Eradicate the "woke" Virus and Embrace Freedom Again - Milei's 2025 Davos Manifesto
- Javier Milei
- Apr 23
- 20 min read
Updated: Aug 17
Author: Javier Milei, Translation: Mr. Y
Abstract
The core characteristics of "wokism" - expanding state and institutional power by reshaping the concept of rights, manipulating moral discourse and labeling and censorship - as well as its specific manifestations in the fields of feminism, environmental protection, gender, immigration, and education.
Key Points and Facts
“A new political class, driven by collectivist ideologies and taking advantage of times of crisis, … All the wealth created by capitalism until then and into the future was redistributed through some scheme of centralized planning…”
“By insidiously promoting a socialist agenda within the liberal paradigm, this new group of pseudo-liberals distorted the values of liberalism. They replaced freedom with liberation, using the coercive power of the state to redistribute the wealth created by capitalism.”
“On this foundation, wokeism was built – an ideology of monolithic thinking upheld by various institutions whose purpose is to penalize dissent …”
“…From preserving the environment for human enjoyment, we have shifted to a fanatical environmentalism, where we humans are seen as a cancer that must be eradicated and economic development is considered little more than a crime against nature…”
“…And they say nothing about when a man dresses as a woman and kills his opponent in a boxing ring, or when a male prison inmate claims to be a woman and ends up sexually assaulting women in prison…”
“…Healthy children are being irreversibly harmed through hormone treatments and mutilation, as if a five-year-old child could possibly consent to such things…”
“…Meanwhile, in our businesses, public institutions and educational establishments, merit has been cast aside in favor of the doctrine of diversity, which represents a regression to the aristocratic systems of the past…”
“…Wokeism has also distorted the issue of immigration ... So, this is how we now see images of hordes of immigrants who abuse, assault, or even kill European citizens…But when someone questions these situations, they are immediately labelled racists, xenophobic or even Nazis.”
“Is it not true that right now, as we speak, in the UK citizens are being imprisoned for exposing horrifying crimes committed by Muslim migrants, crimes that the government seeks to conceal?”
“And what kind of society can wokeism create? One that replaced free communities with forced collectivization. One that replaced the creative chaos of the market with the sterile and sclerotic order of socialism. A society filled with resentment where there are only two types of people…The world described by Ayn Rand in <Atlas Shrugged>, which unfortunately has become a reality. …It is a system where the big winner is the political class, which becomes both a referee and stakeholder in this redistribution game.”
“For this same reason, since wokism is nothing more than a systematic plan by the ‘party of the state’ to justify state intervention and increase public spending, this means that our first and foremost mission…has to be the drastic reduction in the size of the government.”
“…the world is seeing the deepening of the only truly relevant conflict of this century, and of all previous ones - the conflict between free citizens and the political caste that clings to the established order, doubling down on its efforts aimed at censorship, persecution and destruction.”
“When I look back, what do I see? We should embrace again the theories that have proven to be successful in economics and society. That is, the model of freedom, re-embracing the idea of freedom, returning to liberalism.”
Full speech:
Good morning, everyone. And 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 have caused surprise and shock to much of the political, economic and media establishment of the West.
And I must admit that, in a way, I understand it. A president of a country that has experienced more than a hundred years of systemic economic failure, been weak in major global conflicts, been closed to international trade for many years, and lost almost all international influence, a president of such a country stood on this stage and told the entire world that they were wrong, that they were headed for failure, that the West has gone astray and must get back on the right track.
Argentina's rebirth
The president of that country, Argentina, who was not a politician, had no legislative support, no backing from governors, business leaders 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 by socialism for far too long, and that with us Argentina would once again embrace the ideas of freedom – a paradigm that we summarize as the defense of life, liberty and private property.
And I also told you that in a way, Argentina was the "ghost of Western Christmas eve", because we had already experienced everything you were going through, and we already knew how it would end. A year later, I must say that I don’t feel so lonely anymore.
I don't feel lonely, because the world has embraced Argentina. Argentina has become a global example of fiscal responsibility, of commitment to honoring our obligations and, obviously, a commitment to solve the inflation problem.
Also, we are an example of a new way of doing politics, which is about telling people the truth to their faces and trusting that they will understand.
Nor do I feel alone because over the course of this year, I have found allies in this fight for the ideas of freedom in every corner of the world – from the great Elon Musk to that Italian Iron lady, my dear Giorgia Meloni; from Bukele in El Salvador to Viktor Orbán in Hungary; from Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel to Donald Trump in the United States - slowly an international alliance has been forming among all those nations which, like ours, want to be free and believe in the ideas of liberty.
