A Victory for Liberty

Peace, Love and Anarchy prevail on the Pampas...

“Today we have passed the turning point. Today begins the construction of a great Argentina.”

~ Javier Milei after yesterday’s midterm election victory

Joel Bowmanwith today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...

Inquiring minds want to know: How’s the “Greatest Political Experiment of Our Age” going? Herewith, an update.

Historic... Momentous... Crushing...

These are just some of the words missing from the mainstream media’s “reporting” of Argentina’s midterm election yesterday.

Defining... Landslide... and Humiliating were also conspicuously absent from the shame-free establishment bullhorns.

And yet...

Not since the country was returned to democracy, back in 1983, have the long-suffering Argentine people delivered such a resounding defeat to their undead Peronist overlords. Indeed, an historic victory for the Libertarians hardly begins to cover it.

First, the raw numbers...

Purple Tide Rising

Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza (LLA) won 41% of the vote... trouncing the Peronist’s 31.6%. They also added 64 “deputies” (seats in the nation’s lower house of congress, bringing their total to 95) and 13 senators (going from 7 to 20).

Not only was the voter spread the single largest drubbing for the well-deserving Peronists in the country’s modern democratic era, with their additional seats in congress, Milei’s LLA party also sailed past the key one-third threshold, which means they now have the power to block and veto bills.

And unlike his presidential election back in 2023, when the country was experiencing fuel shortages and looking down the barrel of crippling hyperinflation and, thus, was willing to roll the dice on an “anyone else” candidate, yesterday’s voters have had almost two years to witness Milei’s performance in action and to better judge for themselves. Which they did.

Across the country, the call to “paint it purple” (LLA’s color) was heard. And boy did the voters send the Peronist establishment a clear signal. The following graphic, from local newswire Infobae, shows the rising purple tide, from zero in 2021… to it’s (so-far) high water mark today…

Peronist Purge

Perhaps more impressive still, and something even the most diehard libertarian had not dreamed possible, was LLA’s victory here, in the province of Buenos Aires.

Following last month’s local elections, where a strong showing by the Peronists spooked markets and sparked a brief run on the peso, most pollsters had the “kuka” collectivists favored to hold the province again. Imagine their surprise, then, when the “loco” libertarians nudged them out in their own traditional stronghold, 41.5% against 40.8%.

The results were even more decisive here in the capital city itself. From the Buenos Aires Herald:

In Buenos Aires City, LLA comfortably reached first place with 47% for the deputies election, followed by Fuerza Patria with 27%, a staggering 20-point difference. The senate race in the Argentine capital also saw LLA get a thundering victory, with Security Minister Patricia Bullrich leading the ticket to get 50% of the votes, followed by Fuerza Patria with 30%.

The significance of this is difficult to overstate. Until 2021, the Peronists had held a complete and uninterrupted majority in the senate... for 36 years. After the weekend’s trouncing, in which they lost 6 more senate seats, they have dropped below the “magic 30” level, which many considered an immovable, key baseline of support for the party.

Overall, the election result also marked the first time a ruling party has won a midterm election in almost a decade.

And yet, it wasn’t all libertarian rainbows and anarchist unicorns for everyone. Let us spare a thought for the so-called “journalists” in the mainstream media who, along with the ousted socialists, syndicalists, communists, collectivists and the rest of their rotten ilk, also suffered a day of mourning.

Lamestream Media

Here’s how The New York Times framed the results this morning, choking back the tears...

Argentina’s Voters Hand Javier Milei a Crucial Victory in Midterm Election

The result, which gives Mr. Milei enough legislative support to keep his vetoes from being overturned, showed that many voters still back the president’s libertarian experiment.

As one friend, a long time Argentine resident, remarked: “Makes it sound like a few people in the neighborhood still back him... as opposed to a crushing win that defied expectations.”

The Buenos Aires Times was equally tepid...

Argentine Election Results: President Javier Milei emerges strengthened from midterms

And here’s the ordinarily hyperventilating CNN, struggling to stay awake (though conscious enough to drag POTUS’s name into the headline)...

Victory for Milei’s party in Argentina midterms seen as test for his austerity cuts and Trump support

And yet, none of the popular presses, exhibiting all the excitement of a windsock on a breathless night, could quite match The Guardian for sheer delusion and wishful thinking. Here’s a screenshot of “The Grauniad’s” stories going back to the recent, provincial election last month. It’s what the kids call going “Full Retard”...

Tabloid Bingo

Let’s see... “Populist?” Check! “Far-right?” Check! Trump Delusion Syndrome (TDS)? Check! Outright lies, baseless claims and verifiable propaganda? Check, check aaand check!

