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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”).
Sadly, Europe appears to be pursuing the worst lessons of appeasement: the dangerous illusion is that you can temper a ravenous aggressor by conciliation, weakness and generosity. The aggressor immediately sees that the best route for him is to demand more. The cycle becomes self-reinforcing.
By treating the Iranian regime as a legitimate negotiating partner — and by discounting the moral and strategic gulf that separates it from liberal democracies — Europe is bankrolling the terrorism industry.
--Majid Rafizadeh
The history of the welfare state is the history of the state's savage war of aggrandizement and seizure of authority against civil society. Whether in Germany, in the United Kingdom, in Australia, in Canada, in Scandinavia, or in the United States, the coercive state systematically destroyed the "voluntary sector" of civil society and those intermediary institutions that protected the individual from the direct contact and control by the state [much as the Church did for nearly all of the previous two millennia]. Within the short space of two or three decades the protective sphere covered by workingmen's social and other fraternal duties had been stripped to nothing more than drinking associations, with all other matters taken over by the state apparatus. Henceforth, the workingman and much of the middle class reported directly to the bureaucracy of the state's intrusive regime. Everything they did was in some way or another regulated, regimented and overseen by the state. The dire effects ...