The dawn of the idea of freedom
The once seemingly absolute global hegemony of the ‘woke left’ in politics and educational institutions, in the media, in supranational organizations, or even in forums like Davos, began to crumble. Hope for the ideas of freedom began to resurface.
Today I've come here to tell you that our battle has not been won yet. And although hope has been rekindled, it is our moral duty and our historical responsibility to dismantle the ideological edifice of sickly wokeism, until we have succeeded in rebuilding our historical cathedral, until we have ensured that most Western countries once again embrace the ideal of freedom.
Until our ideas become the common currency in the halls of events like this one, we can't let our guard down. Because I must say that forums like this one have been protagonists and promoters of the sinister agenda of wokeism that is doing so much damage to the Western world.
If we want to change, if we truly want to defend the rights of citizens, we must begin by telling them the truth. And the truth is that there is something badly wrong with the ideas that have been promoted through forums like this one. And I would like to take a few minutes today to discuss some of them.
Today, few will deny that winds of change are blowing in the West. There are those who resist change, those who grudgingly accept it, but accept it, anyhow. There are new converts who appear as they see it as inevitable. And finally, there's those of us who have fought our entire lives for change to come.
Each one of you will know which group you belong to. Surely each group has its representatives in this auditorium. You will all surely recognize that the times of change are knocking on our doors.
Historic moments of change have a unique characteristic. The time for the formulas that have been in place for decades has come to an end. The methods once considered the only way of doing things cease to make sense and what, to many, seemed unquestionable truths is finally called into question. These are times when the rules get rewritten, and therefore these are times that reward those who have the courage to take risks.
But much of the free world still prefers the familiar comfort zone, even though it is the wrong path, and they still cling to those failed old methods. And among those failed countries and institutions, the common outstanding problem is the mental virus of "wokeism".
It is the great plague of our time and must be cured; it is a cancer that must be eradicated. This ideology has colonized the world's most important institutions, from the political parties and governments of leading Western nations to global governance organizations, even NGOs, universities and media outlets. It has also set the tone of global conversation over the past decades.
Until we remove this abhorrent 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 demanded by our pioneering spirit.
It is crucial to break those ideological chains if we want to usher in a new golden age. That is why today I would like to spend a few minutes breaking those chains.
But first, let's talk about what we are fighting for. The West represents the pinnacle of human achievement on the fertile ground of its Greco-Roman heritage and Judeo-Christian values.
The seeds of something unprecedented in history were sown after definitively overcoming absolutism. Liberalism inaugurated a new era in human existence, and within the new moral and philosophical framework, which placed individual liberty above the whims of tyrants, the West was able to unleash man's creativity, initiating an unprecedented process of wealth generation.
The data speaks for itself. Until the year 1800, the world's per-capita GDP remained almost unchanged. However, from the 19th century onwards, due to the Industrial Revolution, GDP per capita has increased by 20 times, 90% of the global population was lifted out of poverty, even though the population itself increased eightfold.
And this is only possible with a convergence of respect for the fundamental values of life, liberty and property, which makes possible free trade, free speech, religious freedom and other pillars of Western civilization. In addition, we have the Faustian spirit - creativity, exploration, and pioneering, constantly challenging the boundaries of possibility. This pioneering spirit is reflected today in people like my dear friend Elon Musk. However, he has been unjustly vilified by the Woke ideology for an innocent gesture meant only to show his gratitude towards people.
In summary, we invented capitalism on the basis of saving, investment, labor and reinvestment, and hard work. We have successfully broken out of the Malthusian trap by increasing the productivity of each worker by 10, 100, or even 1,000 times. Yet at some point in the 20th century, we lost our way and the liberal principles that had made humans free and prosperous were betrayed.
The Absurdity of Woke
A new political class, driven by collectivist ideologies and taking advantage of times of crisis, waited for the perfect opportunity and finally found a feast of power! All the wealth created by capitalism until then and into the future was redistributed through some scheme of centralized planning - the wheel of history turned, leaving scars that are still bleeding today!
By insidiously promoting a socialist agenda within the liberal paradigm, this new group of pseudo-liberals distorted the values of liberalism. They replaced freedom with liberation, using the coercive power of the state to redistribute the wealth created by capitalism.
What is even more appalling is that they use social justice as a fig leaf, graft the remnants of Marxist theory, and concoct the big lie of "demand liberation theory"! The fatal poison of this new value system is that legal equality is nothing but an illusory bubble, and we must dig deep into the so-called root cause of "structural injustice" - this is precisely the perpetual motion machine of the bureaucratic group and the perfect breeding ground for the ghost of totalitarianism to resurrect!
