Part One: All the People Who Tried to Kill Mussolini
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State Farm, proud sponsor of My Cultura Podcast Network. Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. We're back, in case you noticed. We weren't here, but now we're here. The we, in this case, is me, Margaret Kiljoy, and my producer, Sophie. Hi, Sophie. Hi, Magpie. And my guest, Robert Evans. Hi, Magpie.

Hi, Magpie. I listened to When I Was Buying Hay today. Right before this, I went to go get hay for my livestock at the feed store, and they were playing that song Brandy. And so now I am in my head remixing that song instead of being about a woman whose lover dies at sea to be about you making podcasts.

Excellent. Well, we can make hay from that. One time Robert and I went and got hay, and it was the first time in a little while that my pickup truck got to be a pickup truck. Well, I guess it was a camper. Actually, we filled my camper full of hay is what happened. Yes, yes. And it took me a long time to get all the hay out. It does take a long time to get all the hay out. But it was worth it because then the goats got to eat hay. And the goats love hay. So, this week... Speaking of saying hay...

Oh, we should say hey to Rory, who's our audio engineer. Hi, Rory. Hi, Rory. Hi, Rory. And our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. And for no particular reason. Not at all. I actually genuinely picked this subject and started researching it before the activities that happened last week. You did. Like, I can vouch for you. You 100% did. I'm glad you... Hopefully you don't have to vouch for me in court about it. But I would, and I would be truthful. I have, like, documentation. Yeah.

It's true because the thing we're going to talk about, Robert Evans, have you ever heard of people trying to assassinate people that they don't like? No, assassinations. No one would ever do such a thing. No one would ever do such a thing and then have it immediately cause Blue Cross Blue Shield to reverse a policy on denying claims arbitrarily when the surgery takes too long to pay for anesthetic. That would never happen.

No, there's not a whole saying about direct action gets the goods. You all are listening to this in the future where the knock-on effects will have become more clear. But right now we know very, we only know one knock-on effect of last week's. Which is if you've got blue cross, you now have to be less worried about getting surgery. Yeah, and waking up in the middle of surgery, which is basically everyone's nightmare. Yeah. Literally, that is so, like so many people have that fear. It's ghoulish, yeah. It's so ghoulish, it's so gross. Mm-hmm.

Well, the person that we're going to talk about attempting to assassinate in the past, who's already dead, is a little fascist you might have heard of named Mussolini. Mussolini? I hardly know... Lini? Okay, pass. It's not going to work. Sorry. Mussolini, originally this was going to be a two-parter where one part was the people who tried when Mussolini was coming up, and then the second part was going to be people who succeeded when he was coming down.

But it's actually all going to be about people who tried when he was coming up because there were so many. Did you know that an awful lot of people tried to kill Mussolini? Yes. I mean, it's like with Hitler, right? Like you've got that guy who tried to blow him up in that and almost did that fucking carpenter who tried to blow him up in one of the halls he was speaking at all sorts of pre attempts. So I wasn't really familiar with the ones on Mussolini, but I was sure there had been some.

We're going to talk about, I think, eight of them today. Or this week. Yeah, that sounds like the right amount. Yeah. And so far by my count, I was counting right before I recorded, I was talking to one of my friends about it. So far by my count, we've got one socialist, one Catholic, one Republican, and five anarchists attempted to kill Mussolini. So...

Benito Mussolini is famously one of the founders of fascism. The ideology that is genuinely and truly bad, that 95% of the people on this planet agree is bad. We just don't agree about what counts as fascism. Yes. That's part of the problem. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't help that... I mean, because some people use fascism to just being anyone I don't like or any authoritarianism, right? And that's not...

an accurate way to talk about things. We shouldn't call our enemies fascists when they're not fascists. No, like Stalin, Stalin wasn't really a fascist. No, because in part, fascists come to power through popular acclaim as a result of like,

setting themselves up in opposition to the left. There's this also idea that Stalin does kind of fit in with the attitude that like the fascist dictator embodies the people in some way. Although the way in which like Soviet propaganda talked about Stalin was actually quite different from the way fascist propaganda tends to talk about the leader being like an embodiment of the people. But yeah,

Yeah. There are some similarities. Like there's a bunch of stuff. Syncretism is a big part. Go read your Umberto Eco. Well, there's gonna be a bunch of Umberto's in this episode, but not Eco. Yeah. But it turns out Umberto is sort of the Mike of Italy. Well, Michele is probably the Mike of Italy. But fascism is one of the most convoluted and complex political ideologies to ever come about, which is one of the reasons why you can kind of point to anything and call it fascism and be wrong, but also be like,

You see where you're coming from about it, you know, because it's not actually a simple ideology. The more as I was reading this, because Italian fascism in particular comes out of where the right and the left meet. And it is not a, well, we'll talk about this.

I'm not going to get too deep into the weeds of defining fascism today, but I want to talk first about someone who 100% absolutely, I am certain, would have been fine with assassinating someone like Benito Mussolini about 15 years before Benito Mussolini came to power. That man who would have been totally fine with killing Benito Mussolini was Benito Mussolini.

Oh, well, yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. Yeah. To open up a can of worms that the internet is not equipped to handle, Benito Mussolini, the founder of the world's deadliest far-right ideology, started on the left. Yep, he sure did. Kind of adjacent to anarchism. Yeah, we're going to talk about that. There's going to be a lot of... Also started as a journalist. Hooray! Yeah, yeah.

He was a socialist for a long-ass time. He was at least a second-generation leftist. Mussolini was born in the year 1883, and he was the child of a blacksmith socialist and a Catholic schoolteacher. He got named after a series of socialists and leftists because of his father, and then he was baptized Catholic because of his mom. He's named Benito after Benito Juarez, the liberal president of Mexico. And his middle names, which I forgot to look up in Italian, are Andrea and Amalacare.