Of course, it’s just another round of “Guardian bingo” for the clowns over at the UK’s notoriously reality adjacent rag. And what’s this “news” of Argentina’s “economy crashing”? We must have missed that one... unless, of course, by “crashing” the selfie-struck interns manning the editorial desk at the tabloid really meant “strongest economic growth of any country in the entire hemisphere.”

Yep. That’s probably what they meant to say. Riiight.

Of course, what could we expect from an outlet that, in the month leading up to Javier Milei’s landslide election back in 2023, when he became the nation’s first ever libertarian president, ran an article titled:

Economists warn electing far-right Milei would spell ‘devastation’ for Argentina

The open letter, penned by “influential economists,” a who’s-who of pontificating blowhards led by none other than Thomas Piketty, author of the most pretend-to-have-read economics book of the 21st century, was crammed full of exactly the kind of brainless drivel you would expect from a slack-jawed hodgepodge of career academics.

“Javier Milei’s dollarization and fiscal austerity proposals overlook the complexities of modern economies, ignore lessons from historical crises, and open the door for accentuating already severe inequalities,” they wrote, predicting that Milei’s policies “would be deeply damaging for Argentina and very unfortunate for the entire continent.”

Milei’s proposals, they continued unironically, were “rooted in laissez-faire economics” (gasp!) and “fraught with risks that make them potentially very harmful for the Argentine economy and the Argentine people.”

Again, if by “harmful” and “damaging” they really meant “invigorating” or “rejuvenating” or simply “liberating,” then... yes, they were spot on! But these men are academics, dear reader, surely too clever to misunderstand basic concepts like “words have meaning.”

Continued their whiney op-ed:

“This is not just the social chaos that could be generated by extreme right positions but also the economic chaos that would ensue from a decline in both public revenues and public spending...

“Argentinians are going to vote in an election where there are these very tough choices. But a libertarian solution that vilifies the public sector will only add to the suffering.”

Except, the economy is not “suffering.” It is flourishing. Stripped of the burden of public disservice, the forces of free market capitalism are doing what they do best... adding real world value to people’s lives and proving useful idiots and “influential economists” dead wrong along the way.

The only “social chaos” we saw in the past month came on the back of the Peronist’s win in a piddling local election here, when people feared a return of that savage blight and rushed to sell their pesos before the print-and-spend brigade was given another chance to torch their savings.

Following yesterday’s victory, Argentina’s markets were poised to post their single best day in history today... with national bank and energy stocks up 20...30... 40% and more at time of writting. The peso, surviving the near fatal miss of another Peronist victory, rallied like a cryptocurrency, moonshotting more than 10%.

Moreover, country risk premium declined precipitously today, falling almost 40% in a single session. (A lower reading means less implied risk for foreign investors looking to deploy capital here.)

It had spiked over 1,400 following the local elections last month (in which the Peronists rose like zombies from their graves). Today, it plummeted into the 600s, continuing a trend of lower risk that has characterized Milei’s free market-friendly presidency and proving once again that, when it comes to investors putting their moolah where their mouths are, “country risk” is really just “socialist risk.” From Infobae and JP Morgan:

Walking back from a day in the park yesterday, we saw people cheering in cafes, honking their horns up and down the street and waving from balconies, like they’d won the world cup all over again.

But then, what would the people living here know about their own conditions, especially when their day-to-day experience dares to contradict the mainstream media and tools of the machine, like Piketty & Co.?

Fear not, dear reader. The Greatest Political Experiment of Our Age continues apace. And given the weekend’s results, we’ve a feeling we’re only just getting started...

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And stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

P.S. With their nonsense “reporting” and shameless allegiance to The Establishment, is it any wonder mainstream media’s readership is falling off a cliff? Here’s a graphic we ran across recently, showing the shrinking reach of once-relevant outlets…

As the graphic details, 46 of the top 50 news sites are seeing lower traffic year on year… some by a lot.

From the aforementioned New York Times (-7%) to the BBC and MSN (down 13% and 17% respectively) to the catastrophe that is CNN… down a whopping 34%… the lapdogs in legacy media have done everything in their fast diminishing power to ensure their place at the bottom of the tarpit.

But…

There is one outlier… so far removed from the rest of the fetid swamp that you might have missed it. Up there, on the upper left hand side of the graph, showing an impressive yearly growth of 47%, is none other than Substack.

As legacy media continues to run cover for the management class… to promote fear and division among honest citizens… and propagate outright propaganda… they are driving critical thinkers and independent minds toward alternative outlets, like Substack and these here humble Notes.

We may be small, but we are many… and we are serving a market of people genuinely interested in the truth. So if you value the work we do, please consider supporting us by becoming a Notes member, today. At less than 20 cents a day, we do our best to make it worth your every penny. Cheers!