Why I voted for Giorgia Meloni

Rocco Loiacono

As an Italian citizen resident abroad, I have the right to vote in Italian elections and referenda. While in past elections the options available may not have filled me with great enthusiasm, this time I was eager to put my cross over the centre-right coalition headed by Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) and its leader, Giorgia Meloni.

Over the last thirty years, Italy has been in decline. In 1992 and 1993, the tangentopoli (bribe city) scandal rocked Italy’s political system to the core. It all started when a Socialist Party (PSI) member of the Italian Parliament, Mario Chiesa, was arrested after taking a bribe from a cleaning service company. At the time, the Socialist Party was the second largest party in Italy’s governing coalition, after the Christian Democrats.

Within a couple of months, the Milan branch of the party was under investigation (which was called mani pulite – clean hands) and the net was closing in on its leader, Bettino Craxi, himself a former Prime Minister.

The scandal then proceeded to engulf the Christian Democrats, in particular leading figures such as Giulio Andreotti and Arnaldo Forlani, themselves having held the office of Prime Minister several times.

The political class of the time, which had governed Italy since 1948, was decimated.

Unfortunately, the tangentopoli scandal, while sweeping way the old political class, didn’t lead to any real improvement in Italy’s governance. The country has essentially been stagnant ever since, and the politicians that took over, as it were, have proven themselves (with a couple of notable exceptions) to be completely inept and probably more corrupt. In Italian we call them iene (hyenas) and sciacalli (jackals). Many of them are former members of the old Italian Communist Party (PCI), which for years had a stench of illegal funding from the Soviet Union surrounding it. But of course, none of that was investigated as part of tangentopoli and mani pulite, but that is another story!

These iene were able to expertly adopt, as I have alluded to before in these pages, the mentality of the Gattopardo (the Leopard), that is to ensure that any change is paradoxically implemented so as to preserve their power and privilege. Despite the obvious need for serious economic and structural reforms, the country is prevented from enacting them, principally as a result of this mentality.

One of these leopards is outgoing Prime Minister Mario Draghi. He was appointed prime minister by President Sergio Mattarella in February 2021 to head an ‘emergency government of national unity’ after Parliament had failed, as often happens, to find a prime minister from among its ranks. Draghi is a former President of the European Central Bank, ex-managing director of Goldman Sachs, and chief inventor of ‘quantitative easing’ or Magic Money Theory. He is, therefore, the ultimate ‘Leopard’, which explains why his government imposed the most brutal vaccine passport regimes in the world.

Draghi, in fact, was President of the ECB in 2011 when a sovereign debt crisis was engineered to justify removing the last democratically elected prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and install a bunch of euro-friendly technocrats to ‘save the single currency’.

Draghi was feted as ‘Super Mario’, the ‘great reformer’ who would relaunch Italy’s stagnant economy. However, his legacy is that he increased national debt by €30 billion and Italy will experience the slowest economic growth in the EU bloc next year, at just 0.9 per cent, owing to a decline in consumer spending due to rising prices and lower business investment – a result of rising borrowing and energy costs, as well as disruptions in the supply of Russian gas.

Italy’s anaemic economy has led to, among other things, a generation of brain drain – a new wave of young, mainly professional, Italians leaving the country, looking for a better future elsewhere. Governments to address this have encouraged immigration, but Italy is on the front line of a wave of illegal migration that started in 2015 and never fully stopped. Of course, the EU has not lifted a finger to help, and neither have its member states. I have cousins that live in the town of Ventimiglia, near the French border on the Riviera. They tell me that any illegal migrants that manage to cross the border simply get taken back to Ventimiglia by the French police, leaving Italy to deal with them.

Fratelli d’Italia was the only major party that refused to join the Draghi government on the not unreasonable grounds that it is illegitimate given his unelected status.

What is more, Fratelli d’Italia was the only party that opposed not only Draghi’s brutal vaccine passport regime, but the draconian lockdowns as well.

