Giorgia Meloni has become a star in Italy and beyond for her staunch defense of family values, national pride, and opposition to woke culture.

Meloni just won a surprise victory in the Italian elections and is expected to become the next Prime Minister.  The Left has gone absolutely nuts. She is accused of being a budding fascist in the mold of Mussolini, and just about every scare word the Left can use is being hurled at her. All because she supports values that, until the day before yesterday, were commonly held by almost every sane person.

The New York Times has a story about how European leaders are quaking in their boots because they will have to deal with Meloni with much more respect than they do with Poland and Hungary. Italy is, if not a Great Power, a very significant one. It has the 8th largest economy in the world, so it is difficult to ignore.

The victory in Italian elections of the far-right and Euroskeptic leader Giorgia Meloni, who once wanted to ditch the euro currency, sent a tremor on Monday through a European establishment worried about a new right-wing shift in Europe.

European Union leaders are now watching her coalition’s comfortable victory in Italy, one of its founding members, with caution and some trepidation, despite reassurances from Ms. Meloni, who would be the first far-right nationalist to govern Italy since Mussolini, that she has moderated her views.

But it is hard for them to escape a degree of dread. Even given the bloc’s successes in recent years to agree on a groundbreaking pandemic recovery fund and to confront Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, the appeal of nationalists and populists remains strong — and is spreading, a potential threat to European ideals and cohesion.

To give you an idea of how dangerous she is to the Left-wing authoritarians, E.U. President Ursula von der Leyen answered a question about Meloni’s likely victory in the elections by warning that the EU has certain ‘tools’ that it can use against Italy if it chooses to go ‘in a difficult direction’. Von der Leyen has apparently warned Poland and Hungary about their more conservative policies as well, implying that she has punished them for being insufficiently woke. “If things go in a difficult direction, I’ve spoken about Hungary and Poland, we have tools,” she said.

YouTube got in on the Meloni bashing by taking down a video of a speech given in 2019 laying out her vision. The speech had gone viral because it was a succinct and persuasive outlining of a conservative vision–a vision that pulled no punches. What did she say that was so dangerous?

“They said it’s scandalous for people to defend the natural family founded on marriage, to want to increase the birth rate, to want to place the correct value on human life, to support freedom in education, and to say no to gender ideology” she declared. She repudiated the accusations that the World Congress of Families represents a step backward for Italy, saying leftists, who she said protested and tried to censor the event, are the regressive ones.

Meloni slammed surrogacy, which she called “degrading and abusive of women,” late-term abortion, and child gender transition hormone therapy. She called the low birth rate one of the “biggest problems facing Europe.”

“The embarrassing ones are those who support practices like “womb for rent,” abortion at nine months, and blocking the development of children with drugs at eleven years of age,” she said.

She rejected the claims that her party is anti-woman, pointing to the fact that she ran for mayor of Rome while pregnant, for which she was intensely criticized. Instead, she said her party is offering a compassionate, pro-human platform that contends that modernity has left women struggling and dissatisfied.

They are fighting for the “right of a woman to be a mother and not have to give up working as a result,” she said. “The right to be a mother, choose not to work, and not starve to death as a result. The right of a woman forced to have an abortion because she has no alternatives.”

Reason magazine contacted YouTube and asked why the platform had purged the speech from its servers.

After Reason asked YouTube to explain why it took down the video, the social media site reversed course and restored it.

“Upon careful review, we determined this video is not violative of our Community Guidelines and have reinstated it,” says Ivy Choi, a spokesperson for YouTube. “We enforce our policies regardless of the speaker’s political views and when it’s brought to our attention that a video has been mistakenly removed, we review the content and take appropriate action, including restoring the relevant videos or channels—as we have done with this video.”

Nice to see that YouTube backed down …when called out. But there are thousands of cases where YouTube bans speech that offends its woke values, and most of the victims of censorship can’t expect that a national magazine will call out the platform for its selective punishment of conservative speech. The result is a chilling of speech. One of my favorite YouTubers invented new words to skirt YouTube censors, calling children “pudding people” and pedophiles “fans of the playground.”

You can watch the video of the speech and decide for yourself how “hateful” it is.