I write to you from snowcapped Switzerland. Every January, I make the trek for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) high in the Alps at Davos, where pretentious billionaires, the politicians they own, and WEF groupies gather to celebrate themselves in what I imagine the Oscars might have been like if the Nazis had hosted them at the Eagle’s Nest in Berchtesgaden:
“And zee vinner for zee most forced vaxi-nashuns goes to…”
[sound of envelope tearing]
…Justin Trudeau!”
[rapturous applause]
“In zee category of zee best costume, zee vinner is Rachel ‘Dick’ Levine…”
[more applause]
Until last year, German engineer Klaus Martin Schwab presided over this coven of globalists as the WEF’s (Pro tip: insiders say “wefff”) founder, sole chairman, and master of ceremonies. This was his annual moment to shine, and shine his bald head did, reflecting the smug self-satisfaction of Ernst Stavro Blofeld. But it seems even Bond villains are answerable to somebody, and Schwab’s bosses increasingly saw the octogenarian’s schtick as a bit of an embarrassment. So, a few “hostile workplace environment” and “improper use of an ATM” accusations later, and Schwab’s 55-year reign was kaput. This coup d’état was as efficient as Trump’s midnight invasion of Venezuela to topple a lesser dictator.
Who replaced him?
As if playing to the WEF stereotype, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, manager of some $14 trillion in assets, and André Hoffman, vice-chairman of Roche Holding AG, the largest family-owned pharmaceutical company in the world, emerged as WEF co-chairmen in the aftermath of Schwab’s demise.
But for all the pretensions of this snowy United Nations knock-off — dozens of heads of state, scores of billionaires, hundreds of CEOs of major corporations, and thousands of others — Schwab and his successors have all the charm of an HOA. Albeit an HOA that, instead of issuing edicts about recycling and how it’s your turn to bring pigs-in-a-blanket to the quarterly meeting, lectures you about your carbon footprint and why it’s necessary for you to eat bugs. That’s fitting because the World Economic Forum is something like a global HOA from hell. WEFers have planetary-sized ambitions and egos to match, and not being content with annoying people individually, they maintain this exclusive club of like-minded maniacs to annoy whole populations.
These are people intoxicated with what philosopher Karl Popper — who, in one of history’s great ironies, taught WEF Agenda Contributor George Soros at the London School of Economics — called “the spell of Plato.” You see, in every intellectual’s literary paradise, from Plato’s Republic to Thomas More’s Utopia, the masses are ruled by a dictatorship of self-appointed “enlightened” elites. True to Plato’s vision, “WEFers,” according to WEF nomenclature, think they have, to quote Biden climate czar John Kerry, an “extraterrestrial” mission “to save the planet.”
The words matter here. Take, for example, the lofty vision of freedom found in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The shared ethos underlying the WEF finds fundamental disagreement with this one sentence at four key points:
First, No truths are self-evident beyond those of WEF making (e.g., a looming climate apocalypse, overpopulation, and the need for one world government).
Second, there is no Creator. Note that Kerry says “extraterrestrial” instead of God. The WEF is nothing if not utterly godless. Tyranny naturally follows.
Third, since men are not created in the image of a loving God, it naturally follows that they are not equal. In the same speech, Kerry refers to WEFers as “a select group of human beings.” They believe they are, by virtue of their virtue, entitled to decide the minutest details of your life.
Fourth, as for the plebian masses, well, they have no rights beyond those their WEF overlords should grant them. And since they are not anchored in eternity, any so-called rights are subject to change according to WEF whims.
Do you begin to see the problem with this unelected SPECTRE-like organization?
All of this is exacerbated by the fact that they are very much typical leftists. Where the average person wakes up in the morning, gets a cup of coffee, and begins to think about his day, the leftist wakes up in the morning, gets a cup of coffee, and begins to think about your day, too.
But if one is to understand the WEF, one must first understand Schwab. Out he may be — no doubt his name will be whispered in hotel lobbies and over dinner tables all week — but his vision for this dubious organization lives on until further notice.
