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“Fascist” is one of those words—like “Nazi,” “racist,” “imperialist,” “white supremacist,” “misogynist” and a whole bagful of other -ists and -isms—that mean anything and everything to anybody and everybody. In short, “fascist” means nothing. It’s empty. And that’s the danger.
There’s a general tendency, over time, for the meaning of words to shift. This can happen quickly, or it can happen across a much longer span of centuries or even millennia.
If I say “I navigated my way through the crowds” on a busy street, only the worst kind of pedant would correct me and say, “But you weren’t in a boat, surely?” The Latin navigo originally meant “I travel by boat”—hence nauta, “sailor,” and now, two thousand years later, “navy,” “nautical” etc.
Sometimes the meaning of a word can flip entirely. Another Latin example. A vir egregius was once an “exceptional man”: exceptional in virtue, deserving of praise, to be emulated. But to call something “egregious” now is to say that it’s exceptional only in its being awful, certainly not to be praised or copied. “An egregious mistake,” “an egregious foul,” “an egregious bit of incompetence.” A complete 180.
I’m not going to write some long piece of linguistic theory, by the way. I’m just pointing to a linguistic fact. Change happens.
The process of change appears to be greatly accelerated when it comes to words with a political meaning, and especially in the modern world under conditions of mass education, mass communication, especially the internet and social media, and mass propaganda.
It’s taken less than a century for the term “fascist” to lose virtually all of its meaning—but none of its power. In truth, it’s only gained in power by being stripped of any fixed reference.
I picked up a book of Roger Scruton’s essays from a second-hand bookshop the other day. One of the shorter essays in the volume is called, “Who is a fascist?” Scruton wrote the essay in 1983. He laments the use of the word “fascist” as a general term of abuse with little regard to the actual political system that emerged in 1920s Italy, or even its sister ideologies of National Socialism in Germany and Falangism in Spain. Scruton calls out the Labour MP and grandee Tony Benn by name, for his absurd claim that Margaret Thatcher—by championing the individual work ethic, family values and national sovereignty—was, in fact, a fascist.
Tony Benn was a diehard communist, the kind of boneheaded true believer you could plonk down in a famine-stricken village in the Ukraine circa 1933 and he’d still tell you Marx and Engels were right and the Dialectic will bring us the Worker’s Paradise—just a few more contradictions!—and none of this horror is Stalin’s fault. It’s probably those bloody kulaks, stealing grain again! Yes, another purge! That’ll do it!
Tony Benn, at least, was old enough to have experienced fascism firsthand, so he should have known better. The fact he didn’t is only further condemnation of his entire worldview.
Like I say, this has been going on for some time.
Today’s bonehead communists are even further removed from the realities of fascism. They couldn’t tell you anything about Mussolini or the corporate state, about how all economic activity in Fascist Italy was organised into corporations that were subordinate to the national state, nor indeed could they tell you how Fascist doctrine differed from National Socialist or Falangist doctrine either. They weren’t the same.
What matters, for present purposes, is that everybody now knows what a fascist is, at least in emotional and moral terms. It’s a bad person. A very bad person. The worst kind of person, in fact. Someone who is an enemy of everything that’s good and proper, meaning leftist values; an enemy of freedom who deserves the harshest treatment, maybe even death, and you shouldn’t feel bad about giving it to them.
When California Governor Gavin Newsom called White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller a “fascist” on X at the weekend, he wasn’t accusing Miller of being an adherent of the corporate state. He wasn’t even saying that, with his bald head, Miller looks a bit like Mussolini. No, Newsom was saying, “Look, this is one of the worst people in the world!”
But of course, Newsom was doing more than that.
Newsom was engaging in something that’s often referred to as “stochastic terrorism.” In basic terms, stochastic terrorism is when public figures use indirect or vague language to increase the likelihood of a random person committing an attack against a particular individual or group.
Stochastic terrorism isn’t direct incitement, but it might as well be. And these people know what they’re doing.
That’s what my friend Jack Posobiec said in response to Newsom’s tweet. “He knows exactly what he’s doing.”
Stochastic terrorism is only possible in an environment saturated with the right kind of implicit meanings. Or, rather, the left kind of meanings.
Because leftists control the culture, because they control signification and their values and goals have become, over many decades, the default values and goals of society, they’re the ones who get to say vague things with very concrete outcomes in mind. It’s all totally understood. Fascists need to be eliminated. It doesn’t need to be spelled out.
This is one of the main reasons why Christopher Rufo’s notion of “radical normie terrorism” is so wrongheaded. Rufo has claimed Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer, and others like him are a new kind of nihilistic killer radicalized by internet memes. They kill not for the leftist utopia, but for LOLs.
In support of this theory, Rufo points to the decentralization of the violence they commit—the absence of an organizational structure—and the apparent lack of a detailed political plan, by contrast with radical groups of the 1960s and 1970s, like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army. What Rufo misses is that leftist violence can afford to be decentralized today, because leftists control the culture. You don’t need a central committee handing down communiqués like the Weather Underground fifty years ago. The Weather Underground won. And now everybody understands implicitly what they once needed to be told.
During the election campaign, Trump’s opponents made constant references to him as Julius Caesar. It was obvious what they were really trying to say. When Victoria Nuland’s husband Robert Kagan wrote “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable” for The Washington Post, and referred to Trump crossing the Rubicon, and the art designers spliced a bust of Caesar with Trump’s face, the message was obvious: America’s Caesar could only be stopped by an American Brutus. But the guardians of the American republic had one advantage over the guardians of the Roman: Americans could know in advance that Trump will be a tyrant. The conspirators led by Brutus had to strike after Caesar had ended the Roman republic, not before.
When I saw that article, I knew there would be a Trump assassination attempt, and I wrote as much. That was November 2023. Instead of one assassination attempt, we got two in eight weeks.
What’s so insidious about stochastic terrorism is its vagueness and its deniability. The commissioner never actually has to say, “Go out and attack / kill this person,” and yet that’s what’s understood. They can just say, “Stephen Miller is a fascist”—and that’s it. They don’t have to address anyone in particular, either. They just put their nasty order out into the universe, and then when some deranged freak in a fur suit goes out and shoots Stephen Miller, they get to issue a condemnation of violence and call for peace and understanding as they snort into their milkshake. Fuck them.
