Text of Milei’s WEF speech translated into English

Good morning, everyone. How much has changed in such a short time. A year ago, I stood here before you alone and told some truths about the state of the Western world that were received with a certain amount of surprise and stupor by a good part of the Western political, economic and media establishment.

And I must admit that, in some sense, I understand it. A president of a country that, as a result of systematic economic failure for more than 100 years, as a result of having taken pusillanimous positions in the great global conflicts, and as a result of having closed ourselves off to trade, had lost practically all international relevance over the years. A president of that country stands on this platform and tells the entire world that they are wrong, that they are headed for failure, that the West has gone astray and that it must be put back on track.

A president of that country, Argentina, who was not a politician, who had no legislative support, who had no support from governors or businessmen or media groups. In that speech, here, standing before you, I told you that it was the beginning of a new Argentina, that Argentina had been infected with socialism for too long and that with us it would once again embrace the ideas of freedom; a model that we summarize in the defense of life, liberty, and private property.

And I also told you that, in a certain sense, Argentina was the ghost of Christmas future for the West because we had already lived through everything that you were living through and we already knew how it would end.

A year later, I must say that I no longer feel so alone, I no longer feel so alone because the world has embraced Argentina. Argentina has become a world example of fiscal responsibility, of commitment to our obligations, of how to end the problem of inflation and also of a new way of doing politics, which consists of telling people the truth in their face and trusting that people will understand.

I don’t feel alone either, because throughout this year I have been able to find companions in this fight for the ideas of freedom in every corner of the planet. From the wonderful Elon Musk to the fierce Italian lady, my dear friend, Giorgia Meloni; from Bukele in El Salvador to Victor Orbán in Hungary; from Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel to Donald Trump in the United States. Slowly, an international alliance has been formed of all those nations that want to be free and that believe in the ideas of freedom.

And slowly, what seemed to be an absolute global hegemony of the woke left in politics, in educational institutions, in the media, in supranational organizations or in forums such as Davos, has been crumbling and a hope for the ideas of freedom is beginning to appear.

Today I come here to tell you that our battle is not won, that—although hope has been reborn—it is our moral duty and our historical responsibility to dismantle the ideological edifice of sickly wokeism. Until we have managed to rebuild our historic cathedral, until we have managed to get the majority of Western countries to embrace the ideas of freedom again, until our ideas are not the common currency of the halls of events like this, we cannot give up because, I must say, forums like this have been protagonists and promoters of the sinister agenda of wokeism that is doing so much harm to the West.

If we want to change, if we truly want to defend the rights of citizens, we must first begin by telling them the truth. And the truth is that there is something deeply wrong with the ideas that have been promoted from forums like this. I would like to take a few minutes, from this day forward, to discuss some of them.

Today, few people deny that the winds of change are blowing in the West. There are those who resist change, there are those who accept it reluctantly but accept it in the end, there are the new converts who appear when they see it as inevitable, and finally, there are those of us who have fought all our lives for its coming.

Each of you will know which group you identify with, there is surely a bit of each of you in this audience, but you will all recognize, surely, that the time of change is knocking at the door. Moments of historical change have a particularity: they are times when the formulas that have been in force for decades are exhausted, the ways considered unique of doing things cease to make sense and what for many were unquestionable truths are, finally, called into question. They are moments where the rules are rewritten and for that reason they are times that reward those who have the courage to take risks.

But much of the free world still prefers the comfort of the known, even if it is the wrong path, and insists on applying the recipes for failure. And the great anvil that appears as a common denominator in the countries and institutions that are failing is the mental virus of woke ideology. This is the great epidemic of our time that must be cured, it is the cancer that must be eradicated.

This ideology has colonized the world’s most important institutions, from the parties and states of the free countries of the West, to global governance organizations, nongovernmental institutions, universities, and the media, and has also shaped the course of the global conversation for the past decades. Until we remove this aberrant ideology from our culture, our institutions, and our laws, Western civilization—and even the human species—will not be able to return to the path of progress that our pioneering spirit demands.

It is essential to break these ideological chains if we want to take a step towards a new golden age. That is why today I want to dedicate a few minutes to destroying those chains, but first let’s talk about what we are fighting for.

The West represents the peak of the human species, the fertile soil of its Greco-Roman heritage and its Judeo-Christian values ​​planted the seeds of something unprecedented in history. After definitively imposing itself on absolutism, a new era in human existence began. Within this new moral and philosophical framework that placed individual freedom above the whim of the tyrant, the West was able to unleash the creative capacity of man, beginning a process of wealth generation never seen before.

The data speak for themselves: until 1800, the world’s GDP per capita remained practically constant. However, starting in the 19th century and thanks to the Industrial Revolution, GDP per capita multiplied by 20, lifting 90% of the world’s population out of poverty even though the population multiplied by eight times. This was only possible thanks to a convergence of fundamental values: respect for life, liberty and property, which made free trade, freedom of expression, religious freedom and the rest of the pillars of Western civilization possible.

