In Honor of Tikvah Fund Jabotinsky Fascist Dara Horn: Il Duce Returns to Italy!

[David Shasha]

How a party of neo-fascist roots won big in Italy

By: Nicole Winfield

ROME (AP) — The Brothers of Italy party, which won the most votes in Italy’s national election, has its roots in the post-World War II neo-fascist Italian Social Movement.

Keeping the movement’s most potent symbol, the tricolor flame, Giorgia Meloni has taken Brothers of Italy from a fringe far-right group to Italy’s biggest party.

A century after Benito Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome, which brought the fascist dictator to power, Meloni is poised to lead Italy’s first far-right-led government since World War II and Italy’s first woman premier.

HOW DID POST-FASCISM BEGIN IN ITALY?

The Italian Social Movement, or MSI, was founded in 1946 by Giorgio Almirante, a chief of staff in Mussolini’s last government. It drew fascist sympathizers and officials into its ranks following Italy’s role in the war, when it was allied with the Nazis and then liberated by the Allies.

Throughout the 1950-1980s, the MSI remained a small right-wing party, polling in the single digits. But historian Paul Ginsborg has noted that its mere survival in the decades after the war “served as a constant reminder of the potent appeal that authoritarianism and nationalism could still exercise among the southern students, urban poor and lower middle classes.”

The 1990s brought about a change under Gianfranco Fini, Almirante’s protege who nevertheless projected a new moderate face of the Italian right. When Fini ran for Rome mayor in 1993, he won a surprising 46.9% of the vote — not enough to win but enough to establish him as a player. Within a year, Fini had renamed the MSI the National Alliance.

It was in those years that a young Meloni, who was raised by a single mother in a Rome working-class neighborhood, first joined the MSI’s youth branch and then went onto lead the youth branch of Fini’s National Alliance.

DOES THAT MEAN MELONI IS NEO-FASCIST?

Fini was dogged by the movement’s neo-fascist roots and his own assessment that Mussolini was the 20th century’s “greatest statesman.” He disavowed that statement, and in 2003 visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel. There, he described Italy’s racial laws, which restricted Jews’ rights, as part of the “absolute evil” of the war.

Meloni, too, had praised Mussolini in her youth but visited Yad Vashem in 2009 when she was a minister in Silvio Berlusconi’s last government. Writing in her 2021 memoir “I Am Giorgia,” she described the experience as evidence of how “a genocide happens step by step, a little at a time.”

During the campaign, Meloni was forced to confront the issue head-on, after the Democrats warned that she represented a danger to democracy.

“The Italian right has handed fascism over to history for decades now, unambiguously condemning the suppression of democracy and the ignominious anti-Jewish laws,” she said in a campaign video.

HOW DID BROTHERS OF ITALY EMERGE?

Meloni, who proudly touts her roots as an MSI militant, has said the first spark of creating Brothers of Italy came after Berlusconi resigned as premier in 2011, forced out by a financial crisis over Italy’s soaring debt and his own legal problems.

Meloni refused to support Mario Monti, who was tapped by Italy’s president to try to form a technocratic government to reassure international financial markets. Meloni couldn’t stand what she believed was external pressure from European capitals to dictate internal Italian politics.

Meloni co-founded the party in 2012, naming it after the first words of the Italian national anthem. “A new party for an old tradition,” Meloni wrote.

Brothers of Italy would only take in single-digit results in its first decade. The European Parliament election in 2019 brought Brothers of Italy 6.4% — a figure that Meloni says “changed everything.”

As the leader of the only party in opposition during Mario Draghi’s 2021-2022 national unity government, her popularity soared, with Sunday’s election netting it 26%.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE PARTY’S LOGO?

The party has at the center of its logo the red, white and green flame of the original MSI that remained when the movement became the National Alliance. While less obvious than the bundle of sticks, or fasces, that was the prominent symbol of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, the tricolor flame is nevertheless a powerful image that ties the current party to its past.

“Political logos are a form of branding, no different than those aimed at consumers,” said Rutgers University professor T. Corey Brennan, who recently wrote “Fasces: A History of Rome’s Most Dangerous Political Symbol.”

