They’ve had a history of emphasizing the perspectives of parents while downplaying the perspectives of autistic people, especially autistic adults. They’re also known to have taken a disease approach to the spectrum, their goals being to minimize symptoms (autistic behavior) by teaching aspie children how to pass as neurotypical and eventually to eradicate autism like the condition is cancer or AIDS. They’ve promoted the use of the puzzle-piece iconography (again, privileging the parents’ perspective of solving the riddle of communicating with their neurodivergent children), including the variation of a jigsaw pattern on a ribbon (which again leans into the “autism is a disease like AIDS or cancer” approach to autism “advocacy”). It’s comparable to pathologizing transness or taking a truscum approach of curing gender dysphoria while ignoring other forms of transness, or pathologizing homosexuality as a paraphilia.

not OP but gonna jump in cuz i hate them

Theyr’e essentially an NGO grift for people who want to control autistic ppl. no autistic people on their board and spends most of their money and time on sketch shit like being anti-vax or promoting shock therapy for autistic people.

https://autisticadvocacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/AutismSpeaksFlyer2020.pdf

https://autisticempath.com/whats-wrong-with-autism-speaks/

Meanwhile there’s a somewhat better org, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, which instead emphasizes the voices and perspectives of autistic people and is more in line with an LGBTQ+ sort of approach to serving the needs of autistic people. They prefer the generally better rainbow iconography.

Assuming either of these men is autistic (not out of the question; a surprising amount of young lumpen online chuds call themselves “autists” as a result of their hyperfixations), they might be in a self-hating “sunken place” position where they take the propaganda of orgs like Autism Speaks as more or less correct (or think because they’re “high-functioning” they’re “one of the good ones”) and are therefore more likely to tolerate the soft eugenics of other groups considered “deviant” for the good of society.

People used to compare me to him when I was a math nerd in undergrad and it was frustrating. Typically including the sort of people my undergrad friends (who were all also varying degrees of math nerd at the time but also counterintuitively much cooler than I was and definitely fucked) and I would interact with tutoring math.