And these are after two anarchists because his father was part of the Anarchist International, which was an anti-authoritarian socialist organization in the 1870s. I'm just going straight into the like the this is like when I have to talk about eugenics on this show. You know, whenever I have to talk about something that was like really common and easily understood in the 19th century that makes no sense in the 21st century. Mm hmm.

Italian nationalism is really intertwined with the left, and it's really intertwined with anarchism. Yeah, and I mean, it makes sense when you're coming out of a world... Well, like, not very long before this period, Italy had been fucking Habsburg property. Much of Italy, at least, had been Habsburg property, right? Yeah.

And when all of these things that we now just see is like, well, obviously Italy's a country, obviously Croatia's a country, when they're all the property of some guy and his inbred family, it's a lot less weird that it's a left-wing position to talk about nationalism. Yeah, totally. Benito Mussolini never did really roll with the anarchists. He kind of wanted to at different points.

When he was a socialist, he was firmly in the authoritarian socialist camp, but he studied a lot of anarchist theory. He remained friendly with anarchists. He was either dating or just friends with, I've read both, the anarchist orientalist poet named Lita Raffinelli. He translated two of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin's books from French into Italian. And because, yeah, he was a journalist, he read newspapers and...

If you were a political person in the 19th century, if you were like a political leader, your thing was that you were a journalist. Your thing is that you ran a newspaper. Yeah, I mean, it's the same reason as that with the generation coming up and the next generation are all going to get their starts on TikTok and Twitter. And like, we're already seeing this on the right, right? I mean, and the left to a degree, you know, it's because that's totally it's not that's not the journalism tweeting is not or making TikTok is not journalism, but

journalism wasn't what we would consider journalism back then. It was just the best way of getting propaganda to the masses. Yeah. And it was, yeah, you wrote polemics and propaganda just literally meant propagating ideas. If you had an idea and you wanted to tell people about it, you would propagandize the idea. So,

Mussolini, the thing that's going to come up throughout this week's story is that he's clearly into authoritarianism, right? But there's something he liked about the anarchists. He liked their courage, he liked their commitment, and he liked action. You know, he wasn't the kind of guy who wanted people to wait around and talk about things. He wanted people to go out and do things. He also, for a long time, shared their opinion that killing autocrats was just fine. I mean, look...

There's a Venn diagram. We may not like to say it, but like there's a Venn diagram at points between me and Mussolini's life, right? Yeah, totally. I'm not against killing early 20th century autocrats, theoretically. Right, yeah, totally. Yeah. If we had a time machine, we would feel justified in going back and killing absolute monarchs from the 19th century and earlier. Look, if I could go back in time and stab the king of Italy, I would try to.

Well, that's going to bring us to this week's first assassin. Is it the guy who stabbed the king of Italy? I actually can't remember whether this guy stabbed or shot him. This is the only successful assassin we're going to talk about for a while. But he shaped a lot of Italy's politics for a long time. And that man's name was Gaetano Bresci. He was a weaver from Italy who emigrated to the U.S. in the 19th century to Patterson, New Jersey.

And it's kind of funny because there's all of these different hidden secret anarchist strongholds of the past. I don't normally think about New Jersey when I think about anarchism. Yeah. Patterson, New Jersey. Very strong Italian anarchist scene. The next little bit, because it's been a little while since I've looked up Gattano Brescia. I used to write about him a lot. So I'm kind of going into a little bit story mode when I talk about Gattano Brescia. I'm going to have more direct sources for the rest of the people I'm going to talk about just so everyone knows.

Gattano Bresci was hanging out in New Jersey with his Irish wife, Sophie, which is a good name. I agree. Right? Yeah. And his two daughters. And she's going to be all right in this story. Cool. Yeah. Cool, cool, cool. Don't bring the name down. Yeah. No, no, she's great. No negative notes on Sophie. In 1898, there were these food riots in Italy. And the government was like, well, a specific general was like, why don't we just murder the entire crowd that's rioting?

And so they did that. And when people think food riots, they usually think like, oh, everyone lost their mind and was running around and burning things or whatever. These were organized strikes that were met with lethal force. At least 80 protesters and two soldiers were killed. Jesus. And so King Umberto I...

What did he do? And everyone at the time was like, oh, the king is the true, you know, a lot of like populism is based on the idea that the government's bad, but the king's good. You know? And this translates to fascism too, right? During the Third Reich, there was always this idea that like, if only Hitler knew, right? Yeah. About like the worst Nazi policies. Yeah. Yeah. The same thing with the czar. Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. Yeah. We see this again and again. And so I think everyone was kind of expecting Umberto to come in and be like, well, you're

You probably shouldn't have done that, right? Oh, I did promise you more than one Umberto, and this is one of them. There's going to be another one probably on Wednesday. But what Umberto I did is awarded the guy who ordered the massacre a Medal of Honor. And Catano Bresci, he didn't like that. He was living in New Jersey with Sophie. He'd started an anarchist paper with some folks, and he'd put up a fuckton of money to start that paper. It was like 200 bucks at the time, which is like several thousand dollars now.

He didn't want anyone else to get in trouble for what he decided to do. So he didn't tell anyone. He didn't tell Sophie. He just told her he had to go deal with some stuff like family stuff in Italy. He didn't tell his comrades. He went into the newspaper and said, hey, all that seed money I put in, I need it back now. And they were like, why? And he was like, not your business. Give me my money back. And so everyone kind of thought he was a sellout and he was just like getting his money to go fuck off, right? Everyone thought he left the movement.

