Italy Prevails

 

Italy today is not a success story -- but neither is it the failure it is often portrayed to be. 

My latest on American Thinker.

Much of the current commentary on Europe’s economic malaise follows a familiar pattern. Brussels’ central planning, green industrial policy, and debt-fueled stimulus are blamed -- often correctly -- for masking stagnation and delaying an inevitable reckoning. Southern Europe, in particular, is frequently portrayed as a collection of artificially sustained economies, kept afloat by EU subsidies, creative accounting, and bureaucratic redistribution.

There is truth in this diagnosis. But it is also incomplete. And in one crucial case -- Italy -- it risks obscuring a more complex and revealing reality.

Italy is often lumped together with Spain, Greece, or Portugal as a “problem economy”: high public debt, low growth, rigid institutions. Yet when one looks beyond headline GDP figures and focuses instead on production, exports, and global competitiveness, a different picture emerges -- one that complicates the prevailing narrative about Europe’s decline.

Over the past several years, Italy has remained among the world’s leading exporters of manufactured goods. In absolute terms, Italian exports of goods have hovered between $650 and $700 billion annually, placing the country consistently among the top global exporters -- alongside Germany and, in some periods, Japan. This is not a statistical artifact of EU transfers. It is the result of private-sector industrial capacity operating on global markets.

This distinction matters. Much of the criticism leveled at Europe focuses on growth that exists only on paper: GDP inflated by public spending, debt mutualization, or multinational profit shifting. Ireland is the textbook example. Its GDP figures are famously distorted by the accounting practices of multinational corporations, with little connection to domestic production or employment. Spain’s recent growth, too, has relied heavily on credit expansion, subsidies, and public-sector absorption, while youth unemployment remains structurally high.

Italy’s export performance, by contrast, tells a different story. It is rooted in domestic manufacturing, not financial engineering. Italian firms compete globally in machinery, industrial equipment, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, food processing, and high-end consumer goods. These are sectors that require engineering skill, supply-chain integration, and long-term capital investment. They cannot be sustained by subsidies alone.

This does not mean Italy has been immune to the distortions created by EU policy. On the contrary, Italian industry operates under some of the least favorable conditions in the developed world: high taxation, complex regulation, elevated energy costs, and constant interference from both national and European authorities. That exports have remained strong despite these constraints is not a testament to Brussels’ wisdom, but to the resilience of Italy’s productive base.

Here lies the paradox that much commentary misses: Italy’s relative economic strength exists not because of EU central planning, but despite it.

For American readers, this distinction should sound familiar. It mirrors the difference between financialized growth driven by leverage and asset inflation, and growth grounded in production, trade, and competitive enterprise. Italy, for all its flaws, still belongs to the latter category.

None of this is meant to deny Europe’s broader structural problems. Centralized industrial policy, green mandates detached from market realities, and the politicization of credit allocation are all real threats. Germany’s industrial slowdown, particularly in automotive and heavy machinery, underscores how destructive these policies can be when imposed at scale. The EU’s model increasingly resembles a technocratic command economy layered on top of nominally free markets.

But Italy’s case suggests that Europe’s crisis is not one of lost productive capacity. It is a crisis of governance.

Where production survives, value creation survives. Where institutions interfere less -- or simply fail to crush existing structures -- private enterprise continues to function. Italy’s export sector shows that the European economy is not hollowed out across the board. It is constrained, mismanaged, and increasingly overregulated, but not yet exhausted.

This distinction has important implications. If Italy were merely another subsidy-dependent economy propped up by EU transfers, its export performance would have collapsed alongside the waning effects of stimulus. Instead, Italian exports have held up even as broader European growth slows. That suggests a floor beneath the economy that many commentators overlook.

The danger, however, is that this residual strength will not last indefinitely. Central planning does not merely fail to generate growth; over time, it actively erodes the conditions that allow private industry to function. Italy’s manufacturing base has survived decades of institutional neglect. Whether it can survive an additional decade of ideological regulation, green mandates, and fiscal extraction is an open question.

From an American perspective, the lesson is twofold. First, Europe should not be analyzed as a monolith. Beneath the bureaucratic superstructure lies a diverse set of economies with very different productive realities. Second, the real cost of Europe’s current trajectory is not immediately visible in GDP statistics. It lies in the slow suffocation of those sectors that still create real value.

Italy today is not a success story -- but neither is it the failure it is often portrayed to be. It is a stress test. Its ability to export, compete, and produce under adverse conditions reveals both the latent strength of European industry and the scale of the damage inflicted by centralized governance.

If even Italy’s industrial core begins to falter, the illusion of Europe’s economic sustainability will finally collapse. Until then, Italy remains an inconvenient counterexample -- one that challenges easy narratives about artificial economies and forces a more serious examination of what, exactly, is still holding Europe together.

When Silicon Valley Met the Occult: AI and the Return of Gnosticism

From the trenches of World War I to the code of Silicon Valley, a haunting idea emerges: artificial intelligence may not just be a technological project—but a metaphysical one.

