In December, a woman posted a photograph on social media of a purple hat she had knitted, while a black-and-white dog lounged on the carpet a few feet away. The cozy scene was accompanied by a single sentence: "This hat is an hour behind schedule thanks to influencer retards."
The proud knitter, Harmeet K. Dhillon, is also the assistant attorney general overseeing the United States' Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Her purview includes protecting the rights of people with intellectual disabilities by ensuring compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act.
For decades now, the "R-word" has been regarded as a slur against people with intellectual disabilities – a word to be avoided. Yet it has had a striking resurgence, in part because people in high-profile positions of power and influence have chosen to resurrect it, often with an air of defiance.
In the past three months, American musician Kid Rock donned a face mask while appearing on a programme streaming on Fox Nation and said he was dressing up as a "retard" for Halloween.
Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld coupled the word with a schoolyard taunt to mock mayors who oppose US President Donald Trump, and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk used it on his social media platform to insult a critic.
The use of a hurtful word still considered taboo is emblematic of the provocative language that courses through the manosphere sector of social media these days – almost gleefully transgressive language often adopted in messaging from the White House.
Diplomacy is out and mockery is in, whether by displaying plaques that insult former presidents, depicting Trump spraying excrement on protesters from a military jet – or using the "R-word" to question the intelligence of a political opponent, as Trump did in a Truth Social post on Thanksgiving Day, in which he called Minnesota's Democratic governor, Tim Walz, "seriously retarded."
When asked later whether he stood by that statement, Trump said, "Absolutely," because he thought there was something wrong with the governor. For her part, Dhillon did not answer questions about her use of the word.
The word's proliferation has alarmed many advocates and people with disabilities who thought it had long since been removed from circulation.
"The drumbeat and use of this word has been like nothing I've seen in a very long time," said Katy Neas, chief executive officer of the Arc of the United States, a disability rights organisation. She called its use by the Justice Department's civil rights chief "simply mind-blowing."
More than a word
The word's return raises an obvious question: Why?
Why decide to resurrect a term well known to offend a community that has been historically marginalised, so much so that its usage prompted public awareness campaigns and wholesale changes to nomenclature?
"I think there's a perception of power, of 'I am powerful, therefore I can use this language; I am powerful, and therefore I can diminish others,'" Neas said. She added: "It's language used by bullies to bully."
To Amy Hewitt, director of the Institute on Community Integration at the University of Minnesota, the word's return reflects a divisiveness defining the United States of 2026, in which a sizable part of the population believes that "many people are a drain on our society, on our progress, on what makes us great."
"It's not just about race and ethnicity, it's also about disability," she said. "This is why the R-word is completely acceptable to them. It's 'us versus them.'"
The researchers, Bond Benton, a communications professor, and Daniela Peterka-Benton, a justice studies professor, said the word's use rose after Musk bought the platform in late 2022, and then spiked when he included it in an X post in January 2025.
But this Musk-induced growth was a blip when compared with what followed in the week after Trump's disparagement of Walz in late November. Use of the word increased by more than 200%, with more than 1.1 mil posts on X employing the word. Most of them, the study's authors noted, conveyed enthusiastic endorsement of the term's apparent restoration.
"Musk influences a lot of people, especially in the manosphere, so we had a hunch that the platform was going to have more use of the term," Benton said. "Then when Trump used it, it was like a nuclear bomb."
The path forwardDefenders of the word's use say that it is intended in part to clap back at political correctness, "wokeness" and perceived infringements of the right to free speech.
"There are so many words in the English language that have been driven out of use because we've been told that they're politically incorrect," Mark Meckler, a right-wing activist and self-described "free speech warrior," said in his podcast last month. "Well, that's just cultural Marxism."
"So this has now come back into common use, and I'm actually glad it has, because it just shows we've been recapturing language from the woke left," said Meckler, who, in adding that he did not mean to insult "mentally handicapped" people, used another term that disability advocates say is outdated.
Those who defend the word's use often contend that it is meant as a synonym for "stupid" or "slow," and not as a reference to people with intellectual disabilities."It's not really like anybody wants to make fun of people who are slow, when it comes to brain development," conservative commentator Megyn Kelly said on her podcast last month. "It's that they're sick and tired of being told what they can and cannot say."No one's trying to actually say something negative about that community," Kelly added. "They’re trying to say something about the person they're targeting – that they're kind of slow."
But many people with intellectual disabilities and their advocates consider this distinction to be disingenuous, if not a complete cop-out. The word, they say, continues to wound.
Perhaps the most significant rejection of the term came in 2010, when Obama signed "Rosa's Law" – named after a young girl with Down syndrome – replacing "mental retardation" with "intellectual disability" in federal legislation and policies.
Over the next decade, the sustained efforts to remove the word from the vocabulary seemed to succeed, with students and teachers reporting a marked decline in its use. By 2019, the Special Olympics considered the matter settled, and began shifting the focus of its public awareness campaign to a larger message of inclusivity.
"I really felt like we had made so much progress," said Andrea Cahn, vice president of Unified Champion Schools, the Special Olympics umbrella program that oversaw the campaign. "The use of the word really seemed to have been diminished."
Then it came back.
Nicole LeBlanc, 40, of Silver Spring, Maryland, an advocate who has autism and an intellectual disability, said she had noticed how the word had returned as a common, everyday insult. Hearing it, she said, she feels the sting of stigma – even when it isn't directed at her or another person with a disability.
"It makes me want to run, hide and curl up into a ball," she said. – ©2026 The New York Times
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
Mind your language
Helena Donato-Sapp, a high school junior in Long Beach in California was shocked when she heard a classmate use the R-word, a term she associates with shame. Photo: The New York Times/Jessica Pons
When LeBlanc hears the R-word, she feels the sting of stigma - even when it isn’t directed at her or another person with a disability. Photo: The New York Times/KT Kanazawich
Jill Egle (center), a disability advocate who was a driving force in having the word eliminated at the state level in Virginia, with her parents, Jolyn and Richard. Photo: The New York Times/Kathleen Flynn
