Extremism always comes wrapped in centrism

Your brain on Murdoch

Australia’s right-wing commentariat are having a quite a moment in the wake of the election of Giorgia Meloni, the candidate for the far-right Brothers of Italy Party. (If you have any doubts about the party’s neo-fascist bone fides, maybe read this or this.)

To justify their enthusiasm or schadenfreude or whatever it is, local conservatives must make the case that Brothers of Italy (Forza Italia) can in no way be considered fascist, and this claim in turn relies on the right-wing trope that the original fascists themselves—Hitler and Mussolini, no less—were actually socialists, and therefore of the left.

No really, this is a thing.

The fact that Meloni is a woman adds another element to their dissembling, and they get to throw a total misreading of feminism into the mix, using the syllogistic logic that she is a woman and therefore a feminist. Ugh. (And how disappointing was it to see Hillary Clinton fall into this trap too: “The election of the first woman prime minister in a country …