Added to this is our Faustian, inventive, exploratory, pioneering spirit, which is always testing the limits of what is possible. A pioneering spirit that is today represented, among others, by my dear friend Elon Musk, who has been unjustly vilified by wokeism in recent hours for an innocent gesture that only means his love] and gratitude to the people. In short, we invented capitalism based on savings, investment, work, reinvestment, and hard work. We managed to make it possible for each worker to multiply their productivity by 10, by 100, or even by 1000, thus overcoming the Malthusian trap. However, at some point in the 20th century, we lost our way and the liberal principles that had made us free and prosperous were betrayed.

A new political class, protected by collectivist ideologies and taking advantage of moments of crisis, saw a perfect opportunity to accumulate power. All the wealth created by capitalism up to that point and in the future would be redistributed under some scheme of centralized planning, which kicked off a process whose dire consequences we are suffering today.

Promoting a socialist agenda, but insidiously operating within the liberal paradigm, this new political class distorted the values ​​of liberalism. Thus, they replaced freedom with liberation, using the coercive power of the state to distribute the wealth created by capitalism. Their justification was the sinister, unjust, and aberrant idea of ​​social justice, complemented by Marxist theoretical frameworks whose purpose was to free the individual from his needs. And at the heart of this new set of values ​​is the fundamental premise that equality before the law is not enough, since there are injustices with hidden foundations that must be rectified, which represents a gold mine for bureaucrats with aspirations of omnipotence.

This is what wokeism is all about. It is the result of the inversion of Western values. Each of the pillars of our civilization was replaced by a distorted version of itself by the introduction of various mechanisms of its cultural version. From negative rights to life, liberty, and property, we moved on to an artificially infinite number of positive rights. First it was education, then housing, and from there on, ridiculous things like access to the Internet, football broadcasts, theatre, cosmetic treatments, and countless other desires that were transformed into fundamental human rights—rights that, of course, someone has to pay for.

And that can only be guaranteed through the infinite expansion of the aberrant state. In other words, from the concept of freedom as the fundamental protection of the individual against the intervention of the tyrant, we move on to the concept of liberation through the intervention of the state. On this basis, wokeism was built, a single system of thought, supported by different institutions whose purpose is to penalize dissent. Feminism, diversity, inclusion, equity, immigration, abortion, environmentalism, gender ideology, among others, are heads of the same creature whose purpose is to justify the advance of the state through the appropriation and distortion of noble causes.

Let’s look at a few. Radical feminism is a distortion of the concept of equality and even in its most benevolent version it is redundant, since equality before the law already exists in the West. Everything else is a search for privileges, which is what radical feminism really aims for, putting one half of the population against the other when they should be on the same side. We even get to the point of normalizing that in many supposedly civilized countries, if one kills a woman it is called femicide, and that carries a more serious penalty than if one kills a man just because of the sex of the victim.

Legalizing, in fact, that a woman’s life is worth more than a man’s, raising the flag of the gender pay gap, but when one looks at the data it is clear that there is no inequality for the same task, but that most men tend to have better paid professions than most women. However, they do not complain that most prisoners are men, or that most plumbers are men, or that most victims of robbery or murder are men, and not to mention the majority of people who died in wars.

But if one raises these issues, from the media or even from this forum, we are branded as misogynists just for defending an elementary principle of modern democracy and the rule of law—which is equality before the law—and the facts.

Wokeism, furthermore, manifests itself in sinister radical environmentalism and the climate change banner. Preserving our planet for future generations is a matter of common sense—nobody wants to live in a garbage dump. But once again, wokeism managed to pervert that elementary idea of ​​preserving the environment for the enjoyment of human beings—we moved to a fanatic environmentalism where human beings are a cancer that must be eliminated, and economic development is little less than a crime against nature.

However, when one argues that the Earth has already had five cycles of sudden temperature changes and that in four of them man did not even exist, we are branded as flat-Earthers to discredit our ideas, regardless of the fact that science and data are on our side. It is no coincidence that these same people are the main promoters of the bloodthirsty and murderous abortion agenda, an agenda designed from the Malthusian premise that overpopulation will destroy the Earth and, therefore, we must implement some mechanism of population control. In fact, this has already been adopted to the point that today on the planet the rate of population growth is beginning to become a problem.

What a task they have given themselves with these abortion aberrations. From these forums, the LGBT agenda is promoted, wanting to impose on us that women are men and men are women only if they perceive themselves as such, and they say nothing about when a man dresses up as a woman and kills his rival in a boxing ring or when a prisoner claims to be a woman and ends up raping every woman he comes across in prison.