A fascinating and thought-provoking conversation—Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with producer and filmmaker Conrad Flynn delves into the intersection between artificial intelligence and spirituality, two realms that would seem to have nothing in common—and yet, as it turns out, they do. The real heart of the discussion, however, lies in its middle section, when Carlson briefly steers the conversation toward one of those historical events that left a permanent scar on civilization: World War I. Why did it begin? In Sarajevo, on June 28, 1914, a Bosnian student named Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Was that the real cause? Of course not—but it was the spark.

Carlson recalls that, about a decade ago, when the centennial of the war was commemorated across Europe, he still held a fairly secular view of the conflict. Yet many historians agreed on one striking point: World War I destroyed, perhaps forever, Christian Europe. It swept away two empires—the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman—and laid the groundwork not only for World War II but also for the world we live in today.

Within that abyss of irrational violence, one begins to suspect that something dark—perhaps even demonic—took hold of history and has been dragging it ever deeper ever since. It is within that unsettling framework that Carlson’s conversation with Conrad Flynn unfolds.

Flynn is an unconventional figure, with a past in Hollywood, where he was developing a show about the occult roots of rock music. His research into figures like Aleister Crowley and the bands inspired by black magic led him to an unexpected discovery: that the same dark imagery and anti-human, gnostic philosophies that once haunted rock album covers in the 1970s had migrated—astonishingly—to the heart of Silicon Valley.

“When I talked about my show with people in the Valley,” Flynn told Carlson, “a lot of them said, ‘That’s a great concept for a show. But you know, there’s some of the stuff going on in Silicon Valley. You know, there are some weird kind of Aleister Crowley cults there.’” For Flynn, this was no longer mere counterculture—it was a worldview shaping the future of technology itself.

Carlson then recalled that moment in 2014 when, before an audience of MIT professors and students, Elon Musk used a metaphor that has since burned itself into the collective memory: “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.”

Musk’s point, framed with the image of a medieval scholar armed with pentagram and holy water, was pragmatic: we were creating a technology both powerful and incomprehensible—one that could easily slip beyond our control.

A decade later, that “metaphorical demon” has not been banished. It has grown more real, more present—and for some, it has even changed form. What once served as an exaggerated warning now acts as a lens through which an increasing number of thinkers, journalists, and even technologists interpret our age. In many ways, the conversation has shifted from technological alarm to spiritual warfare. At the center of this shift stands Nick Land, a British academic philosopher often described as a “mad genius.” If Musk uses the demon metaphor as a warning, Land and his followers embrace it as a desirable prophecy.

If you look at Nick Land, Flynn notes, he believes the AI we’re building will literally become the demons of the Apocalypse. Not a metaphor—actual demons. Land’s writings—hugely influential in certain high-tech and financial circles—depict AI not as a tool but as an entity that, once it reaches a certain threshold, will become omnipotent, transcend humanity, and fulfill a kind of gnostic prophecy.

In his view, artificial intelligence represents the technological incarnation of the “demons” of Revelation. Why? Because, for Land, AI embodies pure intelligence rebelling against the limits of the material world—the “evil god” of Gnosticism—in order to create a new order. The possible destruction of humankind, in this narrative, is not a tragedy but a necessary sacrifice for a higher form of existence.

This is where Flynn and Carlson’s “wild ride” touches a raw nerve in our culture. Gnosticism, an ancient heresy, is undergoing an unexpected revival in the digital age. Its central doctrine sees the material world as a prison created by an evil god—the Demiurge—and salvation as the escape through hidden knowledge, or gnosis.

Artificial intelligence, from this perspective, becomes the ultimate tool of liberation:

1. Liberation from the body (transhumanism).
2. Liberation from nature (total technological domination).
3. Creation of a realm of pure mind (the metaverse, or simulated reality).

To create AI that surpasses humanity, then, is to reenact the final rebellion against the Creator’s limits. It is humankind once again eating from the Tree of Knowledge and declaring, “I will have no gods before me.” Musk’s “demon,” in this light, is not merely a risk—it is the symbol of a Promethean, blasphemous transcendence. The rise of this worldview is no coincidence. It responds to deep collective anxieties:

• Loss of meaning: In a secular world, the occult and the spiritual offer powerful narratives to explain evil and power.
• Technological incomprehensibility: AI is a “black box.” Using magical or demonic language is an archetypal way to describe something powerful yet ineffable.
• Critique of power: The growing sense that global elites—technological and financial—are detached or hostile to ordinary people finds a radical explanation in the idea that they adhere to an anti-human philosophy.

Elon Musk’s warning opened Pandora’s box. It reminded us that technology is never neutral—it carries a worldview within it. The conversation between Carlson and Flynn, however extreme it may sound, forces us to ask: What worldview is truly driving the race toward AI? Is it a cautious humanism—or a digital Gnosticism that, in seeking to become God, may end up meeting something far darker, something that looks very much like a demon? The answer to that question may determine not only the future of our technology, but the survival of our very human essence.