The MAGA obsession with the word “retard” used to be a way to “own the libs.” Now it’s much more dangerous.
Cruelty is not the point. Removal is. Eugenics is. Which is why this is much more serious than simply a chance to trigger the libs. And that's why it has got to stop.
Yes, as SNL trumpeted last weekend, “The R-Word is back, baby!” 1
Trivia question: What was the only time in my entire life that I started a fistfight?
Answer: I was 12 and at a summer camp program (which fittingly featured boxing lessons), and a kid started making fun of my brother Mark, calling him a "retard."
A confession: I asked ChatGPT to tell me what the equivalent of a “libtard” would be for conservatives. I am embarrassed that A.I chose to employ a vulgar term for female genitalia to replace the first syllable of “conservative,” but in truth, that usage does approximate the shock value and offensiveness of the R-word. Or at least it should. I’m not embarrassed to say that I am extremely triggered by the ubiquitous use of the term “retard” by conserva…whatevers. I’m not ashamed because it means I have an ounce of respect for the English language, as well as compassion for people who, like my brother, have diminished intellectual capacity but no less of a soul.
I wrote this about Mark, who has Fragile X Syndrome:
Fragile X results from a weakness in the genetic structure of the X chromosome. Females, who are born with two Xs, one from each parent, are often less affected by the syndrome, because their normal X shields them from the fragile one. Most males born with the defective X are not so lucky. Genetic screening now can detect Fragile X with astounding accuracy. I was tested before I was married. I'm clean. Completely, utterly clean. Not even my great-grandchild could inherit the defect from me. It was a fifty-fifty shot, a flip of the coin. I won. Of my mother's two X chromosomes, I got the good one. Mark got the bad one…. In nature's demonic process of selection, Mark was the victim, while I was condemned, in my good fortune, to live out my life knowing it.
Mark has become my mirror image, the X-factor defining who I am and what I could easily have become. We are two sides of the same coin. We share the accident of birth.
See my article about growing up with my brother. Note that back when I wrote it in the 1990s, I spoke freely of “mental retardation” - but would never have called my brother “a ree-tard.” And would never have tolerated someone else doing that. And I won’t now.
Hear that essay narrated by me in this free preview from Mensch-Marks, my collection soon to be released as an audiobook.
Earlier this year, Rolling Stone suggested that the R-Word’s return is a grim sign of our political moment: 2
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.
I get it. It’s triggering to be called intellectually challenged by those who are so challenged themselves that they condemn universities for being bought by Qatari money, when that same money is also being funneled to support Hamas, and that selfsame Qatari moolah is buying both Trump’s plane and Netanyahu’s support! It takes a high degree of cognitive dissonance and face it, a lack of mental acuity, to believe so indiscriminately in the hokum of a criminal / con man on the one hand, and the lies of a man who has put his own political future ahead of his nation’s, on the other. All being marionetted by a nation that has more Israeli, American and Palestinian blood on its hands than any other nation, even those that don’t begin with Q.
Mental retardation, to use an outdated term, has become a convenient way to describe the hypnotic daze that has severed people’s brains from what their eyes are witnessing in plain sight. Unlike those afflicted, I can condemn all Qatari influence peddling, from college Hamas protests to Netanyahu’s Qatargate scandal to the European Parliament’s Qatargate scandal to Air Force One’s golden bidet - which I’m sure will be the best bidet. And with a bathroom that includes a shower, presumably also golden. There is no turbulence in my cerebral cortex, not is there in my conscience. It’s the Qatari-conomy, stupid!
So I get it. There’s a need for some expletive that expresses a sane person’s indignation over such utter ignorance. For some people (though not me), that’s the R-word.
The R-Word and the Autism Registry
But now the conversation about intellectual challenges has gone way beyond simple name calling.
There was the chilling, Hitleresque talk by Trump and RFK Jr recently of an “autism registry.” “Autism destroys families,” Kennedy said at a news conference. “These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
I wonder whether RFK Jr ever wiped his aunt Rosemary’s bottom as I used to do with Mark before he learned how. Rosemary was born just up the street in Brookline from where my brother lives now, but that’s where the similarities end. Mark had no lobotomy. Rosmary was institutionalized - sent away for much of her life, and her father never visited her - her mother only rarely. Mark stayed in the community in a residence my father established, one of the first in Massachusetts, right across the street from our synagogue. Mark has lived there for fifty years, indignity and surrounded by love, as befits one created in God’s image.
Trump’s affinity for eugenics only highlights what already was a disturbing trend. Where “retard” was once simply a dagger to offend libs, now it suggests a lesser life form, a new subhuman group destined for sterilization, euthanasia, or both.
Trump believes “those kinds of people. . . should just die.”
So what is an equally vulgar retort to “libtard” for conservatives? Chat GPT’s insistence on bringing up female anatomy, some of the most offensive language our so-called culture can muster, helped me realize that my gripe is not against all conservatives, but against that subset: people who have no decency and whose purpose in life is simply to spew anger and divide us all.
