Last week, the official X account for the press office of California Governor Gavin Newsom abruptly announced, “STEPHEN MILLER IS A FASCIST!” The style of the post — trolling and Trumpian — is one that the account in question (presumably run by some of Newsom’s staffers) has increasingly adopted in recent months. And to much success: the account’s posts frequently rack up thousands or tens of thousands of likes.
Of course, we already knew that dim-witted, incendiary statements go viral on social media. More interesting was MAGA’s response: dozens of posts, including one that achieved almost 40K likes, claiming that the original post constituted “incitement to violence”. By calling Miller a fascist, it was claimed, the Governor Newsom Press Office account was putting a target on his back.
This is noteworthy for two reasons. The first is that both sides have been hurling the epithet at one another for months, even years. Miller himself has repeatedly described his opponents as “fascists”. So has Donald Trump: in September of 2024, the Washington Post reported that, over the course of the presidential campaign, he had used “fascist” to describe Democrats more often than Kamala Harris had used it to describe Republicans. Hence if the Governor Newsom Press Office account is guilty of incitement, then Trump and Miller are too.
Another reason MAGA’s response is noteworthy is that, not a million years ago, the same people were relentlessly mocking the left for exaggerating the harm done by speech and stretching the meaning of concepts. Now they turn around and tell us that deploying an overused political diss word is a criminal act?
The context here is that the man suspected of killing Charlie Kirk is said to have carved the phrase “Hey Fascist! Catch!” into one bullet casing and the lyrics from an Italian anti-fascist song into another. Combined with reports from family members that he was “becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented”, this suggests that opposition to “fascism” may have been among his motivations.
However, interpreting the bullet casings is not entirely straightforward. The words “Hey Fascist! Catch!” were followed by the string “↑ → ↓↓↓”, which apparently refers to an action in the video game Helldiver 2. And the song lyrics may refer to another video game, Far Cry 6. A third bullet casing was engraved with the statement, “if you read this you are gay LMAO”. There is at least room for ambiguity.
But let’s assume that the suspect was motivated, at least in part, by opposition to “fascism”. Does this strengthen the argument that calling Stephen Miller a fascist constitutes incitement to violence? Not really.
For speech to qualify as incitement it must be directed to producing imminent lawless action
To begin with, there is the salient fact that for speech to qualify as incitement it must be directed to producing imminent lawless action. Since this was clearly not true of the post sent by the Governor Newsom Press Office account, it does not qualify as incitement. But perhaps it qualifies in a non-legal sense — as speech that might plausibly increase the risk of someone committing violence against Miller?
It certainly could. Yet this would be extremely difficult to prove. Suppose, God forbid, that some lunatic did try to harm Miller. Even if he literally wrote “Stephen Miller is a fascist” in his manifesto, this would not show that the post sent by the Governor Newsom Press Office account had contributed. After all, the perpetrator could have reached the same conclusion independently. Indeed, almost everyone considers their opponents “fascists” these days.
More importantly, all sorts of speech might plausibly increase the risk of someone committing violence against someone else — but that doesn’t mean we regard them as incitement. A number of far-right mass shooters, including Anders Breivik, Brenton Tarrant and Dylann Roof, published manifestos that contained detailed sections on topics like birth rates and crime statistics. It could therefore be argued, and indeed has been argued, that discussion of such topics in right-wing forums increases the risk of terrorism.
The obvious rebuttal is that this risk also applies to topics that get discussed in left-wing forums. The man who killed five police officers in Dallas, Texas, in 2016 was a Black Lives Matter supporter. The man who wounded four people, including Representative Steve Scalise, at a Congressional baseball game in 2017 was an anti-Republican activist. Should partisans on both sides stop discussing topics that interest them in case some lunatic decides to go on a shooting spree? Obviously not.
Interestingly, Reform UK is now using the same playbook: Zia Yusuf has claimed that Sir Keir Starmer is “absolutely inciting violence” against Nigel Farage, and would be “responsible” if anything happens to him, because the Prime Minister called for his party to go into “battle” against the “enemy”. This is patently absurd. Starmer said “enemy of national renewal” and he obviously meant “battle” in a political sense. Surely the party that stood behind Lucy Connolly does not have such a literal-minded attitude to what constitutes incitement?
To be clear, I don’t approve of the “STEPHEN MILLER IS A FASCIST!” post. It’s rude, it’s juvenile and it adds practically nothing to the conversation (a trio that could describe much of what you find on X). But it’s not in any meaningful way an incitement to violence. Rather than pretending there was something uniquely despicable about the post, we should welcome less name-calling across the board.
