A major election surprise in Rome may have crunched the close-to-fascist movement of Beppe Grillo, a very nasty character indeed.  Grillo received 39% of the Roman vote in the last election for the Italian parliament, and he quickly tried to imitate Mussolini's march on Rome a few weeks later.  But in today's election for mayor of Rome, Grillo's "movement" crashed: early results today show only 12% going for Grillo's candidate.

Grillo's blog immediately talked about a "coup d'état" against the people.  He was able to raise 20,000 people for a mass demonstration in Rome.  But today's election results are a big punch in his nose.

What happened?  It looks like the Italian and European media caught on to Grillo's underground campaign, in which teenagers as young as 16 were indoctrinated with bizarre beliefs in closed chatrooms, probably fed to Grillo by Iranian intelligence, exploiting the very real suffering and misgovernment that have plunged half of Europe into its most serious crisis since World War II.

Grillo masquerades as a reformer but brings along a mishmash of maniacal beliefs from the madhouse: anti-Semitic, anti-capitalist, and anti-American clichés from Europe's paranoid fringe.  Adults can spot that poisoned propaganda, but to teenagers it's all new and exciting.  Grillo has been spreading this stuff for fourteen years, and he has gotten rich by it.

Grillo's "movement" is the first real political web cult we've seen.  It won't be the last.  Every new mass medium brings political turmoil.  The printing press brought the Reformation.  Radio was used by Hitler and Mussolini.  Television turned into a political monopoly for the radical left of the sixties.  The internet gave us the "Arab Spring" -- and Beppe Grillo.

Europe's media and political class were completely snookered in the parliamentary elections, and American Thinker was one of the first to raise the alarm.  Today, Grillo's paranoid ideas have been exposed by the Italian media, by Der Spiegel in Germany, the Telegraph and the Spectator in the U.K., and (wait for it!) even the Washington Post at home.

Crypto (secret)-fascist parties continue to pose a danger to Europe.  If you missed our previous exposés of this weird and dangerous development, here are some highlights.

1. All the crypto-parties in Europe claim to be independent, but in fact they are carbon copies.  They all blame the Jews, Israel, the bankers, the Rockefellers, the Bilderbergers, Wall Street, and the Masons for the economic disaster created by the European Union and its Third Way socialism.  They all follow the Iranian party line.

Naturally Grillo instantly blamed today's election crash on "USRael," the Two Satans.

2. Four crypto-parties -- in Hungary, Albania, Greece, and Italy -- want to lower the voting age to 16, to recruit supporters while they're dumb and easy to indoctrinate.

3. Grillo proposes to "process" all the Jews, to solve the economic woes of Europe.  When asked what the word "process" means, he won't answer.  (In Italian, the term "processed meat" means the same as in English.)

As a result, the ancient Jewish community of Rome is openly discussing the option of fleeing to Israel.  To Europeans with terrible memories of the past, Grillo is no joke.  Grillo's rhetoric has the same sadistic ring of those other fascists who brought Italy to her knees before.

4. While Grillo blames the usual suspects, he glorifies Iran's domestic horror show and justifies whatever killing is going on in Syria and the Arab world.  Grillo is obsessed by the Two Satans of Iranian demonology: Israel and the U.S. are responsible for all the evil in the world.  Grillo got rich by marrying an Iranian woman, and his two Ferraris, multiple villas, motor yacht, and wholly owned political movement are linked to Iranian sources.

5. Almost identical copycat parties have risen in Hungary (where Viktor Orban is now the strong man), in Greece, and in Albania.  In Kosovo and elsewhere, similar Iran-inspired parties seem to be run through the Islamic Development Bank, which gives away free money (!) according to the copycat parties, on the principles of sharia finance.

While it is easy to laugh at the gross ignorance of Grillo's followers, the fact is that he won 8.5 million votes in the parliamentary election.  But we now know that his movement is run by exactly two people: Grillo and his internet guru.  Italy does not require political parties to be run democratically.

If today's vote in Rome -- from 39% to 12% -- reflects Grillo's crashing credibility, there may be hope for Europe yet.