With the election of Giorgia Meloni as Italy’s prime minister on Sunday, interest in the charismatic and conservative political leader has surged.
Posts of her stirring, ‘electrifying,’ speech given at the World Congress of Families in Italy in 2019 have gone up on conservative websites across the internet via the popular video platform YouTube. Now, many of the posts show up as dead links, killed for “violating YouTube’s Terms of Service.”
The resurgence of her speech did not go unnoticed.
“Conservatives swoon over resurfaced speech from Italy’s new nationalist prime minister,” reads a headline on the DailyDot.
The article mocks Meloni supporters and considers her political party neo-facist. Though it does not call for the removal of the video, apparently someone, somewhere, notified YouTube, and got at least some of the links taken down.
For now, you can see the speech here:
Meloni’s rousing speech, transcribed here, minced no words, not only in defence of the natural family, motherhood, childbearing, and Christian identity but also in renunciation of the political, social, and economic order that has become the opposition:
Everything that defines us is now an enemy, so they attack national identity, they attack religious identity, they attack gender identity, they attack family identity. I can’t define myself as Italian, Christian, woman, mother, no. I must be citizen x, gender x, parent 1, parent 2. I must be a number, because when I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity or roots, then I will be the perfect slave at the mercy of financial speculators, perfect consumer.
She also directly addressed a number of topics from surrogacy to abortion and gender ideology, not hesitating to indict her political-social opposition for its attacks on conservatives.
“Above all, I say that ‘unpresentable’ are those who advocate practices such as the uterus-for-rent, abortion in the ninth month, and the attempt to block the development of boys with drugs at [age] 11 for their characterization of those defending the natural family,” she said.
Now it’s a game of cat and mouse for Meloni’s speech to stay live, but what YouTube can’t change is her election as prime minister.