Yes, the political elites, the iene, and sciacalli, are the ones who fear Meloni the most, and they will do whatever they can to bring her down. EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said, as Italians went to the polls, that Brussels would ‘punish an Italian government that violates the EU’s social policy consensus’. There is an Italian expletive which readily comes to mind in response to such insolent arrogance.

Day after day Meloni has been called a fascista, and the legacy media is writing the most disgraceful garbage, accusing her, believe it or not, of engaging in identity politics! Probably because in a famous 2019 speech, she declared:

‘Please answer me these questions … why is the family an enemy? Why is the family so frightening?

‘Everything that defines us is now an enemy for those who would like us to no longer have an identity and to simply be perfect consumer slaves.

‘And so they attack national identity, they attack religious identity, they attack gender identity, they attack family identity.

‘I must be citizen x, gender x, parent one, parent two … I must be a number.

‘We do not want to be numbers … we will defend the value of the human being.

‘I’m Giorgia, I’m a woman, I’m Christian, I’m a mother, I’m Italian, they won’t take that away from me.’

As Greg Sheridan wrote in The Australian, if we’re going to be forced to endure identity politics then there is nothing wrong with Meloni declaring proudly that she is a woman, a mother, a Christian, and an Italian. As she declared: Difenderemo Dio, patria e la famiglia che fanno tanto schifo a qualcuno! (We will defend God, country, and family. These things that disgust people so much!).

Moreover, as Sheridan, among others, also notes, Meloni’s program is a perfectly legitimate centre-right amalgam. She wants more police, less crime, cost-of-living relief, control over illegal immigration, lower taxes, reassertion of traditional Italian identity, support for moderate conservative social values and more independence from the dictates of the EU. She wants to address the energy crisis in part by increasing the supply of fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

That is why I voted for Giorgia Meloni. Viva l’Italia!

https://spectator.com.au/2022/09/why-i-voted-for-giorgia-meloni/

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Biology will defeat feminism

Unhappy, screechy, metal-laden, neon-coloured, masculine, overweight women are leading the ‘feminist’ charge.

At least, they think they are.

But is their brand of ‘empowerment’ actually feminism, or are they eroding the unique power that women wield in the world by prioritising victimhood as a virtue and vulgarity as desirable?

The answer may lie in the success of their adversaries who are young, attractive, conservative, well-spoken, good-mannered, accomplished, highly-educated, working women who manage to assume positions of power while keeping their high heels and short skirts. American politics, in particular, has seen many examples grace our screens.

They are a generation of women who don’t fear walking past a magnet and might even give a cheeky wink and flick of the hair if a tradie manages a wolf-whistle from their ute at 6am. (Tell me again when verbal affirmation of attractiveness became offensive?)

These women know that embracing femininity does not mean abandoning power.

This is disastrous news to those women who were fooled by social media and university ‘action’ groups into ruining their looks as a means of rebellion against the patriarchy.

What started as a few boxy-shouldered suits in the 90s became a trend where women donned masculine attire in an attempt to mimic men. Boyish haircuts, deliberately ugly makeup, and androgynous fashion were all symptoms of a gender finding its feet in a land of corporate equality. Most women settled back into the new world without the safety blanket of faux masculinity, but the weaker fringes latched onto their ‘identity’ as a substitute for merit.

It’s sad, really, to watch a generation of thirty-something activists age poorly. What looked ‘edgy’ when they were teenagers is terribly cringe in 2022. Their youthful anger is stretching thin in an unflattering way – like a tattoo slowly deforming as the wearer lets themselves go – leading to bizarre social media rants.

Although it must be pointed out that at least the physical damage these women have done to themselves can be reversed with a few weekend spa retreats (mostly). The same cannot be said of those who subscribed to the surgical fad of they/them. There will be no going back for the youngest converts of Woke.

Biology has a funny way of correcting social politics. To that end, what we are seeing emerge, slowly but inevitably in the West, is a resurgence of conservative values.

