One of the most effective smears is the one that never quite makes an accusation. It offers carefully chosen fragments, strips away the context, and lets the reader supply the fashionable label themselves. Andrew Doyle’s account of Simon Edge’s piece is worth reading. Prejudice and bad faith are real, and should be called out where the evidence supports it. But labels such as “racist”, “fascist” or “phobic” are too often used as shortcuts, not to describe what someone has actually said, but to place them beyond the pale. The effect is to make someone socially suspect before anyone has had to engage with what they actually said. Once the label sticks, evidence often becomes secondary. People stop asking the obvious questions: what was said, in what context, and is the accusation fair? The argument itself gets lost and the label does all the work. That is why this sort of smear is so corrosive: it replaces argument with a cue for people to stop thinking.