Here's an idea: Let's NOT bring back racist, transphobic and ableist slurs!
On a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe Rogan, an obscenely wealthy, powerful 57-year-old with over 19 million subscribers, gushed, “The word ‘r----ded’ is back, and it’s one of the great culture victories that I think is spurred on, probably, by podcasts.”
Rogan and his fellow podcasting culture warriors couldn’t claim total credit for what he sees, unironically, as a great cultural victory. Last year, he enthused that the word was “coming back strong” among high school students who presumably have the same maturity and cultural sensitivity as fifty-something podcasters.
Rogan isn’t the only man-baby jizzing himself with excitement at getting to use a hateful slur that is growing less verboeten by the day.
As the autistic father of special needs sons, I have a special hatred for the word and the people who use it. Elon Musk is also autistic. He knows as well as anyone that the ableist slur is used to denigrate people on the spectrum, yet he cannot keep himself from using it as often and as exuberantly as possible. He doesn’t just feel entitled to use the word; he fucking loves it. It’s become a big part of his brand.
Musk is particularly enamored of a Twitter account with just under 750,000 followers called @IfindRetards. The account is rumored to be one of Musk’s alternate accounts. Regardless, he retweets it regularly.
He’s not alone. In his horrifyingly successful bid to become the world’s worst, most hateful man (no small feat in a world with Elon Musk and Donald Trump), Kanye West applied it to Jay-Z and Beyonce’s children.
When Donald Trump was re-elected in 2024 in what he saw as an unprecedented landslide, but was actually fairly close, it was seen as a victory for his movement and ideas.
Trump doesn’t have ideas. He has hatred. He has rage. He has grievances he will never stop airing. Like Rogan, Trump’s cultists see bringing back slurs as one of the great cultural victories of the Trump era.
Trump ran and won on an anti-woke, anti-DEI, anti-undocumented immigrant, and anti-trans platform.
The essence of Woke, at least in its original incarnation, was rooted in cultural sensitivity and language. It is a movement dedicated to the proposition that words have power and that we should consequently be careful and sensitive in how we use them.
The opposite of woke, consequently, involves using words specifically because they are insensitive, cruel, and rooted in a desire to shock and offend for the sake of shocking and offending.
Looking back, it is adorable and sad that people thought that Tony Hinchcliffe, a Joe Rogan-approved roast comedian making a crass joke about Puerto Rico being a floating island of garbage at a Trump rally, would have a sizable impact on the election, or at least hurt Trump with Hispanic voters.
That did not happen. Trump won, in part because he did better with the black and Hispanic males who are often the target of his virulent racism. Instead of getting cancelled, Hinchcliffe is more popular than ever.
In this toxic new world, saying things that would have ended your career three years ago gets you lionized as a fearless free speech martyr.
As recently as four years ago, Nancy Mace pretended to be pro-LGBTQ because it benefited her politically not to be seen as a bigot or a hatemonger.
Being virulently anti-trans now benefits Mace. She’s ridden an awful wave of transphobia that has made her a household name, and the dead-eyed face of trans hatred.
Mace used a transphobic slur in a professional context. When called on it, she doubled down and screeched it repeatedly, with no negative consequences whatsoever.
In the saddest and most revealing development of the anti-woke movement, Shiloh Hendrix, a white woman, recently went viral for calling an autistic Black five-year-old a racial slur after she found him rifling through her diaper bag.
As the father of a six-year-old autistic child, I can say from experience that the little boy wasn’t stealing from the woman; he probably does not grasp the concept of personal property.
In a horrifying sign of what our country is coming to, Shiloh has received well over half a million dollars from people who want to support calling autistic racial slurs. They see her as a martyr in our country’s culture wars.
The world has turned upside down. Vicious cruelty toward a special needs child was somehow seen as a blow against the evil forces of “Woke” and particularly white guilt.
White folks who have been chomping at the bit to use the N word without consequences or shame see her as the anti-woke free speech warrior who righteously stabbed a dagger in the heart of White Guilt by, again, repeatedly calling a five-year-old autistic boy a slur.
I made the mistake of reading the comments on articles about the kerfluffle. I was mortified by how many people were on the woman’s side. The idea that a racist white woman would receive a massive windfall specifically because she was racist and hateful, rather than despite her bigotry, is tremendously empowering and validating for people dying to use racial slurs without consequences.
That is the awful promise of Trump 2.0. The MAGA mob thinks, not incorrectly, that they have permission to use horrible, hateful words that have been used against the powerless and vulnerable, as well as freedom from consequences.
It’s worse than that. People like Rogan, Mace, Musk, and Shiloh Hendrix all actively benefit from their public, performative nastiness.
They think they’re winning. They are in many ways, but that does not mean we can stop fighting. The stakes are too high. This is not about language or politics; it’s about humanity, morality, and decency, three qualities that may not be in favor in the Trump administration but that we should fight for with the same intensity that the cruelty brigade fights to make the world an uglier, meaner place.
You can pre-order The Fractured Mirror here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
Did you enjoy this article? Then consider becoming a patron here.