Freedom Lovers Aren’t ‘Fascists’ By J.B. Shurk

[mystery-ak]

December 19, 2025
Freedom Lovers Aren’t ‘Fascists’
By J.B. Shurk

There’s nothing ‘right-wing’ about defending the Bill of Rights.

Being called “right-wing” or “fascist” is detestable. The label implies a preference for dictatorship, authoritarianism, and government supremacy over personal freedom. The exact opposite is true. I would describe myself as a supporter of autarchism in the sense that we should rule ourselves and not be ruled by others.

As someone who believes strongly in individual liberty, self-reliance, and self-government, I distrust all repositories of power -- whether such power resides in government, corporations, or social institutions. As Lord Acton advised: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In my estimation, nothing in this physical world can be trusted with power for very long. Regrettably, all forms of power eventually become abusive.

Nineteenth-century diplomat and political writer John O’Sullivan (the man who coined the phrase “manifest destiny” in 1845) helped to popularize a sentiment shared by other luminaries of his time such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mark Twain: “The best government is that which governs least.”

Government is Leviathan. It knows only how to grow its size and the number of its tentacles until it is capable of wrapping its predacious powers around everyone and everything.

more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/12/freedom_lovers_aren_t_fascists.html

[The_Reader_David]

The author of the piece in a part later than that in the excerpt posted her ask, "What is “right-wing” about wanting government bureaucrats to just leave us the hell alone?"

The answer is that "right-wing" has no meaning more coherent than "opposed to the Left", meaning at any given time the normative Left of the day.  This fact, that "right-wing" had no coherent meaning is the origin of the use by the Left of "fascist" and "Nazi" as essentially meaningless pejoratives for those opposed to them.  When the normative Left was defined by the Comintern, even deviations from Stalin's party doctrines were all called "right wing" and lumped together. Trotsky was a "fascist".  And, of course, the Nazis (who created a statist economy supposedly for the benefit of German workers, rather than "the workers of the world") and the Fascists, were therefore "right-wing" along with monarchists, Tories, adherent of the American Constitutional order, clericalists, or nationalist of any sort no aligned with Moscow.

As the Left wants government bureaucrats to dictate minute aspects of our lives, opposing this is "right-wing".