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Make Italy Great Again: Fascism - Part 1 · The Overlap

• 0:01
  Welcome to the Overlap podcast. We're the show that tears down the walls between disciplines, connects the dots you never thought to connect, and unearths the concepts that shape our world.
• 0:15
  Lately, we've noticed a word being thrown around like a political hand grenade. Fascism. You hear it everywhere. In protests, on cable news, in your uncle's Facebook rants.
• 0:28
  But what does it even mean anymore? Has it become so watered down that it's nothing more than a lazy label for anything you disagree with? We think so. And that's a problem.
• 0:40
  Because when a word with such a terrifying history loses its meaning, we lose our ability to recognize the things that it describes, right?
• 0:52
  When we confuse a political movement with a bad personality, we mistake a system of thought for a personal insult.
• 1:04
  And in that confusion, we risk forgetting what it truly represents.
• 1:08
  This new series is a journey to reclaim that meaning. We're going to travel back to the source to the very moment this ideology took its first steps.
• 1:19
  We're going to explore its origins, its core beliefs, and the political and social conditions that allowed it to flourish.
• 1:28
  We'll ask why it's so appealing and how it was so successful.
• 1:32
  We're going to trace this road to its logical conclusion.
• 1:35
  And it all begins in a post-World War I Italy with a revolutionary socialist named Benito Mussolini.
• 1:45
  And welcome back, everybody. If you have not followed us on the socials, make sure you're doing that.
• 2:05
  Click like and subscribe right now for the podcast.
• 2:08
  Will, thank you so much for being with me today. How are you doing?
• 2:13
  I'm well, Joshua. Thank you for asking. And thank you so much for having me.
• 2:17
  Yes. As you know, I am your co-host, Joshua. This is my co-host, Will.
• 2:21
  And we are both very happy to be with you today. We hope you enjoyed our last two-parter.
• 2:28
  We put a lot of work into it. We put a lot of effort into the research and understanding these things to put them out there.
• 2:33
  And our goal is to make them more widely proliferated.
• 2:38
  So, if you wouldn't mind, if you liked this podcast or you liked the last one, share them out to a friend that you think could really benefit from an understanding of the kind of things we put out there into the world.
• 2:49
  So, William, fascism, right?
• 2:52
  Very, very commonly heard around kind of all parts lately. Wouldn't you agree?
• 2:58
  I would. And I kind of just feel uncomfortable just having my name that close to the word, like William fascism.
• 3:04
  I know. And there's reasons that we should all be a little bit afraid of that, right?
• 3:07
  Yeah. It's not a pretty word.
• 3:12
  It's not. It's a scary word. And I think one of the things that I saw when I kind of brought this up to Will was it doesn't really have a meaning anymore.
• 3:21
  I asked a couple of people across the aisle, and it seemed to be this cultural idea of fascism just meaning somebody who espoused ideas that I didn't agree with, right?
• 3:36
  Or in the most extreme case, someone who espouses their ideas or puts their ideas out into the world using violence as a tool to spread their message.
• 3:46
  I don't think that's true. I understand the historical relevance of the word fascism and who actually created it.
• 3:55
  And that's kind of what we wanted to talk about today.
• 3:58
  Before we get started, Will, do you have any—what's your personal definition of fascism?
• 4:04
  If you had to really put it into meaning, you know, in a blurb, something that we could easily, you know, quote you on on Facebook and tie you in with all kinds of other government organizations to specifically tie you, your one view on this very particular thing.
• 4:18
  So I wanted you to pin me down and take everything I say and put it through the lens of this definition.
• 4:22
  I think I'd probably say it's something like a consolidation of power in the central government is mainly run by one person using the threat of violence to enforce or enact their policies.
• 4:35
  Something along those lines.
• 4:37
  I don't think that that's an unfair or an inaccurate summary based upon the research I've done.
• 4:43
  But let's go ahead and do kind of a deep dive into Mr. Benito, Mr. Mussolini.
• 4:52
  I want to apologize ahead of time.
• 4:53
  I mean the muscle Mussolini.
• 4:55
  Yes.
• 4:56
  Putting the muscle into Mussolini.
• 4:58
  Is that dad joke number one?
• 5:01
  That's dad joke number one.
• 5:02
  If you had a guy who's thinking that shirtless ski film, a photo shoot, you know, you had to give him something.