To some extent, we are all products of our time, and Schwab was born in Nazi Germany in 1938, a period where not only was the world on the verge of a war, but the West had been possessed by the idea of perpetual progress since the first rumblings of the Industrial Revolution were heard in 1740s Britain. This notion influenced everything from Darwin’s The Origin of Species to Marx’s theory of history.
This gave rise to the colossal state projects of the early 20th century. The Hoover Dam, the Kuybyshev Hydroelectric Station, the Autobahn, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, Nowa Huta, and many other similar projects were all undertaken during this era. This was understood to be progress, and the inevitability of that progress inspired philosophers and governments alike to think in terms of the collective and “changing the world.” This has always been a hallmark of utopian, that is, leftist, thinking. Where Christianity speaks of “thy neighbor” or of the one lost sheep, utopians are mesmerized by the faceless masses. Dostoevsky mocked ideologies of this type when he characterized them as loving man in the abstract but not in the specific.
Schwab, influenced by the ideologies of fascism and communism of his youth, adopted their ethos insofar as both saw the individual as unimportant and the state as the primary agent of change. His now infamous and somewhat ridiculous statement at the May 2022 opening ceremony of the annual WEF gathering — “Zee futcha is built by us!” — is shot-through with this thinking. And while Schwab is no longer the man in charge, one senses his removal was more about window dressing than a departure from the vision that animated the WEF during the five decades of his tenure.
Thus, every year since 1971, globalists make their annual pilgrimage to Davos to pat each other on the back and lay out their plans for “improving the state of the world.” That has chiefly led them to focus on global population and governance.
Yes, if Schwab is a product of his time, and he is, so is the World Economic Forum. Founded amid the overpopulation hysteria that began with the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling secular prophecy The Population Bomb in 1968, families began severely limiting size while governments became obsessed with population reduction. The apocalypse literature and initiatives where overpopulation was the primary concern punctuate the period: The Population Bomb in 1968, the Club of Rome’s white paper The Predicament of Mankind in 1971, the founding of the World Economic Forum in 1972, The Limits to Growth in 1972, Roe v. Wade in 1973, and NSSM 200, Henry Kissinger’s now declassified National Security Study Memo to President Nixon calling for a global program for population reduction in 1974. (USAID would play a key role here, especially in India and South America, where many were forcibly sterilized.)
Apart from Ehrlich’s screed, perhaps the most influential of these, and least read, is The Predicament of Mankind. Written for and circulated among Club of Rome members, this 30-page missive called for the establishment of a committee of experts — lefties love experts as a means of subverting the will of the people — to address global issues, as prime ministers and presidents came and went with the whims of their electorates.
The WEF was created as a response to this manufactured crisis, and while none of Ehrlich’s dire predictions came true, the WEF has carried on with the same sense of urgency that characterizes Ehrlich and the Club of Rome’s doomsday scenarios. A half-century later, the WEF has added many other issues to the docket, but overpopulation and global governance remain at the center. Moreover, as an unelected body, it has gradually become a kind of globalist deep state with tentacles reaching the highest levels of government throughout the Western world.
All these papers, books, and rulings, however, foster a simmering contempt for democratic self-government. It’s no surprise that on this week’s agenda is a panel discussion titled: “Is Democracy in Crisis?” I can tell you now what their conclusion will be: Yes, it is. WEFers see democracy as a barrier to achieving their goals, namely, the erosion of borders, the annihilation of national sovereignty, and the creation of global governance. But they want you to know that it’s for your own good.
“Of all tyrannies,” wrote C.S. Lewis, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
Two words are used in WEF presentations with frequency that is surely greater than any others: “sustainability” — agricultural sustainability, economic sustainability, population sustainability, etc. — which is freighted with, and hides, an anti-human agenda; and “populism,” which is used with a sneer to indicate the hairy, unwashed masses of humanity who oppose all that Davos represents.
This week, that populism is embodied by one man: Donald J. Trump, who is, much to the dismay of WEF elitists, once again president of the United States. On Tuesday afternoon, he will address this arrogant assembly and, I suspect, read them the riot act much as he did last year by video call. Polite protocol demands they honor him, but make no mistake about it, WEFers like him no more than the Nobel Prize committee. These two sides represent a struggle for the future of the West.
