This year's girl

Following the fash flavor of the month

The rise of Hadolf Itler, the young conservative firebrand who has led the Freedom Party of Austria to the brink of government control, has excited conservatives in the U.S. as well who see in her rise a path to victory in 2024.

The American Conservative recently devoted an entire issue to “The ‘It’-ler Girl.” Written by Rod Dreher, it consists mainly of rhapsodies over Itler’s winning political formula, which mixes fervent appeals to family values — what Itler calls Küche, Kirche, [und] Kitchy-Koo — with tough rhetoric on subjects such as immigration, or in Itler’s evocative term the Rattenplage.

“Sure, Orban and Meloni have found ways to win,” Dreher writes. “But one still feels when they speak that they are hiding their deepest beliefs out of fear that the agents of Soros and big tech will lash out at them in earnest, and smear them further as ‘fascists’ and even ‘Nazis.’ Itler, conversely, makes a sort of game of it. It’s as if she’s saying, sure, I’m sort of a fascist — so what? Not that she really is a fascist, of course — I could not love her as I do were she a genuine fascist! — but she knows that her enemies really hate fascism, and she also knows that her most devoted followers, whom she affectionately calls her Kleine Sturmabteilung, loves when she taunts them with her so-called fascism. For example, when her excited fanboys smashed a few shop windows in Vienna’s Margareten district, which had the liberals fuming, she quipped, ‘If we wanted a Kristallnacht, you think we’d pick a neighborhood where there were no Muslims?’ Like her standard laugh-line about ‘filling great-grandpapa’s shoes,’ this triggers the liberals, and that’s why so many Austrians who are not even interested in politics have fallen for her.”