No matter how much propaganda is put out there, men are more likely to be swayed into marriage by a traditionally beautiful, competent, and mentally stable woman. As Richard Dawkins likes to say, our genes are selfish. Men’s genes are telling them that well-presented women are a better option for raising children than someone who doesn’t know who they are and spends the weekends shouting about a non-existent apocalypse.

Deep down, the Woke know that desirable women have been a constant throughout history – a tried, tested, and successful template for a flourishing civilisation. Beauty and danger are two prizes that nature routinely rewards. The problem is, competing takes self-control. Instead of expending the effort, some women have fashioned a lazy rebellion against attractiveness. These revolutionary sisters look a bit like the back streets during the fall of Rome as they partake in an ideological arms race to see if there is a limit to human depravity.

Five minutes on a social media platform such as TikTok will disabuse you of the notion that this type of progressive ‘feminism’ offers any benefit to humanity. It is little more than a narcissistic binge that serves no one except perhaps the psychiatry industry who must be rubbing their hands together at the growing pool of lifetime clients. This is not a comment intended to be cruel, but a genuine observation that extreme activist ideologies appear to be manufacturing a mental health crisis – and they’re busy dragging children into it.

True equality (and true feminism) will be measured by what the next generation of women create. Are they destined to add value to the fields of science, literature, art, politics, mathematics, and music? Do they have the same ruthlessness as their male counterparts? Absolutely… But it is unlikely any of these fields will be enriched by the activist class.

Watching the swift decay of society, even if only through the female lens, is fascinating.

However depraved, lost, and woeful the narrative of ‘feminism’ becomes, we must always remember that ‘life finds a way’. Women are among the most competitive creatures on Earth and some have seen a niche – a crack, shall we say – in the chaos of Woke.

Now it’s up to men to decide which side of this feminist war they want to see win.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/09/biology-will-decide-this/ ?

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The fake food craze

A sign of the times emerged from a most unexpected place recently – my local butcher. The oxtail I was after had disappeared, replaced by a new range of ‘Paleo’ sausages. A staffer helped me find the oxtail and explained that the new kinds of sausages contained liver, heart and other offal; they were provided for the mainly female vegetarians and vegans who had been diagnosed with nutritional deficiencies, but who found dealing with the actual organs just too yucky. So much for the so-called ‘healthy’ alternative of plant-based diets.

Liver is the ne plus ultra of superfoods, much richer in nutrients such as vitamins A, all B vitamins and iron than steak; lions usually ignore the muscle meat of their prey and go straight to the chest, to feast on the heart, liver, kidneys and other offal. Flesh meats simply don’t contain the range of vitamins, minerals and micronutrients found in organs, traditionally offered in Anglo cultures as crumbed brains, lamb’s fry, steak and kidney pie, tripe and others.

But organ meats have fallen off our menus of late, and most under-50s regard the idea with revulsion. Vegetarianism has won the trend wars, with red meats painted as cancer-inducing, eggs and other animal fats blamed for heart ailments, and plant-heavy diets framed as more sustainable for the planet and kinder to our animals.

But what passes for science in one era can be debunked in the next. An old friend who has been vegan for decades looks like a wraith; he survives on regular vitamin B12 injections. I have just watched my one-year-old granddaughter gobble down raw oysters and prawns. A relative and occasional vegetarian shared an oxtail dinner at my place recently, to surprising effect. After chewing on the collagen and fat-rich meat and gristle, she got a strange gleam in her eye and fell upon the pot with an almost clumsy haste, gobbling down her fill. That was a food deficiency visibly being met. I cannot claim any special cleverness here, but as a one-time vegan who developed a vitamin B12 deficiency I know something of which I speak. Any diet that fails to provide all of our required nutrients is defective.

Try telling that, however, to the growing numbers of Aussies who are abandoning meat altogether, never mind offal. Around 10 per cent of Australians are estimated to be vegetarians, and around half a million vegan, but both categories are rising, as the expanding tiers of plant-based foods in your supermarkets will tell you.

