<
https://www.notus.org/perspectives/why-the-r-word-is-the-defining-slur-of-the-trump-era>
"Last Thanksgiving, while the rest of us were trying not to start a fight at
the dinner table, President Trump started one on the internet. He took to Truth
Social to call Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz “seriously retarded.” When a reporter
later pointed out that many people consider the term a slur, Trump doubled
down. “Yeah,” he said. “I think there’s something wrong with him.”
Soon, use of the R-word on X had tripled, according to research by two
professors at Montclair State University. This is part of a pattern, study
co-author Bond Benton told me. “The use of slurs in general is up,” he
explained. “But nothing comes near the numbers we’re seeing on the R-word.”
The upswing actually kicked off 10 months before Trump’s Thanksgiving rant,
when his frenemy Elon Musk responded to a critic on X by deploying the slur.
That also caused its use on the platform to triple, according to an earlier
report by Benton and his colleagues.
Musk’s embrace of the term struck me as particularly foreboding, because he has
publicly described himself as having Asperger’s — a now-retired autism
diagnosis that specifically excluded people with intellectual disability. His
role in the R-word’s revival reads to me like a man trying to prove he’s the
right kind of neurodivergent. The genius kind. The
productive kind.
The resurgence of the R-word, I have come to believe, is fueled by a
foundational American contradiction. We insist that every human life has equal
worth. Then, when deciding who deserves the government’s help, we make clear
that a person’s worth is something you earn. The intellectually disabled — many
of whom, through no fault of their own, can’t support themselves — force us to
confront that contradiction."
Via Joyce Donahue.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