He recalled that when Almirante made his final MSI campaign pitch to voters in the 1948 election at Rome’s Spanish Steps, he put the party’s flame symbol on top of the obelisk and illuminated it with floodlights.

“You can make whatever you want out of a flame, but everybody understood that Almirante was making a deeply emotional appeal to keep the spirit of fascism alive,” he said.

HOW DO ITALIANS FEEL ABOUT IT?

In general, the party’s neo-fascist roots appear to be of more concern abroad than at home. Some historians explain that by noting a certain historical amnesia here and Italians’ general comfort living with the relics of fascism as evidence that Italy never really repudiated the Fascist Party and Mussolini in the same way Germany repudiated National Socialism and Hitler.

While Germany went through a long and painful process reckoning with its past, Italians have in many ways simply turned a willful blindness to their own.

Historian David Kertzer of Brown University notes that there are 67 institutes for the study of the Resistance to Fascism in Italy, and virtually no center for the study of Italian Fascism.

In addition, Mussolini-era architecture and monuments are everywhere: from the EUR neighborhood in southern Rome to the Olympic training center on the Tiber River, with its obelisk still bearing Mussolini’s name.

The Italian Constitution bars the reconstitution of the Fascist party, but far-right groups still display the fascist salute and there continues to be an acceptance of fascist symbols, said Brennan.

“You don’t have to look very hard for signs,” Brennan said in a phone interview. “Fully a quarter of all manhole covers in Rome still have the fasces on them.”

DOES THAT MEAN ITALIANS SUPPORT FASCISM?

If history is any guide, one constant in recent political elections is that Italians vote for change, with a desire for something new seemingly overtaking traditional political ideology in big pendulum shifts, said Nathalie Tocci, director of the Rome-based Institute of International Affairs.

Tocci said the Brothers of Italy’s popularity in 2022 was evidence of this “violent” swing that is more about Italian dissatisfaction than any surge in neo-fascist or far-right sentiment.

“I would say the main reason why a big chunk of that -- let’s say 25-30% -- will vote for this party is simply because it’s the new kid on the block,” she said.

Meloni still speaks reverently about the MSI and Almirante, even if her rhetoric can change to suit her audience.

This summer, speaking in perfect Spanish, she thundered at a rally of Spain’s hard-right Vox party: “Yes to the natural family. No to the LGBT lobby. Yes to sexual identity. No to gender ideology.”

Back home on the campaign trail, she projected a much more moderate tone and appealed for unity in her victory speech Monday.

“Italy chose us,” she said. “We will not betray it, as we never have.”

Sabrina Sergi contributed to this report.

 

From Associated Press, September 26, 2022

 

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni: From teen activist who praised Mussolini to brink of power

By: Alice Ritchie and Gaël Branchereau

ROME (AFP) — From a teenage activist who praised Mussolini to a favorite to become Italy’s first woman prime minister, Giorgia Meloni has had quite a journey, leading her far-right party to the brink of power.

Meloni’s Brothers of Italy came top in Sunday’s general elections, and her right-wing coalition looks set to secure a majority in both houses of parliament.

Often intense and combative as she rails against the European Union, mass immigration and “LGBT lobbies,” the 45-year-old has swept up disaffected voters and built a powerful personal brand.

“I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian,” she declared at a 2019 rally in Rome.

Brothers of Italy grew out of the country’s post-fascist movement, but Meloni has sought to distance herself from the past, while refusing to renounce it entirely.

She remains deeply divisive, not least over her Catholic family values that many fear will see a step backward on rights such as abortion.

Meloni vowed Monday to unite the country, saying she would govern for “all Italians.”

“It is a time of responsibility,” she said, adding that “Italy has chosen us, and we will not betray her.”

Ready to govern

Born in Rome on January 15, 1977, Meloni was brought up in the working-class neighborhood of Garbatella by her mother, after her father left them.

She has long been involved in politics — becoming the youngest minister in post-war Italian history at 31 — and co-founded Brothers of Italy in 2012.

In the 2018 general elections, her party secured just four percent of the vote, but looked set to secure 26 percent in Sunday’s general elections.

That put Meloni ahead of not just her rivals but also her coalition allies, Matteo Salvini’s anti-immigration League and Forza Italia’s Silvio Berlusconi, in whose government she served in 2008.