Just a few weeks ago, the case of two homosexual Americans who, waving the flag of sexual diversity, were sentenced to 100 years in prison for abusing and filming their adopted children for more than two years, was in the news all over the world. I want to be clear that when I say abuse, it is not a euphemism, because in its most extreme versions, gender ideology constitutes child abuse, plain and simple. They are pedophiles, so I want to know who supports such behavior.

They are irreversibly damaging healthy children through hormone treatments and mutilations, as if a child under five could consent to such a thing. And if it were to happen that their family does not agree, there will always be state agents ready to intercede in favor of what they call the best interests of the child. Believe me, the scandalous experiments that are carried out today in the name of this criminal ideology will be condemned and compared to those that occurred during the darkest periods of our history. And covering up this multitude of abject practices is the eternal victimhood always ready to fire accusations of homophobia or transphobia and other inventions whose only purpose is to try to silence those who denounce this scandal in which national and international authorities are complicit.

On the other hand, in our companies, public institutions and educational institutions, merit has been set aside by the doctrine of diversity, which implies a regression to the noble systems of yesteryear. Quotas are invented for as many minorities as politicians can think of, which only undermines the excellence of these institutions. Wokeism has also distorted the cause of immigration—the free circulation of goods and people are at the foundations of liberalism, as we know well—Argentina and the United States and many other countries became great because of those immigrants who left their lands of origin in search of new opportunities.

However, from trying to attract foreign talent to promote development we have moved on to mass immigration motivated not by national interest but by guilt. Since the West is the supposed cause of all the ills of history, it must redeem itself by opening its borders to everyone, necessarily culminating in reverse colonization, which resembles collective suicide.

This is what we see today in the images of hordes of immigrants abusing, raping or killing European citizens who only committed the sin of not adhering to a particular religion. But when one questions these situations, one is branded as racist, xenophobic, or Nazi. Wokeism has penetrated so deeply into our societies, promoted by institutions like this one, that the very idea of ​​sex has even been questioned through the nefarious ideology of gender.

This has led to even greater state intervention through absurd legislation such as the State having to finance hormones and surgeries worth millions to meet the self-perception of certain individuals. Only now are we seeing the effects of an entire generation that mutilated its body, promoted by a culture of sexual relativity that will have to spend its entire life in psychiatric treatment to deal with what they did to themselves, but nobody says anything about these issues. Not only that, they have also subjected the vast majority to being slaves to the mistaken self-perceptions of a tiny majority and, in addition, wokeism aims to kidnap our future.

Because by dominating the chairs of the most prestigious universities in the world, it is training the elites of our countries to challenge and deny the culture, ideas and values ​​that made us great, further damaging our social fabric. What is left for us for the future if we are teaching our young people to feel ashamed of our past?

All this incubated and developed in an increasingly noticeable way during the last decades, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, curiously free countries began to self-destruct when they ran out of adversaries to defeat. Peace made us weak, we were defeated by our own complacency. All these and other aberrations, which for reasons of time we cannot enumerate, are those that today threaten the West and are, unfortunately, the beliefs that institutions like this one have promoted for forty years. Here, no one can pretend to be innocent. They have worshipped a sinister and murderous ideology for decades as if it were a golden calf and have moved heaven and earth to impose it on humanity.

This same organization and also the most influential supranational organizations have been the ideologues of this barbarity. The multilateral credit organizations have been an extortionist arm and many national states, and in particular the European Union, have been and are an armed wing.

Or is it that in the United Kingdom today they are not imprisoning citizens for revealing aberrant, truly appalling crimes committed by Muslim migrants that the government wants to hide?

Or did the Brussels bureaucrats not suspend the Romanian elections simply because they did not like which party won?

In the face of each of these discussions, wokeism tries to discredit those who question these things, first by labelling us and then by censoring us: if we are white, we must be racist, if you are a man, you must be a misogynist or a member of the patriarchy, if you are rich, you must be a cruel capitalist, if you are heterosexual, you must be heteronormative, homophobic, or transphobic. For each question they have a label, which they then try to censor by de facto or de jure means.

Because beneath the discourse of diversity and democracy and tolerance that they claim to champion, what is really hidden is the manifest desire to destroy dissonance, criticism, and, in essence, freedom in order to continue supporting a model of which they are the main beneficiaries. Or perhaps we do not hear these days how certain important European authorities, fairly “red,” to put it one way, openly call for censorship; or that, in reality, there is no censorship, but those who think differently from the woke ideology must be silenced.

