Bonus Sample: Greta Thunberg’s “Super Power” Vs. Fascists and Liberals (Pt 2)
Greta Thunberg is a burr in the ass of the powerful throughout the world—and not only for rightwing sociopaths. Increasingly, as she grows up, learns more, and networks with other activists around the world, she’s become a scourge for liberals as well.
Many of them would prefer she remain a child, providing a theatre of emotional catharsis for a climate crisis industry more interested in raising money from green economy donors than forcing change.
Now, as Thunberg broadens her target to capitalism and colonialism writ large, it’s more and more clear that she’s confronting what autistic philosopher Robert Chapman calls “the empire of normality,” from her lived experience of autism, about which so many of the conspiracy theories we cover here swirl.
Seizure of the Madleen
Why do Fascists Hate Greta
Why are Liberals Backing Away from Greta?
Neurodiversity and activism
Masking, Burnout, Contemplation
Hamster Wheel of Capitalism
Parenting in Humility
ChaptersPart one (Saturday on Main Feed):Part two:
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This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
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This bonus episode is part two of Greta Thunberg's superpower versus fascists and liberals.
Now, on Saturday, I examined the right-wing sociopathic response to Thunberg, but also the headpadding liberal vibe that is now backing away from her, that refused to intervene when the Madeline, sailing under a British flag, was illegally intercepted and boarded in international waters.
This girl, once hurled onto every TED-like stage in the world, whose portrait went viral for a generation of activists and whose story was the subjects of millions of grade school essays, is now reported on well beneath the fold as she faces off against the most moral army in the world.
And I pointed to a few reasons for why, because as Thunberg broadens her target to capitalism and colonialism writ large, she's confronting what autistic philosopher Robert Chapman calls the empire of normality.
And I would say that she's doing that from her lived experience of autism.
And so that's what I'm going to continue with today.
This is a story of layers.
It's plain to see why the fascists find Thunberg so easy to hate and mock and defame.
But when you dig a little deeper, you can see why, as she radicalizes, many liberal folks, many centrists, you know, people who believe that ultimately capitalism and the way things go generally can be, you know, workable or can be reformed.
These folks just don't know which conferences to invite her to anymore, what questions to ask her, or how to report on her.
And if we go deeper than that and further back into the story that she and her family tell about her childhood, we can see how a lot of it started with her experience of autistic burnout from school.
Now, full or at least partial disclosure here.
As I mentioned on Saturday, I'm the parent of an autistic nine-year-old, and his story is his to tell someday.
But I just want to say up front that everything that I'll look at today in terms of how Thunberg describes her experience and how her parents describe learning about how to support her lines up with what my partner and I have learned over the past few years.
Now, this doesn't make the analyses I offer objectively true, of course, or the last word in anything.
It gives me a strong bias that probably limits me in a number of ways.
But I'm confident in saying that the connections between both the stresses and the advantages of autism that Thunberg illustrates and theorists like Chapman theorize on in relation to social compliance are a felt reality for countless autistic families.
The experience of having a child say no to the basic logic of your society and then potentially recover because you somehow figure out how to help them create a different way of being in the world, this is a real thing.
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