But he got his money back and he bought two things. He bought a Smith & Wesson and he bought a one-way ticket to Paris. That's a song. That's a Warren Zevon song right there. Smith & Wesson and a one-way ticket to Paris. Excellent. And a king is going to die. And unlike a lot of would-be assassins that we've talked about on this show, Bresci practiced with the revolver, which is... Always key. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

He made his way, probably to Rome. He made his way to Italy. He spent two days scouting out the area where he knew the king was going to be. And then on July 29th, 1900, he went out and he got some ice cream. I think he had lunch with like a stranger and just hanging out. And he was like, you're going to remember me, guy. And then he waited for Umberto to come through, waiting in the crowd that was all there to cheer on their, you know, glorious leader. And he shot Umberto to death.

The crowd immediately grabbed him. Gaetano said, I did not kill Umberto. I have killed the king. I have killed a principal. Hell. Oh, oh, that's that's a good line. That's a good line. Back home in New Jersey, his anarchist friends were like, oh, I guess we judged him wrong. And they started a fund to look after his kids and support his family. His wife came to Italy and testified to his good character in court.

His whole family was like arrested in an investigation into conspiracy, but eventually everyone was let go. And Italy under a king was actually had a more fair criminal justice system than the United States does today. They didn't have the death penalty. Mussolini is going to bring that back later. So he gets life in prison. He was held in solitary confinement. He had one hour a day of exercises, like feet were like manacled to the floor. They didn't treat him great.

Less than a year later, he was found hanging in his cell, and modern historians are reasonably certain he was murdered at the time. Everyone's like, nah, he just killed himself. Interestingly enough, this assassination didn't bring in sweeping reactionary forces or anything. Like, usually people are like, ah, you killed the king, and something worse is going to happen. This changed things, but it

The existing kind of leftist government stayed in power and things kind of chugged along okay. It didn't even lead to... They cracked down on the anarchist movement, but they didn't come through and destroy it. It did lead to more international cooperation between law enforcement. When I first started dreaming up this show years ago, it was kind of in a different context. And I wanted to talk about anarchist history. And I was like, you know, they literally invented international policing to stop us. Why are all of our books boring? Yeah.

Has been my like go-to tagline. Because they did. International policing exists because of trying to stop the anarchist movement. Because nothing gets people to work together. Like when people go around and kill like poor people, everyone's like, oh, that sucks. Whatever. When people go around and kill kings...

Kings work together to make sure that that stops. Yeah, no, kings are great at, like, really union behavior. They really work like unions, royalty. Yeah, when someone comes for them as a class, they band together. Yeah. One person who defended Gaetano Bresci doing a little king murder was a man by the name of Benito Mussolini. His fellow socialists were claiming Bresci was crazy for having killed the king, right? Yeah.

Mussolini said that tyrannicide was, quote, the occupational hazard of being a king. Which, I don't know, I... I mean, talking about occupational hazards. Yeah. I feel confident saying that being a king is a pre-existing condition, yeah. Yeah, totally. But what isn't a pre-existing... No. But what else we're obliged to do is play ads for you now.

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And we're back. Now, this might shock you, Robert. Did you know Mussolini didn't stay leftist?

Really? Now, I thought you were talking about Benny Mussolini, the man who invented the three-day weekend. Well, I was reading a whole bunch on that website X about how actually the fascists are socialists and leftists. Mm-hmm.

You're, of course, referring to the website that just plays a looping video of the song X Gon' Give It To You. That's where I get all of my historical information about anarchists in the early 1900s as well. Yes. Uh-huh. Yeah. My X feed is certainly playing looping videos of something right now. And so Mussolini was kicked out of the Socialist Party because he supported interventionism. He supported Italy fighting in World War I.

And along the way, he started developing his theories on fascism, which was basically, what if you took revolutionary socialism and then replaced it with revolutionary nationalism? Instead of class solidarity, you had national solidarity. What if you made all of the poor people suck up to the rich people and then defend the nation as a concept?

the leftist trappings and some of the leftist strategies, but with right wing goals. Because at the time, right wing was just like the status quo, right? If you defend like the monarchy or whatever, you're right wing. So there's nothing really revolutionary about it. But fascism was like, no, but we want the revolution and we want to like feel cool and edgy, but we also want to, we really like the taste of boots. And so we're going to become fascists and invent this new ideology.

For a few years, a lot of politics in Italy was happening in the streets, fascists versus anti-fascists fighting it out. And for a good several years, Mussolini tried to make common cause with the anarchists specifically to join him against the socialists and the communists. After all, this is the period where the Bolsheviks in Russia were murdering anarchists en masse. And so some folks, there was a chance that Mussolini was even going to go anarchist during this time. I actually don't buy it, but I read one person making this argument.

He actually risked alienating his base with how much he appreciated the anarchists. Interesting. Because his base was like, no, those are the people we just go fight in the streets. But Mussolini kind of admires their commitment, right? And the anarchists don't want him. Mussolini said, quote, we are always ready to admire men who are willing to die for a faith they believe in selflessly. And this is him contrasting the anarchists to the cowardly socialists.

The anarchists, in so many words, told him to eat shit and die. They refused his overtures again and again, and soon enough, they're going to try really, really hard to just outright kill this man. The most famous Italian anarchist, then and now, is this guy named Errico Malatesta. He's popped into a bunch of our stories on this show, like when comrades got him to Argentina by smuggling him in a crate of sewing machines, and then he was killed by a man who was a

And then he helped the baker's union there become the most radical union in that country and the model that all the other unions rushed to follow and how today in Argentina there are still pastries named by the anarchist bakers like Little Books and Little Bombs. I really like Malatesta. He's always in and out of jail. He's an older fellow now. I think he's in his 60s at this point that we're talking about. And while he's in prison in Italy, there's a huge campaign to free him. And who supports that campaign but Benito Mussolini?

even though his followers are fighting the anarchists in the streets during this time. Malatesta gets out and he can't get any paper for his newspapers because of political pressure against him. And Mussolini offers him paper to print on. And Malatesta's like, no, what? No. So Mussolini keeps trying to be friends with him.

But some anarchists and folks from every ideology did turn fascist, right? Because you can't have a new ideology without starting with people who used to have other ideologies. An awful lot of anarchists turned fascist.