Meloni has benefited from being the only party in opposition for the past 18 months, after choosing to stay out of outgoing Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s national unity government.

At the same time, she has sought to reassure those who question her lack of experience, with her slogan “Ready” adorning billboards up and down the country.

Wary of Italy’s huge debt, she has emphasized fiscal prudence, despite her coalition’s call for tax cuts and higher social spending.

Her stance on Europe has moderated over the years — she no longer wants Italy to leave the EU’s single currency and has strongly backed the bloc’s sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine war.

However, she says Rome must stand up more for its national interests and has backed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in his battles with Brussels.

Neo-fascist past

Meloni was a teenage activist with the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), formed by supporters of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini after World War II.

At 19, campaigning for the far-right National Alliance, she told French television that “Mussolini was a good politician, in that everything he did, he did for Italy.”

After being elected an MP for National Alliance in 2006, she shifted her tone, saying the dictator had made “mistakes,” notably the racial laws, his authoritarianism and entering World War II on the side of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

Her party takes its name from the first line of Italy’s national anthem and its logo includes the same flame used by MSI, in the green, white and red of the country’s flag.

She has refused calls to change the logo, insisting the flame has “nothing to do with fascism” — and blaming talk to the contrary on “the left.”

She insists that within her party “there is no room for nostalgic attitudes.”

On abortion, she says she has no plans to change the law, which allows terminations but permits doctors to refuse to carry them out.

However, she says she wants to “give to women who think abortion is their only choice the right to make a different choice.”

Meloni has a daughter, born in 2016, with her TV journalist partner, and is a huge fan of “Lord of the Rings.”

From The Times of Israel, September 26, 2022

 

The Return of Fascism in Italy

By: Ruth Ben-Ghiat

“The election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past, and that is certainly a good thing,” Hillary Clinton said to an Italian journalist at the Venice International Film Festival earlier this month. She was speaking of Giorgia Meloni, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, who could make history if the Brothers of Italy party does as well as expected in Sunday’s elections.

That would be one sort of break with the past. But Meloni would also represent continuity with Italy’s darkest episode: the interwar dictatorship of Benito Mussolini. As Clinton would surely concede, this is not such a good thing.

If Meloni comes to power at the end of this month, it will be as head of a coalition whose other members—Matteo Salvini’s League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia—were each once the main force on Italy’s populist right. Brothers of Italy, which was polling at 23 percent earlier this month, has overtaken these more established parties and would represent the bloc’s largest component.

Brothers of Italy, which Meloni has led since 2014, has an underlying and sinister familiarity. The party formed a decade ago to carry forth the spirit and legacy of the extreme right in Italy, which dates back to the Italian Social Movement (MSI), the party that formed in place of the National Fascist Party, which was banned after World War II. Now, just weeks before the 100th anniversary of the March on Rome—the October 1922 event that put Mussolini in power—Italy may have a former MSI activist for its prime minister and a government rooted in fascism. In the words of Ignazio La Russa, Meloni’s predecessor as the head of the Brothers of Italy: “We are all heirs of Il Duce.”

Meloni in many ways sounds more like other modern national-conservative politicians such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and America’s MAGA Republicans than Il Duce. “There’s a leftist ideology, so-called globalist,” she told The Washington Post recently, “that aims to consider as an enemy everything that defined you—everything that has shaped your identity and your civilization.”

Meloni’s enemies list is familiar: “LGBT lobbies” that are out to harm women and the family by destroying “gender identity”; George Soros, an “international speculator,” she has said, who finances global “mass immigration” that threatens a Great Replacement of white, native-born Italians. Meloni shows affinity for authoritarian strongmen: Like Marine Le Pen, until recently the leader of the National Rally party in France, Meloni has expressed support for Russian President Vladimir Putin—although she has muted that enthusiasm since his invasion of Ukraine.

Meloni is comparable to Le Pen in other ways. Both are examples of what political scientists call “genderwashing,” when female politicians adopt a nonthreatening image to blunt the force of their extremism. Meloni’s signature look involves flowing outfits in pastel shades. To uninformed foreigners, her ascent could look like female empowerment; she poses as a defender of women, even as her party has rolled back women’s rights. In localities it governs, Brothers of Italy has made abortion services—the procedure has been legal in Italy since 1978—harder to access. Municipal authorities in Verona, where the party has shared power with Salvini’s League, declared the city “pro-life.”