• 5:08
  You had to get a nickname in there somewhere.
• 5:10
  That's all I got.
• 5:12
  I do want to apologize ahead of time for my Italian pronunciations here.
• 5:16
  I'm going to apologize on Will's behalf as well for our Italian pronunciations.
• 5:20
  Grazie.
• 5:21
  It's going to be prego, prego.
• 5:24
  Sometimes it can even be comical.
• 5:26
  You know, we hope you get a laugh out of it.
• 5:28
  We're not intending to be offensive to anyone, especially to Italians, either the language or the country.
• 5:34
  We just do the best we can.
• 5:36
  And sometimes we do anglicize these words because we're speaking an anglicized language.
• 5:44
  So look, picture this.
• 5:46
  Post-World War I.
• 5:48
  It's 1919.
• 5:51
  Italy as a country has just gotten done with the Great War, right?
• 5:59
  World War I.
• 6:00
  It was the first ever worldwide war.
• 6:03
  They fought alongside the winning team.
• 6:07
  They bled.
• 6:08
  You know, they died.
• 6:09
  They even vanquished their old nemesis, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, right?
• 6:15
  Which at that time was sort of like their high school football rival.
• 6:19
  And you finally get to beat them as an adult, right?
• 6:21
  Maybe you win that contract against your old enemy.
• 6:25
  But over a half a million Italian soldiers did not make it home from the Great War, from World War I.
• 6:33
  So you'd think the streets of Milan would be like one big party.
• 6:38
  Everybody would be celebrating.
• 6:40
  You'd be wrong.
• 6:41
  It was more like a funeral, a national wake.
• 6:44
  The country was, to put it mildly, kind of a dumpster fire, right?
• 6:48
  To pay for the war, the government basically just hit print on the national currency.
• 6:54
  So lira is the name of their currency, was worth literally less than the paper that it was printed on.
• 7:01
  By 1920, less than a year later, it was worth just a sixth of its original value.
• 7:08
  For your average person, let's call him Giuseppe, right?
• 7:12
  This meant that your life savings could now barely buy a week's worth of just pasta.
• 7:18
  The big companies in Italy that had been cranking out ships and guns went bankrupt, leaving millions of employees, leaving millions of citizens of Italy,
• 7:30
  including two million soldiers who were promised, you know, the whole kit and caboodle of a hero's welcome, standing in an unemployment line, standing in bread lines.
• 7:40
  It wasn't just about money, too.
• 7:43
  I mean, obviously, from a capitalist perspective, money always tends to bubble up as one of the most important things.
• 7:51
  But I think at this time, it was also about respect.
• 7:55
  A big shot poet named Gabriele D'Annunzio came up with a killer catchphrase for it.
• 8:01
  It was the Vittoria Mutilata, the mutilated victory.
• 8:06
  Italy had been basically promised a bunch of new territory, like land, to join the war.
• 8:13
  To convince them to join the war, they had been promised specific areas.
• 8:17
  But when everybody actually sat down at the peace conference, the other big players, especially the United States, basically were like, yeah, sorry, we're not going to do that.
• 8:26
  We can't do that.
• 8:26
  We don't have the ability to do that.
• 8:28
  We would have to go in and take it by force.
• 8:29
  It would be a really big deal.
• 8:31
  Their prime minister basically got played.
• 8:34
  I mean, he couldn't actually deliver to his people what he was promised and what he had promised them and was pretty humiliated at a really world stage kind of level.
• 8:46
  The whole country had been kind of hoodwinked by its allies and even worse, by its own leaders.
• 8:56
  So you've got a nation that's broke and humiliated and scared of the future.
• 9:01
  The old school politicians in Italy were masters of a system that was all about creating these do-nothing kind of mushy coalitions.
• 9:11
  And they were completely paralyzed by this problem.
• 9:16
  In the four years after World War I, Italy went through five prime ministers.
• 9:22
  Five.
• 9:23
  That is essentially like the U.S. going through a president as fast as we go through underwear.
• 9:29
  Five prime ministers basically creates total chaos.
• 9:37
  Nobody knows what's going on.
• 9:38
  Nobody knows who the leader of the country is.
• 9:41
  The years 1919 and 1920 were actually – they created a name for them.
