation and debate with bomb threats), they’re just proving correct GamerGate’s perception of them as a new breed of moral authoritarians, which is already becoming bad PR.  Meanwhile, GamerGate’s momentum just keeps building.  While contrary to the accusations, there is no canonized GamerGate ideology that justifies the use of intimidation tactics, we don’t shy away from signal boosting vile behavior on the record, and it is having an effect.  Leigh Alexander, the inflammatory tech journalist condemned by Finnegan above, no longer works at Gamasutra; now languishing in self-employment and “e-begging”, while Gawker, the home of Sam “Bring Back Bullying” Biddle, has lost seven figures in profit from GamerGate’s boycott campaign, and  their infamous recent presumptuous and prying gay-outing article has gotten far more people than just gamers mad at their bullying.  “Revenge of the Nerds” has become a reality; one for which I have waited decades.

The diversity and tolerance progressives already won are here to stay, and good for them, but for the first time in decades, it looks like autism-bashing is on its way out, and if things keep going the way they are, progressives will look back and bemoan that, even while they demonized it, GamerGate stole this tolerance victory from them.

My Friend Has Killed Herself; My Thoughts

This isn't necessarily a political subject; I understand, but it's a controversial statement about my views on morality, and I'm warning readers right now who don't want to read it.  I don't blame you if you don't, but it's one of those things I feel I have to get off my chest before moving on.

Shortly after Justin "JewWario" Carmichael commited suicide, I made one of many of my infamously controversial, arguably cold opinion posts on the Donkey Kong Vine Forums (from which I am incidentally suspended as of typing this); calling him out for what I labelled a "dick move".  Somehow, the idea of a man blowing his brains out in the bathroom while his distraught wife pleaded for him to stop from the other side of the door, aroused more rage in me than the mourning typical of everyone else.  I was attacked rather fiercely in the comments.

Were I to believe much in karma, I might conclude it's hitting me right now, because three days ago, a friend close to me--whom I'll call "Ann" here--killed herself.  The details of how she did it haven't been revealed, but she posted a brief suicide note on her FaceBook account (which I am not linking), which was followed by many grieving posts from others.

Ann, too, was married.  She did not have children, but she had multiple pets she loved, and who loved her back, and many people who cared for her.  At one point, she was my boss, and a good one, too, before a bad depression attack prompted her to leave the company.  She stayed in contact, though, and provided a good reference for me when I applied for another job.  Her thought patterns were obviously something apart from the norm, of which I saw more evidence when I went to a party at her house, and she put a lacey, effeminate dress on her pit bull.  Still, the worst seemed to be past her, and she was rather chipper in the days leading up to her suicide; celebrating the Supreme Court's legalization of gay marriage, amiably texting me about my new job (the one she gave me a reference for) and my cats; her death was a shock.

So having suffered a suicide closer to home, can I say that I finally feel more understanding than I did with JewWario's.  While on the one hand, my greater amount of sadness means I can't be so angry this time, on the other, the event seeming so eclectic, as mentioned above, means that no; I still don't get suicide, and I'm content to remain ignorant.

The suicide of any person who is valued by any other person is, objectively, a selfish crime.  I'm going to ignore the great unknown about what happens to people when they die, and instead focus on the very-much known quantity of what happens to those around  them--they typically get sad; sometimes to traumatic levels.  Even if we are to assume that someone can find relief in death from the woes of life; in taking their own life they've just created woes for other people.  By those criteria, suicide is as vile as relieving oneself of poverty by stealing all of someone else's money.

That is the sort of statement I get called an ignorant jerk for expressing.  They say that my cold, rational mind is simply incapable of understanding the different mindset of suicidal people, and I should stop judging them.  My go-to retort is that few people extend the same benefit of the doubt to homicidal people; despite them being comparable on multiple levels--they're acting in their own interests against those of others, they're making others miserable by taking the life of one they love, and they are often in a different state of mind than normal people.

Not that the different emotional reactions to homicide and suicide aren't understandable or somewhat forgivable, because suicidal people bring in previous perceptions of them; homicidal people don't tend to have as many who cared about them; or at least, those who cared about them aren't the same people they victimized.  Yet in a way, that almost makes it worse--at least if a homicidal person killed my loved ones, I could hate the killer with no qualms.  Yet when it's all the same person, then it's hard to know what to feel; where does the innocent victim end and the psychotic murderer begin?

