Javier Milei, the newly elected President of Argentina, spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 17th. In a little more than half an hour, he skewered all the claims of progressivism that are so dear to the Davos participants.
In this, he was following in the footsteps of Donald Trump, who, for six years, rocked the WEF with the same message of family, faith, and freedom.
Klaus Schwab, Davos’ founder and author of “The Great Reset,” was so incensed by Milei’s attack that he got up and left the room. So much for the radical progressive pretense that they are “inclusive.” They are anything but.
The WEF’s agenda, like that of the UN’s Agenda 2030, poses a powerful danger to families around the world, not less than to life itself. Davos represents big money, and that money is being used to promote the same old leftist agenda: free abortion, gender ideology, population control, and environmentalism.
Poor countries are easy targets for WEF coercion. Witness the Biden Administration attempt to use U.S. foreign aid programs to coerce African countries. Like the EU, the UN, and the World Bank, the Biden Administration threatens to withhold funds from governments that forbid same-sex marriage, abortion, coercive sterilization and other “family planning” programs.
Argentina is better off, but it still has its own problems: the country relies on IMF funding due to years of state socialism called “Peronismo.” But that didn’t stop Milei from denouncing the entire progressive agenda just hours before meeting with the president of the IMF in Davos. He spoke against abortion, against gender ideology, against environmental ideology, and against complete state control. And he didn’t mince words. He delivered his pro-freedom message directly and forcefully. Those of us who have suffered for so long from the progressive agenda have rarely heard our principles articulated with such clarity in such an important forum.
Milei defended capitalism and freedom: “The West is in danger because those who are supposed to defend Western values are co-opted by a worldview that leads to socialism. (…) The main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom.”
He used his own country as an example. Once-prosperous Argentina, he said, had been brought to ruin by the “progressive vision.”
With his glasses at the tip of his nose and his hair disheveled as usual, Milei proceeded to offer a master class in basic economics. Capitalism was responsible for creating enormous amounts of wealth that have benefited humanity like no other system. Socialism, on the other hand, has been an abysmal failure. “Those countries that are more free are eight times richer than those repressed,” he pointed out as heads exploded around the room. Most of the crowd aspire to the role of Mustapha Mond, the “World Controller” in Huxley’s Brave New World.
The West is at risk, he said, because political and economic leaders have created a system that invariably leads to poverty. For those who might find reason to doubt this, Milei reminded his listeners that socialism “is a model that has impoverished and failed that has failed in every country where it was tried. It is a failure economically. It is a failure socially. It is a failure culturally. And it had also killed more than 100 million human beings.”
“Get out of the box,” he told his audience. “When the model fails, don’t get angry with reality, get angry with the model and change it.”
Milei completes his attack on progressive ideology by shifting from economics to culture. First, he denounces gender ideology, a “ridiculous fight” between men and women that feminism uses to create unproductive bureaucrats that contribute nothing to society. His audacity is, as the Spanish say, “¡Sensacional”!
Then Milei fearlessly denounces the worst crime that progressivism has spawned: making people themselves the enemy. “They claim that humans harm the planet and that it must be protected at all costs,” he said, “even advocating for population control mechanisms or for the bloody agenda of abortion.”
A bolt of lightning might well have struck the Davos participants at that moment. The Argentinian president had just pointed out that an ideology that claims to be concerned about humanity not only impoverishes, controls, and bureaucratizes everything it touches, it also hates humanity itself.
The ultimate proof of this hatred for humanity is abortion, an act that is not only the embrace of a lethal crime but also a form of population control.
Milei ended his address by rallying all lovers of freedom. Break free of the controlling passion of socialism. Realize that, even in countries that claim to be capitalist, encroaching bureaucracies are controlling everything, viewing individuals is mere pieces on a chessboard.
And then, looking pointedly over at Klaus Schwab, he told his audience, “Don’t be intimidated by the political caste or the parasites who live off the state. Don’t surrender to a political class that only wants to perpetuate itself in power and preserve its privileges.”
It was at that point that Schwab bolted from the room.
A Davos official later claimed that “Milei just ruined, in 30 minutes, more than 50 years of efforts by the World Economic Forum to shape an inclusive, responsible, and well-educated capitalism.”
This is false. What Milei did was show that an “inclusive, responsible, and well-educated capitalism” was simply a dishonest description of socialism and collectivism.
Does Milei practice what he preaches? Well, one telling detail suggests that he does: he arrived in Switzerland on a commercial Lufthansa flight, accompanied by only four ministers. His flight landed in Zurich; he traveled by car to Davos.
Nearly every other attendee arrived in a private jet, roughly one thousand of them.
Milei has argued that environmentalism is simply an excuse for abortion. Those thousand planes prove it.
Milei’s meeting with the IMF, which occurred shortly after he finished his speech, was incredibly positive. The big challenge now is for the economic plan in Argentina to work.
But how to do that? The damage caused by decades of socialism runs deep. The country is truly bankrupt, and the suffering of the people is real. Moreover, in the classic Marxist tradition, the Left is doing everything in its power to sandbag Milei, even if they ruin Argentina in the process.
Rescuing the economy is also vital to achieving the cultural changes that Milei wants. He is appointing solid officials, among them close allies of the Population Research Institute and other pro-life groups. It is clear that this pro-life president means what he recently said in Davos.
All this is a source of great hope, not just in Argentina, but in the region as well. If Milei succeeds, the days of socialism in the region are numbered.