Political crusaders are entering the arena too. A German animal rights group has urged a sex ban on meat-eating men, as well as a 41 per cent meat tax, while UK anti-dairy activists recently blocked access to supermarket milk racks, and drilled truck tyres to disable milk deliveries (#plant-based future). The green controllers are forcing their emissions-curbing preferences on all of us, even as they sneak away for their Paleo sausages and B12 jabs.

The irony, of course, is that large-scale monocropping of grains and vegetables is notoriously toxic to natural ecosystems, dousing fields with chemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides, compacting soils with heavy machinery and leaving a lifeless wasteland behind. Grazing animals on pasture is positively Elysian by contrast.

And then there’s ‘ze bugs’. The 2013 post-apocalypse movie Snowpiercer had a horror reveal in which proles’ food was exposed as jellied black cockroaches, while the elites dined on luxury meats and greens. What was then a shock scene is now real life, with Silicon Valley ‘philanthropists’ shovelling money into the ‘cultivated meat’ industry and other lab-created and insect-derived foods, including, yes, a variety of cockroaches.

Cricket flour is becoming big as an additive, already being fed to Australian schoolchildren as chips. In July the World Economic Forum promoted ‘10 eco-friendly foods’, including Air Meat made from microbes, a fake avocado made from broad beans and oil, solein, a ‘protein-rich food made from electricity, air and water laced with bacteria’, fake eggs made from ‘pea protein, salt and algae-derived acids’, and lab-grown meats. A 3D-printed steak, looking like the real thing, recently trended on Twitter. Bloomberg predicted last year that the plant-based proteins market could hit $162 billion by 2030, up from $29 billion in 2020.The Washington-based global ‘alternative protein advocate’ the Good Food Institute reported rapid acceleration in 2021, with 107 new start-ups and an unprecedented jump in monies raised. The Aspire group says it’s building the world’s biggest cricket farm in Ontario, to produce 13 million kilograms of crickets annually for human and pet consumption.

Meanwhile existing food supplies are in jeopardy. We’ve seen the Dutch farm protests at savage, government-ordered livestock cuts, and the riot- and starvation-inducing Sri Lanka organic food mandates. Supply chain issues are looming. Some would add the string of mysterious fires destroying dozens of food plants across the US.

Should a food crisis manifest, globalists will use it to turbocharge their new era of Frankenstein foods. Cheap! Tasty (given the right chemicals)! Available! And above all, green, requiring less water, land and other inputs, and generating fewer emissions. These foods might look like steaks, wheat flour, eggs and avocados but what they will be made of and whether they will be good for you is anybody’s guess. Your health is not the priority here.

As the old saw goes, you are what you eat. Slapping ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ labels on industrial sludge won’t make it any healthier. The US pioneered denatured, factory foods, created for industry’s ease rather than consumer health. Alas, the US is now also a global leader in ill-health. The CDC says 6 out of 10 adults have a chronic disease, and 4 of 10 have multiple chronic diseases – the highest rates in the world, despite having the highest healthcare spend per capita. Their obesity is legendary. US life expectancy is now falling after peaking in 2015 and many nations now surpass it, including China. Correlation not causation, you say? Maybe. Whatever the US is doing, it ain’t working.

I’ll trust farmers and gardeners and unprocessed traditional foods over lab-coated technicians, zealous greenies, fake foods and industrialists every time.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/meat-versus-greens/

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Misleading uses of the word "democratic"

When it comes to political analysis, Shakespeare may not get the credit he deserves.

One of his most memorable lines was delivered by Queen Gertrude in Hamlet when, in response to the overacting of an actor in a play created by Hamlet, the Queen says, ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’

When it comes to protesting too much, the left wing of politics are the standard bearers and do it better than anyone.

There are far too many individual examples to consider in a short essay like this, yet one stark instance is in the use of language which implies that representative principles are employed by leftist totalitarian regimes.

