Giorgia Meloni named ‘Man of the Year’ by right-wing Italian newspaper
Feminists say they want women to be able to do anything a man could do but conservative women such as Margaret Thatcher and Georgia Meloni don't count, apparently, showing that destructive policies are the sole aim of Leftist campaigns
An Italian right-wing daily newspaper provoked an outcry on Friday after naming the country’s first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, its “Man of the Year”.
Libero ran a lengthy tribute on its front page and featured a large portrait of Meloni wearing a double-breasted white blazer and a look of determination.
Under the headline “Man of the Year”, the article said Meloni had won “the war of the sexes” in Italy and had “not only broken the glass ceiling, she dissolved it”.
The article was quickly received as a snub by political opponents and women’s rights activists who have accused Meloni of not doing enough to protect women from violence and promulgating regressive views around their role in society.
On Thursday, a senator in her party said that a young woman’s “first aspiration” should be to have a child.
The article was written by Mario Sechi, the paper’s Rome bureau chief, who led the prime minister’s public relations team between March and September of 2023 before taking his position at the daily.
“In our society of weak thinking, we have recognised strong ideas,” Sechi wrote.
“In excessive diversity, we have reversed gender. In times of war, we have chosen someone who has shown she knows how to fight.”
Sechi said the prime minister had confronted two wars, multiple geopolitical shocks, a changing Europe and a world order that was now being reinvented.
She was elected as Italy’s first female prime minister in October 2022.
“Giorgia Meloni for Libero is ‘Man of the Year’ because above everything she has cancelled the war of the sexes by winning it, by thinking differently, being divergent, overcoming the arrogance of men and the defeatism of women. She has not only broken the glass ceiling, she has dissolved it.”
“This is a surrender”
Elly Schlein, secretary of the centre-left Democratic Party, criticised the newspaper’s editorial decision, saying the prime minister had abandoned Italian women.
Italian food historian cooks up carbonara controversy
“Today a right-wing newspaper is explaining to us that politics and power are for men,” Schlein said. “I don’t think my aspiration as a politician is to become ‘Man of the Year’. On the contrary, I think this is a surrender”.
Elisabetta Piccolotti, an MP from the Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra (Greens and Left Alliance), described the cover as “an affirmation of male superiority” and called on the prime minister to reject it.
“At this point, prime minister, please clarify: are you a woman, are you a man or are you non-binary?” Piccolotti wrote on Facebook.
However, the culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, a former deputy director of Libero, told journalists in Naples that the title ‘Man of the Year’ was well-deserved as he also took a swipe at the “barbarism” of “cancel culture”.
Since it was elected in 2022, the Meloni government has sought to defend the traditional family and national identity, protect cultural heritage and restrict migrant arrivals.
Meloni, a single mother who recently separated from her partner, TV presenter Andrea Giambruno, has been known for her strong stance on the concept of the traditional family.
She has so far made no comment on the Libero article.
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Georgia Police Officer Resigns After Being Put on Leave for Facebook Post on Traditional Marriage
A Georgia police officer has resigned after he was told by superiors that he could not share his personal religious views on social media.
“If someone somewhere considers an opinion I have—that isn’t a direct quotation from Scripture—to be offensive, then that would be a fireable offense,” Jacob Kersey, the former officer, told The Daily Signal.
Kersey, 19, who began working last May at the Port Wentworth Police Department in a jurisdiction just outside Savannah, says “everything was going well” until the start of the new year.
On Jan. 2, Kersey posted a 20-word message about his view of marriage on Facebook.
“God designed marriage. Marriage refers to Christ and the church,” he wrote, paraphrasing the Apostle Paul’s teaching in the Book of Ephesians. “That’s why there is no such thing as homosexual marriage.”
The next day, Kersey said he received a phone call from his supervisor, who told him that someone had complained about the post and to take it down.
When Kersey refused, the supervisor warned him that failure to delete the Facebook post on marriage could result in his termination.
