Cheap Seats 2022 By Rich Trzupek

The Lowest Bar - 10/05

By Rich Trzupek
  If you get your news from the mainstream media, which is in fact the propaganda arm of the Democrat party, you will find the election of new Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni described in apocalyptic terms. The usual suspects like the New York Times, the Washington Post and National Public Radio have declared that Meloni is a fascist, an ideological direct descendant of Benito Mussolini and therefore a leader to be both feared and despised.
  The left presents those ideas not as propositions to be duly considered, but as absolute facts that are beyond rational dispute. Questioning the left’s obsession with linking a successful modern-day conservative leader to a long-dead totalitarian would-be megalomaniac is wholly politically incorrect. Doing so will certainly earn you the label of “fascist denier” in the days to come. And yet the Meloni – Mussolini connection is about as nonsensical as assuming a connection between Stalin and Peter the Great.
  It is absolutely mind-blowing how easily our friends on the left toss around the label “fascist” with total disregard to what the word actually means. The core of what thugs like Mussolini and Hitler stood for was absolute state control of ruling institutions, means of communications and social norms. Fascists tolerated no opposing opinions, no alternative messages and no variations in life-style. That insistence on uniformity – imposed and punishable should one defy the standards thus imposed – is a wholly leftist concept.
  More to the point, it’s a socialist way of looking at the world. It’s not a coincidence that the word “Socialist” appears in the official name of the Nazi party: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. People can pretend that the ideas and goals and programs associated with fascism have nothing to do with leftist ideology, but that presumption is difficult to defend. Leftists want control. Conservatives and libertarians want consistency and accountability. Those are vastly different agendas.
  Labeling Ms. Meloni a far-right wing nutjob is lazy and stupid. Consider what Alberto Mingardi, a professor of history and political thought at IULM University in Milan, and Nicola Rossi, a professor of political economy at Tor Vergata University in Rome said about Meloni.  
  “The victory has made Ms. Meloni, 45, the object of widespread international perplexity and even abuse. She has been portrayed as the heir of Benito Mussolini and the harbinger of a new fascism,” they wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. “Yet whatever Italian democracy’s many faults, it isn’t toppling, and there is no risk of authoritarianism. Ms. Meloni, a career politician, has been vocal in defending Parliament’s prerogatives against encroachments by the executive branch.”
  The left says she’s a racist and anti-immigrant. She’s not. She’s against open borders. The left says she will persecute LGBTQ people. She won’t. But she’s going to continue to call boys “boys” and girls “girls” however they chose to appear. In her own words:
  “Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology, yes to the culture of life, no to the abyss of death, no to the violence of Islam, yes to safer borders, no to mass immigration, yes to work for our people.”
  That’s not fascism, that’s common sense. Odd that common sense has become so rare on the left, but that’s where we are folks.
  Or, in the works of Ms. Meloni:
  “People understand that in this age, the only way of being rebels is to preserve what we are. The only way of being rebels is to be conservatives.”
  Email: richtrzupek@gmail.com