Igot into my one and only physical fight when I was in seventh grade. It was right after school let out, the other boy was called Nathan, and moments before I launched at him, he knocked the books out of my brother Casey’s hands and called him “retarded”.
More than 20 years after that scuffle, I still wonder how often Casey, a now 35-year-old autistic man, is called that word. Given the current political landscape, I’m certain he’s going to start hearing it more often.
The R-word is in a new era of prominence in rightwing, chronically online circles – especially on 4chan and X. A favorite of those who currently hold power or stand to gain power under Donald Trump’s second administration, the slur is being used with gleeful relish to belittle and mock ideological enemies.
In the past year, Elon Musk has used the R-word at least 16 times on X. He thought Ben Stiller was one for endorsing Kamala Harris; so was the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz for comparing Tesla to Enron.
Elsewhere, brash, right-leaning personalities such as the political commentator Dave Rubin, and Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan of the podcast Red Scare, frequently throw the word around with provocative irreverence, attempting to discredit those who don’t align with their politics.
Trump reportedly used the word to denigrate both Joe Biden and Harris in private conversations during the 2024 election. When Trump won in November, a “top banker” told Financial Times: “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.” (Interestingly, this banker chose to remain anonymous.)
I’ve spent my life on the lookout for this word: how it shrinks people with intellectual disabilities down to a caricature, incorrectly depicting them as incapable of coherence and, ironically enough, social decorum; how it communicates a lack of respect for their humanity. It’s just something that you do when you have an autistic brother. And while the slur was certainly more prevalent when we were teenagers in the early 2000s, this resurgence is still menacing, not least because I can’t fight Musk after class.
Right now, the right wants a word that stings, and the R-word does the trick, according to Dr Kelly Wright, an experimental sociolinguist, lexicographer and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin. In the 2000s, disability advocates waged a moderately successful social campaign to stop kids (and everyone else) from using the slur. Now, its proponents cling to it because of its taboo nature, lauding it as a victory over censorship by the woke mob (like the insults “libtard”, “fucktard” and “gaytard” before it).“Conservatives are empowered … People struggle with holding back what they actually want to say, so there’s something psychologically ‘freeing’ for this group of empowered people to be able to be like: ‘I’m going to punch up my words with something edgy and get attention,’” said Wright, whose work focuses on self-censorship, or the ways we limit ourselves when speaking.
