Bonfires in the name of liberty

Javier Milei on Friday inaugurated a new phase of his crusade for freedom. If the chainsaw was the symbolic instrument for taking on the shrinking of the State, he now proposes the pyre as the fate of journalists who make him uncomfortable, businessmen, and political opponents whom he accuses of coup-plotters. The fury of the inquisitor took hold of him after federal judge Marcelo Martínez de Giorgi dismissed him from the $LIBRA case. Shouting before a packed audience, he intoned a hymn of intolerance that surpasses the routine of his verbal excesses, often trivialized as the folklore of an extravagant leader. How many times has a president elected by popular vote gone so far as to invoke, even figuratively, the violent death of citizens with whom he disagrees? He chose a vengeful tone over the composure of someone who knows he has been exonerated by the law. He read from a self-victimizing script, in which he demanded compensation for "one year, 8 months and 9 days of slander and insults." He described an "attempted coup by institutional means," without pausing to explain such an oxymoron, accused LA NACION without evidence, and named five journalists who followed the $LIBRA case: Hugo Alconada Mon, Carlos Pagni, Paulino Rodrigues, Natalia Volosin and Luis Novaresio. He called them "corrupt" and "bought off." He prepared the climax to deliver, from the height of his power as head of state, the final verdict of his argument at the Fundación Faro event: "We are going to pull Argentina out of this hole, and that means going against the entire status quo, and I will do it! But they should know very well that the sons of bitches in Argentina will get no mercy. Because, as Adam Smith said, showing mercy to sons of bitches is being unjust to the good ones; and here the good ones must do well; it's the sons of bitches who must burn on the pyre." Milei's reaction after the ruling that exonerated him in the $LIBRA case He paraphrased Smith ("mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent," the original said), but inverted its spirit. Classical liberalism and the Enlightenment sought to replace private vengeance and absolute power with the law, fair trial, and control of state power. Freedom has always been the antithesis of a pyre. Liberal thought was born precisely to extinguish the medieval stakes and protect the individual from the caprice of absolute power. Resorting to the symbol par excellence of obscurantism may be an attempt to intimidate without accepting the full weight of his words: exaggeration works for Milei as an alibi to downplay his words. "You know how Javier is," officials and friends of the President often say off microphone to excuse conduct that makes them uncomfortable in certain social settings. The more indulgent now ask that the "pyre" be understood as a metaphor. Logical. That said, this comes from the same President who waged a war over literalness when he rebutted those who say people cannot make ends meet. "If 20 truly run out of money, how do they live 10 days without eating or drinking?" he repeated over and over this week. Unanswered questions Relieved by the ruling, Milei laid out a redemptive counterattack. "The courts put things back in their place, and the tremendous political and media operation was exposed, whose sole objective was to damage the presidential office with coup-mongering aims," he said. His demand expresses a confusion of roles. Journalism does not judge or declare guilt or innocence. A central axis of its mission in a democratic society is to monitor power, seek information relevant to citizens, verify it, and publish it with the proper context. Its purpose is not to uncover crimes, a task that belongs to judges and prosecutors. There are behaviors of those who govern — such as lying, negligence in their duties, or lack of ethics — that may not be punishable and yet are nevertheless a matter of interest for media coverage. "Who is going to answer for the garbage they spread?" Milei clamored before his militants and financiers in a hall of the Yacht Club. He presented Martínez de Giorgi's ruling as a refutation of everything published by the media since he invited people, with a tweet from his official account, to invest in a cryptocurrency that collapsed within hours. The judge's decision does not refute any of the main revelations of the journalistic investigation. It does not explain, for example, why Milei published the 44-character contract that anyone who wanted to invest in $LIBRA needed before that data was available anywhere else on the internet. Who passed it to him? Milei's tweet with Hayden Davis on January 30, 15 days before the launch of $LIBRA It does not deny that the President and Mauricio Novelli, one of the creators of the token, spoke seven times in the minutes just before and just after the launch of the venture on February 14. It simply dismisses as evidence the information extracted from Novelli's cell phone, arguing that the chain of custody was not respected, after a preliminary report of its contents was leaked to the press. The judge declined to investigate the contracts found on Novelli's phone, which the crypto businessman Hayden Davis also referred to regarding an alleged payment of 5 million dollars for the boost Milei would give $LIBRA. He held that "the reports sent by the Presidency do not reveal the existence of administrative acts related to the initiative." In other words, he asks the investigated parties whether they have any evidence incriminating them. He also accepted as valid the opinion of the Anti-Corruption Office, which answers to the Ministry of Justice, classifying as private the official account from which Milei called for investment in the failed crypto. Milei in 2021, during a visit to Novelli's institute The journalistic investigation described Milei's relationship with Novelli, an adventurer who created an investors' academy and dreamed of million-dollar deals when the libertarian leader came to power. The history of that relationship is highly descriptive of the personality and behavior of the current President. Therein lies the public interest in telling it, even if no crime derives from it. The money trail The judge and prosecutor Eduardo Taiano agreed to dismiss all the investigated parties without even summoning any of them to testify. They accepted as valid the evidence requested from the Government and declined to investigate the trail of cryptocurrencies that Davis moved after securing a meeting with Milei at the Casa Rosada. Much less did they attempt to determine what happened to, and who holds, the more than 100 million dollars captured by the winners of the $LIBRA operation — at the expense of many losers, who were denied the right to join as complainants. Naturally, the ruling does not address — nor should it — Milei's reaction and that of his government when the collapse of $LIBRA became evident. "I was not familiar with the details of the project," said the President on that torrid Valentine's night. Days later he insisted that he shared it as he does with "hundreds of things," even though there was no precedent to support it. Did it not make journalistic sense to cover the explanations of a head of state and corroborate the plausibility of his account? Francisco De Narváez arriving at the Fundación Faro fundraising dinner, where Milei attacked journalists Nicolás Suárez Under the narrative scheme Milei laid out on Friday, any investigation, any uncomfortable question, any opinion discordant with his ideas automatically becomes an attempt at destabilization. If criticism is coup-mongering and journalism is corruption, the only tolerable conduct is submission or blind applause. Cristian Ritondo at the Fundación Faro event Nicolás Suárez On Friday, Milei's warnings were heard by businessmen such as José Luis Manzano, Claudio Belocopitt, Marcelo Mindlin, Eduardo Eurnekian and Francisco De Narváez. Among them mingled politicians who built careers as standard-bearers of republican values, dialogue, and freedom of expression. Macristas, radicals, liberals of various stripes. Even Patricia Bullrich, campaigning to cultivate a profile of her own in libertarian circles, tacitly endorsed Milei's attacks. That same Saturday she published a photo of herself embracing him below the stage: "A night of ideas and freedom at Fundación Faro with the President." There was no shortage of applause and smiles, and not a single voice committed the heresy of nuance. All well committed to the fight against "the caste" and the "status quo" that Milei announced. Who will light the first pyre? By Martín Rodríguez Yebra