Steve Bannon and Matt Schlapp celebrate a party with neo-fascist roots winning power in Italy

Matt Schlapp on the expected next Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni: “She fits right neatly in the term of what we call conservative here in America”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

From the September 26, 2022, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room: Pandemic 

MATT SCHLAPP (GUEST): She has just skyrocketed, as you know, the results put her in a really strong position, obviously, first of all, to put a coalition together of people that are roughly in the same zone ideologically, but she is also in the cusp of getting the number of seats she needs to really make the constitutional changes that need to be made. This is a warning shot coming from Italy.

You know what they, what the propaganda media does, and I learned this in Hungary, I met with lots of parliament members from across Europe and they said the far-right phrase is what they use in Europe, call you a fascist, call you a Nazi, to call you an antisemite. The irony is that all the antisemitism, most of it is on the left. They hate the state of Israel, they hated Netanyahu, they hated the Trump-Netanyahu relationship, and they just hate the state of Israel for all kinds of reasons. So they use this term far-right, which our American media is now picking up.

Let me tell you what she is. She is pro-life, she's pro-Constitution, she's pro-family, and she's anti-globalist. And she fits right neatly in the term of what we call conservative here in America, so as people start reading this propaganda media saying that she's some kind of fascist, just remember, they've called us all fascists, or semi-fascists or whatever they have this week for us.

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STEVE BANNON (HOST): This is the rise of Christian nationalism. You watch.

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BANNON: She's for God, her country, and family. That doesn't seem all that radical. That doesn't seem all that radical to me. They're in full meltdown. That makes her a Christian nationalist. The worst of the fascists, right?

The Associated Press reported about the neo-fascist roots of Meloni's party:

The Brothers of Italy party, which won the most votes in Italy’s national election, has its roots in the post-World War II neo-fascist Italian Social Movement.

Keeping the movement's most potent symbol, the tricolor flame, Giorgia Meloni has taken Brothers of Italy from a fringe far-right group to Italy's biggest party.

A century after Benito Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome, which brought the fascist dictator to power, Meloni is poised to lead Italy's first far-right-led government since World War II and Italy's first woman premier.

The Italian Social Movement, or MSI, was founded in 1946 by Giorgio Almirante, a chief of staff in Mussolini’s last government. It drew fascist sympathizers and officials into its ranks following Italy’s role in the war, when it was allied with the Nazis and then liberated by the Allies.