Brownstone Institute
Why Do Friends of Freedom Dread the World Economic Forum?
From the Brownstone Institute
Last week, Elon Musk appointed Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter. She has excellent political connections. In 2021, she partnered with the Biden administration to create a Covid-19 vaccination campaign. Free speech activists howled over Yaccarino’s appointment as Twitter boss because she is an Executive Chair with the World Economic Forum (WEF). Here’s the story on WEF, sparked by their most recent annual meeting.
The January meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, should have set off alarms among freedom lovers around the globe. The annual confab of billionaires, political weasels, and deranged activists laid out plans to further repress humanity. But at least the gathering provided plenty of comic relief for people who enjoy elite buffoonery.
Self-worship is obligatory in Davos. John Kerry, Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, hailed his fellow attendees as “extraterrestrial” for their devotion to saving the earth. Greenpeace complained that “the rich and powerful flock to Davos in ultra-polluting, socially inequitable private jets to discuss climate and inequality behind closed doors.” Being a climate change activist is “the privilege of rich and elite folks” who want to force people to use unreliable and ineffective wind and solar for energy, according to Daniel Turner of Power the Future.
People around the globe are still recovering from the last time WEF stampeded policymakers. “WEF was hugely influential, championing every form of COVID control from lockdowns to vaccine mandates. The WEF cares nothing for normal people living real lives. They are forging a Faucian nightmare,” warned Jeffrey Tucker, president of Brownstone Institute. China had one of the most brutal and dishonest COVID lockdowns in the world (aside from perhaps fabricating the COVID virus in one of its own laboratories). But WEF founder Klaus Schwab touted China’s COVID crackdown as a “role model” and “a very attractive model for quite a number of countries.”
WEF is whooping up the “Great Reset” — “building back better” so that economies can emerge greener and fairer out of the pandemic. The Great Reset presumes that practically every nation has benevolent dictators waiting to take the reins over people’s lives. American entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy wrote, “The Great Reset calls for dissolving the boundaries between the public & private sectors; between nations; between the online & offline worlds, and the will of individual citizens be damned.” Billionaire Elon Musk, who was not invited, scoffed, “WEF is increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and don’t want.” Musk ridiculed the WEF’s “Master the Future” slogan: “Are they trying to be the boss of Earth!?”
Sounds good to WEF attendees.
Freedom of speech is the greatest barrier to inflicting the Great Reset. Law professor Jonathan Turley observed, “Davos has long been the Legion of Doom for free speech.” Accordingly, the biggest peril the self-proclaimed “Global Shapers” are targeting is “The Clear and Present Danger of Disinformation.”
The WEF searched long and hard to find an eminent disinformation panel host to incarnate Davos values. They selected Brian Stelter, a former anchor who was too squirrely even for CNN. After CNN ejected Stelter, he was snapped up by the Harvard Kennedy School of Government to be their Media and Democracy Fellow.
The star of the panel was New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who proclaimed that disinformation is the “most existential” of every other major challenge that we are grappling with as a society.” Like most of the windy speakers in Switzerland, Sulzberger tormented the audience from the high ground:
Disinformation and in the broader set of misinformation, conspiracy, propaganda, clickbait, you know, the broader mix of bad information that’s corrupting the information ecosystem, what it attacks is trust. And once you see trust decline, what you then see is a society start to fracture, and so you see people fracture along tribal lines and, you know, that immediately undermines pluralism.
Sulzberger boasted, “When we make mistakes, we acknowledge them in public and we correct them.” Except for RussiaGate, its 1619 Project fairy tale, the January 6 Capitol clash, and a few dozen other howlers. The New York Times effectively refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election, giving an unearned boost to Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
Sulzberger talked about the decline of trust as if it were the result of a leaking underground storage tank tainting the “information ecosystem.” But it was the media that poisoned the well upon which they depend. A 2021 survey by the Reuters Institute reported that only 29 percent of Americans trusted the news media — the lowest rating of any of the 46 nations surveyed. A Gallup poll revealed that “86 percent of Americans believed the media was politically biased.” Practically the only folks who don’t recognize the bias are the people who share the media’s slant.
Serendipitously, the WEF also had a panel on “Disrupting Distrust.” The panel opened with a report grimly revealing that trust in government has declined in nations across the world. Maybe the profound, pointless disruptions from the COVID lockdowns that ravaged many countries were part of the blame? That panel was hosted by New York Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury. Her paper recently ran an opinion piece which claimed that there had been “no lockdowns” for COVID in this country. All of the closed schools and shuttered small businesses were an optical illusion, apparently.
