Freedom Lovers Aren’t ‘Fascists’

American Thinker ^ | 19 Dec, 2025 | J.B. Shurk

[MtnClimber]

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.

Emissaries of Big Government globalism speak of government as a benevolent “friend” and “parent” whose job is to “protect” and “take care of” the people. But government is none of those things. Government is coercion. It is force, including the threat of lethal force. It robs people of their labor in the form of taxes. It presumes to know what is best for everyone. It insists on telling people how to use their property and how to live their lives. It intrudes into family households and inserts itself between parents and children. Whereas a friend will fight beside you

[MtnClimber]

I get so tired of hearing “far right” being thrown around by people who actually fit the definition of fascists.

[FreedomPoster]

Accuracy in nomenclature matters not at all to the Left. Their goal is to “other” you so they can kill you. It is what the Left does to those who oppose them. The history of the 20th Century is clear on this.

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM

[Ueriah]

The actual history of fascism, no one seems to talk about.

In Italy in the early 19th century there was a division amongst the communists as to whether they should join WW1 or not.
Those who wanted to join were called interventionalists (including Mussolini, who was a communist at the time, running a communist newspaper) and there was a big rift between the interventionalists and the “regular” communists who were using organized worker strikes to cripple the Italian economy.

The merchant class, tired of hemmoraging money to general labor stikes, approached the interventionalists with money to hire them to break up the communists who would strike, violently (many of the interventionalists were previously soliders)

The origional fascist movement was all communists who felt they weren’t using enough violence.

[ProgressingAmerica]

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

Correct.

That’s because we aren’t right wingers.

[FreedomPoster]

Overall there is not a hairsbreadth difference between them. Hayek saw this in the 30s and 40s:

Although our modern socialists’ promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under “communism” and “fascism.” As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, “the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.”

No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.

— F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

The Left does not believe in individual freedom, they are consistent there.

[ProgressingAmerica]

Right.

They were generally motivated (additionally) by the work of Georges Sorel. Sorel wrote a book titled Reflections on Violence, which of course promoted the idea that its alright and perhaps at times preferable to throw a molotov or two.

New audiobook release: Reflections on Violence, by George Sorel
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/4358124/posts

[sauropod]

.

[Fiji Hill]

Liberals don’t call us Nazis and fascists because they think that’s what we are—they know damn well that we are not. They call us that so as to incite and justify violence against us.

[ProgressingAmerica]

Hayek is 100% correct in as much as how those who want big government all look the same to people like us who want small government and to us, watching socialists and fascists squabbling over "which form of big government is superior" just seems like clown to clown communication

To them though, those who believe in a dictatorship, the nationalists on the right and the internationalists on the left couldn't look more different. Reagan talked about this generally in A Time For Choosing.

https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/reagans/ronald-reagan/time-choosing-speech-october-27-1964

"You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down - [up] man's old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism."

Those down in the ant heap of totalitarianism squabble over whether they are left wing or right wing ants.(according to Reagan)

Personally, I think an up/down political scale as Reagan uses makes way more rational sense than a left/right political scale. Up, as in vertically, not on a plotted scale like so many stupid square charts. Up is small government. Down is big government, and that is all.

[Racketeer]

I learned long ago to just be myself and whatever I am called be thankful for it.

[bobbo666]

To commie trash everyone = fascist.

Even family around Thanksgiving dinner.

[spacewarp]

You mean early 20th century.