A theme of this blog since its inception has been how narrative framing is used to denounce, derogate, and demean people, or even to damn them. This post attempts to restore human contours to a man who is otherwise only memorialized in hellish caricature.

Fed his name as a search term, Google News returns dozens of results that variously identify Nathan Larson, a man with whom the writer had corresponded by email, as an “ex-con” who “threatened to kill the President,” a “Hitler fan,” “Beelzebub,” a “child abductor,” a “pedophile dad,” and an “extreme misogynist” who “[ran] for Congress from his parents’ house.”

For either the search term Nathan Larson Asperger’s syndrome or Nathan Larson autism spectrum disorder returns from Google News are zero.

While there’s no redeeming the name Nathan Larson, I’m urged on learning that he died in federal custody last year to try to qualify the humanity of a man who lived largely in the realm of words and whom seemingly few ever tried to understand while he was alive.

This picture of Nathan Larson is one he sent to me in 2015 after he had been accused in a restraining order affidavit by a gender-ambiguous, personality-disordered person he had corresponded with online and precipitously married, and who had then left him after 75 days and, from another state, filed a series of accusations against him, something s/he had done against others.

Note the direction of Nathan’s gaze in the image.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often find it difficult to look others in the eyes [ScienceDaily.com].

I have major issues with eye contact. It’s the one thing that still gives me away as an aspie, or at least strikes others as odd [Jesse J., Quora.com].

I watch aspies on you tube and a lot don’t look into the camera [CaptainTrips222, WrongPlanet.net].

Nathan was “on the spectrum.” He was autistic and had the broad, “macrocephalic” brow associated with Asperger’s. One of my best friends is an Aspie. He wasn’t diagnosed until he had white hair. He comically refers to “this Asperger’s thing I’ve got.” I didn’t need a clinical confirmation to recognize that Nathan possessed gifts and deficits similar to my friend’s, but Nathan shared with me that he was formally diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in 2016 in a court-ordered psych evaluation. (Asperger’s syndrome was replaced by ASD as an official diagnosis three years before that.)

Nathan would die in federal detention six years later. I don’t know if he shared his diagnosis with anyone but me or if it was ever used in his defense (though no one who had ever communicated with him at length could pronounce him remotely “neurotypical”).

He should have been in counseling, as the transgender person he called his wife should have been, but I doubt he was. Nathan’s wasn’t a sympathetic case, and he had no money, which I’ve discovered are generally cues to the system to punch the delete button.

Here is another image of Nathan. The woman in the picture was his fiancée. Note again the direction of Nathan’s gaze and then note the color of his fiancée’s skin. She is Filipino.

The picture was taken in 2015 or thereabouts. Nathan spoke positively then of Filipino culture and of the people he hoped to call family. From an email (referring to a different picture): “That’s my fiancee’s cousin Bang-bang (aka Bang2x). Everyone in the Philippines has a cute nickname like that, and the word ‘cousin’ is used loosely to refer to any relative, however distant.” The woman in the photo left Nathan a few months after they married, after which RationalWiki.com describes his dawning fixation with “white supremacy.”

Correspondingly, Nathan became obsessed with anti-feminism (or “neo-masculinism”) after he was rejected by his first spouse. He never claimed he was undeserving of rejection, and I think he would have challenged the notion that his “political views” were inspired by kneejerk reactions to perceived betrayals. I’m convinced otherwise.

“He used to write about Susan B. Anthony, he used to write about these feminist leaders,” Nathan’s sister told an interviewer after his death.

The pattern of rejection and hurt (or indirectly vengeful) obsession by an intelligent man who would never achieve social or emotional maturity isn’t hard to discern. My impression from talking with him was that Nathan wanted a “normal life” but didn’t possess the social sensitivity to achieve it.

There are times when I find the social world of others mystifying. […] It can make me very angry – angry at the misunderstandings, frustrated at the judgments imposed upon me by those misunderstandings, and aggravated at the persistence of those misunderstandings, despite my repeated attempts to make myself understood [Lynne Soraya, “Autistic Aloneness: When Coping Mechanisms Go Bad,” PsychologyToday.com].

Nathan, who described himself as socially inept, said he had been bullied in school from an early age. Depression and suicidal ideation were themes of his life.

He withdrew into a world of language and ideas and had copious social and political fixations including “radical transparency”: If he thought it, he wrote it. RationalWiki.com lists dozens of websites Nathan authored.

Individuals with Asperger’s often develop a fixation for very narrow topics…. They retain vast amounts of information on their subject of interest and can talk about it for hours on end [SpectrumRoadMap.com].

Reviewing some of the emails Nathan sent me over the years, which I could seldom keep up with and stopped monitoring in 2018, I can’t help but conclude he spent the majority of his day online. If he had been denied access to the Internet, I doubt anyone would know his name.