• 9:45
  They were called the Two Red Years because inspired by the revolution that was happening in Russia, socialist unions went on a striking spree.
• 9:55
  Right?
• 10:25
  So they looked at their government and they saw all of these politicians who essentially were paralyzed, kind of spineless, do-nothings.
• 10:34
  And they looked at the streets and they saw crime and anarchy and thievery and people were getting killed on the streets.
• 10:41
  And they were basically just desperate for someone.
• 10:44
  Anyone.
• 10:45
  Please.
• 10:47
  Just come and fix it.
• 10:48
  Right?
• 10:49
  Someone who could restore order, could bring back national pride, and, you know, like, make Italy great again.
• 10:58
  Very much like they remember from the Roman Empire.
• 11:03
  Enter a person with all of the answers.
• 11:08
  Will, do you want to –
• 11:09
  And it's just to bend you the muscle, Mussolini?
• 11:12
  Yes.
• 11:13
  Yes, I'd love to.
• 11:15
  Mussolini is – well, his background is a little bit unusual, to say the least, for an Italian politician.
• 11:24
  He started off as a journalist, which maybe that's not so unusual, but then he was a former schoolteacher and actually a former star of the Socialist Party, which, if you're keeping track here, kids, is not the fascism, not the home of fascism.
• 11:39
  Yes.
• 11:40
  In fact, it's often quite the opposite and the direct enemy of fascism.
• 11:43
  So, we have a former star of an opposite political party with a background as a teacher and journalist who eventually became an editor of the newspaper for the Socialist Party, the primary newspaper.
• 11:55
  And that's where he sort of began to learn, I guess, the rhetoric and the political machinations, if you will, and how to promote those.
• 12:06
  So, he became sort of a firebrand to the cause of socialism.
• 12:09
  He loved to talk about his humble roots as a blacksmith's son, even though his family wasn't, by any means, like, poverty-ridden or anything like that.
• 12:16
  But he wanted to come across as a real man of the people.
• 12:19
  So, he sort of embraced that story of himself as, you know, a poor blacksmith's son.
• 12:24
  I can imagine him talking about, you know.
• 12:27
  I always think of Steve Martin in these scenarios.
• 12:31
  Yeah, exactly.
• 12:31
  Go back to the Steve Martin quote, you know.
• 12:33
  Yeah.
• 12:35
  Yes, I mean, I could just see him talking about quenching the steel, you know, with, like, hauling the heavy buckets around and the steaming water and the temperature of the forge burning his young eyes and, you know, whatever.
• 12:46
  That's, that's most funny where he starts out.
• 12:49
  And, you know, to be fair, he was using his real gift, which is his mouth, right?
• 12:55
  Gift of gab.
• 12:57
  Gift of gab, as they say.
• 12:58
  And he was a master of the new political brand, the new political game, which is crafting a brand.
• 13:04
  You think of this as more marketing than politics, but in these sorts of times, this is what people do.
• 13:11
  They craft a brand, they build a following, and they turn that following's anger into personal power.
• 13:18
  Kind of like Instagram.
• 13:19
  Yeah, exactly.
• 13:22
  Mobilize your TikTok forces and then tell them where to point them in the right direction and where to go to make change.
• 13:30
  Exactly.
• 13:31
  But it turns out that Mussolini was much more vocal than he was, let me say, his mouth was writing checks, his political rear end couldn't pass.
• 13:43
  He couldn't pay.
• 13:44
  But his own politics, it turns out, were flexible.
• 13:47
  He came from being a fierce anti-war guy to a chest-lumping nationalist overnight, arguing that the Great War was Italy's big chance.
• 13:54
  So this got him started.
• 13:56
  He figured the way to mobilize his forces and get the people behind him was to advocate for some big goal like the Great War.
• 14:05
  And so, unfortunately, that made him unpopular with his own crowd, the socialists.
• 14:11
  So they basically booted him.
• 14:13
  They said, yeah, we're not looking for that kind of stuff here.
• 14:17
  And, unfortunately, by booting him, they gave him sort of his own stage.
• 14:22
  And they set him up as an independent figure.
• 14:25
  And with a little seed money from some industrialists, this is also a fairly common part of the playbook, a play out of the playbook.
• 14:32
  With a little seed money from industrialists who won Italy in the war, can't imagine why.
• 14:36
  Maybe they can build tanks, boats, all sorts of stuff.
