There’s a clear campaign against the mentally ill with the global rise of fascism. Lots of it shows up in anti homeless rhetoric, but you can see it in the MAHA and anti vaccination movements.
There’s no reason to use the word “r-tarded” to describe someone. As someone who’s worked with the intellectually challenged, it’s an insult to them to compare them with people who are willfully ignorant.
Policing the hell out of language, while well intentioned, creates a backlash effect that I think actually hurts us more these days. Look at how they originally attacked “political correctness” in the 90s - because we were trying to code some improvements into language. Now people openly laugh at us for not having a solution to homelessness besides renaming them “unhoused.”
Be far easier to just let the R word become the word it has become, which doesn’t describe mental illness or disability anymore, much like “idiot” and “moron” and “imbecile” were once used as medical terms, and now they have none of that meaning.
Languages evolve. It’s a very common thing for descriptors of negative things to become slang for insults. Not to say we should be encouraging this behavior, but rather that policing it is ineffective at best.
Effective solutions address the underlying issues
(Destigmatization of ailments is a good thing, but doing so by stigmatizing the words themselves often has a Streisand effect)
As long as one ignores all the solutions that capitalists dont like, sure. We also cant figure out why people starve while we’re at it.