Italy held an election, and a conservative, anti-socialist, anti–illegal immigration candidate has now won.

In Europe, that's a big deal, given that upstart-type conservative candidates have generally fallen just a little short of winning any power of any kind over the past two decades.

The victory of Giorgia Meloni, first female prime minister of Italy, has shocked the press, as well as the local European Union devotees, and practically all of them are now using the word "brace" as a means of describing what happened.  It's like a memo went out.

Get a load of the headlines:

Italy Braces for Pivotal Election —Foreign Policy 

Italy braces for sharp move to the right after election campaigning closes —The Guardian

On eve of election, Italy braces for potential far-right win —Agence France-Presse

Italy braces for far-right victory in elections —National Public Radio

Italy braces for political earthquake on eve of elections expected to hand the country the most right-wing government since World War Two —Daily Mail

It's as if they've elected...President Trump.

"Brace" is a term you use ahead of a plane crash, as in "brace for impact."  Talk about giving Italy's first female prime minister a chance.

It's disgusting.  What we have here is a free and fair election, of the kind western Europe is always lecturing the Third World to conduct, and now that one has happened in Italy, all of a sudden, that's a crisis.

Since when does a normal, unfraudulent election, where voters freely choose the person they'd like to have represent them, merit the term "brace"? 

Obviously, when it has a winner the establishment doesn't like.

The press and its political allies in Europe didn't want Italians to vote for the candidate of their choice, so in their minds, the whole thing is going to crash.

It's a stupid, uninsightful, anti-democratic interpretation of a free and fair election, which, judging by the results, suggests some tremendous discontent with how the European Union has been governing Italy, which, in more intelligent times, would have merited some introspection.

People don't change horses without compelling reasons.

In Italy, factors such as the monster COVID lockdowns, the horrible COVID death count, the loss of people's grandparents in the pandemic, and then the inflation based on government overspending, the vast increase in the size and power of government, and the E.U., the open borders, and now the greenie-midwifed energy crisis, which is about to plunge Europe into a very cold winter, had to have something to do with this.

The short story here is that the ruling establishment failed, and now the Italians have said "basta!" and chosen someone else.  That's all there is to it.

This shouldn't be a wildly unexpected outcome, let alone a "brace for impact"–type story, but sure enough, it is. 

Over at the European Commission, the reaction was utterly crazy:

"My approach is that whatever democratic government is willing to work with us, we're working together," [European Commission chief Ursula] von der Leyen said at Princeton University in the United States on Thursday, responding to a question on whether there were any concerns with regard to the upcoming elections in Italy.

"If things go in a difficult direction, I've spoken about Hungary and Poland, we have tools," she added.

It sounds like someone's threatening her rice bowl, and she feels very, very entitled to it.  The remarks were read as a veiled threat and have stirred a lot of controversy since.

It's as obnoxious as can be, given that Italy's course correction was probably long overdue, and the Italians were getting tired of playing guinea pig and vassal state to all of the E.U.'s idiotic central planning schemes, which have been claimed to be for Italy's own good.

The press is yelling "brace," but the other problem is in the loose use of the word "fascism," apparently because some in Meloni's movement came from a Mussolini-associated party in the past.

There's little evidence that she's a budding Mussolini, given her agenda, but that hasn't stopped the "brace for impact" crowd.

Is Meloni's party, with its free market agenda, traditional values, and flag-waving nationalism, actually a fascist party?

Is it corporate state–oriented, with the heavy hand of the state in all major industries, as well as state control of education and social institutions, as Mussolini himself posited?  You know, like how the state influences and controls what Facebook does even though it doesn't own it, as is the case here in the U.S.?

Not by this definition, described by Snopes.com based on a verbal scuffle over what somebody on the web claimed:

Corporatism ("corporativismo" in Italian) was one of the cornerstone principles in Mussolini's fascism, and had to do with the way society and the economy would be organized, with state power at the head of a system of guilds or corporations ("corporazione") representing each major industry. 

In his Dictionary of Political Thought, Roger Scruton describes corporatism in this way:

The economy was divided into associations (called 'syndicates') of workers, employers and the professions; only one syndicate was allowed in each branch of industry, and all officials were either fascist politicians or else loyal to the fascist cause. According to law the syndicates were autonomous, but in fact they were run by the state. The 'corporations' united the syndicates in a given industry, but made no pretence at autonomy from the state.

This ultimate power and pervasive influence of the state (led by one man, of course) was famously summed up by Mussolini in a speech in 1927, in which he declared: "everything in the state, nothing against the State, nothing outside the state." 

In the Doctrine of Fascism, in 1932, Mussolini (with the help of Gentile) wrote:

Fascism desires the State to be strong and organic, based on broad foundations of popular support. The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporative, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organized in their res­pective associations, circulate within the State.

In other words, corporatism in Mussolini's fascism was not a free-market capitalist system. Far from it. It did not allow for the kind of competition, innovation, market entry, and research and development characteristic of modern capitalism, and it was closely ruled in every way by the state with Mussolini at its head. 

Meloni has none of that crap in her agenda.  The real reason the left finds it easy to yell "fascist" is that Joe Biden and his ilk have been calling Republicans "fascist" for weeks now, ironically so, given Joe Biden's blood-red speech in Philadelphia.  Who again is the fascist?  Of course Meloni would be a fascist to them, no matter how conservative she is.

Rod Dreher at the American Conservative has incisive observations:

It is true that Meloni's party, the Brothers Of Italy, has roots in twentieth-century fascism. But she herself is a standard right-wing populist, in that she is a social conservative (particularly, she values religion and opposes gender ideology) and is skeptical of political and economic globalism. Meloni was raised working class in Rome by a single mother; her father abandoned the family. She still holds on to her strong Roman accent. Below, watch her 15-minute speech in English at the National Conservatism Rome conference in 2020, and tell me with a straight face that that woman is a Fascist. The only thing that would set her apart from a standard US Republican is a more critical attitude towards capitalism, but in the post-Trump era, not even that would be a big deal (e.g., Gov. Ron DeSantis said in Florida recently that "America is a country with an economy, not the other way around" — which is Meloni's position captured in a phrase). If CBS News is right and Giorgia Meloni is a "fascist," then I'm telling you, half of America is fascist. Then again, they probably do believe that in the CBS Newsroom in New York.

Please, I want you to watch this, or at least part of it. It's important to see and hear for yourself the radical distance between what CBS News and other media say Giorgia Meloni is, and what she actually is. It's important so you can grasp how badly you and all of us are gaslighted by the media when it comes to politics, especially when politics intersect with culture. They hate Meloni because she takes a hard line on out-of-control immigration, and because she believes in defending the traditional family (which entails rejecting transgender ideology). Ergo, "FASCIST!"

It's similar to the smear jobs the left has been pulling on Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orbán.  Stuff like this tends to make voters want to vote for such candidates if only to make their voices heard.  The claims of doom and doom from the establishment and corporate media are amazing in their statist uniformity.  If you want to be looking for fascism anywhere, or for that matter a "brace for impact" crash, they're a good place to look.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.