In one of the more bizarre Twitter trends of recent days, the name “Mussolini,” as in Benito Mussolini — the founder of the ultra-right wing political movement known as “fascism” who ruled as Italy’s fascist dictator from 1925 to 1943, per History.com — was trending on the social media platform Sunday afternoon.
Why? The reason was just as bizarre. After comedian Jim Carrey posted a painting on Saturday depicting Mussolini dead, hanging by his feet — an accurate rendering of how Mussolini’s body was displayed in public after his 1945 slaying by Italian Communists in 1945, per History.com — the fascist dictator’s granddaughter Alessandra Mussolini responded to Carrey on Twitter.
“You are a bas***d,” the 56-year-old Mussolini said to Carrey, in her Twitter message. Alessandra Mussolini is, herself, a politician in Italy and currently serves in the European Parliament. Until recently, she belonged to the right-wing Forza Italia party headed by four-time Italia Prime Minister and industrialist Silvio Berlusconi.
But lashing out at Carrey was apparently not enough for Benito Mussolini’s granddaughter, who returned to her Twitter account, retweeting two Twitter messages by Donald Trump. She also defended Trump from Carrey, who has previously posted his caricatures of Trump online,
“President @realDonaldTrump doesn’t have to worry about poor @JimCarrey politica attacks,” she wrote on Twitter . “His drawings are only dirty paper.”
Alessandra Mussolini has generated controversy in the recent past, with her defense of her grandfather. In October, as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, she tweeted a threat to “monitor” and “bring to court” anyone who posted “disrespectful” images or words about her fascist dictator grandfather online — even though Italy also has a law dating to 1952 that makes it illegal to “publicly glorify representatives of fascism.”
In one Twitter post responding to Carrey, Alessandra Mussolini appeared to somehow compare her fascist grandfather, who seized power in a “March on Rome” by his gang of thugs known as “Blackshirts” in 1922, according to a United States Holocaust Museum history, to American Civil Right activist Rosa Parks who she referred to as “Rosa Park.”
Hi @JimCarrey do you know the history of #RosaPark ? pic.twitter.com/tVbvqISt2N
— Alessandra Mussolini (@Ale_Mussolini_) March 31, 2019
She also for some reason tweeted at Carrey with a photo of an atomic mushroom cloud, perhaps intending to accuse Carrey of ignoring the United States atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. Carrey, however, is Canadian.
Hi @JimCarrey now draw this for us pic.twitter.com/tDZ9RB1WLm
— Alessandra Mussolini (@Ale_Mussolini_) March 31, 2019
In another Twitter post, Alessandra Mussolini said that her tweets would “bring out the miasmas #antifa from the sewers.” Of course, the name “Antifa” is a shortened version of term “anti-fascist,” as the BBC noted, so the Mussolini granddaughter’s antipathy toward Antifa would be understandable given that Benito Mussolini was the inventor of fascism.