What better time to share a feel-good story than a Monday morning?
Today’s tale takes place in the charming country of Italy, which has had a long-standing problem with leftist anarchist groups who are always looking for ways to make life in their country worse.
Sound familiar?
No story about Italy would be complete without some great Italian names. So buckle up for some sweet ones that steer directly into maximum Italian-ness. And if you can read this list aloud without instinctively raising your right hand and bobbing it in the air, palm up, while touching all four fingers to your thumb, you’re no paisan of mine:
Retired judge Otello Lupacchini. Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi. Deputy Minister Antonio Tajani. Jailed anarchist figurehead Alfredo Cospito.
The anarchist Cospito is doing 20 years for a series of bombings aimed at companies and government officials. His group and others like it have kept the judge and the ministers busy trying to prevent mass casualty attacks. During the recent Winter Olympics, anarchists were tied to three sabotage incidents, including a railway fire.
Similar to our home-grown leftist bad actors, the Italian anarchists have indulged themselves in dishonest sloganeering. A spate of graffiti on the theme of “war against the oppressors” plastered in a Rome metro station in mid-March had counter-terrorism police on edge.
An Italian couple named Alessandro Mercogliano (53) and Sara Ardizzone (36) – with those names they should have been a tenor singing Nessun Dorma and a painter in Venice, respectively –were instead fans of anarchist Alfredo Cospito, with a kind of Bonnie and Clyde flair.
Mercogliano had once been convicted on terrorist-adjacent charges, but was later acquitted. Ardizzone had been investigated too, and connected to charges of incitement. At a preliminary hearing, she had proclaimed herself an enemy of the Italian state.
Unlike the many AWFLs in Minneapolis, Portland and other lefty enclaves, she was attractive. But like them, she was a narcissist, and romanticized her bad cause with self-aggrandizing flattery. During her trial, she described herself and Mercogliano as “partners in life and in the struggle,”
She also displayed the same double standards and hypocrisy as antifa, defending violent protest. She excused her own side’s violence to the court, claiming that, “There’s an enormous difference between the violence of the oppressed and that of the oppressors: the former follows an ethical code, the latter, none.”
Sure they do, sweetheart. And when ICE enforces our laws they are the Gestapo disappearing American citizens, and when violent thug protesters act like fascists they are anti-fascists.
Anyway, as this romantic couple were pursuing their wholesome dream of being enemies of their own country, they got the fantastic idea to build some bombs. They wanted to use them against the police and a defense contractor.
Annndddd… it turns out that they were as good at making bombs as they were at thinking about politics. So on March 22nd, as they were working away in a cottage on the outskirts of Rome, they must have touched the red wire to the green wire or something, because they blew themselves (and the cottage) into fettucini with thatched roof garnish.
Unexpectedly! But hilariously!
At least some good came out of their idiotic and well-deserved deaths though, because the explosion caused their anarchist cell (or clot, or coven, or whatever collective noun applies to anarchists) to engage in some serious self-reflection about whether they should turn away from their violently nihilistic leftism.
HA! I kid.
Leftists’ political radicalism is always blowing up in their faces, and they never seem to learn from it. And they didn’t in this case, either.
Their supporters put out a press statement praising them as martyrs and calling them “a shining example,” according to Italian media. “Sara and Sandro died in action, they died fighting,” the statement said.
If by “fighting” you mean “sudden onset molecular disassembly.”
We should create a Go Fund Me to buy a bunch of dynamite to send to their anarchist collective, and then just sit back and watch as entertaining explosions go off in romantic cottages all over the Italian countryside.
In the meantime, Rest in Pieces, Sara and Sandro.
Thoughts and prayers…for the cottage.
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Martin Simpson 