The Word That Lost Its Teeth
Once upon a time, fascism referred to a specific ideological package: ultranationalism, corporatist statism, militarism, and violent authoritarian control. Over the decades, the word’s sharpness has dulled. Today it is often deployed as a generic insult for “people I dislike on the right.” That semantic inflation has robbed the term of its diagnostic utility. When everyone is a fascist, the label becomes meaningless.
Doyle’s Razor
Enter Andrew Doyle with a simple intervention:
If you condone the murder of your political opponents, you’re a fascist.
This is not an exhaustive definition, but it is a sharp one. Doyle draws a bright line at political murder, reclaiming the word for contexts where it matters. The timing of his remark was no accident: it was posted in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, when a fringe subset of people openly celebrated the killing online.
The Fringe, Not the Whole
Let’s be precise. The majority of responses to Kirk’s assassination were condemnations across the political spectrum. But screenshots of celebratory posts circulated widely, creating the impression that a “large fraction” of the left was cheering. That is exaggeration. What we’re really dealing with is a noisy fringe — individuals who did cross the line into condoning political murder.
These people are not the mainstream left. They are the extremist edge. But Doyle’s definition applies to them with full force. By cheering political bloodshed, they disqualify themselves from the moral high ground and embrace the very authoritarian impulse they claim to resist.
Two Errors of Language
The discourse around fascism suffers from two opposite distortions:
Overuse: Calling every ordinary conservative a fascist drains the term of meaning.
Under-focus: Ignoring the fringe that actually condones political violence leaves genuine fascism unnamed.
Doyle’s “murder test” slices through both. It preserves the word’s moral weight while targeting it precisely where it belongs.
The Real Lesson
Fascism is not “your neighbor who votes wrong.” Nor is it “anyone with an unpopular opinion.” Fascism is when you cross the line into legitimizing political murder. That’s the point Doyle hammers home, and it’s one worth keeping. The fringe who cheered Kirk’s death have unmasked themselves. The rest of us should resist both the inflation and the denial that makes the term useless.
Language matters. Precision matters. And the line Doyle drew — murder as the threshold of fascism — is a line worth defending.