The Right Successfully Coins a Lot of Insults. The Left Has ‘Chud.’

Early this year, a woman posted online to express concern about her 16-year-old son. He spent all his time in his bedroom, online. His grades were plummeting. And he had started describing himself, constantly, as a chud. He saw his chuddom as so hopeless, so irredeemable, that the best option was to give up and accept it, rather than indulging in cope.

His mother, searching “chud” online, gathered that it referred to some kind of sad, loathsome troll — and often a right-wing one.

Only a few decades ago, when an American teenager developed alarming new habits, parents’ first investigative stops tended to be the bookshelf or the record collection, where they’d panic over heavy-metal album art, rap lyrics or Dungeons & Dragons manuals. Not anymore. Today’s chief suspects will be podcasts, streamers, Discord chats. Young people’s worldviews aren’t being suggested by the aesthetics of cultural objects; they’re being shaped by people arguing about ideology much more directly. And this has a strange impact on slang: Ordinary young conversation can be packed with words that carry weird political baggage.

“Chud” is a ripe example. It doesn’t come from politics. It originates, essentially, with the 1984 movie “C.H.U.D.,” which is about man-eating sewer mutants: cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers. It’s not as if you’d need to know that, though, to intuit that it’s an insult. The connotations are right there in the sound of the word: the back-of-throat U vowel of disgust (as in yuck, muck, ugh); the spat-out, dismissive chiding of the CH; even the way it lands with the dull thud of a D. Over the years it has seemed to merge with crud — you sometimes see it used to describe grimes like the finger-gunk that accumulates on guitar fretboards. The chud could only be the human equivalent of that: doltish and contemptible, a duh of a person, migrated up from the sewers to the slovenly basement.

That seems to be how it became a political insult — specifically, a left-wing epithet for a kind of brutish, predictable right-winger. (Credit for this fresh usage is often given to the podcast “Chapo Trap House,” featuring episodes like the 2017 recording “From Russia with CHUD.”) The left does not have a lot of these epithets — certainly not as many as the right, which coins them in such volume that some inevitably thrive. (For every “libtard” or “soyboy,” a “snowflake” catches fire.) “Chud” is a rare success. Search for a phrase like “MAGA chuds” almost anywhere online, and you’ll find exactly the uses you’d imagine. Even on Truth Social, you can find one person calling Tucker Carlson a chud, while another defends Carlson and dares “some MAGA chud” to have a meltdown about it.

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Leave off the “MAGA,” though, and you’ll also find questions like the one an older gentleman posted on Facebook in January: “What does this new word ‘Chud’ mean. My grandson called me a chud and laughed at me.” To which somebody responded: “Chud is internet slang and a derogatory term for people with far-right, reactionary or hateful political views. It’s sometimes associated with the Chud wojak meme.”

That second sentence will likely be of zero help to the disrespected elder, but it does capture the wild trip “chud” has taken through political realms. A simple political insult was one thing — then came years in the meme-filled brew pot where a lot of modern slang percolates. If the phrase “Chud wojak meme” makes sense to you, then you can probably picture this process. If those words are mystifying and alien, well: Suffice it to say that the memes surrounding chuddom came to take in emblems of the online right-wing fringe, like a line drawing of Patrick Crusius (the white nationalist who shot 45 people in El Paso in 2019) and the phrase “billions must die” (a mockery, or occasionally endorsement, of a sullen extremist’s mind-set), as the concept bounced from insulting online fringes to being ironically reclaimed by them.

Words often emerge from those dark corners into the light of ordinary slang — a game of telephone that runs from sketchy forums to memes to chats to TikTok to schools. But the fine ideological details don’t travel with them. The average person who picks up “chud” as an insult leaves that baggage behind, taking only the raw connotations the word had from the very beginning: just some pointless loser.

This is probably what that kid is calling his grandfather; the simple understanding of “chud” does seem to have swelled in youth popularity over recent months. In March, the student newspaper at Virginia Commonwealth University covered Richmond’s first-ever “Chud-Off,” described as “a positive competition for those who feel like outsiders,” with a panel of “chudges” bestowing awards for Dumbest Chud, Most Nefarious Chud, Mega Chud. One contestant wore a banana costume and wished to be known as Chudnana. “So my definition of a chud,” Chudnana said, “is someone who stays inside, never does anything with their life, unemployed and dumb, essentially a big, fat chud.”

Two years ago, a Reddit poster observed that “chud” was being used in two vastly different ways — sometimes to describe literal Nazis, sometimes “almost like a ‘lumpen prole’ kind of idea.” In the time since, it’s somehow even more of each. The organizer of that Chud-Off can both casually apologize for “rambling on like a chud” and concoct a prize called the Truecel Chud Award — a nod at precisely the kinds of online wilds chuddom has traveled. Banal, everyday chatter and ideological extremity wash together and become one thing — because, online, ideological extremity is a form of banal, everyday chatter, always there to be eye-rolled or winked at or, in extreme cases, to sit somewhere in the background of the standard-issue hopelessness of a lost 16-year-old.

Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine.

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