October 1st, 2025 | Thomas Carter

ThEse Are The Real Fascists

They wanted to permanently silence their enemies.

Call me old fashioned, but if your first response to being questioned or scrutinized is to silence the other side with a knife or a bullet, you have stopped arguing and started policing. You’ve not only abandoned debate, you’ve embraced the oldest instinct of authoritarianism by eliminating the person you disagree with so their words can’t make a case. That isn’t courage. It isn’t moral clarity. It’s fascism in its purest form.

Fascism is not merely a tidy academic label reserved for 20th-century dictators. It’s a set of behaviors and practices — the forcible suppression of opposition, the elevation of violence as political instrument, the idea that certain people must be removed so “truth” can prevail. Encyclopedias and scholars define it the same way. Fascism is an authoritarian, anti-pluralist creed that celebrates the use of force to crush opponents and subordinating individuals for a presumed higher good. That’s why killing or maiming people for what they say sits at the absolute apex of what fascistic politics has always been. It’s the short, brutal route from “I disagree” to “you must disappear”.

To make this concrete, look at three unmistakable examples where speech and debate were answered with deadly force.

First, the September 10, 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University. Kirk — a controversial but unmistakably public political voice who built his brand on campus debate and political agitation — was shot while speaking to a crowd. Authorities treated the attack as a targeted assassination; footage showed a single long-distance shot fired into an outdoor event where Kirk was addressing students and citizens. Law enforcement quickly characterized this as politically motivated violence. Whatever you think of Kirk’s politics, the act was raw political murder. Somebody decided that killing a person for speaking was the way to end his “fascism”. That is not argument. It is not protest. It is political assassination.

Second, the June 14, 2025 murder of Minnesota state representative and former Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband at their home, part of a spree that left other state lawmakers gravely wounded. The suspect allegedly impersonated a police officer and targeted specific Democratic lawmakers; prosecutors later described the attacks as stalking and targeted political violence. Targeting elected officials because you disagree with their positions is a direct attack on democracy itself.

Third, the notorious 2022 stabbing of author Salman Rushdie on the Chautauqua lecture stage — an attempt to silence words with knives, inspired by ancient edicts and modern fanaticism. Rushdie survived but suffered grievous injuries. The attacker later linked his actions to a decades-old fatwa and told authorities he believed he was carrying out a righteous mission. He didn’t want a debate; he wanted blood. The courts treated the attack as attempted murder and terrorism-related conduct, and jurors convicted him in 2025. Whether ideologically driven by religion, grievance, or something else, the method is the same. Kill the speaker to silence the speech.

Three different actors, three different ideologies, one shared method. If you disagree with someone, destroy them. That’s not revolutionary heroism or moral courage, it’s the primal authoritarian formula. History shows us that political movements that burn books, beat up journalists, and assassinate public figures for their opinions don’t stay small. They metastasize. Whether done by some masked lone actor on a roof, a would-be executioner at a lecture, or a stalker at a lawmaker’s house, the tactic is identical: suppress speech by eliminating the speaker. That’s not debate. It’s the censorship of the final kind.

There is a perverse irony worth dwelling on. In each of these cases, or in the chorus of social-media denunciations that preceded them, the assailant or their apologists often labeled the victim a “fascist” — a rhetorical move that should shame anyone who cares about precision in language. If you call your opponent “fascist” because they argue for policies you dislike, then take a knife or a gun to their microphone, congratulations, you've completed the definition of the term you were throwing around like a slur. Calling someone a fascist while murdering them for their views is not rhetorical cleverness; it is the most literal enactment of the charge. That irony is not trivial. It reveals that the people using the word casually don’t have a grasp of what it means; they are playing with a moral accelerant, and then, sometimes, acting like arsonists.

The conservative case for robust free speech has always been straightforward. We may despise our opponents’ arguments, we may work to defeat them at the ballot box, and we may publicly oppose them in social and cultural forums, but we do not murder them. Conservatives who value limited government, individual liberty, and the rule of law should be the first to condemn the notion that speech is a crime deserving death. Why? Because once you accept political violence as a legitimate response to words, you’ve abandoned civil society and handed the field to whoever is willing to be crueller, louder, and bloodier. That is not conservative principle — it is the tool of the tyrant.

Let’s be honest about the human dimension, too. These attacks do more than silence an individual. They terrorize a community. After a speaker is shot or a lawmaker killed, other people in that sphere — other writers, campus activists, local elected officials — think twice before accepting an invitation to speak. Public discourse chills. Town halls become dangerous. Universities, churches, and civic spaces take on an atmosphere of guarded suspicion. The long-term effect is the erosion of a marketplace of ideas that is supposed to be messy and loud — but not murderous. Every assassination is an argument for fear, and fear is the enemy of all decent politics. The people who would curtail that marketplace through terror are in the business of destroying the very institutions that make self-government possible.

Some will respond: “But what about ‘fascists’ who call for genocide, bigotry, or the end of democratic institutions? Don’t they deserve to be silenced?” Answer: No.

The remedy for bad ideas is more speech, better organization, and political activity. If you believe a writer’s work is poison, publish a rebuttal. If you think a politician is a menace, beat them at the ballot box. If you fear an ideology, expose it to sunlight. Resorting to murder elevates the violence you oppose — it makes you its moral twin. That’s the point. When violence becomes the method, the side that resorts to it reveals itself to be the true enemy of liberal society, which is intolerant, coercive, and doctrinaire.

We should also call out the media and political class for the language games that incubate this mindset. When political leaders and influencers use dehumanizing language — “vermin,” “traitors,” “enemies of the people” — to describe opponents, they thin the moral membrane that prevents real people from committing real violence. Bluntly put, rhetorical dehumanization doesn't cause every act of violence, but it makes the psychological leap to it smaller for disturbed actors. Political leaders on every side would do well to stop using language that normalizes violence as sheer rhetorical sport. The moment we treat our fellow citizens as sub-human, we have invited the sort of acts that killed Charlie Kirk. When we call them fascists, we incite fear and anger in the minds of radicals. 

So what should be done? First, we need to re-commit to lawful responses. Prosecutors and judges should apply the full force of the law to those who would turn speech into a death sentence. Hadi Matar’s conviction and sentence, and the federal charges in politically motivated murders, show the system can — and must — treat these crimes as what they are: assaults on our civic order. Second, public institutions should protect civic spaces without turning them into fortresses. That means sensible security protocols for lectures and town halls, professional threat assessments, and public investments in safety that don’t strangle free assembly. Third, civic leaders must re-embrace a norm that disagreement is not heresy deserving death. Condemnation of political violence must be unanimous; equivocation is complicity.

Finally, conservatives should lead on this point out of principle and strategy. Defend the right of the loathsome to speak, while condemning their ideas and beating them with facts, votes, and persuasion. Violence isn’t a way to win political arguments — it’s a way to break the polity that sustains winning in the long run. If we want a politics that rewards ideas rather than armies, we must insist on an iron line: argument can be harsh, mocking, and ruthless — but it must never become lethal. Anything else is not activism; it is tyranny.

To return to the simplest moral test. If you ever think it’s acceptable to kill someone for debating you, you are not fighting fascism. You are engaging in the most naked form of it. The people who would put bullets where ballots belong, and knives where words belong — those are the real fascists. And they must be opposed not just with outrage, but with law, with institutions, and with the stubborn, unromantic work of winning arguments the civilized way.