• 14:40
  He started his own newspaper.
• 14:42
  So Mussolini's paper was, of all things, and this is so great to read his titles, but it's the people of Italy.
• 14:48
  The people of Italy.
• 14:50
  That's, you know, he's just speaking for the people.
• 14:51
  Just the voice of the people, you know?
• 14:54
  Yes.
• 14:54
  Kind of like it is.
• 14:55
  Meanwhile, we got our funding from industrialists.
• 14:57
  That's okay.
• 14:58
  We're the voice of the people.
• 14:59
  And this became the sort of engine that drove his rise to power, where it basically was his mouthpiece, right, in the form of a newspaper.
• 15:08
  So it allowed him to spell whatever he wanted to.
• 15:10
  He could make it to headlines.
• 15:11
  You know, he had total control over what was on page one.
• 15:14
  So that's where he positioned himself as the ultimate anti-establishment outsider, right?
• 15:19
  So now he can write about these people and comment on the weakened politicians who are part of the old-school political group.
• 15:25
  He can rail against them from the safety of his editorial office with the backing of his industrialists and call them out for their corruption, their broken system.
• 15:34
  They're not real Italians.
• 15:36
  Right.
• 15:36
  They're not like us.
• 15:37
  They're not like, you know, they're not the people of Italy.
• 15:39
  Then he, of course, had to come up with a name for his movement, which this is where, you know, again, keep in mind, we apologize up front about the pronunciations, but...
• 15:49
  Combatimento.
• 15:51
  Combatimento.
• 15:53
  Yeah.
• 15:54
  So we'll go with the English translation of that, which is Fighting Bundles.
• 15:58
  His platform was sort of just that a bundle of ideas, a mess of ideas.
• 16:03
  And as Mussolini himself would say, his was not a party of programs.
• 16:07
  It was a party of action.
• 16:09
  So he's basically saying right up front, we're not here to write policy or make policy.
• 16:12
  We're here to act.
• 16:14
  And act he did.
• 16:15
  Yeah.
• 16:15
  So the bundles is the important part here.
• 16:19
  The idea, so FASCI, F-A-S-C-I, FASCI, is the part that is actually bundles.
• 16:25
  And it's this concept.
• 16:27
  And you can see, even if you look at, like, Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., these little sticks, right?
• 16:35
  It looks like a little bundle of sticks that have been tied with a vine or tied with...
• 16:40
  It was to signify that individually a stick was easily broken, but a pile of sticks or a bundle of sticks was a lot stronger.
• 16:50
  So from the very beginning, he was creating this idea that together we are stronger.
• 16:58
  And so he was building, in effect, a stick man or a straw man.
• 17:03
  But his message was really delivering in his paper his trash mag and at gigantic rallies, right?
• 17:11
  They were very, very, like, rowdy.
• 17:13
  And they were pretty simple, right?
• 17:16
  And pretty effective.
• 17:17
  It's something that we're all familiar with.
• 17:19
  It was a cocktail of fear and grievance and this big, beautiful promise.
• 17:26
  First, he sort of went after the establishment, like Will said.
• 17:30
  He talked about the...
• 17:32
  And we're going to quote him.
• 17:33
  I kind of want to do air quotes.
• 17:35
  How do you do air quotes in an audio format, Will?
• 17:38
  I think you just have to...
• 17:39
  I guess I'll just say quote.
• 17:40
  Yeah.
• 17:41
  Quote, the miserable ruling class that needed to, quote, be taken by the throat.
• 17:48
  He railed against the incompetent politicians in Rome.
• 17:52
  He promised to clean house, to really get rid of the bloated bureaucracy.
• 17:57
  He talked about bonifica, or reclamation, which is a word that he used for, like, radical transformation,
• 18:05
  but also for reclaiming the country itself, right?
• 18:09
  A human reclamation that involved firing tens of thousands of government workers, right?
• 18:17
  You might even say he wanted to drain the swamp.
• 18:21
  Second, he weaponized the fear of those two red years that we talked about earlier
• 18:27
  by painting this, like, horrific picture of a nation about to be swallowed by a Bolshevik menace
• 18:36
  that would destroy property and family and God.
• 18:40
  And who was the only one that was tough enough to stop it?
• 18:45
  Obviously, it was him, right?