Kersey said he then was contacted by Lt. Justin Hardy, who told him that the Port Wentworth Police Department didn’t want to be held liable in a “use of force” situation involving someone in the LGBTQ community. Kersey still refused to delete the post.
The police officer received a phone call later that day from the police department’s Maj. Lee Sherrod, ordering him to come to the office the following morning, Jan. 4, and turn in everything he had that belonged to the city.
Kersey told The Daily Signal that he believed he was going to be terminated.
When he arrived at the police station, the young officer met with Sherrod, Hardy, Capt. Nathan Jentzen, and Police Chief Matt Libby.
He was told that he was “being placed on administrative leave while the city investigated to see if I could keep my job,” Kersey said. “I was told that I was wise beyond my years, an old soul, and that they brag on me all the time, but that I couldn’t post things like that.”
Kersey said Libby told him that his Facebook post on marriage was the “same thing as saying the N-word and ‘F— all those homosexuals.’” Kersey said his captain told him that his free speech “was limited due to my position as … a police officer.”
The Port Wentworth Police Department, which serves a city with a population of just under 11,000 in 2020, did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
After a week of paid administrative leave, Kersey met again with the leadership of the police department. He says he was informed that he no longer was on administrative leave and would not be fired, but that he could not share opinions on social media that could be considered offensive.
Kersey says he was told he could post Scripture verses, but could not work as one of the department’s officers if he continued to share his “interpretation or opinion on Scripture if it was deemed offensive.”
“Separation of church and state” was the reason given for why he could not post such views, Kersey said.
Kersey said police officials told him that they were developing a new policy to guide officers on what they were and were not allowed to post on social media.
Next, Kersey received a “letter of notification” from Sherrod dated Jan. 13. The letter explained that although Kersey is entitled to his own personal beliefs, he should be “reminded that if any post on any of your social media platforms, or any other statement or action, renders you unable to perform, and to be seen as [unable] to perform, your job in a fair and equitable manner, you could be terminated.”
Four days after the date on the letter, on Jan. 17, Kersey formally resigned from the Port Wentworth Police Department.
“I decided to resign … because I just didn’t think it wise to go back and play their game,” Kersey told The Daily Signal, adding that “the way things went down, I didn’t feel as if my command really had my back.”
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Mazi Melesa Pilip: A Fantastic Republican to Replace George Santos
A special election will be held in New York’s 3rd Congressional District on Feb. 13 to replace George Santos, world-class conman, who Republicans recently expelled on ethics charges.
Republicans have picked a uniquely exciting candidate to run for this now open seat in Mazi Melesa Pilip.
Pilip is a Black Orthodox Jew and a mother of seven children who arrived to Israel at age 12 from Ethiopia, grew up there, served as a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces and continued on to earn a degree in occupational therapy at Haifa University, where she met her husband, and then earned a master’s in diplomacy and security at Tel Aviv University.
Her husband immigrated to Israel from Ukraine, and subsequently they moved to the U.S. where he continued his medical studies and now works as a cardiologist. With five children and pregnant with twins, she ran two years ago for a seat in the Nassau County Legislature, won the seat — defeating a Democrat incumbent — and then was reelected, winning 60% of the vote.
Pilip effervesces her belief in the “American dream” and the importance to keep government limited, keep taxes low and fight crime. As an immigrant, she is particularly passionate about this issue and the importance to control our border.
She will run against Democrat Tom Suozzi, who held the seat for three terms before leaving in 2022 to enter the race for New York governor.
In an interview with Israeli newspaper Israel Today, Pilip explained that she became motivated to enter American politics when flare-ups with Hamas produced antisemitism endangering her children to walk freely and openly as Jews in their neighborhood in New York.
“My story is the story of America and Israel together. Israel is a diverse state, there is not just one color, and in the U.S., any dream can become reality. … This is my second immigration. I had to learn culture and a new language twice. It wasn’t easy for me.”