When you objectify those with disabilities and those from foreign countries, or women, the offensive statement is usually accompanied by a vulgarity. Calling them “vermin” is not vulgar enough, though Trump has used that term for immigrants. But it needs to be more disgusting, more objectifying. Some resort to the easy peasy, all purpose “F’n.”
“They’re f’n vermin!”
Whatever it takes to knock the living image-of-God right out of them.
So that you can achieve the next objective, which is to remove them.
The cruelty is not the point, in the end, despite Adam Serwer’s persuasive case.
Removal is.
Removal from civil society. Removal from America. Removal from life.
What happened to Jews in the Holocaust first happened to people with intellectual challenges. Dr. Edith Sheffer, in her 2018 book Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna exposed the story of Hans Asperger, a pioneer of autism and Asperger syndrome, who played an active role in the Nazi project.
In an interview with the Jewish Heritage Museum, Sheffer states:
The circle of people that were deemed hereditarily ill was a constantly expanding category from schizophrenia to Huntington's to epilepsy - different kinds of disabilities. But also it would then encircle people who had problems with alcohol. In the end, almost half a million people were forcibly sterilized - about 400,000 (taken from transcript)
Sheffer adds that in July 1939 the Nazi regime began its first program of mass murder - this predates the Holocaust. It was the decision to kill children under three who were seeing to be born with defects.
And, unlike other programs of Nazi killing, this was to be legal. They were working on a law, and this was to become a permanent part of the health care system. This expanded then again we're still in 1939 to the killing of adults who were deemed to be disabled. And this was a much larger operation, in contrast to the killing of children.
In the end, a quarter of a million adults were killed, and Sheffer points out that the killing was often indiscriminate. No - what’s that term again?? - “Due Process.”
And of course, they committed no crime.
It was a genocide of the weakest in our society. In language even my friends in the MAGAtocracy can understand, it was the deliberate murder of R-E-T-A-R-D-S.
I’m not saying that Trump and RFK Jr are going to march Americans off to concentration camps.
Oh wait. They are already doing that.
What I’m saying is that the use of vulgarities to describe people as a whole, or parts of their body, is the first necessary step toward their dehumanization, which is the first and necessary step toward their removal: from society, from America or from life itself.
Where “retard” was once simply a dagger to offend libs, now it suggests a lesser life form, a new subhuman group destined for sterilization, euthanasia, or both.
Brene Brown quotes David Smith, the author of Less Than Human, who explains that dehumanization is a response to conflicting motives.
We want to harm a group of people, but it goes against our wiring as members of a social species to actually harm, kill, torture, or degrade other humans. Smith explains that there are very deep and natural inhibitions that prevent us from treating other people like animals, game, or dangerous predators. He writes, “Dehumanization is a way of subverting those inhibitions.
It’s a seemingly harmless way of setting far more destructive forces into motion. Or is it? As Brown writes, “Dehumanization has fueled innumerable acts of violence, human rights violations, war crimes, and genocides. It makes slavery, torture, and human trafficking possible. Dehumanizing others is the process by which we become accepting of violations against human nature, the human spirit, and, for many of us, violations against the central tenets of our faith.”
Removing the removers
Sometimes removal is warranted - when it removes the removers.
Jews have a shortcut to removing inordinately destructive and dehumanizing people. It’s called excommunication (cherem in Hebrew) and it has been used only on rare occasions in Jewish history, and most often mistakenly.3
I once proposed that America’s Jewish leaders excommunicate Bernard Madoff. My suggestion received a lot of play, and even won me the most prestigious award in Jewish journalism.
I wrote at the time:
Rabbis have employed excommunication often over the centuries, particularly in chasing down husbands who refuse to grant religious divorces to their wives; but usually the impact has been localized. In medieval times, it was used as a political weapon against alleged heretics, like Spinoza and some Karaites. In our time this tool has lost its clout, simply because the Jewish community lacks unity, and because rabbinic sanction has little impact outside the ultra-Orthodox world.
But Madoff’s crimes cut across the Jewish spectrum - like a hatchet, not a scalpel. Hadassah reportedly lost $90 million; the Robert E. Lappin Foundation of Boston, which sent twenty of my community’s teens to Israel for free two years ago, was forced to shut down. Imagine if all the organizations represented by the Council of Presidents were to come together and say, flat out, that Madoff has done irreparable harm to Jews and Judaism and that he is not welcome in any synagogue, JCC or Federation event anywhere. No rabbi will marry him or bury him. No organization will make excuses for him. He is to be cut off. Period.
I stood by the need to make a clear statement dissociating Madoff from the Jewish community at that time. We needed to cleanse ourselves from the Madoff stench.
To be clear, I do not recommend excommunication for anyone now. But if I were to recommend it, it would be for those who spend every waking hour trying to dehumanize others.
For a religion that preaches tolerance, and it does, Judaism has long been preoccupied with how to deal with outcasts. It needs to be done with great care - and the ultimate step, the “nuclear option,” taken only in a situation where it is really warranted.
