La Duchessa

As I have watched the rise of right-wing populism in the United States, I looked to see if I could make an ancestral claim to Irish citizenship on my paternal side, but my nearest Irish immigrant relatives are my fourth great-grandparents, which leaves me out of contention.  But, at least on my maternal Italian side, I had my maternal grandfather, who came to the U.S. from Italy in 1924 to escape fascism.

Then this shrew Giorgia Meloni and her far-right Brothers of Italy party win power.

The Brothers of Italy are a right-wing extremist party founded in 1946, a year after Mussolini's downfall  and the same year the Italian monarchy was abolished.  As party leader, Meloni opposes abortion, gender studies, and immigration.  Not all immigration, apparently, just immigration of the brown people from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, believing that the EU's acceptance of migrants is part of a plot to replace Italians.  She also supports domestic economic policies that promote more native births to push up the country's low birth rate.  Paradoxically, she's been skeptical of COVID vaccines and has refused to vaccinate her daughter, claiming that the probability of someone under twenty years of age dying from COVID is the same as being struck by lightning.

You may wonder how an Italian woman can be so ruthless and nasty, but I've known all along that Italians have such a mean streak.  I grew up outside Newark, remember.

I thought I'd have to escape the rise of fascism in America in 2022 and move to Italy just like my maternal grandfather escaped the rise of fascism in Italy in 1922 and moved to America.  Now I have to go to a backup plan - travel to Ireland and marry a red-haired local lass like Sean Thornton did in The Quiet Man.  

And if that doesn't work out, there's always claiming political asylum in Canada.

One advantage Meloni does have is that, like her hero Mussolini, she'll make the trains run on time.  It's not that American fascists can't make trains run on time.  It's that they don't even believe in passenger rail in the first place.