By James Bovard
The Future of Freedom Foundation
May 3, 2024
Last January, humanity's elite gathered again in Davos, Switzerland, to plan out the rest of our lives. World Economic Forum (WEF) honchos are morally superior because they are devoted to destroying your freedom to save the Earth, or at least to safeguard plant habitat.
Sixty heads of government from around the world attended, as did endless Lear Jet-loads of multilateral officials. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, out-blathered President Biden: "The world is not at a single inflection point; it is at multi-inflection points." (Biden drags "inflection points" into almost every speech.)
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres told the WEF crowd that "deep reforms to global governance" were needed. And who better to deepen governance than the United Nations, the supreme tyrants' club in the solar system?
Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, declared, "We have a responsibility to be stewards of our beautiful, small planet's future. There is something that leaders need to embrace, and it is the responsibility to act, even if it's not popular." This spiel perfectly captured the prevailing disdain for democracy - or at least of any populace that fails to vote themselves into ever-greater subjection to their self-proclaimed-expert saviors. WEF Founder Klaus Schwab whooped up the Davos attendees as "trustees of the future."
No wonder that Australian senator Alex Antic warned in the Australian Parliament: "The WEF is steeped in authoritarianism and Marxist ideology. It's an ideology which is creeping into governments across the world."
A world of censorship
The WEF had two big goals this year: "restore trust" and "crush dissent." Okay, that last one is a paraphrase. Instead, the WEF is proclaiming that the greatest peril humanity now faces is "misinformation and disinformation." And it knows this because its own truths are self-evident.
The WEF officials have complained bitterly that it is "misinformation" to assert that they are power-crazed maniacs. But consider its June 2020 call for a Great Reset for humanity:
To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a "Great Reset" of capitalism.
"Misinformation" seems to include any facts which obstruct WEF cronies from ruling the earth. The WEF's latest Global Risks Report warns, "Some governments and platforms... may fail to act to effectively curb falsified information and harmful content, making the definition of 'truth' increasingly contentious across societies." In other words, governments must suppress "falsified" information to save truth. The WEF presumes governments are founts of truth - regardless of "politician" being a term of derision going back thousands of years. Or maybe the WEF considers "truth" the same type of luxury nowadays as eating meat.
The destruction of private property
We are barely two thousand days away from the halcyon time - the year 2030 - when the WEF has promised, "you will own nothing and be happy." (Davos attendees are exempt from that lofty edict.) Recent political reforms in many nations have furthered the first promise, ravaging private-property rights and subverting individual independence. Australian senator Malcolm Roberts warned:
The plan of the Great Reset is that you will die with nothing. Klaus Schwab's 'life by subscription' is really serfdom. It's slavery. Billionaire, globalist corporations will own everything - homes, factories, farms, cars, furniture - and everyday citizens will rent what they need, if their social credit score allows.
The world's kingpins will need to tighten all the mental thumbscrews for propertyless serfs to "be happy." Public euphoria could be in especially short supply considering other policies championed at the WEF.
Mass surveillance
"Individual carbon footprint trackers" are a popular panacea at Davos, and the WEF has proposed the "setting of acceptable limits for personal emissions." How many burps will it take to get sent to reeducation camp?
Footprint trackers will be useless without imposing universal "digital identification," another WEF pet project. How can government "serve" people unless it can find and accost them at any moment, day or night? Vaccine passports are also a cause célèbres for this crowd. Count on the master wizards to exert far more effort to compel injections than to ensure vaccines actually provide the protection they promise.
Environmental tyranny
One of the wackiest shows at Davos was performed by British environmental activist Jojo Mehta, the chief of "Stop Ecocide Now." She hectored Davos attendees to recognize that people making money from farming or fishing could be as guilty as people committing "mass murder and genocide." But if the elites succeed in stopping farmers from farming and fishermen from fishing, future Swiss shindigs may run short of caviar.
"Climate change" is probably the WEF's best short-term hope to put a halo over tyranny. This is a topic which requires boundless censorship in order to keep peasants in their place. Cartoonists have long ridiculed all the private jets that fly in for the WEF conference, but such details need to be suppressed on "world security grounds" or some such crap. The same is true for the appalling failure of green energy schemes such as windmills to provide energy at reasonable prices. But those pratfalls did not deter Jane Goodall, an officially designated United Nations Messenger of Peace: "We know exactly what we ought to be doing to slow down and eventually reverse climate change and loss of biodiversity... if only various countries lived up to promises they made about reducing emissions."
Chrystia Freeland, Canada's deputy prime minister and a member of the WEF Board of Trustees, recently prattled as if glaciers should have veto power over elections: "Our shrinking glaciers, and our warming oceans, are asking us wordlessly but emphatically, if democratic societies can rise to the existential challenge of climate change." (A Canadian court recently condemned the Trudeau-Freeland government for tyrannizing truck drivers and other protestors against their COVID policies.)
