Italian Fascists Hope New Fascist PM Will Bring About New Era Of Tolerance (For Fascism)

In which the New York Times goes on a Benito Safari.

For many years now and most especially since 2016 election, legacy media outlets have trekked out to diners across the nation to get a read on the pulse of Real America, often to find out what it is that they find so very delightful about Donald Trump. People like to call these "Cletus Safaris" (a term that feels a little more "LOL poor people" than I've ever really feel comfortable with).

But now they're expanding the brand to what one might call Benito Safaris. Because yesterday, the New York Times came out with an actual story about how literal fascists are hoping that now that Giorgia Meloni is in charge, people will be more tolerant of their fascism.

For real.

 It begins:  

As a young card-carrying member of a party formed from the ashes of Italy’s Fascist party after World War II, Gino Del Nero, 73, recalls being insulted, sidelined and silenced by leftists, as well as by some neighbors and co-workers.

But now that Giorgia Meloni, a hard-right political leader, has been sworn in as prime minister of Italy, Mr. Del Nero feels vindicated.

“That is over,” he said of the decades where he had to keep his head down. “We are freer now.” [...]

Mr. Del Nero, from Rocca di Papa, said he hoped that now he could read a right-wing newspaper or book on the subway without eliciting scornful looks.

His loyalty to the right had come at a cost, he said, years of being excluded from workers’ union meetings at the hospital where he worked. Colleagues silenced him in discussions.

People often dismissed him as a “Fascist.”“It’s a mark we carry inside,” he said. “Now I feel vindicated.”

This is real. This is an actual newspaper story about how a literal fascist was very sad about being silenced and was surprised that people didn't want to be around him, just because of how he was a fascist, and how they called him a fascist just because he was literally in the party that replaced the National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista or PNF) with all of the people who had previously been in ... the National Fascist Party.

Meloni herself has painted her victory in these terms as well, talking about how this was a victory for all of the people who had been so terribly demoralized by people opposing fascism:

In her maiden speech to Parliament as prime minister this week, Ms. Meloni again rejected Fascism and said that the racial laws of 1938 were the lowest point in Italian history. But she also denounced Italy’s postwar years of “criminalization and political violence,” in which she said “innocent boys” had been killed “in the name of antifascism.”

The remarks were very much in line with the balancing act that Ms. Meloni executed throughout her campaign before the election in September. On the eve of that vote, she said her victory would not only be “payback for so many people who in this nation had to lower their head for decades,” but also “for all the people who saw it differently from the mainstream and the dominant power system.”

Several other cafones were profiled for the article. There was one guy who says his restaurant was targeted by vandals who spray painted "Friend of Giorgia. Fascist." on the front of his business who was excited to say that “Now the word patriot is not going to be canceled anymore.”

The word patriot — patriota — was not previously canceled.

The rest of their complaints were also pretty familiar sounding.

Some nationalists said that having a prime minister might also give them a better foothold in public sectors of cultural life that they complain has systematically excluded them.

“There’s now a great opportunity on a cultural level,” said Federico Gennaccari, the editor of a Rome-based conservative publishing house. His wish list, for example, would include a new take on the massacre of Italian soldiers and civilians by Yugoslav Communist partisans from 1943 to 1947 in northeastern Italy. For decades, members of the hard right, in a clear example of “whataboutism,” cited that massacre when asked about Fascist complicity in the Holocaust. [...]

Others, like Gennaro Malgieri, a conservative author and former lawmaker, spoke of a “hegemony of the left” in postwar Italy that had “occupied centers of learning and culture,” keeping the right from making inroads in “publishing, means of mass communication, universities, festivals and positions in cultural institutions.”

Just like here, there is very little evidence that they have, in fact, been "systematically excluded" from anything.

This nonsense is not entirely unlike the nonsense that came out of the mouths of Trump supporters when Trump was elected. Many of them truly seemed to believe that electing a terrible, repulsive person to be president would make it more socially acceptable for them to be terrible, repulsive people. This did not happen. If anything, people were even more pissed off at them for saddling them with a terrible, repulsive president and had even less time for their bullshit than they previously did.

This all assumes that the reason why people are less than tolerant of assholes and fascists is that assholes and fascists have not had adequate representation — which I think we can all agree has never been an issue. It is not lack of exposure that makes people dislike fascists, but rather the fascism itself. People don't like fascism, they don't want to live under fascism and as a result, tend to skeeve people who might be inclined towards fascism.

Shocking, I know.

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