Mussolini’s Granddaughter Had Beef With Jim Carrey

It’s the 78th anniversary of Benito Mussolini’s execution and to mark the occasion, Twitter is revisiting the classic Twitter beef between his granddaughter and comedian Jim Carrey. 

Before Carrey quit Twitter last November in protest of the Elon Musk regime, he’d been showing off his artistic skills as an anti-Trump political cartoonist. In 2019, that included a cartoon depicting fascist dictator Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, dangling from a metal girder in Milan after their 1945 execution. “If you’re wondering what fascism leads to,” Carrey wrote in his caption, “just ask Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta.” As sly political cartoons go, this one wasn’t exactly subtle.

Benito’s granddaughter, Alessandra Mussolini, understandably didn’t take kindly to the image, tweeting, “You are a bastard” to the comedian. 

But she didn’t stop there. Alessandra, a far-right politician serving in European Parliament (she left for a TV gig in 2020 but returned late last year), has a history of aggressively defending her infamous pop-pop. In 2018, she vowed to sue anyone on social media who posted “images and/or sentences” disrespecting her grandfather. (You can imagine how well that went for her Twitter timeline.) Ultimately, she didn’t take Carrey to court but did put him on blast, suggesting that he should turn his attention to America’s dark past instead of focusing on Italy’s.

Roasted! Except, of course, Carrey is Canadian so maybe that tweet didn’t hit as hard as it could have. The social media battle waged on from there, but Carrey wasn’t a part of it. While he remained silent, Mussolini fired back at all of the critics who sided with the Pet Detective. Twitter users who criticized her grandfather were labeled “a piece of human garbage” or worse. 

In 2019, many of those online critics ignored grandpa and called out Alessandra Mussolini for her own far-right views, in particular, her opposition to gay adoption and declarations that it was “better to be a fascist than a f(-slur).” But as Twitter users now point out, she seems to have done an about-face. 

Mussolini is now fighting for gay rights since her return to Parliament, backing a bill to punish discrimination and violence against gay, lesbian, transgender and disabled people, as well as making misogyny a hate crime. Wait, what? According to Gabriele Piazzoni, president of the Italian LGBT group Arcigay, Mussolini has pivoted, a “180-degree shift from the conservative, heterosexual, Catholic politics she was associated with.”

"You can learn from the young,” Mussolini told The Times U.K. “The most important thing is that you can give love.”

What do you say, Jim Carrey? Could a reconciliatory cartoon bring an end to this feud once and for all? Or maybe just some kind words out of your butt.