Fratelli d’italia

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

How much hope did Trump offer Meloni?

In early March Donald Trump said Elon Musk was doing “an amazing job.” Last week he said Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan was doing an “excellent job.” On Thursday it was the turn of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni during her meeting at the White House. Trump declared that she was “doing a fantastic job.”  What Trump found so fantastic was never specified, but he tossed a variety of bouquets in Meloni’s direction. Not least was his vow that “there will be a trade deal, 100 percent” with the European Union. It was qualified, however, by Trump’s claim that he’s in no rush to strike a deal with Ursula “the West no longer exists as we knew it no longer exists” von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission.

meloni

Thursday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The era of ideological, overreaching and omnipresent government

It was a law of classical political philosophy that democratic polities devolve inevitably into tyrannical ones. This law is being validated in the twenty-first century, as liberal democracy creates societies antithetical to both liberalism and democracy by shaping citizens of a character for which neither was designed nor developed. In a parallel development over the past decade or so in Europe and the United States, liberals and democrats view their response to the problem as “reaction,” pure and simple, against the sort of thing they have been fighting since 1789. Only it is not reaction; it is apparently something new in history.

government

Friday

Paul Wood

‘We must defend our territory’: on the frontline of Europe’s migrant woes

Lampedusa, Italy The motorcade carrying Italy’s prime minister is being held up by a wild-eyed pirate. With a bushy black beard, sun-blasted face, tattooed forearms and a single earring, he stands in front of the convoy of a dozen police cars, extending a flattened palm. Blue lights flash, engines idle and somewhere behind blacked-out windows sit Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, and her important guest, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. The pirate is Giacomo Sferlazzo, leader of the protests that began on the island of Lampedusa after around 100 small boats carrying migrants arrived there on a single day in September. Really he’s a local musician, professional puppeteer and, as he describes himself, a Marxist-Leninist follower of Antonio Gramsci.

lampedusa