So once again, it's all very confusing, and to the naysayers who claim I'm completely ignorant of what goes through the heads of the mentally unwell, I say that I am fine living with that ignorance--because living I continue to do.  Perhaps I could venture to empathize with whatever sort of chemically-imbalanced mind that can conceive of a moral excuse for suicide, but if I stared into that abyss I'd be worried it would stare back.  I don't want to know their rationale.  Also, contrary to the naysayers; I have known depression, and at one point I inflicted self-harm, but at no point did I conclude suicide was at all useful, and I got through it.  I got cats who depend on me, and a circle of online friends who care about me and collaborate with me, and they justify my existence; as lonely and drab as it gets sometimes.  I will miss you Ann, but I will not be that person who left a comment saying she respected your decision; anymore than I respected my half-sister's decision to continue smoking cigarrettes or my brother's decision to drive under the influence.  Reveling in my higher sanity is how I deal and soldier on, and if you're thinking of telling me how disgustingly self-righteous my coping method is, I remind you that I haven't taken the life of anyone you love; be it my own or another's.

With that rant done, we move on.

Gays Have Gotten the Right to Love--Can Autistics Be Next?

As of this month, July 2015, I am a thirty-year-old virgin.  This is a problem I have long bereaved, and like everything related to romance, one person can't fix it alone, and I'm now calling on people who care to help find a solution.  Lest anyone think of accusing me of distasteful political opportunism at a time while many are still celebrating the Supreme Court's decision to legalize gay marriage, I would like any possible naysayers to know that I have been called "faggot" more times than I can count.  I may be straight, but as an autistic straight man in a world only beginning to understand autism, I've suffered my share from the family of prejudices that includes homophobia, and in many ways I'm still suffering.  I am one of many nerdy, introverted people who can't manage to get into a romantic relationship, and here I intend to recount the sort of barriers that I, much like homosexuals, have faced to finding love, as well as positing a solution that also takes a page from gay culture.

Early Childhood

It's probably no surprise that autistic people, like many who seem alien, get bullied in school.  I was relentlessly persecuted for my differences, and those who didn't detest me still tended to ignore me, so eventually it became mutual, and I excused myself from my society.  While they used normal routes through the school, I resorted to the fire escape routes where nobody else was, and detoured through the staff offices; while they stood in line for lunch outside of the multipurpose room, I entered it through a side door and cut into the line, then ate in the backwings of the adjacent school theater.  When they went outside to play sports during recess, I retreated to the library and spent my leisure time reading; something I suspect that many see as something to get away from during breaks!  Anything I could do to be either apart from my peers, in the company of bully-busting adult supervisors, or both, I did.  I shunned contact with other students, and perhaps because of the natural tendency of autistic people to be rather disinterested in socializing to begin with, I was just fine with that.

Adolescence

Then along came puberty, and things suddenly weren't the same ever again.  My brain may not have functioned the same way as those of other boys, but as it happened, my genitals certainly did, and I knew if I was to satisfy them, I'd have to figure out some way to reacquaint myself with other people, and in many regards, I am still struggling to figure out how I fit into society.

Autistic people tend to have problems with normal socially-useful behaviors by default, and I was no exception, but it certainly exacerbated the problem that I was scared away from social development at an early age!  It took years before I learned girls don't like boys who stare at them constantly, as I did in multiple classes, and though they might like people a bit better who go and talk to them with some pretentious pick-up lines, I've never been good at that, either.

Part of it is that I don't tend to start random conversations with any people, any sex, because talking about random things is one of those social pastimes I've never been able to give a damn about, but another part, I have become convinced, is that I scare people, or at least irritate them.  Another thing I wasn't aware of until some time towards the end of high school, is that my voice is very abnormal-sounding.  People made fun of it for a long time, but I wrote it off as that standard "repeat speech in stupid voices to make the speaker sound dumb" thing that people do in spiteful conversations, until I actually heard myself on a tape recorder, and then even I conceded I sounded annoying.  I also have tried, to no avail, to get help learning to speak more normally; most coaches can't even assess what my problem is.  I also make involuntary motions, although they've subsided a bit since High School and never were at a really debilitating level.  Still, they brought even more teasing to me from other students, and actually worried some adults.  Such things also go a long way towards explaining why things might even have gotten worse as I moved on to a stage of life when social contact was no longer mandatory.