Orwell has a really good essay about this. George Orwell has a really good essay about this called Notes on Nationalism. It basically lays out the case that a lot of political extremists are into extremism, not the idea that the extremism is attached to. So you get people going from the radical left to the radical right reasonably often. And this, unfortunately, ties into the first time that I've found of someone trying to kill Mussolini.

Some anarchists got together in 1921, before Mussolini ever even took formal power. He does that in 1922. And they're like, all right, we got to kill this guy. They delegated one among their number, a man named Biagio Massi, to go kill Mussolini. Instead, Biagio went to Mussolini and told him the whole plan. Mussolini protected him.

And then the very next day, because Mussolini is just being, I don't know, cunning or whatever. Yeah. Mussolini goes and gives a speech about how the government needs to really release Malatesta, right? Even though he has just learned that the anarchists are trying to kill him.

He's a 4D chess kind of man, this Mussolini. Yeah, yeah, unfortunately he is. He was, I mean, one thing you learn about Mussolini and all these guys, with the exception of Franco, who unfortunately kept a pretty good grip on his rationality throughout his life, is most of them are a lot more cunning and better at planning before they get into power, and it's almost like Pacquiao

Power damages your brain in a way that makes you less capable of like clamping down on your own worse impulses and analyzing things logically. That makes sense to me. There's also this thing where people are always like Mussolini is like the little brother of Hitler, you know, and he's kind of a joke because Italy's military might is not the same as Germany's, right? Mm hmm.

Mussolini pulled off something pretty incredible, like terrible, evil. But like he did become dictator of a major country. That is like a hard thing to do. I mean, I think I could become dictator of Italy. Yeah, no, I know. But you give me six months, Margaret. OK, six months and a lot of pizza pies. We know anything about our Italians. Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut's probably fine.

I really like the pizza in Italy. Yeah. I like how every country, not every country, but most countries I've been to, the American version of their national food is hard to get vegan. But in the country that I'm in, it's actually reasonably easy. Like it's really easy to just go into any train station in Italy and buy vegan pizza.

You could feel about this however you want, but undeniably, like, one of the most intense flexes in the history of international conflict is when the U.S. had the former premier of the Soviet Union become a spokesman for Pizza Hut. Like, that was just such a, wow, well, I guess you guys lost that conflict. Jesus. Jesus. So...

Mussolini comes to power in October 1922, first as the prime minister. There's something that's like not not a coup. I mean, it's not a coup, but it's also not not a coup. Right. 30,000 of his black shirts, his personal army, marched on Rome in the March on Rome. The liberal government was like, hey, let's declare martial law to stop this. But then the king was like, no, let's just put that guy in charge instead. Mussolini immediately helped out the rich people. He was not a fucking leftist at this point.

Immediately helped out all the rich people, centralized power, and just was a right-wing shitbag. By 1924, he was like, look, there's not a democracy anymore, okay? It's just fascism. And Italy became fascist. And people didn't really like that. There are some occupational hazards to being a dictator.

First and most famous at the time, but not the most famous now, was a socialist politician named Tito Zanaboni. And don't worry if you're like, hey, that sounds like Zanaboni and you think that's clever. Don't worry. There's two Zanabonis later. OK? OK. But this one's Zanaboni. This is not a serious country. Look, I know we're talking about serious things, but Italy, I just I'm sorry. It's just not. Yeah.

One time I was in Italy and my friend took me to like her very nice apartment in, um, no, I don't remember which city I was on tour for like a month or I went to a bunch of cities and she was like, looks out and I'm like, how do you afford this? Like amazing, fantastic place. And she goes to the window and points down to this like public square right outside. And she's like, that's where the mafia assassinates, like executes people in public. No one wants to live here.

I mean, shit, you could do that in front of my house if I could have paid like, you know, 30% less. Absolutely. Look, I'm not getting involved with the mafia. They got no reason to be pissed at me. Yeah. I don't see shit. Yeah, she stays out of it. I don't even hear gunshots at night. I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah. Mafia what?

Most of the places that have been really nice, that have been aesthetically really nice that I can afford to live in, have had gunshots outside at night. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I have twice been coming home to my house when someone has, a couple of blocks away, been shooting it out with the police. Yeah. A nice place to live. A nice place to live. And I'm not the police, so I'm not worried if I get shot. I'm not the police. These people have no reason to be angry at me. Yeah.

So, before we talk about Tito, we're going to talk about another Italian socialist politician, Giacomo Mattiotti. And his best friend, Bucca di Beppo. Giacomo Mattiotti was a socialist politician who tried repeatedly to expose Mussolini and fascism for what they were.

After he published a book against the fascists and accused them of fraud, the fascists, who were certainly people of action, on June 10th, 1924, Giacomo was kidnapped by the fascist secret police, who stabbed him to death with a carpenter's file, I believe in the car.

This was in a lot of ways the thing that paved the way for Mussolini to declare himself dictator. I'm going to oversimplify this dangerously, but after a lot of hand wringing and investigations and castigations of the fascists for this kind of thing, eventually Mussolini was like, look, I'm a fascist though. I'm in charge and we're going to stab people to death with Carpenter's files and you're just going to deal with it.

This had an enormous amount of knock-on effects. One of them was that this other socialist politician, Tito Zanaboni, he got real mad. He had been part of the search efforts to find his friend. Before that, he'd been part of signing a peace treaty between the socialists and the fascists. But after they killed his friend, oh yeah, the socialists signed a peace treaty with the fascists. Mm-hmm. Yeah. After I talk about all the anarchists who became fascists and stuff, it's worth pointing out the socialists signed a peace treaty with the fascists. Mm-hmm.

