Milei: The Latest Product of the Factory of Fake Outsiders

Every so often, he appears in the media with disheveled hair, railing against the establishment, talking about children smeared with Vaseline, about donkeys’ sexuality in front of minors at a high school, defending river pollution if it generates capital gains, blaming left-wing women for the low birth rate, and threatening people with a chainsaw like the character from the 1974 film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—literal: “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”. Stunned, the audience believes it is witnessing a spontaneous phenomenon—a new creature sprung from nowhere, like Athena from Zeus’s head—who deserves “a chance.” It is an old illusion.

Quite the opposite. President Javier Milei was born of an old political and economic tradition (if the two were ever distinct) that periodically repeats its failures, like sunspots. To put this into context, we could look back to Martínez de Hoz, but to understand its origins, we must look to the heart of the ideological empire.

In 1981, British businessman Antony Fisher founded the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in the United States. Fisher had made his fortune raising chickens on an industrial scale and had already founded the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, a think tank that paved the way for Margaret Thatcher. What ideas? Well, his discovery was strategic rather than economic: Politicians do not change the world; it is changed by those who alter the narrative ecosystem surrounding politicians. To win elections, one had to construct a common sense, however absurd it might be.

The Mileis are not a new phenomenon, nor were they born of pure individual genius. They were born of a long, extensive, and powerful manipulation engineered in the dark, secret centers of those who do not believe in freedom, but in the power of sects.

By the mid-1980s, the network already had the support of tobacco companies (which, like the National Rifle Association, promoted the “freedom to kill”) and included 15 think tanks in nine countries. By 2020, there were 457 in 96 countries—100 of them in Latin America and 10 in Argentina. Like any successful business model, it has a manual, a logo, training courses, annual awards, and a network of suppliers. Unlike a pen or a new car brand, here the product isn’t sold—it’s installed.

Milei served on the advisory board of a foundation affiliated with Atlas, moved on to others, and in 2018 received the “Atlas Foundation Freedom Award.” The incestuous nature of the system is evident, much like a publishing house awarding one of its own authors in a literary contest. One of the greatest successes of the “Milei” product (like so many others around the world) is having sold it to nearly 15 million Argentines (55.7% of voters) as an outsider.

In 2017, an investigation by The Intercept described the network as an extension of US foreign policy. Several affiliated think tanks received funding from the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an organization created in 1983 to carry out in broad daylight part of what the CIA had previously done in the shadows. Funds from the network also reached the libertarian groups that filled the streets of Brazil to protest against President Dilma Rousseff, who was removed from office on corruption charges by the most corrupt lawmakers in Brazil’s recent history.

Whenever the money comes from Washington, from Virginia-based foundations, and from donors in Texas, it’s called cooperation. Not interference. It’s not propaganda, but education. Indoctrination? Not at all. It is pure and abstract freedom.

The word freedom, like democracy, has been hijacked so many times that it no longer even knows where it was born. In 1954, the United Fruit Company and the CIA overthrew the elected government of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in the name of freedom. In 1973, in the name of freedom, democracy and human rights were suppressed in Chile. With the country under martial law, the Chicago Boys implemented the recipes for economic freedom favored by those at the top—a freedom that required the absence of all other freedoms to function. Friedrich Hayek visited Santiago and explained to the press that he preferred a liberal dictator to a democracy without liberalism. It wasn’t a contradiction. It was a confession.

Of course, tanks aren’t really necessary on the streets anymore when you have influencers. The classic coup d’état was expensive, noisy, and left behind too many images and documents. The culture war was cheaper and more efficient. So battalions of young people were formed, institutes with solemn names were funded, forums were organized in five-star hotels, awards were handed out, and viral videos were disseminated. The savior outsider only appears when the stadium is full and tired of waiting for the new leader. The Germans knew this a century ago, and Edward Bernays knew it: Public opinion is a product, just like the idea that everyone thinks freely. Antony Fisher knew it, too. He raised chickens on a massive scale.

By the time the Savior appeared, millions of Argentines were fed up with inflation (partly due to Covid-19 and the debt invented by Mauricio Macri’s neoliberal government in 2018) and with a complacent, gentrified Peronist leadership. But discontent is like water that takes the shape of whatever container it finds. When the savior appeared, the outrage found a ready channel, a well-oiled vocabulary, and an invented enemy: the state, the ruling class. Social justice became “an aberration,” according to Milei himself—Hayek, Mises, Ayn Rand, et al.

The network that claims to despise the state has been nourished by state funds. The libertarians who preach the end of centralized planning are planning, with Soviet-style discipline, the expansion of their ideas across entire continents. The defenders of individual sovereignty do not concern themselves with the sovereignty of nations. The patriots admire corporations without a homeland. It is the freedom of the slave owner.

Now, where does the proven efficiency of this manipulation of the political market lie? It lies in its invisibility, just like the global dictatorship of financial power itself. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to rebel against an abstract, untouchable, invisible, and powerful entity like God. The effectiveness of this perverse ideology does not lie in its ability to explain and demonstrate a theory.

It suffices to invent axioms that cannot be proven or refuted except through a blind act of faith. Economics and politics are technical matters. Historical phenomena are eternal truths. Etc. When a precarious worker passionately defends the elimination of his own labor rights—and even human rights—in the name of freedom, the ideological indoctrination reproduces itself. For free.

The Mileis are not a new phenomenon, nor were they born of pure individual genius. They were born of a long, extensive, and powerful manipulation engineered in the dark, secret centers of those who do not believe in freedom, but in the power of sects. The long hair, the shouting, the farting, the chainsaw, and the exploitation of a frustration created by the very same social model are only part of a single plan of neocolonization through the voluntary neo-slavery of individuals who, as in the 18th century, believe themselves to be free within an order established by God.