The Adult World

If school is hard for autistic people, the work world may be harder still.  As the economy slides ever further into the consumerist trend, and standardized chains push more individualized businesses out in favor of their carefully crafted customer-friendly images, heavy discrimination against introverts and anyone else who seems "off" has increasingly become the norm.  I quote myself from an earlier article:

We still get discriminated against in the job market, bymanipulative questionnaires that despise our mindsets as allegedly unfriendly, that force us to lie about who we are to get jobs.  UK data shows only 15% of autistic adults fully employed as a result of such things.  Even when they get in, bigotry still bites.  I once got thrown out of avolunteer position because of it.  The venue offered free English lessons to Spanish speakers, and after the girl who introduced me to the venue stopped going because she needed to focus more on her school work, I was the only tutor there who understood Spanish and could work with the clients one-on-one, which they needed often.  I felt invaluable, but apparently somebody got bothered by how I occasionally thought out-loud, and I was told not to come back.  That is just a a sample of the depths of bigotry affecting the people who don't--sometimes can't--conform to common but trivial behavioral standards, no matter how well they do the job at hand.  I have many other anecdotes, too.

 In the adult world, jobs replace schools as the most time-consuming social gathering for many individuals, and because of the relative unlikelyhood of autistic people getting into them, their chances of meeting people remain low.  As with schools, lower amounts of social interaction mean less chances to make friends, and less chance to make friends in turn means less chance to meet potential romantic partners.  There exists an alternative in the form of approaching random people, of course, but in addition to everything I said above about my general disdain for small-talk, I detest lying, and have long-since said no to the ridiculous pretentious convention of coming up with an asexual excuse (commonly known as "pick-up lines") to speak to women I'm sexually attracted to; as has become my standard declaration on this matter, when all I really know about a woman is her body, all I really care about is her body, and if being honest about that offends her, the most courteous thing I can do is not talk to random women at all.  As the mere act of approaching women out of lust has been meeting more and more disapproval these days, and since the Elliot Rogers shooting, nerd lust in particular terrifies casual observers more than ever, I'm convinced I made the right choice in not pursuing that purely (or at least, initially) carnal avenue of romance.  Let it remain open to the so-called alpha males and trophy girlfriends who know it's vacuous, pretentious crap, but have the assets that lead them to expect it to be worth it.

The Solution

Yet while I can agree that liking a woman for her personality, rather than just her body, is a more ideal path to romance, once again, the circumstances in which that path opens up do not avail themselves readily to autistic people.  Almost from birth, the odds of useful social interactions are stacked against us.  We can learn academic and professional skills, and in fact learn them well , but we don't fit the neurotypical definition of charisma; even when we try; we do not function on the same groupthink wavelength that governs playground politics, flirting, and even many workplaces.  We're a group that annoys-to-scares people; much like gays up until recently.  So in my thirtieth year of a life wherein I still haven't learned if I really fit anywhere in society, I declare that autistic people should consider doing exactly what the gays did between then and now: Just go our own way as a group, and nuts to those normies who object.

Hillcrest, San Diego; the gay district closest to me.

What I mean by this, as I've mentioned before, is that we autistic people (as well as other subcultures) should build our own counterpart to the rainbow district.  We collectively occupy neighborhoods of cities, or if need be, even create our own town, where we run things our way.  Autistic people will run the businesses, these sympathetic bosses will endeavor to hire autistic employees, they will assume customers are also largely autistic and make company policy around pleasing them; not neurotypical customers, and finally, these autistic establishments will festoon themselves with a broadly-conceived, blatant emblem to draw in others of our own kind and ward off those people who are scared of us.  The time is now for autistic people to band together and show the world they're capable of being productive members of society, so long as society (in this initial case, ours own autistic society) gives them a chance.  Then, just like gays in their specialized institutions, we'll also have a much chance to meet others who have suffered in a world where they've felt unloved and misunderstood for their whole lives, find common ground, hit it off, and maybe more.

I will return to more discussion of exactly how these communities should be organized at a later date; after I've talked around with other autistics, but meanwhile, I believe I have made my parable clear: Getting the right to marry the person you love is all well and good, but first, you have to find the person you love, without the constant worry of scaring people, and gays organized to do just that; far sooner than they got any justice from those outside and above.  If we autistic people ever hope to get justice, we, too, must organize in kind.

Will The New Culture-Wars Wreck the Leftist/Liberal Alliance?

For those skeptical, the short answer is probably no.  Nevertheless, I think it's time we have a talk.

For some of us (not myself, but more on that later), what felt like one of most poignant examples of left-wing cultural shaming in years came in the form of 2014's The Lego Movie; pictured above. (Actually, a film within the film is pictured above; the actual movie's comedy is much better.)  After a short-but-dramatic prologue, the film opens in the life of Emmet Brickowski; a dopey, vacuously giddy peon living and working in Bricksburg, a glossy but nearly-as-dopey dystopia run by the bureaucratic dictator President Business, whose citizens' minds appear to have been proactively numbed into impotence by inanely optimistic pop-songs (actually; just one inanely optimistic pop-song that plays endlessly) and the one-meme sitcom pictured above.