The Davos pro-censorship fervor was epitomized by panelist Věra Jourová, European Commission vice president. She declared that the United States “will have soon” laws prohibiting “illegal hate speech,” like Europe has. Jourová previously urged expanding hate crime laws to ban “sexual exploitation of women.” Would possession of a 1957 Playboy centerfold be sufficient for a criminal conviction? Nude beaches are common in Europe. Would the European Commission backstop online prohibitions by deploying commissars on every beach to make sure no male had improper thoughts about the birthday suits he saw?
Hate-speech laws are a Pandora’s box because the speech politicians hate the most is criticism of government. And some knuckleheads on Capitol Hill believe that the United States already has hate-speech laws. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) recently declared, “If you espouse hate, if you espouse violence, you’re not protected under the First Amendment. I think we can be more aggressive in the way that we handle that type of use of the internet.” What’s next — a federal Cordiality Czar with the prerogative to purify every tweet?
Disinformation panelist Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) blamed “misinformation” for not being able to “get people to take a COVID vaccine.” But the false claims by Biden and top officials that vaxxes prevent infection and transmission weren’t misinformation — they were just typos.
Davos attendees ignored the stunning disclosures of US government censorship that occurred shortly before their private jets arrived in Switzerland. The #Twitterfiles recently revealed that federal officials pressured Twitter to suppress 250,000 Twitter users (including journalists). But according to WEF scoring, that wasn’t an outrage — instead, it was a tiny down payment for a Higher Truth. WEF ignored that the FBI was already suppressing free speech the same way that WEF panelists championed.
As journalist Matt Taibbi revealed, “As the election approached in 2020, the FBI overwhelmed Twitter with requests, sending spreadsheets with hundreds of accounts” to target and suppress. The official browbeating continued until very recently. In an internal email from November 5, 2022, the FBI’s National Election Command Post sent the FBI San Francisco field office (which dealt directly with Twitter) “a long list of accounts that ‘may warrant additional action’” — that is, suppression.
The FBI pressured Twitter to torpedo parody accounts that only idiots or federal agents would not recognize as humor. Taibbi wrote, “The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which ‘FBI San Francisco is notifying you’ it wants action on four accounts.”
The WEF is calling for a “Global Framework To Regulate Harm Online” — that is, worldwide censorship. One of the WEF’s favorite stars — a certified WEF Young Global Leader — was unable to attend because she was having a meltdown that ended with her resignation. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern became a progressive hero for making ever screechier demands for world censorship, comparing free speech to “weapons of war.” She told the United Nations last September: “We have the means; we just need the collective will” to suppress ideas that officialdom disapproves. Journalist Glenn Greenwald derided Ardern’s pitch as “the face of authoritarianism … and the mindset of tyrants everywhere.” But Ardern was there in spirit even if she was overwhelmed at home.
The WEF offers one of the best illustrations of how denunciations of “disinformation” are self-serving shams. In 2016, WEF put out a video with eight predictions for life in 2030. The highlight of the film was a vapid Millennial guy pictured alongside the slogan: “You will own nothing and be happy.” The slogan was inspired by an essay the WEF published from Danish Member of Parliament Ida Auken: “Welcome to 2030: I own nothing, have no privacy and life has never been better.” But the anti–private property bias is no WEF aberration. Last July, the WEF proposed slashing ownership of private vehicles around the globe. And then there was the WEF pitch to save the planet by having people eat insects instead of red meat. (The chairman of German manufacturer Siemens achieved heroic status at Davos by calling for a billion people to stop eating meat to save the planet.)
But according to WEF managing director Adrian Monck, the WEF has been the victim of a horrible conspiracy theory sparked by the “own nothing” phrase. Monck absolved WEF because the phrase in the video came from “an essay series intended to spark debate about socio-economic developments.” Monck claimed the phrase “started life as a screenshot, culled from the Internet by an anonymous anti-semitic account on the image board 4chan.” Bigots or zealots on 4chan howled in protest about that phrase. But as Elon Musk quipped, “Would be great if someone could compile a game contest of who said the craziest stuff between 4chan and WEF! My money is on the latter.”
At least the WEF has not (yet) proposed mandatory injections to compel propertyless underlinings to be happy. Or maybe the WEF would just recommend covertly adding drugs to the water supply.
Major media outlets were either participants or cosponsors of the WEF. Former New York Times editor-in-chief Jill Abramson slammed the Times for being part of the Davos “corrupt circle-jerk.” While the event was portrayed as a chance for sharing ideas, it was instead little more than a chance to hobnob with fellow elitists. Author Walter Kirn noted that there is almost no disagreement among WEF attendees: “The largest matters on earth are at stake (supposedly) yet the conferees don’t argue. They don’t debate. All points seem smugly settled. It’s an ego orgy.” The hypocrisy was beyond hip-deep. Journalist Michael Shellenberger noted, “WEF doesn’t engage in even the minimal amount of transparency through public disclosure that it constantly preaches to corporations and philanthropies.”