Meloni and her French counterpart diverge, however, over their respective movements’ extremist history. Le Pen pushed her father out of the leadership of the National Front (National Rally’s forerunner) because of his overt racism and Holocaust denialism. Meloni, though, has never fully disavowed her connection to Italy’s neofascist tradition even as she claims that her party is merely “conservative” and that fascism is a thing of the past.

The tricolor flame in the Brothers of Italy logo contradicts that claim: It celebrates her party’s connection with its fascist past by reviving the MSI’s emblem. The Brothers of Italy also perpetuates its forebear’s values. In particular, the natalist obsession of Il Duce’s 20-year rule, with its “Battle for Births,” has survived in the Brothers of Italy’s present-day concern about boosting the birth rate, its proposal to link social-welfare assistance to mothers and those engaged in child care, and its attempts to limit reproductive rights.

Italy never underwent a process equivalent to Germany’s de-Nazification after World War II. At the start of the Cold War, the Allies wanted to block Western Europe’s largest Communist party from power. They took a minimalist approach to purges of fascists and other punitive measures that could cause social unrest in Italy. They also looked the other way when Giorgio Almirante and other fascists who had served Il Duce founded the MSI in 1946. By the 1960s, the MSI had become the fourth-largest party, yet it remained largely on the sidelines of Italian politics because of the electoral strength of the left.

The political will of the MSI to return the far right to power never waned. The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe created a new space for the right to flourish. In came the billionaire Berlusconi and his new party, Forza Italia. Berlusconi’s short-lived center-right government of 1994 also included the Northern League (the original name of Salvini’s party) and brought the MSI’s neofascists into a governing coalition for the first time in Europe since 1945.

Their party was rebranded as the National Alliance, yet the MSI’s tricolor flame remained. The National Alliance’s leader, Gianfranco Fini, wore business suits and discouraged fascist salutes among the party faithful, but he hailed Il Duce as “the greatest statesman of the 20th century.” Meloni had joined the MSI’s youth wing in 1992, as a teenager. Four years later, as a young activist electioneering for her party, she echoed Fini’s praise for the dictator. “I think Mussolini was a good politician,” she told a TV interviewer. “Everything he did, he did for Italy.”

The current popularity of Meloni’s party in part indicates the weakness of the Italian center-left, which has struggled to package its ideas in ways that connect with voters. Above all, it signifies an acceleration of Italy’s democratic backsliding. In many respects, Meloni’s current coalition is an updated version of the governments Berlusconi went on to form during the 2000s—which, over time, took on more and more of his neofascist partner’s politics. In 2009, the process was formalized in a merger of Forza Italia and the National Alliance to form a new party, People of Freedom. Berlusconi’s coalitions demonized immigrants and detained them, and stoked anti-communist fears (even though the Italian Communist Party had ceased to exist).

Throughout, Berlusconi played on nostalgia for fascism’s promise of law and order even as he whitewashed its violence. “Mussolini never killed anyone,” he told Britain’s Spectator magazine in 2003; “he sent people into confinement to have vacations.” The Fascist prisons on islands such as Ponza, where torture was practiced, were no holiday resorts. His statement also denied the Fascists’ mass killings in Italy and its colonies, including Libya, and ignored their participation in the Holocaust.

Meloni served as minister of youth in Berlusconi’s last government (2008–11), which proved a laboratory for policies she has made her own. In 2008, one of Berlusconi’s ministers claimed that high immigrant birth rates, together with Italy’s aging population and sluggish demographic growth, would cause Italians to disappear “in two or three generations.” Such fear-mongering finds an audience because of Italy’s historically low birth rates, yet it also foments racist attitudes about who should be having babies.

This nationalist preoccupation echoes Mussolini’s warnings. “Cradles are empty and cemeteries are expanding,” Il Duce declared in 1927. “The entire white race, the Western race, could be submerged by other races of color that multiply with a rhythm unknown to our own.” Meloni’s twist on this theme is “ethnic substitution.” Since 2017, she has tweeted repeatedly that Italian identity is being deliberately erased by globalists such as Soros and European Union officials, who have conspired to unleash “uncontrolled mass immigration.” The paranoid style in Italian politics translates into xenophobic proposals to deny citizenship to children born in Italy to foreign parents and to cut foreigners’ access to welfare benefits.

