Argentina’s flamboyant libertarian president Javier Milei was invited back to the World Economic Forum’s annual confab at Davos. Last year, the confident new president torched Davos and most of its attendees with a blistering and unapologetic condemnation of globalism, socialism, and woke ideology, an unprecedented affront to the global gathering that was met with equal parts dismay and ridicule among attendees and in the legacy media.
But since that time he did something no other world leader has done: He put his economic house in order in stunning fashion, getting Argentina out of the red and into the black for the first time in 123 years. The ruined Argentine economy was fixed by Milei in just a matter of months. From his speech last week:
“The great burden that is the common denominator among the countries and institutions that are failing is the mental virus of woke ideology,” Milei told his squirming audience. “This is the great epidemic of our time that must be cured. This is the cancer we need to get rid of. This ideology has colonized the world’s most important institutions.”
Characterizing wokeism as a “reversal of Western values,” Milei went on to pillory every one of its derivative ideologies, including radical feminism, “sinister radical environmentalism,” the “bloody, murderous abortion agenda” (which, Milei averred, was designed to be a tool for Malthusian population control), the homosexual agenda, transgender ideology (whose proponents he characterized as “pedophiles” for their advocacy of child genital mutilation), the “eternal victimhood narrative,” and the epidemic of mass immigration (which, Milei trenchantly observed, is motivated “not by national interest but by guilt”).
"Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least hear of brave knights.”
C.S. Lewis
“A man’s natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, (or by any other name indicating his true character,) or by millions, calling themselves a government.”
Lysander Spooner (1867). “No Treason: No. 1-”, p.7
Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.
In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.
The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
James Madison, 1795