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Discovering the Special Needs Parent-MAGA Connection
Why didn’t I connect the dots earlier?
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Recently, I was mindlessly scrolling TikTok when a particular familiar creator appeared on my For You Page. Over the course of the past year, I had endured several unpleasant interactions with her, none of which, explicitly involved mainstream US partisan politics. The first time I encountered her profile, I immediately clocked her as an Autism Mom™ posting the usual associated fare. Her offspring got zero privacy. She relentlessly dehumanized him, while downplaying his abilities, exaggerating how things like stimming are “bad”, and sporting a bit of a martyr complex. She seemed endlessly controlling over her spawn’s tiniest deviations from established social norms. Until a few weeks ago, the comments were pretty predictable and entirely unnoteworthy for the situation.
People largely either told her how “good” and “brave” of a mom she was or dared to disagree and got dogpiled about being “too high-functioning” to have a real opinion or fake-claimed. Her and I had butted heads in the past about topics like alternatives to guardianship and meeting sensory needs.
