Your regular reminder that the Heritage Foundation has a journalism fellowship that was funded by the Guardabassi family. Countess Guardabassi was a Palm Beach heiress who was one of the most generous benefactors of American fascists like Gerald LK Smith and Revilo Oliver in the Cold War era.
She gave money to the organization run by William Luther Pierce, the author of The Turner Diaries. She dined regularly with Pedro del Valle, a pro-Hitler former Lt. General who spent 1950 to the 1970s trying to organize a fascist coup in the US.
Here's a letter from one of the Countess's friends to Pedro del Valle in which she fondly recalls "that day she said 'Why don't we kill them all?' How we laughed. She was so cute and so honest...I'm still searching for more evidence that Rocky [Nelson Rockefeller] is a Jew." By "them" she meant Jews
Countess Guardabassi lived in a mansion 4 miles north of Mar-a-Lago. Throughout the 1950s and 60s she would regularly host parties like this where wealthy white "conservative" Christians would sit around and "joke" about killing all of the Jews in order to "save America" from Communism.
This article is from December 1936. Countess Guardabassi's husband was a pal of Mussolini's who did his best to mount a propaganda campaign on behalf of fascism in America.
Another fun fact is that the guy who designed Mar-a-Lago's grand ballroom in the 1930s, you know the one where Trump holds all of those events, dubbed it "the Mussolini Room" because it was modeled on Rome’s Chigi Palace that was then occupied by Il Duce. Good times!
