Editor: I want to explain my choice of image for this article. The Mother Jones piece included here is about Elon Musk thinking that being autistic makes him superhuman. The superhuman part is what reminded me of the latest conspiracy theory from MAGA.
I don’t know if you’ve heard the latest conspiracy theory, but it all began after Trump said something about Biden having died years ago. MAGA ran with that.
From reporting by NBC News:
President Donald Trump on Saturday night reposted a baseless claim on Truth Social that former President Joe Biden was executed in 2020 and replaced with clones or robots.
The original post, made by an anonymous Truth Social user who often spreads outlandish claims, suggested that Biden was replaced with “clones, doubles” and “robotic engineered soulless mindless entities.”
Trump published a link to the post to his nearly 10 million followers without adding any context or explanation. The original poster’s account has a little more than 5,000 followers.
They’ve been sharing photos of Biden from before and after his “death” and pointing out the difference in how his skin looks. I commented on one of them yesterday explaining that when Presidents are going to be on camera for a speech, they wear makeup. It’s common practice for any man on television.
I forgot to mention this in my comment, but Pete Hegseth wanted to build a makeup studio inside the Pentagon for him to prepare before going on camera. How fans of Trump and Vance don’t know about men and makeup is behind me. If you compare photos of Trump with and without his bronzer makeup, the difference is drastic.
Since they currently believe that Biden is a human clone robot, I thought a human robot removing its face was a good choice for an article about 4-chan.
4-Chan Article, Mother Jones
This article was written by Julia Métraux.
In September, Elon Musk amplified a post from Autism Capital—a pro-Trump X account that he often reposts—that read: “Only high T alpha males and aneurotypical people (hey autists!) are actually free to parse new information with an objective ‘is this true?’ filter. This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.” Musk called the claim, which originated on the infamous web forum 4chan, an “interesting observation.” His repost was viewed 20 million times.
Musk is the world’s most prominent—and most powerful—autistic person. It’s not something he conceals; notably, he mentioned it during a 2021 monologue on Saturday Night Live. Only “autistic” wasn’t the term he used. Musk told the SNL audience he had Asperger’s syndrome, a term struck from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 2013 and largely disused in psychiatry.
But Asperger’s has persisted in popular culture, even as psychiatrists have ditched it. As a shorthand for autistic people with low support needs, it has gradually become an armchair diagnosis that’s often used to sidestep the baggage or consequences that come with calling someone autistic. It means not autistic autistic; autistic, but not quite. The words “mild” or “high-functioning” are never far off. “Aspies,” in this vision, are socially inept, technically gifted, mathematically minded, unemotional, blunt. They can probably code.
At its best, the cultural rise of Asperger’s has yielded somewhat positive (if still flattening) depictions in media: Think Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory. But who are we talking about when we talk about Aspies? The answer is bound up with ideas about white men—who were disproportionately given the label—and decades of underdiagnosis of other autistic people.
Musk isn’t oblivious to Aspie stereotypes. He’s used them to get off the hook: “I sometimes say or post strange things,” he told the SNL audience, “but that’s just how my brain works.” He’s worked them into his self-promotion: In a 2022 TED interview, Musk called himself “absolutely obsessed with truth,” crediting Asperger’s with his desire to “expand the scope and scale of consciousness, biological and digital.” And he’s deployed them politically: By pushing the line that empathy is a “fundamental weakness,” Musk both reminds audiences of the discarded, dehumanizing idea that a lack of empathy is an autistic trait and implies that his own cold detachment from humanity is the best way to project strength in Donald Trump’s America.