Pilip is a poster child who speaks forcefully, disabusing distortions and ignorance about Israel being spread, particularly on university campuses.
Recently, for instance, a program was held at UCLA labeled as an “Emergency Teach-In on the Crisis in Palestine.” One of the UCLA professors depicted Israel as a “colonial power driven by an exclusionary racial ideology.”
Just looking at this impressive Black Ethiopian Jewish woman, who grew up in Israel, who speaks warmly about her love for and the beauty of the country where she grew up, says everything about the absurdity of such outrageous allegations.
I recall on my own first trip to Israel noting the full spectrum of color in the population — white, brown, black.
Israel literally was founded as an ingathering of Jews dispersed in the four corners of the globe.
The parents and grandparents of today’s Israelis came from Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, North America, Latin America, North Africa and Asia. Pilip arrived to Israel as part of Operation Solomon in 1991 in which, over the course of 36 hours, Israel airlifted over 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel out of concern for their safety as result of political instability in Ethiopia.
There is now an estimated more than 160,000 Ethiopian Jews in Israel.
Around the same time, 1990-91, after considerable pressure, the Soviet Union released over 300,000 Jews to leave for Israel.
How Jews who returned to their historic homeland from all over the globe, after so many years of oppression, persecution and murder, could be accused of either racism or colonialism should give everyone great pause regarding what is happening on our college campuses.
Meanwhile, Mazi Melesa Pilip is a presence Republicans and all Americans need in the U.S. Congress.
Let’s hope and pray that in February she will be adding her important voice to those on Capitol Hill.
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Left/Right policy switches
TIMOTHY LYNCH notes below that what were once conservative policies have become Leftist and vice versa. So is there any condistency in ideologies? There is but it is not at the policy level. The lasting Left/Right identities are at the psychological level. The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger. Applying those attitudes to differing life circumstances will produce different policy preferences
The first woman I ever loved was an eco-feminist. She was radicalised by the 1984 British miners’ strike, listened to Billy Bragg on a C90 cassette tape, marched for women’s rights, admired communist East Germany and refused on principle to visit the US. In the 33 years since she dumped me, I don’t think she ever has.
In those decades, the left of which she was a proud and, I thought, typical member has been transformed.
Barbara (name changed) would now march not to keep coalmines open but to close them. Bragg would be too old/white male/working class (and thus need decolonising). The women’s rights marches Barbara joined in the 1980s she would now condemn as anti-trans. Only her anti-Americanism – the second most durable hatred on the left, after anti-Semitism – would endure.
The right has switched, too. Not as completely as the left but in important ways we often elide. This transposition of left and right conditions much of our contemporary politics but goes mostly unremarked.
In the ’80s, the Conservatives effectively closed the British coal industry. Barbara sent the picketing men blankets and goodwill. Today, “beautiful, clean coal” (Donald Trump’s phrase) is deified by those on the right. It speaks to man’s independence from the forces of cold nature. Scott Morrison held aloft a lump in parliament.
In the 2020s, it is the left that has assumed the four-decade-old Conservative position.
In Australia, Anthony Albanese and Energy Minister Chris Bowen vilify coal. Like Margaret Thatcher and Ian MacGregor, Thatcher’s head of the National Coal Board, Labor is plotting to throw every miner out of work.
Then, the right stood for middle-class values: marriage, family, low taxation, strong defences. Now, Australian Liberals trade on their working-class bona fides. In the US, Republicans tell defenestrated coalminers that they will be their voice. Democrats blame them for climate change. Barbara wept with the injustice of Thatcher’s assault on mining communities. Hillary Clinton now derides them as deplorables.
The right stood against the sexual revolution, free love and the consequences of the pill. Now it is the left that polices sex. Brittany Higgins, a young conservative woman (at least until Network Ten got to her), has become a poster child of the left’s obsession with sexual misconduct. The sex re-education programs on every university campus, warning of the perils of physical intimacy, are mandated by progressives, not by conservatives.
