On the 9th of June 2020, Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Klaus Schwab woke up as he usually did with wires attached to his head, hands and genitals. He changed into a new set of lingerie and exhaled deeply: somewhere a line had been crossed, and there was a lot he needed to get off his chest. He cleared his throat then summoned his virtual assistant: “VREKORD!”
“Zi anger,” he started hissing, “generated by zi murder of zi George Floyd Ufrekun Amerikun man, is not good.” The assistant had been trained to Anglicize Schwab’s language — a blend of volcano, swamp and Swiss German — and soon enough a statement of 500 words had been documented expressing how the fate of one career criminal on America’s streets justified the urgent need for a global “great reset”.
Prior to this there was enough suspicion of Schwab, thanks to the creature he designed, then unleashed upon the world: “Davos man”. “Davos man” was a descriptor for the majority of inexplicably wealthy uniparty politicians in the Anglosphere: prickly economists such as the unlikeable Paul Krugman, think-tankers like Chatham House, McKinsey operatives and the global asset management elite who had graduated beyond wearing lanyards to enter or exit their premises of work. At the beginning of every year these profiles would congregate in the Swiss village, then return days later speaking some of the most unintelligible garbage ever conceived — all articulated with imperial smugness.
Successful entrepreneurs who had grown up the hard way all knew: Davos was an obscenely expensive junket catering to the 0.01%, many of whom had zero idea how to run businesses. A specific loathing was reserved for politicians who attended, most of whom were demonstrably inept in their installed capacities, for they appeared oblivious to the spectacle of elected officials assembling in a forum explicitly bereft of democratic prescripts.
In 2017, Schwab appeared at The Harvard Kennedy School to deliver the annual Malcolm H. Wiener lecture. It was here — not Davos — where he claimed that the WEF “penetrated cabinets” of supposed democracies (and Russia), identifying a few premiers. Critics of the speech would be lambasted for “conspiracy theories” by removing context, but the problem was: the context was the claim that this mysterious organization was secretly grooming and influencing leaders to an agenda beyond remits or mandates.
Strategic decision
Claims that the WEF was just a networking event were not aided by Schwab’s (very obviously) strategic decision to barge his way into “pandemic” commentary in early 2020. Defenders were quick to point out the timing, then segue into how Schwab predicted a cancelled 2021 event, necessitating alternative fundraising to mitigate potential losses.
But neither could ever be convincing enough, especially when world leaders — including Joe Biden’s autopen, Jacinda Ardern, Boris Johnson and Justin Trudeau — started aping the “great reset” swindle, followed by hyping something else called “stakeholder capitalism” — which, amongst other things, would become the very concept responsible for the debanking of individuals considered hostile to establishment narratives. Apparently, Davos wasn’t just the place to platform companies who wanted to monitor the brainwaves of their staff with electrodes so they could dock pay the moment an employee started thinking about sending a cannibal to visit the wretched HR woman, but also a venue to legitimize the worst of humanity in DEI pursuits and other ladder-burning schemes.
Hints that “Davos Man” would one day get punched in the mouth strengthened when the newly elected President of Argentina, Javier Milei, took to the forum’s stage at the 2024 event. Up until then, the majority of economists invited were built to the specifications of ideological tax obsessives like Thomas Piketty or Rutger Bregman, whose bias left them incapable of delivering even their most salient points (e.g private equity owning utilities). Milei emphasized the slide into socialism — in full view of the continent’s political elite, feverish in their support of subsidized green energy, DEI and mass immigration. Across the world, light seemed to break in the sustained darkness of people’s minds.
So it was only a matter of time before things went a bit FIFA-sleaze. On Easter Monday last year, Schwab announced his immediate retirement from the organization he founded, the news scrummed in alongside allegations of financial misappropriation, nepotism and the bullying of staff.
Much weaker
Under Schwab, the WEF’s exaggerated view of itself propelled it into enemy-of-the-people territory, but this wasn’t entirely deserved. The organisation is actually much weaker than it leads people to believe. It is evidently politically compromised and beholden to its own funders, mostly financial institutions. Unable to rescue itself from its status delusion, it has become the subject of relentless attacks from populists who have seized on it as the prime example of the decaying west. Nobody sensible, after all, rides to the WEF’s defence.
At the time of composing the George Floyd statement, there was plenty of economics to talk about: the economics of the greatest upward wealth transfer in history, or manifold corruption in any of the UK government’s Covid strategies. As it happened, individuals who were failing to demonstrate sufficient enthusiasm for George Floyd were being sidelined or cancelled, but here Schwab, the peripatetic bullshitter, sensed a fast one. As scams beget scams, soon much of the parasitic world was up to its guts in pandering and apology. This is the side he took.
Perhaps we did not need an economic organization to understand that globalization happens whether one likes it or not, but maybe an economic organization would have been useful in defying the shift to race-based everything. It could represent reasonable middle-classes being fleeced or called racists by their governments in accordance with trendy ideas showcased elsewhere.
That did not happen.
[Image: https://unsplash.com/photos/-17Q_JhiDAw]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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