The People of Freedom merger entailed a loss of autonomy for the neofascist tradition. The breakup of Berlusconi’s coalition in 2011, when the euro-zone crisis forced his resignation, created an opportunity for its far-right partner to make a fresh start. The Brothers of Italy formed the following year.

As it has grown, Meloni has walked a double line, trading in far-right conspiracy theories at times, while claiming to be a traditional conservative at others. The approach has proved ominously successful. Ignazio La Russa is now the vice president of the Italian Senate; and last year, Mussolini’s granddaughter Rachele, who has been a Brothers of Italy politician since 2016, was reelected to Rome’s municipal council with more votes than any other candidate.

What can we expect if the first female-led far-right government comes into being after next week’s election? Meloni seems unlikely to tone down her extremism or change her alignment  with illiberal parties in Europe, such as Hungary’s Fidesz. After all, pursuing hard-line anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ policies in the name of defending white Christian civilization has worked well for them. Like Orbán, Meloni has made common cause with U.S. Republicans, attending the Conservative Political Action Conference and the National Prayer Breakfast.

The political résumés of her coalition partners hardly inspire optimism that any government Meloni led would respect the rule of law. Berlusconi is a convicted criminal (on counts of tax fraud and bribery), and in 2018—not long before Salvini became minister of the interior—the League leader called for a “mass cleansing” of immigrants. A scenario in which a Meloni-led government’s rollback of civil rights might put Italy on a path to conflict with the European Union is not far-fetched. That is the situation with Hungary, which a recent European Parliament resolution said can “no longer be considered a full democracy.” Orbán’s government uses such clashes for its populist culture-warring even as it continues to take billions of euros in EU funding.

The Brothers of Italy could also try to revisit a constitutional reform that it first proposed in 2018 but was rejected by Parliament. The measure would make the president elected directly rather than by an electoral college. On its face, a head of state chosen by popular vote appears more democratic, but other things are at play here. Italy’s electoral college was introduced by the 1948 constitution, which enshrined antifascist protections against the future possibility of government takeover by a charismatic demagogue. Ostensibly, Italy’s political system is also parliamentary, which makes the prime minister accountable as the government’s chief executive; the presidency is supposed to be a figurehead role, at a remove from day-to-day partisanship. But the Brothers of Italy’s advocacy of “presidentialism,” as the idea of a more robust head of state with a popular mandate is known in Italy, has naturally put the country’s center-left parties on edge.

In her interview in Venice, Hillary Clinton also remarked on how right-wing parties can sometimes appear better at promoting women. Women like Meloni “are protected by patriarchy,” she said, “because they are often the first to support the fundamental pillars of male power and privilege.” Meloni’s party slogan—“God, Fatherland, Family”—celebrates those very pillars of power. And it came from Mussolini’s dictatorship.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at NYU, is the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present and publishes Lucid, a newsletter about threats to democracy.

 

From The Atlantic, September 22, 2022

 

MAGA Media Salivates Over Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s Most Far-Right Leader Since Mussolini

By: Justin Baragona

Right-wing media rejoiced this week over news that Italy had elected its most far-right leader since fascist Benito Mussolini was deposed following World War II, describing the victory of Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party as “the rise of Christian nationalism.”

With Italy’s flirtation with fascism sending shockwaves throughout Europe and the Western world, MAGA pundits attempted to paint Meloni’s ideology as “middle of the road,” suggesting that she couldn’t be “hard-right” if she won the election.

In just a matter of a few short years, Meloni has helped take the Brothers of Italy from a fringe-right group to the most powerful party in her country. And besides leading the nation’s first far-right government since Mussolini, Meloni also makes history by becoming Italy’s first woman premier.

