Elon Musk keeps tweeting the 'R-word.' Disability advocates say he needs to stop.

The right has never gotten over the loss of the N word and they don't want to loose another precious.
- At this point I say we just give them the word. Let them reclaim it, only use the word when referring to Conservatives.
  I feel bad for the disabled people who have to be compared to them for the time being, but eventually we'll come out the other side together.
  
  From Dictionary.com:
  removed
  verb (used with object)
  to make slow; delay the development or progress of (an action, process, etc.); hinder or impede.
  "Hindering or impeding" does sound exactly like the Grand Obstructionist Party.
  
  Just because someone has a mental disability doesn't mean they are Republican. The word r etard should be reserved for Republicans only.
- It’s on its way back. They’ve reverted to “negro” already.

Disability advocates say he needs to stop.
Which is literally why he is just going to keep doing it.
I'm not fucking mincing words when I say these people are god damned children.
Because it's exactly like a child learning a cuss word and being told not to say it. Guess what? They're gonna say it non-stop now.
These people are immature children.
- That's an insult to children.

The motherfucker did Nazi salutes and didn't care. Pretty sure he is not going to care about people complaining that he is saying slurs.

So what’s he doing posting a slur multiple times targeting the disabled community on social media?
If only his other actions could give us some clue.
- Nope. Still a mystery!
- Israeli spent so long pretending the only victims of the Holocaust everyone forgot LGBT and the mentally/physically disabled were among the first once forcibly sterilized and sent to camps.
  So now we get pro Israeli Nazis who still hate LGBT and every other group the Nazis did.

Disability advocates seem unaware of what right-wingers mean when they complain about "free speech". This is it.
- no they know. they're who's been warning everyone else that the right means hate speech when they say free speech. they don't actually mean freedom of dissent, which is what most of us understand it to mean
- “Freedom of speech” is about the governments ability to regulate your speech. Other people have the free speech to tell you to shut the fuck up, or call you out for using slurs, as the disability rights activists are doing.
  No one is wanting the Stazi to show up if you say something shitty, but “r-tarded” is a word with a nasty history behind it. There are so many better ways to insult people than to compare someone or something to developmentally delayed people.
  It’s also extremely concerning when someone who is pretty explicitly pro eugenics is using a word that dehumanizes disabled people, while we just appointed a health guy who wants to make farm camps for people with ASD or ADHD.

Asking the eugenics advocate nazi to use nicer words about disabled people is kind of pointless considering he’d probably kill them if he could.
This should be a condemnation letter, it rubs me the wrong way that this is titled as such a defanged “please stop.”

The dude is in desperate need of being flayed alive

Useless headline. The R-word is apparently "removed".
I spell it out here because this isn't mentioned at all in the article. Figuring out what it was talking about required finding and reading text that was embedded in an image on xcom.
- Yes, it is... stop.
  
  I just Ctrl+f'd the article and can confirm it's not defined. Why do you say it is?
  Edit: woof there's something going on in the replies that I do not want to be part of.
- I can't wait for your treatise on pronouns, Sir Edgealot.
  
  Using the actual word for reporting is not the same as using the word as an insult. Bowdlerizing news doesn't do anything besides making them uncleared.
  
  You're in the wrong here. Reread the message and the tone of the message and then I'd like a 500 word essay on which particular diction in the post makes you think he's an edgelord rather than someone who genuinely doesn't know who would abbreviate something "r-word" as if it's an equivalent moral choice to call a person by that word as it is to call a person by a word that evokes 400 years of triangle trade suffering (or for a subset of the us population, the analogous c-word which many view as evoking 10,000 years of misogynistic behaviors).
  Once that essay is done, I'd like 1000 words on why you think this post makes him anti-trans or, if it's easier, anti-"pronoun" whatever that happens to be a dog whistle for in your head. Feel free to use their comment history for this one if needs be.

He needs to stop, R-words or not.
Besides that, he's a eugenicists, so he wants us "cease to exist" in one way or another.

Isn't he allowed to use this word just as black people have a pass using the N-word?

"This just in: Emlo tweeted 69 times while repeating the r-word 420 times in each one."
He's such an edgelord it makes me sick. 🙃
- Look, I was a teenager in the 90s, and I too probably used "removed," "gay" and plenty of other words in ways that were offensive in 2025 (or even 2010, or 2000). But as we live in the world, most of us, you know... grow.
  While Elon, Trump and all of these other crazy people complain about sensitive liberals, in reality they are the ones feeling triggered by the fabric of reality constantly reminding them that they continue to have the emotional intelligence of a 90s teen (at best). When someone tells them not to say "removed," they say "NO, 90s ME WAS NOT WRONG, YOU'RE WRONG."
  But Elon, if you haven't developed enough to feel superior to your 90s self, to treat your 90s self like a different person you're allowed to disagree with, something is wrong with you. It's all just emotional, infantile contrarianism to avoid admitting that they have no capacity for self-reflection.