After they killed his friend, he's like, all right, fuck this. We got to shoot this guy. And he and his friends conspired to kill Mussolini. Tito is a war hero, so he got a precision rifle, and he set himself up to station himself in a window to shoot Mussolini from far away. But among his co-conspirators was an informant. So Tito, and actually a general in the Italian army, were both sent to prison. I think they got the maximum sentence, which was 30 years at the time. Great.

The United Socialist Party was no more. In court, Tito used the same defense as most of Mussolini's would-be assassins used later, which is the defense of, yeah, but fuck Mussolini, though. Somebody should shoot him. Mm-hmm. Just, you know, not always the best way to get off in court, but like...

Looks good in history books. Yeah, looks good. I mean, there's right around this time the case of Sagamon Telerian, who a Berlin jury decided like, oh, no, no, it was totally fine that he assassinated that guy who did a genocide. Oh, yeah, yeah, totally. That Turkish politician. Yeah, we covered this one on the Armenian genocide episode. I'm just saying, everybody who might wind up in a court in New York, start looking up jury nullifications right now. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

So, Tito was released in 1943 when the fascist government fell. Which is the other thing that comes up a lot is that revolutionaries, or in this case, it wasn't even a revolutionary, it was a politician who was like, yeah, but other politicians shouldn't murder people. You know? And people go to jail for a really long time. Right-wing governments often fall. And if you can stay alive in jail long enough, you'll be free again. But...

Someone else was directly inspired by the death of Giacomo Mattiotti. One of my favorite strange and misunderstood assassins in history. Violet Gibson. Have you heard of... I feel like there's one... I've heard the name. Yeah. If there's one assassin, people have probably heard of Violet Gibson. This is the most widely known attempt on his life in the modern era because it's the one that makes the coolest social media headline. Is there like a... I'm...

There are. There's actually, there's songs about her. There's documentaries. Yeah. I really hope I'm thinking of the right person or else I sound dumb. She was like really short, right? Yeah. She's five foot one. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. So I love stories about short ladies doing bad-ass things. My grandma was like four foot 11. Hell yeah. My grandpa was six five. And because she was so small during World War II, um,

she had a special job. They would hold her by her feet and shove her inside the wings of P 51 Mustangs. So she could like weld them or like, well, bolting or something. She was, I think welding them on the inside. There was like an area that needed welds that only the tiniest girls could fit. Hell yeah. Fucking rad. Yeah.

As somebody who definitely can't reach things on the top shelf, I'm very excited to hear more about Violet. Also, the only person who I'm going to talk about today who successfully shot the man. Well done. I mean, one of the lessons is that nobody knew how to shoot in the past. Yeah. And most people don't know how to shoot today, also. Yeah. Yeah.

So Violet Gibson was a 49-year-old Irish woman from Dublin who lived in a convent in Rome and shot Mussolini in the face on April 7th, 1926.

What's not to like? Oh, God. Ireland stays winning. Yeah, you know? I know. Mostly, the part to not like about this story is that he turned his head at the last minute. Yeah, he didn't die. And she only grazed his nose. But there are good pictures of him with the bandage on his nose or whatever. There's no comparisons that can be made now to the modern world. No. Ugh.

About people turning their heads. Yeah, and getting grazed. Yep. The world would have been a very different place if he had not turned his head. Yep.

Violet Gibson was a thin woman about 5'1". Her father was the Lord Chancellor of Ireland. She grew up, she's Anglo-Irish, right? And she grew up like... Oh, wow. So they're like the English landlord Irish type deal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, like Lawrence of Arabia. Yeah, totally. And like Lawrence of Arabia, she's crazy as shit. But people use this to invalidate and claim that her action wasn't political or thought out. And that's what I want to argue against. But I can't argue against her being crazy as shit. And I'm going to tell you why.

But she grew up rich as hell. She was a debutante, debuted in Queen Victoria's court, which I only vaguely understand what is through mostly my friends who are from the South. Most tellings of the story come down to, I don't know, she did it because she was crazy. I am going to make the case that she did it because she was a politically committed Catholic socialist who wanted to do right by God and people by killing a man who went on to be responsible for millions of deaths, who was also crazy.

She was always esoteric. She was raised Protestant, right? Her mother became a Christian scientist, and so she herself experimented with Christian science. And then she got into theosophy for a while, but then she converted. She found another esoteric religion to get involved in, Catholicism, when she was 26, and she stayed a Catholic for the rest of her life. She was sick all of the time. Her body carried the scars of many surgeries, and she spent years working at various pacifist organizations.

The craziest thing she did, which is left out of the leftist accounts of her story, but it's included in the right-wing accounts of her story that are, like, demonizing her. But they're verifiable. I believe this happened. So she used to walk around Dublin with a Bible in one hand and a knife in the other. I hate to say it, but that is pretty cool. Oh, yeah, no, like, yeah, no. She's...

I would want to meet her. Maybe from a distance, but I would want to meet her. I would want to like observe her from a safe distance. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

She talked all the time about the necessity of mortifying the flesh, which is normally about like killing the urge to sin. But she seemed to want to kill. That was part of her way of understanding that particular doctrine. Around 1920, she attacked a young woman with a knife, cutting the woman's face and hands. And so she spent two years in an asylum.

And I don't know enough about that attack to know like if there's any motivation beyond something about like she wanted to like replicate the sacrifice of so-and-so in the Bible or whatever. Sure. When she got out, she moved to a convent in Rome. I believe this was kind of a like, yeah, you're like super rich though. So you can go be in this convent. Her friends thought to themselves, she's probably going to kill somebody. Maybe the Pope.

But they didn't try to stop her, which is really funny because they're probably all Irish Catholics. And they're just like, eh, whatever. Then in 1924, when Giacomo was murdered, the guy murdered to death with a carpenter's file. Yeah. She was heartbroken because she was a Catholic socialist, right? And so she decided to like revenge that killing by shooting herself in the chest. The bullet bounced off her ribs and she survived.

