Rick Santelli, the fixed income specialist on CNBC may have another career as a Mussolini imitator.
Based on this clip of CNBC’s Rick Santelli saying it is not appropriate to wear masks, he has mastered some of the same chest pumpings, crossed arms, and 
arrogant look that made Mussolini a great fascist dictator and memorable orator.
Just watch this old clip of Mussolini. At about 8 seconds in, Mussolini goes full-blown Mussolini. Then watch Santelli arguing with Andrew Ross Sorkin and at about 16 seconds in, Santelli uses some of the same mannerisms from Mussolini.
The difference, in this case, is that Santelli is arguing with Sorkin and is claiming that wearing masks is either a violation of his personal rights (the old free-market libertarian argument) or that masks do not prevent the spread of the Covid virus.
Remember, that Santelli is no doctor or scientist. He is a fixed income expert, but that does not mean he cannot make some serious mistakes and have bad judgment.
Santelli’s Mussolini imitations in this tape remind us that he did a similar stunt on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange when he went ballistic near the S&P 500 futures pit to criticize people who could not pay their mortgages due to rampant mortgage and real estate fraud that created the 2008 recession.
The bottom line is that Santelli, along with some other CNBC and FOX commentators (Joe Kiernan, Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs, Charles Payne, and Stuart Varney) are all free-market zealots who believe in unfettered, unregulated capitalism.
These market and financial commentators have large audiences, but they are not objective. They believe in survival of the fittest, but they should all remember what happened to Mussolini.
