The R-Word’s Comeback Is a Grim sign of Our Political Moment
As someone who grew up in the U.s. in the 1990s, I am all too familiar with a culture in which anything you and your friends disapprove of is “retarded,” and anybody you might care to insult is a “retard.” And, like others my age who grew out of such harmful language not long after graduating from middle school, I have been dismayed to see it flood into mainstream adult discourse over the past few years, abetted by social media and its laziest, most callous shitposters.
You have Anna Khachiyan of the edgelord podcast Red scare, which helped repopularize these terms, using that word to describe progressives in the wake of the 2024 election; Elon Musk replying “F u retard” to a Finnish doctoral student on his platform X (formerly Twitter) who accurately described him as a historically dangerous purveyor of disinformation; and countless users across alt-tech sites including Kick, Rumble, Gab, and Truth social who have inserted the word in their account handle. TikTok blocks you from searching the slur, noting that it “may be associated with hateful behavior” — a change implemented after Mashable contacted them about the use of the word on the app — but it’s all over Facebook and Reddit. Disability advocates have been sounding the alarm for months as the word has once more became entrenched as a commonplace eptithet, despite their long and tireless campaign to protect the intellectually disabled from pejorative abuse.
Is there a point anymore in explaining what makes the r-word offensive? Everybody knows why it’s ugly and vicious. Today’s trolls use it because it crosses a contested boundary, as a deliberate (if uninspired) provocation. The same way reactionaries misgender and deadname transgender individuals in hopes of triggering them, the r-word has lately served as an anti-virtue signal, affirmation that the speaker is not bound by the standards of “wokeness,” which of course is the updated idiom for that older conservative bugbear, “political correctness.” Mocking preferred pronouns and putting down a person who disagrees with you as a “retard” are two functions of the same ideological reflex system.
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Much continues to be written about how the harsh vulgarity of President-elect Donald Trump has coarsened the national conversation since he launched his 2016 campaign. Critics of this coverage are correct when they note that the recklessly destructive way Trump wields power is more important than his violations of state decorum, those ill-mannered outbursts that leave longtime Beltway observers gasping about the dignity of the office and so forth. Yet the invective Trump pours out in public statements encodes, quite clearly, his atrocious agenda: His open racism toward migrants advertises a dystopian border policy, and his misogyny is a not-so-tacit endorsement of laws that choke off women’s access to life-saving reproductive care.
Where the r-slur is concerned, one recalls Trump’s grotesque imitation in 2015 of New York Times reporter serge Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, a congenital joint condition. Trump flailed his arms at awkward angles and pulled a distended face in this little performance, disqualifying for any another era — indeed, the following April, likely voters polled on his controversies judged it his worst offense to date. Now it is a distant memory, even though this mockery of Kovaleski’s ailment prefigured his attempts to deprive millions of Americans of medical insurance by repealing the Affordable Care Act.
We have since witnessed that strain of cruelty again and again, with Trump and the MAGA movement indulging their fascistic impulse to dehumanize their opponents in Washington, members of the press, and voters aligned against the authoritarian proposals of Project 2025. When culture warriors throw around the r-word online, it’s a reminder that they’re not interested in civic debate, and never were — they imply not only that leftists and liberals are wrong, but that these groups are not entitled to an opinion, and, moreover, lack the means to form a coherent idea in the first place. The American right objects to Black mayors or female CEOs as mere “DEI hires” without the qualifications to occupy those roles, and smears detractors as the unproductive refuse of a supposedly meritocratic society.
It’s no coincidence that Musk and his tech-bro cult are meanwhile fixated on IQ scores, a highly suspect metric of intelligence, when peddling the pseudoscience of their biological superiority. Eugenics have roared back into fashion among the silicon Valley elite, prompting ever wilder justifications for the belief that whites of European descent possess some evolutionary advantage, and inevitably leading to the dark question of whether certain demographics shouldn’t reproduce. (Whereas the pro-natalist Musk is reportedly offering his sperm to women in order to spread his precious DNA far and wide, his father, Errol Musk, has outright suggested that having babies should be like breeding horses.)
Children shouting “retard” at recess can easily be made to understand how it isolates and stigmatizes their developmentally disabled peers. The same ought to go for those of us already old enough to know better. As a redditor recently wrote in a thread on the topic: “I used to work as a job developer for people with developmental disabilities. Every once in a while in an overheard conversation or on the radio/TV, someone would jokingly call their friend or co-worker ‘retarded.’ My clients would never get mad or make a big deal out of it, they would just say something like ‘oh’ to themselves and get real quiet and not really interact with anyone for the rest of the day.” The word, “even if it’s not in reference to them,” this user explained, “shuts them down and reminds them they aren’t who they wish to be.”
Yet the increasingly normalized and casual use of the slur in the digital public square is so far removed from this framework of basic empathy, and from the euphemistic origins of the expression — a clinical term twisted for the purposes of disparagement — that the appeal to decency doesn’t apply. X’s own policy against hateful conduct forbids attacks on the basis of disability, and if you pressed Musk on his violations of that rule, he’d probably demand that his targets produce documentation of their cognitive impairment to prove the personal injury. It’s nothing but a recursive semantic game to this crowd, pressing the big red button for a totally predictable reaction. “I realized it was retarded of me to say retard,” Musk mused last month, when his lackeys were commending his latest post using the word.
Nobody else reads these as the quips of an enlightened futurist. Like Trump’s repetitive attacks on favorite scapegoats, they are verbal spam, designating specific targets as undeserving of safety, self-fulfillment, or a say in the direction society is taking. It’s almost fortunate that their naked contempt exposes their goal of disenfranchisement. When battling that tide, though, it will be crucial to hold on to language that correctly diagnoses the moment and its villains — not the kind that tramples the innocent.