And this is fundamentally, fundamentally what wokeism is about, the result of the reversal of Western values. Each of our civilization's pillars has been replaced by a distorted version of itself through various mechanisms of cultural subversion.
Negative rights to life, liberty and property were transformed into an artificially and artificial and endless list of positive rights. First it was education, then housing, and from then on, absurdities like access to the internet, televised football, theatre, cosmetic treatments and an endless number of other desires that were turned into fundamental human rights.
Rights that, of course, someone has to pay for, and which can only be guaranteed through the infinite expansion of the abhorrent state. In other words, we moved from the concept of freedom as the fundamental protection of the individual against the intervention of the tyrant to the concept of liberation through state intervention.
On this foundation, wokeism was built – an ideology of monolithic thinking upheld by various institutions whose purpose is to penalize dissent, feminism, diversity, inclusion, equity, immigration, abortion, environmentalism, gender ideology, among others. These are all various heads of the same beast aimed at justifying the state's expansion through the appropriation and distortion of noble causes.
Let us look at some of these. Radical feminism is a distortion of the concept of equality, even in its most benevolent form, it is redundant – as equality before the law already exists in the West. Everything else is a quest for privileges, which is what radical feminism truly seeks, pitting half of the population against the other half, when they should both be on the same side.
We have even got to the point of normalizing the fact that in many supposedly civilized countries, if you kill a woman, it is called femicide. And this carries more serious punishment than if you kill a man simply based on the sex of the victim – legally making a woman's life be worth more than that of a man.
And that they carry the banner of the gender-based wage gap. But when you look at the data, it is clear that there is no inequality for the same work, but rather that most men tend to choose better paying professions than most women.
However, they don't complain about the fact that most prison inmates are men, or that most plumbers are men, or that most victims of robbery or murder are men – let alone the majority of people who have died in wars.
But if you raise these points in the media or even at this forum, you are considered a misogynist simply for defending an elementary principle of modern democracy and the rule of law, which is equality before the law. And of course, defending the data as well.
Wokism also manifests in sinister radical environmentalism and the climate change agenda, preserving our planet for future generations is a matter of common sense. No-one wants to live in a landfill.
But once again, wokeism has managed to pervert this fundamental idea. From preserving the environment for human enjoyment, we have shifted to a fanatical environmentalism, where we humans are seen as a cancer that must be eradicated and economic development is considered little more than a crime against nature.
And yet, when we argue that the Earth has already gone through five abrupt temperature change cycles, and that during four of those men was not even around, we are called ‘Flat Earthers’ in order to discredit our ideas, even though science and the data are on our side.
It is no coincidence that these same groups are the main promoters of the bloody, murderous abortion agenda, an agenda designed on the basis of the Malthusian premise that overpopulation will destroy the Earth, and that we must therefore implement some form of population control.
In fact, this has been carried to such an extreme that today on Earth we start to see a population growth rate starting to look like a problem and talk about a job they've done by promoting abortion.
And these forums promote the LGBT agenda, attempting to impose the idea that women are men and men are women simply based on self-perception. And they say nothing about when a man dresses as a woman and kills his opponent in a boxing ring, or when a male prison inmate claims to be a woman and ends up sexually assaulting women in prison.
In fact, just a few weeks ago, there were headlines around the world regarding the case of two gay Americans who championed the banners of sexual diversity and were sentenced to 100 years in prison for abusing and filming their adopted children for more than two years.
I want to be clear when I say abuse, this is no euphemism because in its most extreme forms, gender ideology is outright child abuse. They are paedophiles. So, I want to know who would support that kind of behavior.
Healthy children are being irreversibly harmed through hormone treatments and mutilation, as if a five-year-old child could possibly consent to such things, and should their family not agree to this, there will always be state agents ready to step in in favour of what they call the best interests of the child.
And believe me, the scandalous experiments in the name of this criminal ideology will be condemned and likened to those committed in the darkest periods in human history. And covering this multitude of abhorrent practices is the eternal victimhood narrative, always ready to hurl accusations of homophobia, transphobia and other fabricated terms, whose sole purpose is to silence those of us who dare to expose the scandal - one of which both national and international authorities are complicit.
Meanwhile, in our businesses, public institutions and educational establishments, merit has been cast aside in favor of the doctrine of diversity, which represents a regression to the aristocratic systems of the past.
Quotas are invented for every minority any politician can come up with, which ends up undermining the excellence of institutions.
