Argentine President Javier Milei gave a second idiosyncratic address in as many years at the 2025 World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos, claiming that “wokism” is a “mental virus” and a “cancer that must be removed.” 

In a speech that listed far-right talking points, Milei restated his attacks on feminism, immigration, and the fight against climate change, calling them causes only intended to justify the advance of the state. He also said that “winds of change” are blowing in the West and expressed hope over the formation of an “international alliance” of countries that “believe in the idea of freedom.” 

Milei listed a number of leaders he saw as “partners” in his crusade. Among them were Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu, and U.S. President Donald Trump. 

He also included the “marvelous” Space X and Tesla founder Elon Musk and once again defended him from accusations of Nazism, saying he had been “unjustly vilified” for “an innocent gesture” intended to express his “gratitude for the people.” 

Like his 2024 presentation at Davos, when he lauded unbridled capitalism and warned of the dangers of “socialism,” the libertarian economist once again decried the “profoundly mistaken ideas” institutionals like the WEF has been promoting. 

Milei painted a vision in which human society progressed through the industrial revolution and the ideas of liberty and private property, before being hijacked by a new political class based on “collectivist principles” that took advantage of a moment of crisis to accumulate power.

Femicide and the gender pay gap

“Their justification was the sinister, unjust, and abhorrent idea of social justice,” the Argentine president claimed. Later, he claimed that there was no such thing as a market failure.

He accused “radical feminism” of a “distortion” of the concept of equality. “Equality before the law already exists in the West. Everything else is just seeking privileges,” he said. He criticized femicide — the murder of a woman or girl because of her gender — as valuing women’s lives more.

“We’ve reached the point that in many supposedly civilized countries, if a woman is killed, it’s called femicide, and the punishment is harsher than if you kill a man, just because of the sex of the victim, legalizing that a woman’s life is worth more than a man’s,” he said.

The legal concept of femicide applies only in cases where the woman or girl’s gender was a factor in her murder, and does not assign a greater intrinsic value to women’s or girls’ lives.

Milei also claimed that the gender pay gap does not exist, that there is no such thing as unequal pay for the same task, and that data shows men are drawn to higher-paying professions than women. 

‘Gender ideology’

He also lashed out against the “LGBT agenda,” accusing activists of trying to impose their ideas. “In its most extreme version, gender ideology simply and plainly constitutes child abuse. They’re pedophiles,” he said.

In some cases, he made false claims to back up his arguments: for instance, by implying that children as young as five were being “mutilated” and given hormone treatments because their family believes they are transgender. Many common treatments for young trans people in Argentina cannot be given to anyone under the age of 16.

“Nobody says anything when a man dresses up as a woman and kills their opponent in a boxing ring,” he said, referencing the case of female Algerian boxer Imane Khelif without naming her. 

Khelif made headlines in the 2024 Paris Olympics when she was the subject of online hate amid accusations that she was transgender and should not have been allowed to compete. Khelif is a cis woman who reportedly has differences of sexual development, known as DSDs, which does not mean she has male hormones. 

Climate change

The economist also took issue with “radical sinister environmentalism and the banner of climate change.” He accused its activists of treating human population as a “cancer” and economic development almost as a “crime against nature.”

Immigration was also a target of his tirade. While he acknowledged that countries like Argentina and the U.S. benefitted from mass population movements, he claimed that immigration is now motivated by “guilt and not national interest.” 

“Because the West is the alleged perpetrator of all the evils in History, it must now redeem itself by opening its borders to everyone”, he railed, adding that this would end in “inverse colonization, something akin to mass suicide.”  

He concluded by calling on world leaders to “abandon the script of the last 40 years” and “embrace the model of liberty again.” 

“Let’s make the West great again,” he concluded.