What could possibly go wrong from turning common people around the world into serfs of their elitist overlords? According to WEF, individual freedom is a luxury that citizens — or at least their rulers — can no longer afford. But the benevolence of dictators is almost always an illusion created by their fawning supporters. And this year’s WEF gathering proved again that there will never be a shortage of media and intellectual bootlickers for tyranny.
A version of this article was originally published in the April 2023 edition of Future of Freedom.
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From the Brownstone Institute
Way back in the B.C. era (Before Covid), I taught Medical Humanities and Bioethics at an American medical school. One of my older colleagues – I’ll call him Dr. Quinlan – was a prominent member of the faculty and a nationally recognized proponent of physician-assisted suicide.
Dr. Quinlan was a very nice man. He was soft-spoken, friendly, and intelligent. He had originally become involved in the subject of physician-assisted suicide by accident, while trying to help a patient near the end of her life who was suffering terribly.
That particular clinical case, which Dr. Quinlan wrote up and published in a major medical journal, launched a second career of sorts for him, as he became a leading figure in the physician-assisted suicide movement. In fact, he was lead plaintiff in a challenge of New York’s then-prohibition against physician-assisted suicide.
The case eventually went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which added to his fame. As it happened, SCOTUS ruled 9-0 against him, definitively establishing that there is no “right to die” enshrined in the Constitution, and affirming that the state has a compelling interest to protect the vulnerable.
SCOTUS’s unanimous decision against Dr. Quinlan meant that his side had somehow pulled off the impressive feat of uniting Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and all points in between against their cause. (I never quite saw how that added to his luster, but such is the Academy.)
At any rate, I once had a conversation with Dr. Quinlan about physician-assisted suicide. I told him that I opposed it ever becoming legal. I recall he calmly, pleasantly asked me why I felt that way.
First, I acknowledged that his formative case must have been very tough, and allowed that maybe, just maybe, he had done right in that exceptionally difficult situation. But as the legal saying goes, hard cases make bad law.
Second, as a clinical physician, I felt strongly that no patient should ever see their doctor and have to wonder if he was coming to help keep them alive or to kill them.
Finally, perhaps most importantly, there’s this thing called the slippery slope.
As I recall, he replied that he couldn’t imagine the slippery slope becoming a problem in a matter so profound as causing a patient’s death.
Well, maybe not with you personally, Dr. Quinlan, I thought. I said no more.
But having done my residency at a major liver transplant center in Boston, I had had more than enough experience with the rather slapdash ethics of the organ transplantation world. The opaque shuffling of patients up and down the transplant list, the endless and rather macabre scrounging for donors, and the nebulous, vaguely sinister concept of brain death had all unsettled me.
Prior to residency, I had attended medical school in Canada. In those days, the McGill University Faculty of Medicine was still almost Victorian in its ways: an old-school, stiff-upper-lip, Workaholics-Anonymous-chapter-house sort of place. The ethic was hard work, personal accountability for mistakes, and above all primum non nocere – first, do no harm.
Fast forward to today’s soft-core totalitarian state of Canada, the land of debanking and convicting peaceful protesters, persecuting honest physicians for speaking obvious truth, fining people $25,000 for hiking on their own property, and spitefully seeking to slaughter harmless animals precisely because they may hold unique medical and scientific value.
To all those offenses against liberty, morality, and basic decency, we must add Canada’s aggressive policy of legalizing, and, in fact, encouraging industrial-scale physician-assisted suicide. Under Canada’s Medical Assistance In Dying (MAiD) program, which has been in place only since 2016, physician-assisted suicide now accounts for a terrifying 4.7 percent of all deaths in Canada.
MAiD will be permitted for patients suffering from mental illness in Canada in 2027, putting it on par with the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland.
To its credit, and unlike the Netherlands and Belgium, Canada does not allow minors to access MAiD. Not yet.
However, patients scheduled to be terminated via MAiD in Canada are actively recruited to have their organs harvested. In fact, MAiD accounts for 6 percent of all deceased organ donors in Canada.
In summary, in Canada, in less than 10 years, physician-assisted suicide has gone from illegal to both an epidemic cause of death and a highly successful organ-harvesting source for the organ transplantation industry.
Physician-assisted suicide has not slid down the slippery slope in Canada. It has thrown itself off the face of El Capitan.
And now, at long last, physician-assisted suicide may be coming to New York. It has passed the House and Senate, and just awaits the Governor’s signature. It seems that the 9-0 Supreme Court shellacking back in the day was just a bump in the road. The long march through the institutions, indeed.