It isn’t just her hard-line populist positions against abortion, immigration, LGBTQ rights, the European Union, and other social issues that have resulted in her getting labeled with the dreaded f-word: Her party has literal origins in the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, which was founded by Mussolini’s supporters after his death, and still uses the group’s tri-color flame as its logo. And though she has denounced antisemitism and disavowed parts of Mussolini’s legacy, she also openly praised the fascist dictator in her youth. “Mussolini was a good politician, in that everything he did, he did for Italy,” a 19-year-old Meloni told French television.

Much of her meteoric rise can be attributed to former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, who began boosting her during the 2018 election and has spoken at her ultra-nationalist events. The MAGA influencer also pushed to make her a featured speaker at this year’s Conservative Political Action Convention (CPAC), where she made a similar splash as far-right Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, whom she views as a kindred spirit and close friend.

Meloni’s electoral victory was therefore greeted with much celebration on Bannon’s War Room: Pandemic show on Monday. Alongside CPAC organizer Matt Schlapp, the ex-Trump adviser excitedly exclaimed that her win was the “rise of Christian nationalism” while the mainstream establishment was “in full meltdown.” Schlapp, meanwhile, declared that she “skyrocketed” to victory, which was a “warning shot coming from Italy.”Bannon and Schlapp also laid down the groundwork for a talking point that quickly became prevalent in the pro-Trump media ecosphere. “She’s for God, her country, and family. That doesn't seem all that radical. That doesn’t seem all that radical to me,” Bannon stated.

“She is pro-life, she’s pro-Constitution, she’s pro-family, and she’s anti-globalist,” Schlapp noted. “And she fits right neatly in the term of what we call conservative here in America, so as people start reading this propaganda media saying that she’s some kind of fascist, just remember, they’ve called us all fascists.”

British tabloid host Piers Morgan, who recently joined Fox Nation and Murdoch-owned British network TalkTV, insisted Meloni “is not ‘far-right,’” claiming anyone labeling her that needs to “brush up on your Nazi/Fascist history” because she’s really “center-right.”

Charlie Kirk, founder of Trump-devoted student organization Turning Point USA, also asserted that Meloni’s politics were largely uncontroversial. “It’s not fascist. It’s common sense, it’s normal, it’s middle of the road,” he blared on his podcast.

Appearing on his network’s flagship news program Special Report on Monday evening, former GOP congressman-turned-Fox News host Trey Gowdy bemoaned the media calling Meloni “far-right” while suggesting her victory demonstrated her centrist bona fides.

“I guess what I'm wondering is if you are winning elections, if you are what the people want, at what point does that become the center?” Gowdy wondered. “Who gets to say what is far-right, or what is hard-right?”

Over on Fox News wannabe competitor Newsmax, the commentary incorporated outright cheerleading and revisionist history.

Conservative author Sam Sorbo (wife of Hercules actor and right-wing activist Kevin Sorbo) gushed over Meloni, insisting that “we don’t see neo-fascism” with the incoming premier. Furthermore, according to Sorbo, fascism is actually a left-wing ideology.

“Fascism has everything to do with socialism,” she said to the credulous Newsmax anchors. “That’s why Mussolini joined with Hitler during WWII. And Hitler was not a fascist, Hitler was a socialist. Mussolini was a fascist.”

Newsmax host and serial plagiarist Benny Johnson, who spent Monday online raving about “Based” Meloni, also took to his channel’s airwaves to effusively praise the new premier. “Meloni doesn’t want globalist control, she doesn't want the Italians to essentially be melted into a pot of all Europeans and treated like a number instead of a unique, individual human being,” he proclaimed. “Populism is popular.”

In the end, though, it was up to the host of the most-watched primetime show on cable news to put his stamp of approval on Meloni. Tucker Carlson, who has relentlessly boosted Orban and Brazil’s authoritarian president Jair Bolsonaro, delivered a full-throated endorsement of the incoming Italian prime minister on Monday night. And he called for a similar candidate in the U.S.

“American families are facing the very same onslaught from the very same poisonous ideologies,” Carlson emphatically stated. “The difference is that in this country it's rarely acknowledged, except on the fringes. Meloni is not on the fringes. She's the new prime minister of Italy—she will be—and she's saying it out loud.”

Before playing a clip of a Meloni, speech, the Fox star added, “As you watch this, ask yourself if you would vote for a candidate like this if you had the chance in our country.”

From The Daily Beast, September 27, 2022