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And we're back. Mussolini at this point. God, I read a whole bunch of New York Times articles and like other like

newspaper articles from this time. And they're all like, Mussolini's great. We all like Mussolini because he's stopping the Bolsheviks, you know. Mussolini was being courted by the Western world. The King of England awarded him the Order of the Bath, which is not an order to take a bath, unfortunately, but instead a knighthood. And Violet Gibson decided that the way to glorify God was to assassinate Mussolini.

So she showed up at one of his talks in 1926 with a revolver and a rock. The rock was to break his windshield if necessary, which later assassins would have been more successful if they had also brought a rock. The modern mind can't really understand her motive, I think, because her motive was primarily religious, but it was also political. She did it to, quote, glorify God, and an angel kept her arm steady.

I told this story to a Catholic anarchist friend of mine whose response was basically like, oh, those Irish and their angels. Mussolini turned his head at the last minute. She grazed his nose. She tried to fire again, but the gun jammed. And I've read that what he yelled at the time that he was shot was, fancy a woman.

But that might have been later. He told the crowd, don't be afraid. This is a mere trifle. And then like later he went on this rant about how he's totally down to die violently as long as like a good glorious death. But if he's like killed by an old lady, he just can't handle it. Which is why I wish Violet had succeeded over everyone else. Alas. Yeah. The crowd caught her and beat her. And she was whisked away by the cops and declared insane.

People said that she was paranoid and that was why she tried to kill him because she was paranoid I hate to break it to the people of back then she was correct about this particular thing She spent the rest of her life in various institutions She wrote letter after letter pleading to be set free, but those letters were never sent because you know women are crazy, right? That's fine. That's a sarcastic. Yeah, yeah, they caught on to that. Mm-hmm

She told people that her mood controlled the weather. Okay. Well, did it? If she'd killed Mussolini, she would have stopped like three million deaths. Maybe her moods, like I want to kill Mussolini, have a pretty major impact. Yeah. I mean, look, I can't prove that she's wrong. Yeah. It reminds me of when I covered Joan of Arc on this show, where people are like, oh, feminist icon, except, you know, obviously she was just crazy with her visions from God. And it's just that...

People were conceiving of reality in different ways than we conceive of it now. And I think that people have a hard time wrapping their heads around that. She died in 1956 at the age of 79. She did outlive Mussolini. No family members came to her funeral. History has vindicated her and there's now a plaque for her on her childhood home in Dublin that describes her accurately as a committed anti-fascist. And it was articles about this.

from like right-wing Irish people is how I learned about how she would run around and stab people and things like that. Is it possible that there was like no one at her funeral because this, I mean, I had just made a comment about Ireland staying winning, but Ireland's history, R.E. the fascists in this period is not particularly clean in large part because the

The fascists were opposed to the British government. And so there was a lot of at least the enemy of my enemy is my friend thing among the Irish, as well as the fact that Franco was like a Catholic. Like it's not a clean period for Ireland entirely either. It's not. But she's also Anglo-Irish, right?

Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, that also makes sense. You're right. I'd forgotten that. And I think it's, I think overall it was just like, oh, there's our crazy aunt. She's just crazy. She just wanted to kill a guy, you know? That's like my best guess, but I'm not, I'm not certain. People didn't like her at the time, and now there's been kind of this reclamation of her legacy. But...

Mussolini was particularly good at turning attempts on his life into popular support, which is like what you do if someone tries to kill you, right? You can either say like, oh, no, I'm afraid and the enemy is scary and bad, which is not a good way to gain power. Or you can say like, ha ha ha, they can't get me, but they want to because they're evil. You know, almost every article about attempts on Mussolini's life from then or now is

is basically like, but this particular attempt is what Mussolini used to consolidate power. Everything was fine until this person tried to kill him, and then whoosh, he just swept in with fascism. Yeah, exactly. I think that that's people... Number one, it's like working backwards, which you shouldn't do when you're trying to analyze people psychologically. Now, that said, I don't know that I would say it didn't have an impact on the character of the regime, just like it's probably fair to...

whatever Trump does next, the shooting will probably have impacted because it clearly affected his mental state, right? Totally. Maybe it'll mean that he's a little less coherent and a little less like, maybe even less willing to take risks he might otherwise have taken. Maybe it'll mean he's more vengeful. We don't know yet. We'll all be learning soon. But it definitely...

the presidency we are going to get out of him now is different than if he had won and nobody had shot him. Right? Like, that's just, we don't know how, and we'll never know how, but that's just a reality because nearly being shot to death on live television changes you. Changes anybody. You don't have to be a good person. And it's like,

People talk about like hindsight is 2020, but it's not because you don't know what the other options were. You know, you can only see the one thing that happened. Yeah. And Mussolini would have become dictator if no one had tried to kill him. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And it he used moments like this to consolidate power because anyone would. Yeah.

Yeah, because you can't let something like this go to waste. And also, just, like, continuing to work after you've nearly been shot to death in the head, probably also just kind of mentally necessary. Like, you're going to make use of that, because otherwise you're going to sit alone in a room and think about how you nearly got your brains blown out. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Yeah, he keeps busy, you know? He's got a lot of mistresses. Although New York Times just is gonna run articles. I'll talk about him later. But New York Times is like, oh, he's just hanging out with his family. He's a family man. Oh, they loved Mussolini. Benito... I mean, a lot of Americans really liked Mussolini. In part because, like, he was...

He was a very, very much a celebrity dictator in a way that Hitler Hitler was, but not in this like Hitler was, you know, famous and managed to become beloved in Germany. Mussolini had a level of like international, like movie star clout in part because he looked handsome in his photos in a way Hitler didn't really like he looked like a movie star. Yeah.