And what kind of society can result from wokeism? A society that has replaced the free exchange of goods and services with the arbitrary distribution of wealth at gunpoint, replaced free communities with forced collectivization, replaced the creative chaos of the market with the sterile and sclerotic order of socialism. A society full of resentment, where there are only two kinds of people, those who are net taxpayers on the one hand and those who are beneficiaries of the state on the other. And I am not referring to those who receive social subsistence because they have nothing to eat, I am referring to the privileged corporations, I am referring to the bankers who were bailed out in the subprime crisis, to most of the media, to the indoctrination centers disguised as universities, to the state bureaucracy, to the unions, to social organizations, to the state-sponsored companies, and to all the sectors that live off the taxes paid by those who work.

I am talking about the world described by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged, which unfortunately has come to fruition. A scheme where the big winner is the political class, which becomes, in turn, the referee and interested party in this distribution. I repeat: The political class is the referee and interested party in this distribution. And as always, the one who distributes gets the best part. Where, beneath their cosmetic differences—interests, partners, arrangements, and an unalterable commitment to ensure that nothing changes are shared by the different parties, which is why she called them all the Party of the State. A system that hides behind well-meaning discourse where, according to them, the market fails, and they are the ones in charge of solving these failures with regulations, force, and bureaucracy. But market failures do not exist. I repeat again: Market failures do not exist.

Since the market is a mechanism of social cooperation, where property rights are voluntarily exchanged, the supposed market failure is a contradiction in terms, the only thing that this intervention generates are new distortions of the price system, which in turn hinders economic calculation, savings, and investment and therefore ultimately ends up generating more poverty or a filthy tangle of regulations, for example, like the one that exists in Europe, killing economic growth. As I often say in my presentations: “If you think there is a market failure, go and check if the state is not involved, and if you find it, do not do the analysis again because it is wrong.”

For this very reason, since wokeism is nothing more or less than a systematic plan by the State Party to justify state intervention and the increase in public spending, this means that our first crusade—the most important one if we want to recover the West’s progress, if we want to build a new Golden Age—has to be the drastic reduction of the size of the state. Not only in each of our countries, but also the drastic reduction of all supranational organizations.

Because it is the only way to cut off this perverse system, draining it of resources, to return to the taxpayer what is his and to end the sale of favors. There is no better method than eliminating state bureaucracy so that there is no possibility of selling such favors.

The functions of the state must be limited once again to the defense of the right to life, liberty, and property. Any other function that the state assumes will be detrimental to its fundamental task and will inevitably culminate in the omnipresent Leviathan that we all suffer today. Today we are witnessing a global exhaustion of this system that has dominated us in recent decades. Just as it happened in Argentina, in the rest of the world the only relevant conflict of this century, and of all those that have passed, is becoming more acute: the conflict between free citizens and the political caste that clings to the established order, redoubling its efforts of censorship, persecution, and destruction.

Fortunately, throughout the free world there is a silenced majority that is organizing itself, and in every corner of our hemisphere the echo of this cry for freedom resounds. We are facing a change of era, a Copernican shift, the destruction of one paradigm and the construction of another, and if institutions with global influence, like this house, want to turn the page and participate in good faith in this new paradigm, they will have to take responsibility for the role they played in these last decades and acknowledge before society the mea culpa that is demanded of them.

In closing, I would like to speak directly to the leaders of the world, to all those who lead both national states and large economic groups and international organizations, both those present here and those listening to us from their homes. The political formulas of the last decades that I have set forth in this speech have failed and are collapsing on themselves. This means that thinking like everyone else thinks, reading what everyone else reads, saying what everyone else says can only lead to error, although there are still many who persist in walking towards the precipice.

The script of the last 40 years has run out, and when a system runs out, history opens up. That is why I say to all global leaders: It is time to get out of that script. It is time to be bold. It is time to dare to think and to dare to write your own verses because when the ideas and texts of the present say all the same things and say the wrong things. Being brave consists precisely in being untimely—it consists in going back, in not letting yourself be dazzled by the passengers, losing sight of the universal. It consists in recovering truths that for our ancestors were obvious and that are at the base of the civilizing success that the West has been, but that the regime of single thought of the last decades perceived as if they were heresies.

As Churchill once said, “The further back we look, the further forward we can see.” In other words, we have to find forgotten truths from our past in order to untie the knot of the present and take the next step forward as a civilization toward the future. And what do I see when I look back? That we have to embrace, once again, the latest proven theses of economic and social success. That is, the model of freedom, to embrace the ideas of freedom again, to return to liberalism. That is what we are doing in Argentina, that is what I trust President Trump will do in this new North America, and that is what we invite all the great free nations of the world to do and to try to stop in time what, by all accounts, is a path that leads to catastrophe.

In short, what I am proposing is that we make the West great again. Today, just like 215 years ago, Argentina has broken its chains and invites—as our anthem says—all mortals of the world to hear the sacred cry: Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! May the forces of heaven be with us.

Thank you all very much and … Long live freedom, dammit!

[Translated into English]

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