Countries that use the words ‘democratic’, ‘peoples’, or ‘republic’ are generally the least likely to be genuinely democratic, for the people, or actual republics.

Arguably the most famous example of such a generous use of these terms is East Germany, which existed from 1949-90 and was officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

The GDR was formed after the second world war by the Soviet Union, when communist leaders were installed to govern half of the German nation using a planned economy controlled by a totalitarian regime.

The Potsdam Agreement committed the Soviets to supporting democracy, however the Soviets’ understanding of democracy was limited to naming rights only as outside the use of the words ‘democratic’ and ‘republic’, the GDR showed few signs of any such traits.

Today we have the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, better known as North Korea, which ranks 167th of a possible 167 countries assessed by the Economist in its 2021 Democracy Index.

The DPRK is another totalitarian regime in which people are repressed in every aspect of their lives, including voting rights, freedom of speech, travel, employment, and religion. The Kim dynasty has ruled North Korea for three generations. There is nothing ‘democratic’ about the DPRK.

At rank 166 there is the Democratic Republic of Congo, followed by another ‘democratic heavyweight’ in the Central African Republic which comes in at number 165. Also, let’s not forget the People’s Republic of China qualifying at number 151.

It is as sad as it is ironic that ‘Democratic Republics’ have turned out to be among the most authoritarian and the least democratic of all countries.

The leaders of these ‘Democratic Republics’ certainly doth protest too much. The President of China Xi Jinping once said, ‘We must uphold the principle that all power of the country belongs to the people.’

This slippery use of language also extends to left-leaning political parties in the West such as the Democratic Party in the United States. Founded in 1848, the Democratic Party’s website states that, ‘As Democrats, we believe that every person in this nation should be treated with dignity and respect.’ Yet the Obama Administration reportedly planted spies inside the Trump campaign to drum up false accusations of President Trump illegally interfering with the 2016 election. Doesn’t sound very ‘democratic’ to me.

From the Russian collusion hoax and the impeachment scam to blocking and frustrating the Trump Administration in critical announcements and culminating with the Democrats’ appalling silence regarding the Antifa/BLM riots across the country, it’s hard to see how they treated the United States, or the office of the President, with anything vaguely resembling dignity or respect from 2016-20.

In addition, the Democrats have the gall to call for unity following Joe Biden taking the whip hand in the Presidential race. We all know that by unity they simply mean compliance with their agenda.

The so-called party of democracy has seen fit to be at the centre of most of the unedifying conduct during the previous Presidential term culminating in some very undemocratic conduct during the 2020 election.

The Democrats have mastered the art of accusing ‘…the other side of that which you are guilty’. In essence, a form of political gaslighting on a grand scale. This quote is attributed to Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, and sometimes even modern leftist icon Saul Alinsky and succinctly sums up how the Left operate.

They love to call Republicans racist for banning Critical Race Theory, yet prior to the 2020 election, Joe Biden said, ‘If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.’ Furthermore, Democrats incessantly claimed Russian interference in the 2016 election, but upon Biden’s victory in 2020 they suddenly insisted that elections were foolproof.

In Australia, we see the same trend emerging from the Left on a routine basis.

Left-wing media outlets are fond of describing themselves as ‘independent’, despite being deeply ideologically motivated by collectivist attitudes. Leftist publications often seem to view themselves as being the ‘alternative’ or the ‘resistance’ despite often toeing the same lines as massive woke corporations and Hollywood.

In relation to energy policy, we see Labor and the Australian Greens vigorously protesting for the need for carbon neutrality, yet when offered virtually emission free energy in the form of nuclear power, they throw up their arms. A clear example of how ‘progressive’ policies prove to be regressive.

For all the Left’s protests about emissions, their energy policies have nothing to do with emissions reduction and everything to do with ideological zealotry regarding renewables dependent on government subsidies.

Accusing the other side of that which they are guilty of and then protesting too much – hypocrisy and political gaslighting, it’s in the Left’s DNA.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/09/political-gaslighting/

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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)

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