Italy’s own populist revolution may be about to begin

Golden boy, Luigi Di Maio, is the 30-year-old, slickly dressed leader of the Parliamentary Italian Five Star Movement (M5S), Italy’s insurgent political party that is polling ahead of the incumbent Democrats with a smorgasbord of National Socialist-style policies, plucked from the manifestos of the left and right. And just like everyone else in M5S, Di Maio doesn’t like journalists.  

This dislike of journalists is not merely the perfectly reasonable loathing that one develops towards the mainstream media (MSM) if one is a vegan, who doesn’t believe in vaccinations, but who does believe that airplane contrails are evidence of government-funded chemical spraying of the population (M5S member beliefs at one point or another). There is also another facet to M5S’s contempt for the mainstream media: M5S is pre-Trump living proof that the MSM doesn’t matter anymore. 

Beppe Grillo, the stand-up comic, blogger and failed actor from Genoa, is routinely cited as the founder of M5S but its real inventor was Gianroberto Casaleggio, an internet strategist from Milan who died in April this year.