Wokeism has also distorted the issue of immigration, the free movement of goods and people is a fundamental pillar of liberalism. We know this well. Argentina, the United States and many other countries became great thanks to immigrants who left their homelands in search of new opportunities. However, we have shifted from attracting foreign talent to foster development to now embracing mass immigration, driven not by national interests but by guilt.
Since the West is supposedly the root cause of all the world's evils in history, it must redeem itself by opening its borders to everyone, which leads to a form of reverse colonization that resembles collective suicide.
So, this is how we now see images of hordes of immigrants who abuse, assault, or even kill European citizens, whose only sin was not adhering to a particular religion. But when someone questions these situations, they are immediately labelled racists, xenophobic or even Nazis.
Wokeism has penetrated our societies so deeply, promoted by institutions like this one, that it has even led to questioning the very concept of biological sex through the disastrous influence of gender ideology, which has resulted in even greater state intervention through absurd legislation - such as the state having to fund expensive hormone treatments and surgeries to fulfil the self-perception of certain individuals.
Only now are we beginning to see the effects of an entire generation that has mutilated their bodies, encouraged by a culture of sexual relativism, and these people will have to spend their entire lives in psychiatric treatment to cope with what they have done to themselves. Yet no one dares to speak about these issues. Not only that, but the vast majority have also been subjected to the misguided self-perceptions of a tiny minority.
And wokeism also seeks to hijack our future by dominating the faculties of the world's most prestigious universities, shaping the elites of our countries to reject and deny the culture, ideas and values that made us great, further damaging our social structure.
What future do we have if we are teaching our young people to feel ashamed of our past? All of this was incubated and increasingly developed over the past decades, after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
No one can pretend to be innocent
Curious enough, free nations began to self-destruct when they had no adversaries to defeat. Peace made us weak. We were defeated by our own complacency. All these and other aberrations which we can't enumerate due to time constraints are the threats that today endanger the West.
And unfortunately, these are the beliefs that institutions like this one have been promoting for 40 years, and no one here can feign innocence. For decades, there has been a worship of a sinister and murderous ideology, as if it were a golden calf, moving heaven and Earth to impose it on humanity.
And this organization, along with the most influential supranational bodies, have been the ideologues of this barbarity. Multilateral lending organizations have been instruments of extortion, while many national governments, and especially the European Union, have acted as their armed wing.
Is it not true that right now, as we speak, in the UK citizens are being imprisoned for exposing horrifying crimes committed by Muslim migrants, crimes that the government seeks to conceal? Or didn't the bureaucrats in Brussels suspend Romania's elections simply because they didn't like the party that had won?
Faced with each of these discussions, wokeism’s first strategy is to discredit those of us who challenge these things first by labelling us and then by silencing us. If you're white, you must be racist. If you're a man, you must be a misogynist or part of the patriarchy. If you're rich, you must be a cruel capitalist. If you're heterosexual, you must be heteronormative, homophobic or transphobic.
For every challenge, they have a label, and then they try to suppress you by force, or through legal means. Because beneath the rhetoric of diversity, democracy and tolerance that they so often preach, what truly lies is their blatant desire to eliminate dissent, criticism and ultimately freedom, so they can continue to uphold a model in which they are the main beneficiaries.
Haven’t we heard in recent days some leading European authorities (who are, to put it mildly, quite left leaning) openly calling for censorship; or that there is no censorship, but that those who do not share “woke” ideas must be silenced.
And what kind of society can wokeism create? A society that replaced the free exchange of goods and services with the arbitrary distribution of wealth at gunpoint. One that replaced free communities with forced collectivization. One that replaced the creative chaos of the market with the sterile and sclerotic order of socialism. A society filled with resentment where there are only two types of people – those who are net taxpayers, on the one hand, and those who are beneficiaries of the state on the other.
And by this, I don't refer to those who receive social assistance because they don't have enough to eat. I'm talking about the privileged corporations, the bankers who were bailed out during the sub-prime crisis, the majority of media outlets, the indoctrination centres disguised as universities, the state bureaucracy, the unions, social organizations and the crony businesses that thrive off the taxes paid by hard-working individuals and taxpayers.
I'm talking about the world described by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged, which unfortunately has become a reality. It is a system where the big winner is the political class, which becomes both a referee and stakeholder in this redistribution game.
I say it again, the political class is a referee and stakeholder, an interested party in this redistribution. Of course, the one who redistributes is the one who keeps the lion's share. And despite the cosmetic differences between various political parties, they share interests, partners, deals and an unshakable commitment to maintaining the status quo.
