There are a lot of ways to describe what life has been like over the last few years, but “boring” certainly isn’t one of them.
With each passing day, it seems like life can’t decide whether it wants to imitate bad satire, Mad Libs, or just our deepest, most feverish nightmares.
But in between all of the anxiety and embarrassment, sometimes the chaotic nature of the world today just finds a way to leave us baffled.
And whether it’s funny or just impossible to look away from in the same way as a train wreck, a recent Twitter feud definitely meets that qualification.
The strange saga we’re about to get into all began with a drawing that Jim Carrey decided to share on Twitter.
Likely sensing a shift in how many people are willing to support fascist policies in the air, he felt compelled to remind everyone about the price of such hard-line politics with a drawing of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s fate,
Although most people wouldn’t exactly shed a tear over seeing an ally of Hitler depicted this way, there was one very vocal exception.
And that angry reply happened to come from none other than Alessandra Mussolini, the dictator’s actual grand-daughter.
As you might imagine, her thoughts weren’t exactly welcome.
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Although Carrey neither replied to her nor posted anything further, others started taking Mussolini to task.
And considering that her initial argument essentially consisted of hoping her opponents somehow had worse family histories than her, she wasn’t off to a great start.
From there, Mussolini switched tactics, asking Carrey to draw some other atrocities.
The ones she suggested included genocide against Native Americans and atomic attacks against Japan at the end of World War II.
As if outlining dark chapters in American history suddenly excuses both the war crimes her grandfather supported and her tacit defense of him.
Mussolini’s responses to the drawing reached their nadir when she invoked the history of Rosa Parks.
Not only because it amounts to more “whataboutism” on her part, but also because she somehow managed to spell Parks’ name wrong.
Yes, despite the fact that the correct spelling appears in bold letters in the image she tweeted.
As other users pointed out, it’s especially strange for her to use these historical injustices as ammo against Jim Carrey.
After all, Carrey wasn’t even born in the United States. He hails from Canada.
While it’s certainly not impossible to find some embarrassing moments in Canada’s history, the American examples she cites have as little to do with Carrey as if she had mentioned the atrocities of Stalin.
And even if Carrey were born in the U.S., Mussolini would still be creating a false equivalency with her Rosa Parks example.
As @sunraysunray pointed out, Carrey would not only need to have a direct familial link to the Trail of Tears, the Manhattan Project, or the Jim Crow Laws for any of this to make sense, but he’d also need to make similar excuses for these dark chapters as Mussolini is for her grandfather’s actions.
What also doesn’t help is that Mussolini is now a politician who seems to be just barely avoiding explicitly carrying on Benito’s legacy.
As The Telegraph reported , she was a member of the Italian political party known as the National Alliance until 2003. At that point, she formed her own “Social Action” party.
Before she fell out with National Alliance leader Gianfranco Fini, he had described Benito Mussolini as “the greatest statesman of the 20th century.”