• 18:47
  His fascisti, or the fascists, were really, from his, what he was espousing,
• 18:53
  the only thing between Italy and an entire anarchy, like, just a country of every man for himself.
• 19:01
  This played really, really well with rich people and with business owners
• 19:06
  who were absolutely terrified of having their factories taken over by the people who were working in the factories.
• 19:14
  Finally, he promised a national rebirth, right?
• 19:18
  He poked at this very raw nerve from the World War I era of the mutilated victory,
• 19:25
  which we said earlier.
• 19:27
  I'm not going to say it again because, yeah, I'm going to do the English quote, the mutilated victory.
• 19:31
  And he swore he'd restore Italy's honor and he would make it a feared and respected world power again.
• 19:39
  He said he'd replace the weakness of democracy with discipline and unity and strength in a single simplified purpose, right?
• 19:50
  His speeches were full of references to glory and destiny and sacrifice.
• 19:56
  And he told the Italians that the country didn't need more plans.
• 20:01
  It didn't need more visions of the future.
• 20:04
  It needed men and it needed willpower.
• 20:07
  The program was pretty simple.
• 20:09
  He told in Naples a crowd of 60,000 or so that, quote, we want to rule Italy.
• 20:17
  Of course, it wasn't just talk, right?
• 20:19
  Like he backed up all of these things with his own private army of thugs.
• 20:25
  They were called the squadristi, better known as black shirts.
• 20:29
  You've probably heard this before.
• 20:30
  You might even be hearing it now about a particular group of people.
• 20:34
  These were guys, angry veterans, jobless kids, hardcore nationalists who got a cool uniform, a sense of purpose and a green light to beat the shit out of anyone who the movement saw as an enemy.
• 20:51
  For the average Italian, this wasn't like a debate on TV, on ideals and beliefs.
• 20:58
  It was like real.
• 21:00
  They were literally the sound of boots marching through the center of town.
• 21:05
  It was seeing a political opponent get held down physically and force fed a bottle of castor oil as a public humiliation.
• 21:16
  Now, that doesn't make sense to me, right?
• 21:18
  Like in this day and age, we don't take castor oil, but it would be like being force fed Metamucil in the town square by people who were faceless and nameless and just to punish them.
• 21:29
  Right.
• 21:30
  It was.
• 21:31
  The smell of a socialist newspaper office burning down.
• 21:37
  People were beaten.
• 21:38
  They were stabbed.
• 21:39
  And ultimately they were killed.
• 21:41
  Right.
• 21:41
  This violence being produced by the Esquadristi wasn't a side effect of this movement.
• 21:51
  It was an unfortunate side effect.
• 21:53
  It was the whole point, right?
• 21:54
  It served kind of two competing purposes.
• 21:57
  One, it physically crushed the opposition by physically crushing them.
• 22:03
  Second, it created the type of chaos that Mussolini was actually claiming that he could fix.
• 22:11
  It was it created what he said intrinsically already existed and that only he could figure it out.
• 22:18
  Right.
• 22:19
  So the more the Esquadristi rampage, the black shirts, the more it looked like the country was actually falling apart because there's all this violence and there's this giant group that's hurting people physically in the streets.
• 22:33
  The cops, the army, the local city council.
• 22:37
  They often just look the other way because they were too scared to get caught up in the problem themselves.
• 22:43
  They figured that the black shirts were a handy tool for smashing the socialists that they were scared of.
• 22:52
  They didn't realize that the violence that they were cheering on wasn't just aimed at the people on the left side of this left right spectrum.
• 23:00
  It was actually aimed at democracy as a concept within Italy.
• 23:07
  So where do we go from here, right?
• 23:10
  Starting the violence, he's starting to burn newspaper offices, humiliate individuals.
• 23:19
  But he's got to take power, right?
• 23:21
  He's got to have the seat of power at some point.
• 23:23
  So in October of 1922, Mussolini decided it's time to really cash in his chips or, you know, go for pro, so to speak.
• 23:34
  And he announces a march on Rome to seize power.
• 23:38
  So this is later painted, of course, in retrospect, as in a brief time that Mussolini was the victor.
• 23:45
  It was painted as a heroic revolutionary time class, right?
• 23:49
  This is like, you know, the man of the people leading his armies of the people to the seat of power to take control.
• 23:57
  The reality is it's more like a political poker game.