Fortunately, the movie's satire isn't actually all that one-sided.  In due time, the film also points out some things that are beneficial about this environment; its big failing just being that it's a dictatorship, and jokes are made at the expense of the pretentiously pessimistic and avante-garde with as much enthusiasm as they're made at Emmet's empty but comfortable life.  The Lego Movie is probably one of those rare works that makes fun of all sorts of things and people while not really hating on any of them, and I love it for that; among other things.  Yet the amount of people who have concluded differently; both critical of the film (as with Fox News, whose critique I am not linking) and fond of it, is rather revealing of broader trends that have always been brimming within our culture and have up until recently avoided scrutiny.

Authoritarian cultural whinging from moral conservatives; typically of a religious persuasion, has become well-known to our society.  From dancing to rock and roll to Playboy to Dungeons and Dragons to Pokemon to Harry Potter, birth-control to pre-marital straight sex to promiscuous straight sex to gay sex, drink to drugs, religious old fogeys have constantly condemned pleasure-centric popular culture in deference to religion's greatest built-in asset against innovation and free-thinking; prophetic fear-mongering.  Whether it's called Armageddon, the Apocalypse, Ragnarok, Kali Yuga or any number of other things, fanatics have maintained that the falcon is being lured further and further from the falconer, until society becomes so sinful the world will end and the select few will be judged worthy to ascend to the kingdom of Heaven.  Fortunately, as liberalism and science have consistently made our kingdom of Earth increasingly more heavenly, we've increasingly ignored these sanctimonious old bores, and they may have met their functional Waterloo last decade, when George W. Bush's application of divine right to patriotism led to some very unpopular policies both at home and abroad, and we saw one rapture prediction after another proven resoundingly false.  The deaths of Jerry Falwell and Fred Phelps probably helped, too.

Yet even as we have sneered down our noses at the once-loud; now ever-softer Religious-Right authoritarians bemoaning the supposedly degenerate state of our popular culture, another bout of moaning has been coming in from another direction; occasionally satirized but not, until recently, recognized for the danger it potentially is.  Largely associated with what have become known as hipsters, the idea that bread and circuses (to borrow an old Roman term for "spit in the bucket") have neutralized us has never been far away from self-assumed rebels acting in the name of progress and liberation.  To their credit, I believe many of these people do sincerely believe that; they are not religious fundamentalists in sheep's clothing--at least not to any official religion.  What they are, however, is so obsessed with the romantic rebellious notion of going against the grain, that they do so without thinking of whence or wherefore that grain came; it's not always from the same old discredited religious ideals, and in many modern cases is, in fact, from their own.

There was a time in intellectual history when free-market capitalism was considered a radical idea.  A time where the idea that someone should attain wealth from hard work and merit flew in the face of the long-standing tradition of landed nobility hording it, a time when state-sanctioned merchants had the unique power to exchange goods between nations, driving their monopolistic prices to levels only such grandfathered-in aristocrats could afford.  When capitalism rode into intellectual favor with liberalism and democracy, it's not even an exaggeration to say that it was, in essence, the "socialism" of its time; the lofty but always desirable ideal that economic power, just like political power, should belong to the masses.  Unfortunately, some years and industrial technology later, there was also a time when the free market seemed to be undermining itself, as those who succeeded from it bought up the means of success until they were in short supply for others, and then reduced the others to cogs in mass-production.  Fortunately, pragmatic regulations and sub-state organizing for economic justice have largely saved the system, but from that grim-but-departed era of Carnegie, Dickens and Marx, more recent left-wing cynics have unearthed the premature conclusion that capitalism is inevitably oppressive, and applied it to capitalism's unique brand of culture.

The result, especially when taken to its logical (and, when a defense of contested culture is mounted by the contented, probably inevitable) extreme, thus becomes eerily similar to the old argument of religiously-minded critics; while they hollered slogans along the line of "The degenerate liberal media is making you sinful; repent before Satan takes our souls!" progressive critics have warned "The fascist corporate media is making you stupid; wake up before we're all subjugated!"  I am sad to admit that among the latter critics was my father, a product of the 1960s who, in his worse moments, blamed my supposed brainwashing by this supposed fascist corporate media for everything from my insistence that eating an apple would not sate my appetite for chocolate, to my association of organ music with the horror genre of literature.

This ongoing cynical idea of popular culture and its media being somehow "fascist" is probably the key reason that the few remaining arch-conservative satanism alarmists, via their presumptuous "Illuminati" theories, managed to recruit a disturbing amount of anti-authority/anti-war youth as an audience last decade, in probably the most shameful trend of counter-culture I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing.  Hopefully, most of these young rebels eventually realized that ironically, religious Rightists on the fringes of society had co-opted their anger at a religious rightist in the White House, but I still see things that make me think many haven't.