It used to be the religious right that told us to avoid sex. Now it is the cultural left. It was conservatives who criticised feminism. Now it is trans activists on the left. Indeed, it is Liberal women (such as Moira Deeming) who have paid the highest price for upholding a traditional conception of women’s rights. Many left-wing feminists have gone missing in action.
The left-right transposition is especially evident when it comes to race. It was small-C conservatives (often southern Democrats) in the US who wanted to maintain racial distinctions. Now it is the left that upholds race as the basic determinant of societal relations.
Conservative segregationists scoffed at Martin Luther King’s vision of a colourblind constitution. Now it is the left that condemns the reverend for his colour-blindness. We should hire, fire, promote and condemn based on race. MLK, left-wing anti-racists now tell us, was guilty of “content of character racism”.
Yes campaigners for the Indigenous voice wanted race written permanently into the Australian Constitution. No campaigners, representing most conservative voters, wanted it written out. When I was growing up near Leicester, then and still one of the most ethnically diverse cities in Britain, the far right demanded rights for indigenous Brits. In modern-day Australia, it is the left that makes the equivalent claim for First Nations people.
In Britain, asserting “indigenous rights” is racist. Here it is anti-racist. I have never been able to hear an acknowledgment of country here without thinking how bizarre it would sound in the English Midlands. “Sovereignty was never ceded!” sounds like an anti-EU Brexit slogan.
Why this ideological transposition? Losing wars changes the loser. And the left lost the biggest in its history in 1989.
My year with Barbara began the night the Berlin Wall fell (the other 9/11: November 9). We drank Blue Smirnoff, she in bemused sorrow, me in joyous irony; vodka was one of the few things the Soviet Union did well.
That night, the left lost the key economic argument of the 20th century: command economies don’t work, free-market ones do. People crave the opportunities of the latter. They will flee the former when given the chance.
My bearded university lecturers spent the ensuing years in a state of deep agitation. For many, the fall of communism coincided with their own midlife crises. It was wonderful. Today, zealously held but weak arguments are protected by speech codes and de-platforming. Then, men and women who had backed the Soviet project were subject to debate. Many did not like it.
The game plan thereafter was to establish a leftist catechism, grounded in a cultural revolution, the challenging of which would be heresy.
This “long march through the institutions”, as Rudi Dutschke, the young disciple of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, described it, is reaching some sort of destination now. And what a scene of tedium and enervation it is.
Instead of debating big questions, we fly rainbow flags. Safe spaces have taken precedence over dangerous ideas.
When class war didn’t work, new kinds of oppression, to paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones, were found.
Climate, race and gender have replaced class as the source of left-wing fervour. These wars have been waged much more effectively. Their dialecticism – you are with us or against us, anti-racist or racist, pro-trans or transphobic – has enabled their colonisation of social media.
Marx claimed class war was inevitable. It proved not so. But culture war may well be. The US has been in a protracted one since Roe v Wade in 1973. Australia is flirting with its own version because of the voice debacle.
Climate denialism, structural racism, rape culture and transphobia. Collectively, these progressive priorities now have the quality of crisis. They are spectres haunting the West, to again adapt Marx’s rhetoric. Their negation now mobilises whole campuses and workplaces. Denying their salience, let alone standing against them, is hard to impossible.
In the US, if you want a university job, you will likely have to affirm, in writing and at interview, your contribution to their fighting. Australia is not quite there but we are inching closer. It is one of the forms of American cultural imperialism to which we are most susceptible.
I don’t know what Barbara would make of this transformation of the left. Sadly, dear reader, finding out would be a research project too far for me. I suspect she would be in sympathy with some of it. But much of it she would not recognise as the natural evolution from her 1989 platform.
She did teach me something vital, a lesson too few on the right imbibe. Those on the left are not bad people. They are not evil. But they are naive. They insist on realities that are fantasies. They seek final solutions to problems insoluble. They imagine better worlds while creating worse ones.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See