So no Jews are on my list now, buuuutttt, I can think of a couple of nominees for a hypothetical future cherem panel:
Stephen Miller, with his documented ties to white nationalists and advocacy of policies so racist and xenophobic that his family disavowed him and his rabbi refused to vote in his favor. “I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country,” wrote his uncle.
Betzalel Smotrich, the right-wing extremist who now heads Israel’s security services. On what planet is this headline from Times of Israel not - just by itself - worthy of excommunication?
The article states that Smotrich did not elaborate on how confining all of Gaza’s war-battered population into a narrow strip without the ability to leave would be a “humanitarian act,” but he added: “They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”
Last August, Smotrich said it might be ‘justified and moral’ to cause 2 million Gazans to die of hunger, but the world won’t let us.” To which Amy Spitalnick, leader of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and one of the few current American Jewish leaders with more than an ounce of moral courage, replied on X:
The rhetoric used against Palestinians by Smotrich and others has, unfortunately, been brought as evidence against Israel in international court cases. As prominent Israeli lawyer Michael Sfard told the AP, “Words lead to deeds. Words that normalize or legitimize serious crimes against civilians create the social, political and moral basis for other people to do things like that.” Hamas of course is guilty of much worse, and their rhetoric is filled with even worse dehumanization. Many can play that game.
Trump plays it “better” than anyone. Feast yourselves on this collection of over a hundred Trump nicknames designed to humiliate his opponents and soften them up for further abuse. To restate the obvious: It’s not funny. For a guy who wants English to be the designated language of the US, he’s doing a good job of laying waste to that language.
No one’s going to be kicked out of the Jewish people for comparing the enemy to animals and no one will be forced to self-deport for comparing immigrants to vermin.
But we know now just how dangerous dehumanizing words can be.
Which is why I hope people will think twice before using the R-word.
But if you plan on humiliating my brother, I’d bring some ice packs along.
Just in case.
See Why Are People Using the R-Word Again? (Special Olympics) and also The 'R-word,' embraced by Joe Rogan and Elon Musk, inches back into the mainstream (NBC)
Tesla CEO Elon Musk now frequently uses the word on X to disparage everyone from a Danish astronaut to Ben Stiller. In March, Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, used it in questioning the mental capacity of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s twins, only to later issue an apology. The FX show “English Teacher” included a bit about how “the kids are not into being woke” and they’re “saying the ‘R-word’ again.” And a recent Netflix comedy special invoked the word repeatedly.
Strangely, the term “retarded” became a subject of public consternation when Rahm Emanuel used that term to describe Sarah Palin’s son. It's not often that I find myself agreeing with Sarah Palin, especially since one who uses inflammatory language in saying that her opponent is "palling with terrorists" is hardly one to cast stones at name callers.
But "retarded" ceased being acceptable a long time ago and I'm glad Emanuel saw the error of his ways. See also this article on the use of the R word.
Some resources on Jewish excommunication:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/Excommunication.html
The Wikipedia entry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherem) lists 24 offenses mentioned in the Talmud that, in theory, were punishable by a form of niddui or temporary excommunication. Maimonides (as well as later authorities) enumerates them.
The classic Jewish Encyclopedia, over a century old and now entirely online, details especially the biblical background. And then, at http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=1477&letter=A and http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=544&letter=E it surveys the medieval use of cherem.
Here is an excerpt:
It may be concluded, therefore, that the rabbinical Anathema, in its developments, was designed to conserve the morality of the community. In the hands of the teachers of the Law it was applied, with scrupulous care, to protect the community against offenders. It was not hastily pronounced. The transgressor was repeatedly warned to mend his ways, to repent, or to make restitution. It was only after every mode of remonstrance had been exhausted, and the offender's pertinacity had become evident, that the corrective powers of the ḥerem were invoked. Three successive times—on Monday, on Thursday, and on the following Monday—the culprit was publicly exhorted. Only when his obduracy continued was the ban pronounced, in the offender's presence, with the formula: "N. N. is excommunicated," or, in his absence, in the words: "Let N. N. be excommunicated" (Maimonides, "Yad ha-Ḥazaḳah; Hilkot Talmud Torah," vii.), without any statement of the reasons for which the Anathema was pronounced. In extreme cases, however, the reasons were publicly given; and then the ban was preceded by blowing the shofar. The ban could be removed by a rabbi or a college of three laymen (Maimonides, ib.).
See http://www.fact-archive.com/encyclopedia/Mitnagdim for a fascinating exploration of how the early Hasidim were banned by the contemporary rabbinic authorities (called the Mitnagdim). When you think about it, the “who's who” of the excommunicated (Mordechai Kaplan, Maimonides, Spinoza, the Baal Shem Tov) would comprise an all-time lineup in the Jewish Hall of Fame. I'm far from being in their league, but I'm sure there are rabbis out there who have banned me a few times over, along with the rest of my Conservative colleagues.
