Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) caused a lot of head-scratching on Sunday when he tweeted a quote from fascist dictator Benito Mussolini :

“We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become.” Benito Mussolini

Cornyn later retweeted a message explaining that he was warning “against an overly powerful central government” ― and then added a message of his own saying that democratic socialists “have forgotten or never learned the lessons of history, and how their ideology is incompatible with freedom.”

He also complained about the criticism: