Yesterday, the New York Times published an article lamenting the return of “the R-word”. In contrast, last year podcast host Joe Rogan said the return of “retarded” to the everyday lexicon represented one of the greatest victories of the culture war. He is hardly alone: a banker last year confessed to the Financial Times that he was relieved he could finally say words like “pussy” and “retard” again.

The era of wokeness — now almost entirely in the rearview mirror — was marked by the need to engage in public displays of virtue. That meant using the correct words, and going along with stated and unstated social rules and codes — all to illustrate that you were, in fact, a good person. If you weren’t a good person, the social and financial consequences could, at times, be quite severe. Eventually, exasperation with endlessly spiralling purity tests became a huge contributor to the electoral defeat of the Democrats in 2016 and then again in 2024.

Wokeness may be dead and unlikely to return in exactly the same form, but Trump’s comeback has accelerated the emergence of a new kind of social phenomenon. Rather than obsessively signalling its virtue, America today seems preoccupied with doing the exact opposite. Memorising pronouns and refraining from the R-word gave credibility during the woke era, but now many anti-woke people are trapped in a similar kind of arms race. Empathy? That’s for losers. International laws and treaties with Nato allies like Denmark? Only the strong survive.

The Right is now engaged in a kind of purity spiral, with figures trying to outdo one another in displays of toughness and indifference to basic moral constraints. Once, Americans competed with each other in — often hypocritical and shallow — displays of being “good”; now, they’re instead locked in a race to prove who can be the nastiest.

When Renee Good was fatally shot by ICE agents in Minneapolis earlier this month, only border czar Tom Homan (originally an Obama appointee) tried to hold off on commenting on the incident, saying that it was better to wait until an investigation could take place. Everyone else in the Trump administration — and the broader pundit ecosystem — rushed at the chance to call her a domestic terrorist, an idiot, or a brainwashed communist. The urge to signal purity in this direction was just irresistible. On X, Right-wing commentator Matt Walsh called Good “a lesbian agitator [who] gave her life to protect 68 IQ Somali scammers”. He also dismissed any comparison between Kyle Rittenhouse and Alex Pretti as “retarded”.

Walsh is purportedly a devoted Christian, but if he had chosen that moment to talk about Imago Dei and the tragedy of any human death regardless of politics, he would have very quickly been torn apart by his political bedfellows. He used the only language he could to maintain social credibility, language that keeps growing harsher as the purity spiral tightens and the vice signalling becomes ever more intense.

Whether it’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller switching between denigrating European allies and his fellow Americans, or Secretary of War Pete Hegseth dismissing all notions of there being rules to war, or Fox News implying that Renee Good deserved to die because she was in a lesbian relationship, the basic rule is the same. Cruelty and callousness are now the Right’s version of writing your pronouns in your bio.

Once a purity spiral starts, nobody taken by the current can argue for moderation without paying a massive social cost. This lack of self-correction eventually leads to more extreme politics and rhetoric that alienates normal people. When the Left did it, people rightfully complained and punishment eventually followed. Now, as the Trump administration scrambles to deal with a public relations disaster entirely of its own making, it’s useful to remember that doing the exact opposite of a bad thing can still be very bad.

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Malcom Kyeyune is a freelance writer living in Uppsala, Sweden

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