• 23:59
  Well, one guy had a terrible hand, but bluffed so hard, everybody else folded.
• 24:02
  He wasn't exactly packing heat.
• 24:04
  He was just, you know, he just started his pocket pair.
• 24:06
  And it turns out that the other guys were holding even less.
• 24:09
  So they all folded.
• 24:11
  While Mussolini himself chilled out in Milan, conveniently close to the Swiss border in case things went south, meaning Mussolini had a knight's plan.
• 24:20
  He sent his goons, his black shirts, headed to the capital of Rome.
• 24:24
  And there were maybe 30,000 of them.
• 24:26
  And their armaments, they weren't, again, they weren't, this wasn't a tank battalion or anything like that.
• 24:31
  People armed with clubs and farm implements.
• 24:33
  Meanwhile, the actual Italian army, which had, again, been decimated in the Great War, the First Great War, had about 30,000 professional soldiers with machine guns and armored cars.
• 24:43
  So that may appear to be a neat match, you know, numerically.
• 24:47
  But machine guns and armored cars versus clubs and farm tools, not much of a competition.
• 24:52
  So they, in reality, the Italian army could have scattered the black shirts like bowling pins.
• 24:57
  But, again, remember we talked in the beginning of this story, this podcast episode, we were talking about the weak prime minister, right?
• 25:07
  Who had been just, you know, everything that he had allowed to happen, even though Italy came out on the winning side of this war, they were worse off for it and lost so many of their young men in war.
• 25:18
  He just panics.
• 25:20
  He just can't handle it.
• 25:22
  So, they decided to declare a state of siege and call in the army, which all they needed was a signature from the king, Victor Emmanuel III.
• 25:29
  But the king, who was also famously timid and apparently didn't like his stature or what he also liked in courage, he choked.
• 25:38
  He just didn't call in the army and he hesitated.
• 25:41
  He worried that the army might not even obey him.
• 25:43
  So he's worried, like, what if I call in the army and I get them all geared up and then they switch sides, right?
• 25:49
  Like that scene out of Braveheart.
• 25:50
  So, he's afraid of civil war or his armies might not obey him.
• 25:55
  And so maybe, just maybe he thought he could control Mussolini.
• 25:57
  So maybe if we get Mussolini in here, like, let's bring him in, let him get a taste of power, and then we'll outsmart him because we're all experienced political maneuvering and maneuvers.
• 26:10
  So, this turned out to be a big mistake.
• 26:12
  A huge mistake.
• 26:15
  The king refused to sign the order.
• 26:17
  The government collapsed.
• 26:18
  The king then picks up the phone, calls Mussolini in Milan, and invites him to form a government.
• 26:23
  So, now the government's fallen apart and Mussolini is being called up in Milan where he's sitting there waiting to hear if he needs to skip the country.
• 26:33
  And instead, now he's invited him to run the government, to put together a government with the king.
• 26:38
  But instead of marching into Rome, he took the overnight sleeper train and showed up well rested and refreshed the next morning and took power that was handed over to him.
• 26:49
  Basically, they gave him the keys to the kingdom and he then decided it was time to implement his ultimate plan.
• 26:56
  So, now with the title behind him, Mussolini is now prime minister, but he's clever.
• 27:02
  He doesn't just come in on day one and declare himself dictator for light.
• 27:06
  He has the, he sort of turns up the heat slowly on the proverbial democratic frog in the water, right?
• 27:12
  First, he puts on a show of being a normal politician, forming a coalition government with other parties.
• 27:17
  This is pretty standard stuff in Europe, right?
• 27:20
  Find, find a coalition, find some things that people can unite behind and set up your government.
• 27:24
  But behind the scenes, he's building his own power structure.
• 27:27
  He's taking his goon squads and turning them into a national militia.
• 27:31
  National militia.
• 27:32
  I haven't heard that idea before.
• 27:34
  Paid for by the taxpayers, but sworn by oath of loyalty to Mussolini personally.
• 27:39
  So, these are...
• 27:40
  Not to the Italian government, not to the, the Italian people, to Mussolini the leader.
• 27:46
  So, again, paid for by taxpayers, but sworn loyal, sworn to support Mussolini at all costs.
• 27:54
  Then he tells big business, don't worry about pesky things like taxes.