I got this forum response because I like Cars 2.

While progressive and conservative social critics naturally have their differences in how they process culture to fit their own biases, both in essence can and do arrive at warcries that boil down to "stop enjoying these things I dislike", and insist upon creating a higher culture that fosters higher ideals; however they define "higher".  Yet even as the twin viper heads of the authoritarian horseshoe snap at it from the right and the left, popular culture continues on its merry, liberal way.  While mass-media, like any institution wielding great power, comes naturally under skepticism, including plenty from liberals, in fact it, in a way perhaps unsurpassed by any other byproduct of capitalism, has had a positive association with those ideas widely seen as liberal, and in fact, progressive, for quite a while.

Consider, for example, popular music in egalitarian terms.  Almost since the dawn of recording technology, via such historical music genres as jazz, blues, rock, soul, funk, disco and rap, it has conveyed and glorified the talents of African Americans to American society as a whole; often well ahead of the time government and other mossy well-established institutions were willing to accept black people as having perfectly functional brains.  Naysayers may point to to the constant influx of white artists into these once-black genres as evidence of some top-down takeover, and yet onward through the present day, black innovators always come back to music, and many are rich.  Black power also broke into movies en-masse in the 1970s, which also saw the rise of feminism in cinema; sometimes, as in Pam Grier's case, within a single film.  Rather counter-intuitive policies for a media supposedly interested in propping up the established power-brokers!

For many, the 1980s were the loudest decade yet for popular culture; in essence facilitated by the pro-capitalist policies of Reagan's New Right Coalition.  Going by rabid anti-capitalist cynicism, this should have mean their collective values dug themselves in to establish an intellectually-strangling conformity, and yet even then, myriad pop songs critical of the era's prevailing right-wing culture were allowed in; The Message, Money For Nothing, Material Girl, and The Future's So Bright; to name a few.

In the 1990s, even as the Reagan era's D.A.R.E. garbage continued to be taught in state-funded schools, Sublime was conquering the radio waves with marijuana-friendly messages, and this has just snow-balled from there.  By the 2000s, another very conservative era insofar as official politics, the vocally pro-marijuana Jack Black was considered a fine casting choice for children's movies.  Now, as more and more states move towards legalizing marijuana, it is little accident that a news show has emerged noting its lucrative potential.

Finally, this decade gave us Mackelmore, whose 2011 gay rights anthem "Same Love" took the charts by storm.  At the time, gay marriage was still banned in California.  Shortly after, it was lifted here, as in some other states.  Then, yesterday, gay marriage was legalized nationwide.

Make no mistake; it's not my intention to ride capitalism enthusiastically.  I think it has its problems, and I'm happy to talk about them another time.  Yet while one of its less pleasant elements is its embrace of amoral values in the name of personal gain, as even proponents like Adam Smith and Ayn Rand allowed, the upside of amorality is that businesses realize "holier than thou" attitudes don't appeal to the masses.  On the contrary, as no person can spend as much money as every person, businesses keep their fingers on the pulse of the nation, and reflect people's desires with what they sell.  The inconvenient truth for liberals who are also leftists, and have a knee-jerk reaction against anything related to the free market, is that in the area of culture, that free market made its peace with the beat generation, complete with all of its sexual deviation, hazing, loud music, mock-satanism, raunchy attitudes, and even egalitarianism, a long time ago.  Far from the allegations that mass-media is just a tool for the political and economic elites to hand down authoritarianism from on-high, it has served oftentimes to amplify people's desires for liberty and justice far faster than they reach legally elected representatives and the writing of bills.

Yet still, radical leftists, many who also consider themselves liberals, continue to attack consumer-driven pop culture, banning pop songs the masses voted into prominence with their money, digging up old right-wing talking-points about violent video games, and other tiresome dreck, and finally, perhaps because the old moral authoritarians on the Right no longer scare anyone, people on the same political side are turning against them.  Once again, I don't believe that this means the Leftist/Liberal alliance is about to collapse.  I am not convinced the political Right has become devoid of its old gallery of moral authoritarians since it fell out of favor, and should they let these old scoundrels out of their sleeves come 2016, I still see the alliance between social liberalism and economic leftism enduring.  Still, it has never been more obvious that this alliance is not the only one imaginable.  If the Left still hasn't resolved its internal turmoil within the next four years, I may be saying something very different, and resolving this turmoil means in essence moving away from the obsession with "punching up" at the products of popular culture.  Ultimately, this culture is a liberal invention, so while those shenanigans go on, the Left is essentially punching itself.