Which R word? Republican?
- Damnit, you swore!

Billionaire with a megaphone, and this is the best he can do? Pathetic.
😾😾

Lmao, anyone who thinks Trump would stop using that word is, well, I know what Trump would call them.

Of course. Remember, he is projecting.

He’s self-diagnosing. It’s a cry for help.

As an aside, why does the article avoid actually naming the r-word? Saying the word is not the same thing as using it. It's not like the N word that way. Maybe it's for SEO or something.
- No, there are just a lot of people that literally think it's as bad as the n word. A few comments up someone used the word to help people understand what word the article describes. They got a good 40% downvotes.
  It's exhausting. Internet Karen's exist on both sides of the political isle.
  
  I think this one is generational (for real, not "these kids don't have work ethic"). I don't know anyone in my age group that cares at all. I've only ever heard people a decade younger than me say "r-word" in real life.
- Saying the word is not the same thing as using it. It’s not like the N word that way.
  Explain the logic for not quoting an offensive word?
  Taboos are weird.

It's his word, he is just taking it back to empower himself.

Musk doesn't take orders and he sure as hell doesn't take requests. Knowing that it offends just makes him want to do it more. He loves the attention, it's why he bought Twitter.

They should just send him some human feces topped with lettuce, onions, and tomatoes, in a hamburger bun, in a bag that says “Enjoy your ass burgers, Elon.”

the disabled are not removed just like the gays are not removeds

I wanna bet in a few months it'll be racist slurs too.
- Thats already allowed on Twitter. Though you will get in trouble for the word cis.

It's not my place to tell him how he can use his people's word.

Ok so yeah, fuck him and I hope he crumbles but this is... Not accurate.
He should stop. He in no way needs to. And not in the normal "billionaires break rules and shouldn't" way.
He owns a private company.
My girlfriend can choke me and knee me in the balls in my home just the same. It's my house, dammit, I said she could.
Obligatory fuck Nazis.

It'll be an extremely funny day when one of the racist children convince him to drop a hard R.
Big Balls, please, you have the power to do something great.

- "it's just a word" is such a shallow take. Words carry meaning and weight. Language also evolves and changes; this is why no one speaks Middle English.
  
  I never said they didn't carry meaning. I simply meant they are just words in the sense that they can't actually do anything to you as a person. Just wiggly air or ink on paper.
- That's the good ol' euphemism cycle/treadmill. Linguists have long observed a process of semantic shift, often pejoration, for words of taboo subjects.
  Words idiot, imbecile, moron were technical designations that became offensive yet somehow later softened into acceptable insults.
  Words colored people, negro, black went through the euphemism cycle. At some point black was reclaimed & became acceptable. Now people are afraid to say it again.
  VD became STD and now it's STI. I still don't know what was wrong with STD.
  This phenomenon reflects society's avoidance of uncomfortable ideas by shifting words. The words change, though it's questionable they objectively change society's discomfort toward the subjects. The phenomenon might be reasonably criticized as ineffective & distracting.
  Can you guess what will happen to today's euphemisms?
- I think George Carlin would agree with you, if you've heard of him. He had a thing with words. Elon's a banal idiot, no offence to all the banal people out there, and idiot is no longer derogetory, it's really Idiocracy out there these days.
  
  I miss George Carlin so much. He would have some SPICY takes about what all has been going on lately.
- You can both give someone armor to fend off blows, and also raise people to understand you shouldn't inflict those blows, both help. But calling someone "removed" is not something a good person does.
  Nobody is making the word bad. The word is intrinsically bad because it inflicts unfair and callous pain on others. A person's right to inflict that pain is debatable, but is also immaterial, because what we're saying here is that using those words without regard to the other person and causing that pain recklessly, makes one in some real sense a bad person. They can say the pain inflicted is "not their intention," but that's also immaterial if they are recklessly disregarding that pain. And accountability for being a bad person is just a natural result.
  
  The word is intrinsically bad
  While I agree words can offend, I challenge your understanding of linguistics: no word is intrinsically bad. They're signs & symbols with arbitrary, often conventional meaning.
  Usage & context matter. Take any euphemism & say it in a hateful manner: now it's offensive. Lifewise, take any offensive word & speak of it in an inoffensive manner: not offensive. Language is flexible.
  
  No armor required as no blows are being thrown my friend.
  Not a physical attack. It's literally just a word.