“Anti-vaxxer,” “anti-intellectual,” “backward,” “Bible-thumper,” “bigot,” “brownshirt,” “caveman,” “chauvinist,” “Christian nationalist,” “cracker,” “cretin,” “cruel,” “deplorable,” “extremist,” “fascist,” “flat-earther,” “garbage,” “gun-nut,” “heartless,” “hick,” “hillbilly,” “homophobe,” “idiot,” “ignoramus,” “Islamophobe,” “imbecile,” “low-information voter,” “MAGAt,” “moron,” “mouth-breather,” “Nazi,” “neo-Nazi,” “Neanderthal,” “racist,” “reactionary,” “redneck,” “regressive,” “trailer-trash,” “transphobe,” “uneducated,” “white supremacist,” “yokel,” and “xenophobe.”
I’m sure I’ve left out many others. These are smears routinely hurled at conservatives. As a free-speech advocate, I have no objection to people using any of these words; I use plenty of them myself. My point in listing them is simple: there is no consequence for doing so. I cannot think of a single smear routinely directed at conservatives that has been euphemized into the childish “[capital letter]-word” construction.
I would, however, get in trouble for using words that do receive that treatment. Take one example: “retard.” This word has become somewhat safe to say now. Still, I can’t count how many times I’ve seen the sanctimonious “R-word” formulation, accompanied by ritual condemnation of anyone who refuses to adopt the approved progressive kindergarten locution.
Yet, as I’ve pointed out before, “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “moron” were once formal medical classifications in psychology and psychiatry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They described levels of intellectual functioning and adaptive ability—i.e., degrees of what was then clinically termed mental retardation: an “idiot” had the most severe impairment—the lowest level of intellectual functioning; an “imbecile” had moderate impairment; a “moron” had mild impairment.
These terms were gradually abandoned between the 1950s and 1970s precisely because they had become common insults (thanks in part to the Three Stooges and Warner Brothers). They were linguistically and semantically bleached through repeated pejorative use—a process known as the euphemism treadmill (or the language cycle of harm). When a word is heard often enough as an insult, it eventually feels ordinary.
Sometimes a bad word is even reclaimed and repurposed. Calling someone “queer,” for instance, once felt visceral. Today, it’s an affirmative identity and the name of an entire academic discipline, complete with departments and degree programs in “Queer Studies.”
All of this illustrates a larger truth: which words we’re allowed to say—and who is allowed to say them—are windows into power. This isn’t only (or even primarily) about formal punishment through laws or institutional policy. Mostly, it operates through subtler, informal social controls. One lowers one’s voice when uttering a forbidden word because one fears what will happen if one doesn’t: being labeled, harassed, ostracized, or even subjected to violence.
Because progressivism is the dominant worldview in virtually all sense-making institutions—corporate HR, academia, entertainment, media, tech—no progressive will face formal or informal consequences for deploying any of the slurs I listed against conservatives (or, for that matter, against liberals). That fact tells us who actually holds power over acceptable speech. Conservatives—and even many liberals—appear to have almost none. In the spring of 2024, students at the institution where I teach drew up a petition to get me fired for, among other things, using a racial slur, even though I was not using the word in a derogatory manner. Yet they smeared me as a “racist” and “transphobe.” Nobody defended me against these smears. I don’t care that they didn’t; it proves my point.
The good news, as I argued in the essay I published on my platform Saturday, is that words only have the power we collectively grant them. If we refuse to be afraid of them and use them as we see fit, the speech police may eventually grow tired of trying to punish us. Perhaps their authoritarian and illiberal actions will delegitimize their speech codes and the practice of thought control. At the very least, over time, frequent use will once semantically bleach the offending terms, stripping them of their sting—just as happened with “idiot,” “imbecile,” “moron,” and, in a different way, “queer.”
And, now, “retard.”
freedom and reason 