A little over 17 years ago, when pudgy Venezuelan socialist strongman Hugo Chávez appeared at the United Nations — giving his speech after then-U.S. President George W. Bush had spoken to the general assembly — he sensed the feeling of an unholy presence.
“This is another abuse and another abuse of power on the part of the devil,” Chávez said about Bush’s remarks, according to the U.K. Guardian. “It smells of sulphur here, but God is with us, and I embrace you all.”
The sulfur, I suspect, was a whiff of the ambiance in his future home, which he departed for in 2013 after a battle with cancer. However, there’s little doubt that the Fidel-lite Marxist definitely felt the presence of a hostile force on that September 2006 day.
On Wednesday, a very different South American politician — Argentinian President Javier Milei, a libertarian who was swept into office amid promises to slash the beleaguered nation’s massive bureaucracy, cut its massive debt load and jump-start a stagnant economy through free enterprise — strode into the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a venue where that sort of weltanschauung induces other attendees to start smelling sulphur.
And, lest you think that Milei — an economist, activist and self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who won the 2023 Argentine presidential runoff in a landslide with over 55 percent of the vote — would get cold feet upon arrival in Switzerland, let’s just say that he didn’t disappoint.
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In a speech where he warned the global elite “that the western world is in danger” because those charged with defending its values were asleep at the wheel, he railed against “collectivism,” a “cruel … environmental agenda” and “radical feminism,” among other topics, according to the Financial Times.
And not only that, he tied it all together by noting that a “privileged caste” (read: those in attendance) had essentially shanghaied the developed world into a form of creeping socialism.
“The case of Argentina is an empirical demonstration that no matter how rich you may be, or how much you may have in terms of natural resource … if measures are adopted that hinder the free function of markets …. the only possible fate is poverty,” Milei told the audience at Davos.
Indeed, as CNBC noted in its coverage of Milei’s speech, “Latin America’s third-largest economy is once again in the grip of a profound crisis.
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“The purchasing power of the South American country has been ravaged by an annual inflation rate of more than 211 percent, its highest level in 32 years, while 2 in 5 Argentines now live in poverty,” the outlet noted.
In his speech, Milei said that “free enterprise capitalism” was the only way out of the latest Argentinian crisis. But more importantly, he not-so-subtly upbraided the private-jet-set that descended upon Davos to preach climate austerity and shared scarcity. (For the record, Milei traveled by commercial jet. Take that, Bill Gates.)
“Today, I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger, and it is endangered because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inextricably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty,” Milei said in translated remarks.
“Unfortunately, in recent decades, motivated by some well-meaning individuals willing to help others and others motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism,” he continued.
“We are here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world. Rather, they are the root cause.”
NEW: President of Argentina Javier Milei demolishes socialism in front of a bunch of socialists at the World Economic Forum.
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“I’m here to tell you that the western world is in danger and it is endangered because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the… pic.twitter.com/Bcnq3V94mO
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 17, 2024
His full remarks are here:
President Milei just went to the WEF and called out the Davos elites to their faces
His full speech (English):
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 17, 2024
Milei is a colorful character — and clearly out-of-step with the globalist set at Davos, even though the Financial Times reported that he received polite applause. This is probably because he didn’t bring out a chainsaw — like he did on the campaign trail, according to Reuters — to underscore just how much he plans to cut.
Perhaps the impression that the Davosites are under is that Milei’s chainsaw will only be used at home. If they think that was the case, they clearly weren’t listening.
His words were a direct attack on a creeping, supranational type of mixed-economy socialism presided over by the jet-setting unelected bureaucrats who sit on fora like the WEF. To them, the era of “free enterprise capitalism” and “the model of freedom” that led to unequaled global prosperity is a quaint relic of a time when international busybodies weren’t telling nations what they could build, what they could export, what they could emit and when they’ve crossed the line. As for corporations, they’re also tied to DEI, ESG, and whatever other mephitic, destructive acronyms the woke scions of global capital manage to cook up next.
Milei might not have physically brought the chainsaw with him to Switzerland, but it was there rhetorically. The implications were clear: The further the globalist elite drift from the Western paradigm, the more strands of the web that connect Argentina to the meddlers in Davos will be cut. If the WEF crowd didn’t smell the sulfur hot and thick on Wednesday, they ought to see an ENT posthaste regarding the acuity of their olfactory functions.