Nathan is universally remembered for having sent an email to the White House in 2008 threatening “the President”—which President that was wasn’t clear. RationalWiki.com absurdly calls it “a death threat against George W. Bush and/or Barack Obama.” Who the President was very evidently wasn’t the point. It was a stunt.

“The idea behind it was to raise public awareness of the anarcho-capitalist belief that overthrow of the state is justified in defense of freedom,” Nathan told me. He felt oppressed by authority, probably based on many run-ins with school and law enforcement officials when he was a boy. He had a facility with language, and I think words provided him with the only sense of personal empowerment he ever knew. Unsurprisingly, he was particularly dedicated to the principle of free speech. “I was impulsively acting in hopes of becoming a lightning rod of controversy,” he said. “But I’d always wanted to try some sort of civil disobedience. It just happened that was the moment when I got fed up and impassioned enough to do it.” Just as likely, I think, is that he was trying to impress a “comrade” he had met online. He said he was given a sentencing break because “the offense involved a single instance evidencing little or no deliberation.”

ASD is often characterized by a lack of impulse control. People on the autism spectrum are sometimes labeled unmanageable or aggressive because of their impulsivity (e.g., they may act on a whim, display behavior characterized by little – or no – forethought/reflection/consideration of the consequences) [AdultAspergersChat.com].

Nathan’s social conscience was idiosyncratic, and he had no sense of social consequence at all. He was clueless: “I hadn’t anticipated that when I ran for office this time, the big issue overshadowing everything would be that I threatened the President back in 2008. Is it really that big a deal? It’s a class D felony, which is basically equivalent to a class 6 felony under Virginia law.”

Nathan, who was very impressionable (something that’s also associated with ASD) was jailed in a federal prison for 14 months. Among his cellmates was a rabbi who had been caught “in a television sting operation…for trying to solicit sex from a 13-year-old boy over the Internet.” I think Nathan had spoken of having earlier pedophilic fantasies, but this may have been a catalyzing encounter.

There’s an eerie correspondence between his cellmate’s capture—

A Maryland rabbi caught in a television sting operation was convicted yesterday of traveling to Herndon for what he thought would be sex with a 13-year-old boy he met over the Internet [WashingtonPost.com].

And his own years later:

A Virginia man who has made several tries for public office and has advocated white supremacy, pedophilia and rape is in police custody for what authorities are calling an “extremely disturbing” kidnapping plot involving a 12-year-old California girl [WashingtonPost.com].

Nathan was a knot of contradictions, which despite his intellectual prowess he would have rationalized into coherency. He is identified with “alt-right” values but married a transgender man and a Filipino woman. RationalWiki.com, for example, notes these facts but invests no effort in trying to make the dots connect. I believe Nathan’s reactionary politics were motivated by personal blows and insufficiencies that he equated with larger-scale injustice, obsessively.

He seemed always to be in search of community. He felt rejected by accepted groups so he perversely turned to ones that inspired loathing.

Nathan lacked the social aptitude to realize an enduring sexual relationship with an adult, and he knew it. I believe the crime and the “passions” for which he has been immortalized in the press instance a developmentally arrested, oversexed man’s horribly distorted attempt to cope.

A 2017 review report[s] that autistic people may experience hypersexual and paraphilic fantasies more frequently than [non-autistic] people [PsychCentral.com].

Nathan was imprisoned in his final days in my home state, but I couldn’t have borne to see him. He was too smart to reason with and too assured that possessing ways to rationalize his thoughts could somehow make them translatable to others.

When I look at the last image of him, gaunt and staring directly at the camera lens, I can’t help but think he felt a certain satisfaction in the knowledge that he was slowly killing himself in front of his government warders.

“When you’re thinking of jumping off a ledge, it’s easy to walk up to the very brink; that last step over the edge is the hardest to make yourself take,” Nathan had told me once.

Nathan succumbed to self-starvation in 2022, perhaps at the end attaining that pride in self-efficacy that had eluded him his whole life.

Copyright © 2023 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*To the best of my knowledge, Nathan had never used violence to coerce sex, and I have a hard time believing he would. His first “wife,” who at the end of her life took a male name, wrote this in one of her online journals (which, like Nathan’s own writings, were voluminous): “And he didn’t! Get physical, I mean. He just got really, really angry whenever I denied him sex. He’d give me the silent treatment or yell or claim I was ‘controlling our sex life’, or pretty much do whatever it took to make me feel like a shitty partner so I’d let him f[—] me.”

**A contributor to a “Talk” page on RationalWiki.com about Nathan poses the question, “Do psychopaths kill themselves?” The answer is that psychopaths may have suicidal histories, but people with Asperger’s syndrome/ASD disproportionately self-report that they do.