• 27:58
  And, of course, there's industrial supporters, industrial supporters who are now going to see the benefits of their investment, are all too happy to support him.
• 28:07
  And then he cuts the deal with the ultimate power in Italy, the Vatican, which then pulls his support.
• 28:12
  Yeah.
• 28:13
  Cue the Hens.
• 28:14
  Cue the angelic choir.
• 28:16
  He goes to the Vatican.
• 28:17
  He makes a deal.
• 28:18
  And the Vatican pulls his support from the Catholic political party.
• 28:23
  It's like they had a political party that was there to advocate for the Vatican.
• 28:27
  And they essentially pulled their support from that and threw it behind the Muslim.
• 28:31
  Which basically, for lack of a better term, kneecapped their own people.
• 28:35
  I mean, you can see how he's building this and how he's maneuvering.
• 28:38
  But then the real killer move for Mussolini was the Acerbo law.
• 28:43
  51 p.m.
• 28:44
  You know, in the fashion of great autocrats everywhere, a beautiful, simple, evil piece of wood.
• 28:52
  Which said that whichever party you get the most votes, as long as it's over 25 percent.
• 28:56
  Now, keep in mind, this means you don't have to get a majority.
• 28:58
  You just have to get more than anybody else.
• 29:01
  And to get more than 25 percent and more than anybody else.
• 29:03
  Would automatically get two-thirds of the seats in Parliament.
• 29:08
  Win-and-take-all system designed to create the illusion of a mandate while guaranteeing total control.
• 29:13
  And how did it pass?
• 29:16
  Well, it passed with armed black shirts casually throwing through the aisles of Parliament.
• 29:21
  Right?
• 29:21
  Just there to keep people safe.
• 29:22
  Just there to make sure nobody threatened anybody else.
• 29:24
  Right?
• 29:26
  And just happening to remind everybody what it might mean if they voted against the Acerbo law.
• 29:31
  So imagine you're sitting there, deciding whether to hand over Italy to this new upstart who's bringing all this muscle.
• 29:38
  And while you're deciding how you want to vote, his thugs are walking around, controlling the aisles and watching what you're doing.
• 29:45
  And that's the rest of the following.
• 29:47
  Absolutely.
• 29:47
  This Acerbo law is in place now.
• 29:52
  He gets it passed because he's got the muscle to make sure that nobody says no.
• 29:57
  Right?
• 29:58
  As soon as it happens, as soon as it passes, Mussolini says, let's have an election.
• 30:04
  This Acerbo law went really well.
• 30:07
  It went exactly like I needed it to.
• 30:09
  I wonder how an election might work out.
• 30:11
  The campaign was a joke.
• 30:13
  Right?
• 30:14
  The black shirts beat up opponents and literally scared voters away from the polls by showing up and threatening them.
• 30:24
  Shockingly, the fascist-led ticket won in a landslide 65% of the vote.
• 30:32
  I'm always wondering when I see those numbers.
• 30:34
  Like, is that all they could get?
• 30:35
  I mean, with that kind of intimidation, why can't you get to 80% or 90%?
• 30:39
  Right?
• 30:39
  Get a real mandate.
• 30:40
  Exactly.
• 30:40
  At that point, you'd think it would be 100%.
• 30:42
  But no, 65%.
• 30:43
  Which, you know, some people call a mandate.
• 30:46
  It looked like it was absolutely game over.
• 30:50
  Right?
• 30:50
  But one guy, a tough socialist leader named Giacomo Matteotti, he just refused to shut up.
• 30:56
  No, he stood up in parliament and gave this scathing speech, laid out the violence, the fraud.
• 31:05
  He said, this election is invalid.
• 31:07
  He said, because no voter was free.
• 31:10
  And he knew what was coming.
• 31:12
  He even told a friend, quote, now you can prepare my funeral oration.
• 31:17
  Eleven days later, he was grabbed off the street, shoved into a car, and stabbed to death.
• 31:23
  That was it.
• 31:24
  That one thing.
• 31:25
  The moment of truth.
• 31:27
  The entire country was horrified.
• 31:30
  Everyone knew who did it.
• 31:32
  Right?
• 31:32
  There was no secret.
• 31:35
  But for a few weeks, the regime, because of this, actually looked like it was on the brink of collapse.
• 31:42
  The opposition politicians walked out of parliament, even, hoping that the king would finally step in and fire Mussolini.