You know, not in real life, but he, you know, he had good, he had good people where, and he had a lot of movie stars hanging out with him, by the way, a lot of American ones. And he like knew more about philosophy and art and shit like that, you know, which was like a lot of the ways to be kind of like cool at the time. And like, I mean, he created a philosophy, one that is still around. Yep. It's a bad one. Yep.

So there's another thing that's going to tie into this that is going on in the Italian anarchist world and the Italian American world and just the news in general. And it's another thing that, like, looking back, it's hard to see why this is as big of a deal as it was. And this is the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti. Have you heard of this? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are the two American anarchists who there was a bombing. They got accused of it, executed, didn't do it. Right. Am I am I on the basics there? So what's funny about it?

It's messy. The general version is... Usually it is. Yeah. This was like cumulatively four sentences over the course of my high school education. And it's probably the only time during anyone's high school education that the word anarchist gets mentioned. Besides like maybe you're going to get Shogosh killing McKinley. But...

Probably not. I don't even think I learned about McKinley getting assassinated. I don't think I learned it was an anarchist, but maybe I barely remember high school. Yeah, fair enough. I honestly, whenever I'm like, my high school teacher didn't teach me this, I'm like, I don't know. How would I have known? I got C's. But I definitely remember knowing that Sacco and Vanzetti had been anarchists. Because that one is inescapable, and it was this incredibly important celebrity trial all over the world. And

Basically, some Italian-American anarchists or mafia, but almost certainly anarchists, were robbing a guy who carried the wages, basically the equivalent of an armored truck robbery. And someone shot and killed the paymaster and a guard.

Two Italian-American anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, were put on trial. The entire leftist world, not just the anarchists, was convinced that they were innocent. And basically this whole thing was seen as like a travesty of justice. In 1921, they were found guilty and sentenced to death, but it took years for the state to kill them because the outcry was so much that they had to have all these appeals and investigations and things like that. This dragged on for years. Later historians have been like,

Well, Sacco probably did it. And Vanzetti, maybe? Like, it's possible Vanzetti was there and therefore actually criminally liable but, like, didn't pull the trigger. It's also possible that they weren't there because a lot of the evidence that they did do it comes from a guy we're going to talk about later who's an anarchist bomb maker who turned into a fascist informant named Mario Buda. Oh.

Well, it's also an unfortunate truth that a lot of times the people who are most willing to make things like bombs are also driven more by rage than like political conviction and thus very easy to swing to a politics that entirely exists on the basis of rage. Yeah. Which is which is why we really do try here not to.

idolize people whose only contribution is that they did a violence. Yeah. Um, totally. Even when everybody's making some very funny jokes on social media. Yeah. Right now about a thing that just happened. No, it's, it's true. And that is like something that, um, yeah. Fun time to have decided to write this episode. And, uh,

The important thing about the Sacco and Vanzetti case is that this trial was huge. The outcry was enormous. And one thing that happened in this is that the fascists tried hard to capitalize on it and did capitalize on it because most of the outcry against the trial was that the trial was unfair as a result of the U.S.'s anti-Italian and anti-anarchist bigotry. A fuckton of the Italian-American crowd was either anarchist or fascist.

And so both the fascists and the anarchists rallied for Sacco and Vanzetti. Mussolini was cynically using the trial to stir up nationalism at home and continuing his odd overtures to the anarchists, even though he was in power by most of this point. And he's cracking down on the anarchists left and right. His soldiers are burning photos of that guy Malatesta. Anarchists are being rounded up and stuff.

Yet Mussolini is telling his ambassadors to try and intervene on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti because Mussolini wanted to be seen as the man who protected Italians everywhere. And he has all these quotes that are like, I cannot agree with anything that these men stand for, but...

They're Italian, by God, and America shouldn't kill them or whatever. I'm now paraphrasing terribly. Great stuff. Yeah. And... I don't love their murders, but I support them being Italian. Thus, they ought to be free. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Fair enough. And what does this have to do with Violet Gibson? Well, this is going to turn into one of the best zings against America that I've ever read about. Mm-hmm.

On July 23rd, 1927, Mussolini wrote, It is certain that the execution of Sacco-Vanzetti would provide the pretext for a vast and continuous agitation throughout the world. The fascist government, which is strongly authoritarian and does not give quarter to the Bolsheviks, very often employs clemency in individual cases. The governor of Massachusetts should not lose the opportunity for a humanitarian act whose repercussions would be especially positive in Italy."

And fascist newspapers were now contrasting the American government as more totalitarian than the fascist Italian government. Because the Italian system, the fascist system, had let Violet Gibson return to her own country. And there is no death penalty in Italy at this point. That's nice. People could literally kill kings and get life in prison. Comparing this to the barbaric United States. And...

This is the thing that I love about it. It is like, the dude's got a point. Yep. The U S president industrial system is like a nightmare. It sure is. It was worse than the fascist government. I mean, at, at, at the, it, you know, it depends on the stage, but at the early stages, you know, Mussolini does eventually invade Ethiopia and deploy chemical weapons. Uh,

Yeah, that's certainly an argument that you could have made earlier in Mussolini's regime. You have to remember he was not, he definitely was killing his political enemies. Oh yeah, he stabbed a dude to death with a file. Yeah, not necessarily in a way that's a higher body count than, for example, the number of black people being murdered by police in apartheid states in the United States.

Right. Yeah. Like which is not a different thing to me. I don't consider that to be better than, I don't know, rounding up like a few dozen socialists and murdering them or whatever. Like that and the constant mass, the constant murder at a pretty high rate of black men in the South by cops and vigilantes, like both both things that I would put on a similar moral level.

Yeah, exactly. I'm not trying to be like Benito Mussolini is great. You know, no, no, no, no. I didn't I didn't I didn't think you were. Yeah. I'm just saying like, yeah, that's not an irrational statement to make at that point in time, knowing what they knew. Yeah. Yeah. And Violet, she was not alone in her quest to see the Duke die. The next attempt was on September 11th, 1926. And this is why people remember September 11th.

