Beyond the False Choice
Why survival games, not ideology, are the real battle shaping politics—and the perception of autism.
There’s a story America likes to tell itself.
That politics is a battleground between ideals and material interests.
Between dreamers who envision better worlds and realists who accept the world as it is.
It’s a comforting story.
And like most comforting stories, it conceals more than it reveals.
Because when you look closer, you see the real game:
Idealism has been hollowed into branding.
Materialism has been reduced to transaction.
Neither offers real transformation.
Both chase survival, dressed in different costumes.
We’re not seeing a war between vision and pragmatism.
We’re seeing a system built on performative survival—and the few forces still stubborn enough to demand authentic structure.
Authentic structure isn’t an aesthetic.
It’s the slow, difficult work of building systems that actually change how people live.
It looks like grassroots movements reshaping local governance when national politics stalls.
It looks like peer-led support networks emerging where institutional care fails.
It looks like education rebuilt around learners instead of forcing learners to adapt to rigid systems.
Real structure threatens performance because it demands depth where performance demands optics.
And that’s much harder to sell.
You can see the preference for performance everywhere.
When candidates promise dignity but legislate cruelty.
When corporations paint themselves in rainbow logos while funding politicians who erase civil rights.
When universities pledge allegiance to inclusion but reward only compliance.
Let’s be clear: Donald Trump didn’t corrupt this system.
He exposed the system—and then took advantage of it.
He optimized pure materialism—loyalty, wealth, dominance—and wrapped it in pure idealism—nostalgia, rebirth, mythic belonging.
He revealed how survival games reward those willing to treat morality as costume change.
The consequences don’t stay confined to politics.
They shape how we see people—how we define worth, how we decide who belongs.
And yes, how the public narrative and real world perception of autism continues to evolve.
We’re celebrated in slogans.
“Different, not less.”
“Neurodiversity is beautiful.”
Meanwhile, behaviorist therapies still dominate funding pipelines.
School systems still prioritize compliance over cognitive authenticity.
Public narratives still divide us into “high functioning” enough to tolerate and “low functioning” enough to pity.
Idealism sells inclusion.
Materialism sells management.
Neither builds belonging.
Real autistic experience resists containment.
It’s the autistic woman whose focused brilliance is overlooked because she struggles with rapid task switching.
The autistic child whose love of repetition and sensory richness is pathologized instead of nurtured.
The everyday negotiation of a world not built for your rhythms.
We’re not anomalies.
We are realities this system was never designed to hold.
And when performance begins to lose its grip, it turns more dangerous.
As most of us are now well aware, RFK Jr. has proposed a national autism registry—cataloging autistic lives under the banner of “help.”
It’s a chilling echo.
Throughout history, marginalized groups have been tracked, always in the name of understanding, always ending in control.
The fear isn’t simply being counted.
It’s being defined.
It’s being managed.
It’s being contained and controlled.
It is the survival game reaching its logical conclusion:
Reducing existence to data points in order to manage difference.
So, here’s what we do:
We flood the world.
Not with slogans or branding.
With the full, unvarnished weight of autistic reality.
We write without permission.
We create art that refuses compression.
We build networks that value presence over performance.
We call out distortions before they harden into systems.
We lift each other across margins—not as charity, but as shared rebellion.
We are not here to be tolerated.
We are here to remake what tolerance was never enough to sustain.
It’s time to stop asking for a seat at the table.
It’s time to build a world that cannot be sustained by survival games.
A world whose foundations demand honesty, demand transformation, demand depth—because nothing shallow will hold.
And if they cannot become part of that, they will not belong to what comes next.
I won’t lie: this is a frightening time.
For us. For the world. In more ways than one.
I won’t pretend to have the answer.
The best I can offer is my voice—and my refusal to be silenced.
I know some of you already have been.
Some of you are being silenced right now.
Some of you have lost so much you have nothing left to give—and that survival, that endurance, is enough.
I’m not speaking to demand anything from you.
I’m speaking to those who still have some energy to give, some fight left in them—not just for themselves, but for all of us.
I’m saying:
I’m here. In limited capacity, dealing with my own shit.
But here.
Trying to do this better.
Trying to be louder.
Trying not to let them contain us, control us, erase us.
And if you can, if you want to—you’re here too. ∞