• 31:52
  But the king didn't do anything.
• 31:54
  And Mussolini, seeing that the king was now essentially kneecapped, he saw his chance.
• 32:03
  He went on the attack.
• 32:04
  He walked into the half-empty parliament building because the other half of opposition had already walked out.
• 32:12
  And he gave the speech that officially kicked off the beginning of the dictatorship.
• 32:18
  He dropped all of the pretense.
• 32:20
  He stopped beating around the bush.
• 32:22
  He quotes, says,
• 32:24
  I declare here that I alone assume the political, moral, and historical responsibility for all that has happened.
• 32:37
  If fascism has been an association of criminals, the responsibility for this is mine.
• 32:44
  He basically dared them to stop him.
• 32:47
  But of course they couldn't.
• 32:49
  The mask was off.
• 32:51
  And the slow, legal death of freedom was over.
• 32:55
  Now, Mussolini's real game could actually begin.
• 32:58
  With the opposition gone, the establishment is thoroughly intimidated,
• 33:03
  it was time to build the world's first fascist state in both title and in principle.
• 33:11
  For your average Giuseppe, this meant a total lifestyle makeover.
• 33:16
  The goal was to control everything.
• 33:20
  Your job, your kids' education, what you did on Saturday night, and even who you could marry.
• 33:27
  The new national motto, which was chanted at rallies and plastered on billboards and I'm assuming baseball caps,
• 33:36
  was believe, obey.
• 33:38
  Like, who is the center of this new universe?
• 33:41
  One man.
• 33:43
  Mussolini.
• 33:44
  He wasn't just the prime minister anymore.
• 33:46
  He took on a new title, Il Duce, the leader.
• 33:49
  And did he have an excellent madmen collection of advertising team?
• 33:56
  They built the most elaborate, ridiculous, and incredibly effective personality cult you've ever seen.
• 34:05
  His face literally was everywhere.
• 34:08
  Posters, schools, magazine covers.
• 34:10
  The slogans were painted on buildings.
• 34:13
  Quote,
• 34:14
  Mussolini is always right.
• 34:18
  That propaganda machine worked 24 hours a day to turn him into a 20th century superhero.
• 34:26
  He was a tireless worker.
• 34:29
  They'd leave the light on in his office all night to make people think he never slept.
• 34:33
  He was a fearless athlete.
• 34:36
  Photographed fencing, riding horses, flying planes, and in one absolutely legendary photo op,
• 34:42
  and if you see one photo of Mussolini, you have to Google it to see what it is, skiing bare-chested in the snow.
• 34:50
  There's nothing cool about that.
• 34:51
  But at the time, I don't know, he was the ultimate strongman.
• 34:55
  He was the man of the people.
• 34:57
  He took pictures helping farmers, you know, with their harvest.
• 35:01
  It was only ever for about five minutes, you know, just for the photo op.
• 35:04
  He was the ultimate ladies' man, a devoted family guy who had many affairs, many affairs,
• 35:12
  and they were sort of, like, winking at it to boost his image of, like, this raw masculine power
• 35:18
  who's just irresistible to the ladies, right?
• 35:21
  They gave him this, like, godlike aura with even the press, who at this time, at this point,
• 35:28
  was entirely stayed controlled, claiming that he'd done things like stop lava from flowing
• 35:34
  and literally making it rain.
• 35:37
  After he signed a treaty with the Vatican, the pope himself called Mussolini, quote,
• 35:44
  the man of providence.
• 35:46
  For a lot of Italians at the time, he wasn't just a politician.
• 35:51
  He wasn't just a prime minister.
• 35:52
  He wasn't just il ducce.
• 35:55
  He was literally the savior of a nation, replete with the Superman logo on his chest and the red cape.
• 36:03
  Thank you for listening so far to the Overlap Podcast.
• 36:09
  This is part one of a two-part series.
• 36:11
  Make sure to check back next week as we continue our downward spiral into fascism,
• 36:16
  as created by Benito Mussolini.
• 36:17
  If you haven't already, please give us a review or a like wherever you're listening to this podcast.
• 36:26
  And check out our website in the show notes, as well as how to access our socials with Mastodon and Blue Sky.
• 36:37
  See you next week, friends and fellow compatriots.
• 36:40
  We'll see you next week.