Davos provided a cosseting atmosphere that encouraged some supposedly objective observers to reveal their fervent dogmas. New York Times climate correspondent David Gelles gave a speech in which he said:
implored a room full of CEOs, diplomats and NGO leaders to step up their urgency and begin considering truly radical political and economic interventions.... The hour is late, and it's incumbent on those with the capital and the clout to start deploying the whole of their resources toward the climate crisis.
To boost confidence in the all-electric future, government censors will need to be extra vigilant during harsh winter weather so that people are not warned that their Tesla becomes a useless block of metal during cold snaps.
But the point of the "climate change" hysteria is not to protect either the environment or humanity. It is to provide a pretext for perpetual, boundless subjugation by the elites. According to Christine Anderson, a member of the European Parliament from Germany, "The green agenda is just part of [the overall globalist agenda], which is to erect a totalitarian regime, in which people are under complete control." If Davos folks were meeting in the woods and subsisting on nuts and berries, they would have more credibility to lecture everyone else on their diets.
Monetary control
The WEF is also gung-ho on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). The U.S. dollar has lost 97 percent of its value since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, but politicians deserve more arbitrary power over the currency, right? Never forget: "cash is printed freedom." But CBDCs have powerful appeal to would-be financial tyrants. Saule Omarova, Biden's nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, proposed in 2021 to give government total control over every person's finances: "There will be no more private bank accounts, and all of the deposit accounts will be held directly at the Fed." And you will be happy or you will be relocated to Fargo.
A 2023 WEF analysis declared, "CBDCs offer potential benefits for financial inclusion, but.... Governments and central banks need to be transparent and honest about the potential advantages and risks of digital currencies in order to build public trust in CBDCs." To expect central banks to be honest and transparent is worse than believing in the tooth fairy. This is not how political machinations to depreciate a currency happen.
The WEF states that "CBDCs would allow for the creation of digital records and traces, and this could make it easier to stop money laundering and flows of money used to finance terrorism." Even better - CBDCs could enable government officials to prohibit citizens from spending anything on unapproved items - or maybe to financially destroy anyone who complained about central banks. As Mark Seilor observed, "CBDCs are a totalitarian's wet dream, and would enable governments to centrally enforce tyrannical policies on an industrial scale - at the flick of a switch - without the need for human enforcement agents."
The swagger of the Davos crowd is beyond parody. WEF president Borge Brende promised: "We will make sure that we bring together the right people... to see how we can solve this very challenging world." But how can they have the right people when neither you nor I were invited?
Paeans to democracy
The WEF offers platitudes for democracy while championing iron-fisted paternalist policies. This is why pervasive censorship is vital to carry out WEF-favored schemes to force common people to stop bothering the environment. Government policies will be propelled by alarmist pronouncements which private citizens could debunk.
With WEF-sanctioned censorship, self-government could be replaced by "one person, one vote, one time." Whoever wins a national election will take control of the censorship regime and exploit it to insulate and perpetuate their power. We already saw that in this nation. Censorship helped Biden win the 2020 election, and his administration proceeded to carry out potentially "the most massive attack against free speech in United States history," according to Federal Judge Terry Doughty. (The Supreme Court will settle that censorship controversy.)
The specter of libertarianism
But there is a specter haunting the Davos crowd. WEF Chairman Klaus Schwab recently practically echoed Marx's Communist Manifesto, warning of a new specter haunting the world. Schwab derided "an anti-System which is called Libertarianism, which means to tear down everything which creates some kind of influence of government into private lives." But it is not libertarians' fault that Schwab's standard for "some kind of influence of government" is eerily similar to medieval serfdom. Schwab also warned of the rising danger of individuals become "ego centric." And we all know that the worst form of selfishness is refusal to submit to your superiors.
The most effective rebuttal at Davos of the WEF sirens of subjugation came from the newly elected president of Argentina. Javier Milei exhorted the friends of freedom around the globe: "Do not be intimidated either by the political class or the parasites who live off of the State. The State is the problem itself." Milei's scoff at people "motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste" was perhaps the ultimate face slap for the self-proclaimed saviors in Switzerland.
Boneheaded delusions
So many of the follies championed at Davos arise from the boneheaded delusion that political power is irredeemably benevolent. We should not trust elitists who portray "truth" as the same type of despicable luxury as eating meat or owning your own automobile. And we should not trust those who seek to convert officialdom into a priesthood with the right to blindfold people, to muzzle them, and to slash their living standards.
Luckily, people still have freedom to scoff on social media (thanks in large part to Elon Musk). Maybe the next Davos confab will convince critics to cease referring to the "World Enslavement Forum." It would help if WEF ceased fearing "runaway skepticism" with the same dread that old southern plantation owners viewed runaway slaves.
This article was originally published in the April 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.