And this is probably the most organized attempt. Sophie clearly agrees with me. Did anything else happen on September 11th? Ever? That seems like one of those... There was a coup that happened somewhere. Oh, it's such a smooth joke. Yeah, thank you. I'm looking at my calendar of various September 11ths that I keep for no reason. Yeah, it doesn't look like anything's ever happened on another September 11th that I've got. Yeah.

Okay. You're the funniest person I know. That must be why I celebrate 9-11. Yeah, exactly. Wait, no, shit. Robert. Margaret, Margaret, I'm getting some very bad Google results suddenly. We need to edit that out. Oh my God. Oh my God, all those poor people. Holy shit. Yeah, I lived in New York City on September 11, 2001. Saw the towers on fire. Or saw the smoking remains. But anyway, the socialist politician had failed. The Catholic wingnut had failed.

Time to bring in the professionals. If there's one group that knows about killing kings and monarchs and stuff, it's the anarchists. Again, we all know they failed, but you know what? They tried real hard. The next attempt was by a man named Gino Lucetti, who I'll tell you about along with his cousin Gino, because his name is Gino, but so is his cousin. That's the thing I'm saying. Well, I'll tell you about it on Wednesday.

Woohoo! Excellent. You know, Wednesday, Margaret, is the day that comes after Tuesday. That's a little science fact for those of you in the audience. Robert, just thank you so much for telling us that. I have no idea. I have no idea how we would have come up with that. We tried to shoot a little bit, a couple of facts your way. Yeah.

That's why it's edutainment. That's why it's edutainment, right? Yeah. So remember, folks, Wednesday, day after Tuesday, Thursday comes the day before Monday. And that's all I got to say. Comes before Monday. Yes, yes, yes. Tomorrow is Saturday. And after Monday is the weirdest thing about Thursday. I know, I know. It's the day so nice they made it happen twice. It...

I can't even. There's nothing I can do with that. Yep. Oh, Margaret, I wish you and I could hang out all 11 days of the week. I know. I know. That'd be nice. But I only have so many hours in the day, and I don't remember how many it is. 41. Oh, okay. No, yeah, that makes sense.

Yes. But Robert Evans, where can people find more about you or what do you do? Well, you can find me sweating away in my basement because you and I only use an antique Coptic Christian calendar and day system based largely on a step pyramid that used to exist but was bulldozed in what was once Sumeria. So it's very it takes a lot of time to remember what day it is. Yeah.

I don't know. We really kept this bit going for a while. I feel like at the end of a G.I. Joe episode where you tell kids to like not hide in refrigerators, right? I feel like it's worth pointing out that I really am talking about history here and that nothing necessarily good happened from any of the attempts that I'm describing. I am not morally against the attempts that I am describing. I'm clearly not of this thing that happened in the 1920s. But I want to be like clear on that. Just

Just for anyone. That is the thing. I can think of very few assassinations in history where ultimately you would look at it and say that, like, yeah, that worked out really well. Particularly that worked out well by the person carrying out the assassination standards.

Really, the one that, like, Sagamon Telerian, who shot, you know, one of the young Turks who orchestrated the Armenian genocide, that worked out great by his standards and everyone else's. That guy who shot Abe seems to, the long run of that seems to have been positive. Very few other instances. Like, I don't know that I'd say McKinley worked out very well in the long run. Obviously, shooting the Archduke, fucking disaster. Yeah.

No, it is worth thinking about that anarchists had given up on propaganda by the deed at this point. Propaganda by the deed was this anarchist idea that people were like, well, the masses don't really read theory. So let's just show them by killing all the kings and the people who are in charge of them. And it overall was disastrous for the anarchist movement because it just led people to then defend the very systems that the anarchists were opposed to.

And this happened time and time again. There are exceptions. During the run-up to the Russian Revolution, you have like about from like 1903 to 1917, anarchists and other groups were all doing these attentats, all doing these assassinations. And it did lead to a revolutionary situation, which of course all kind of ended badly and created the USSR. But...

Usually these kind of things destroy a social movement. Sometimes if enough people are interested in it, it builds a social movement. But usually it doesn't. And that is the like, it's a crapshoot at best. It's a like, let's redraw our hand of cards and probably get something worse. Yep. But still.

If someone had successfully killed Mussolini, I bet the world would have been a better place. Yes, yes. But the if within the if contains a lot of reasons why, you know, we're going to say for legal reasons here, assassinations probably not worth it. And we're going to talk about like five more of them on Wednesday. Yeah.

At the end here, I just want to plug if you haven't listened, I just am plugging this on anything I can. I just want to plug our colleague James Stout's series from reporting from the Darien Gap. Yeah. About one of the worst land migration places in the world. And just, you know, the stories and people he talked to there. And I just want to plug that because it's an amazing series. And I'm very proud of James.

I started listening to it. I haven't finished it yet. It is really good. It's really good. Yeah, so if you have time around the end of the year and you're like, hmm, I need something to binge, James did five episodes. On It Could Happen Here. On It Could Happen... Thank you. On It Could Happen Here.

All right. See you all on Wednesday. Bye. Bye.

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With Kroger brand products, you can get all of your favorite things this holiday season because our proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices. And with a money back quality guarantee, every dish is sure to be a favorite from sweet sugar cookies and holiday ham to that perfect slice of pie. Whether you shop delivery, pickup or in store, Kroger brand has all your favorite things. Kroger, fresh for everyone.

Whether you're ordering wings for the game, whipping up a seven-layer dip, or ordering pizza, there's something about football that makes you want to eat. And this football season, Uber Eats has the best deals on game day food. No matter what you're craving, from two-for-one pizza to buy one, get one wings, Uber Eats will be dropping new deals each week, all season long. Uber Eats, official on-demand delivery partner of the NFL. Order now. Terms and conditions apply. See app for details.