That is why I call them the “party of the state”, a system that hides behind well-meaning rhetoric claiming that the market fails and that they are the ones responsible for correcting the failures through regulations, force and bureaucracy.
But there is no such thing as market failures. Market failures, I say this again, do not exist. Since the market is a mechanism of social cooperation where property rights are voluntarily exchanged, the very concept of market failures is a contradiction in terms.
The only thing such intervention achieves is the creation of new distortions within the price system, which in turn hinders economic calculation, savings and investment - ultimately leading to even more poverty in its wake or a mesh of abhorrent regulations, such as is the case in Europe, which kills economic growth.
As I often say in my speeches, if you believe there is a market failure, go and check to see if the state is not involved. And if you find that it isn't, check again because you got it wrong.
For this same reason, since wokism is nothing more than a systematic plan by the “party of the state” to justify state intervention and increase public spending, this means that our first and foremost mission - if we truly want to reclaim the West's progress and build a new golden era - has to be the drastic reduction in the size of the government.
Not only in each of our countries, but also the drastic reduction of all supranational organizations, as this is the only way to root out this perverse system, draining its resources to give back to taxpayers what belongs to them, and to put an end to the sale of favors. There is no better method to end state bureaucracy than to have no opportunity for such favors to be sold in the first place.
The functions of the state must once again be limited to defending the right of life, liberty and property. Any other function the state assumes will come at the expense of its fundamental role and will inevitably lead to the ‘omnipresent Leviathan’ that we all suffer under today.
Today we are witnessing the global exhaustion of this system that has dominated us for the past few decades. Just as has happened in Argentina, the rest of the world is seeing the deepening of the only truly relevant conflict of this century, and of all previous ones - the conflict between free citizens and the political caste that clings to the established order, doubling down on its efforts aimed at censorship, persecution and destruction.
Fortunately, throughout the free world, a silent majority is organizing. And in every corner of our hemisphere, the echo of this freedom cry resonates. We are facing a change of era, a Copernican shift, the destruction of one paradigm and the construction of another.
And if globally influential institutions like this one wish to turn over a new page and participate in good faith in this new paradigm, it will have to take responsibility for the role it has played over the past decades, acknowledging to society the Mia culpa that is being demanded of them.
Let the world go back on track
To conclude, I wish to speak directly to the world's leaders, to all those who lead national states, major economic groups and influential international organizations, whether present here today or listening from their homes. The political formulas of the past decades, which I have referred to in this speech, have failed and are now collapsing under their own weight. This means that thinking like everyone else thinks, reading what everyone else reads, and saying what everyone else says, can only lead to failure. Even though many still insist on marching towards the precipice.
The script of nearly four decades has been exhausted, and when a system comes to an end, history will open a new chapter. That is why, to all global leaders, I say it is time to break free from that script. It is time to be bold. It is time to dare to think and to dare to write our own verses.
Because the current thoughts and words are all the same and full of fallacies. The real courage lies in not following the crowd, daring to return to the source, not being confused by the fog of the moment and thus ignoring the universal values. This requires us to rediscover the truths that were obvious to our ancestors, which are the cornerstones of the achievements of Western civilization, but in the past few decades of single-minded thinking, they have been regarded as heresy.
As Churchill once said, the farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see. In other words, we must rediscover the forgotten truths of our past to unravel the knots of the present, as the next step into civilization’s future.
When I look back, what do I see? We should embrace again the theories that have proven to be successful in economics and society. That is, the model of freedom, re-embracing the idea of freedom, returning to liberalism.
That's what we're doing now in Argentina. That is what I trust President Trump will do in the new America. And this is what we invite all the great nations of the free world to do if they wish to halt in time what is clearly a path leading to catastrophe.
So ultimately, what I'm proposing is that we make the West great again today. Today, as it did 215 years ago, Argentina has broken free from its chains and invites - as our National Anthem says - all the peoples of the world to listen to this sacred cry: ‘Freedom, freedom, freedom! May the Power of Heaven be with us.’
Thank you all so much, and long live freedom, damn it!
Source and copyright notice
This article is a translation of a public-domain speech. The translation and abstract have been prepared by Mr. Y.
Original Speech Transcript: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/davos-2025-special-address-javier-milei-president-argentina/
You are welcome to share or republish this translation on the condition that you provide full attribution to the original author and the translator, link back to this article on this website.
Proof of first publication: the SHA-256 hash of this file has been immutably recorded on a public blockchain, serving as verifiable timestamp certification of copyright ownership.
Comments