For a brief period in Western history, roughly from the introduction of antibiotics until Covid, hospitals ceased to be a place one entered fully expecting to die. It appears that era is coming to an end.
Covid demonstrated that Western allopathic medicine has a dark, sadistic, anti-human side – fueled by 20th-century scientism and 21st-century technocratic globalism – to which it is increasingly turning. Physician-assisted suicide is a growing part of this death cult transformation. It should be fought at every step.
I have not seen Dr. Quinlan in years. I do not know how he might feel about my slippery slope argument today.
I still believe I was correct.
From the Brownstone Institute
Many news outlets reported the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday by saying President Donald Trump had missed out (Washington Post, Yahoo, Hindustan Times, Huffington Post), not won (USA Today), fallen short (AP News), lost (Time), etc. There is even a meme doing the rounds about ‘Trump Wine.’ ‘Made from sour grapes,’ the label explains, ‘This is a full bodied and bitter vintage guaranteed to leave a nasty taste in your mouth for years.’
For the record, the prize was awarded to María Corina Machado for her courageous and sustained opposition to Venezuela’s ruling regime. Trump called to congratulate her. Given his own attacks on the Venezuelan president, his anger will be partly mollified, and he could even back her with practical support. He nonetheless attacked the prize committee, and the White House assailed it for putting politics before peace.
He could be in serious contention next year. If his Gaza peace plan is implemented and holds until next October, he should get it. That he is unlikely to do so is more a reflection on the award and less on Trump.
So He Won the Nobel Peace Prize. Meh!
Alfred Nobel’s will stipulates the prize should be awarded to the person who has contributed the most to promote ‘fraternity between nations…abolition or reduction of standing armies and…holding and promotion of peace congresses.’ Over the decades, this has expanded progressively to embrace human rights, political dissent, environmentalism, race, gender, and other social justice causes.
On these grounds, I would have thought the Covid resistance should have been a winner. The emphasis has shifted from outcomes and actual work to advocacy. In honouring President Barack Obama in 2009, the Nobel committee embarrassed itself, patronised him, and demeaned the prize. His biggest accomplishment was the choice of his predecessor as president: the prize was a one-finger send-off to President George W. Bush.
There have been other strange laureates, including those prone to wage war (Henry Kissinger, 1973), tainted through association with terrorism (Yasser Arafat, 1994), and contributions to fields beyond peace, such as planting millions of trees. Some laureates were subsequently discovered to have embellished their record, and others proved to be flawed champions of human rights who had won them the treasured accolade.
Conversely, Mahatma Gandhi did not get the prize, not for his contributions to the theory and practice of non-violence, nor for his role in toppling the British Raj as the curtain raiser to worldwide decolonisation. The sad reality is how little practical difference the prize has made to the causes it espoused. They bring baubles and honour to the laureates, but the prize has lost much of its lustre as far as results go.
Trump Was Not a Serious Contender
The nomination processes start in September and nominations close on 31 January. The five-member Norwegian Nobel committee scrutinises the list of candidates and whittles it down between February and October. The prize is announced on or close to 10 October, the date Alfred Nobel died, and the award ceremony is held in Oslo in early December.
The calendar rules out a newly elected president in his first year, with the risible exception of Obama. The period under review was 2024. Trump’s claims to have ended seven wars and boasts of ‘nobody’s ever done that’ are not taken seriously beyond the narrow circle of fervent devotees, sycophantic courtiers, and supplicant foreign leaders eager to ingratiate themselves with over-the-top flattery.
Trump Could Be in Serious Contention Next Year
Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan falls into three conceptual-cum-chronological parts: today, tomorrow, and the day after. At the time of writing, in a hinge moment in the two-year war, Israel has implemented a ceasefire in Gaza, Hamas has agreed to release Israeli hostages on 13-14 October, and Israel will release around 2,000 Palestinian prisoners (today’s agenda). So why are the ‘Ceasefire Now!’ mobs not out on the streets celebrating joyously instead of looking morose and discombobulated? Perhaps they’ve been robbed of the meaning of life?
The second part (tomorrow) requires Hamas demilitarisation, surrender, amnesty, no role in Gaza’s future governance, resumption of aid deliveries, Israeli military pullbacks, a temporary international stabilisation force, and a technocratic transitional administration. The third part, the agenda for the day after, calls for the deradicalisation of Gaza, its reconstruction and development, an international Peace Board to oversee implementation of the plan, governance reforms of the Palestinian Authority, and, over the horizon, Palestinian statehood.
There are too many potential pitfalls to rest easy on the prospects for success. Will Hamas commit military and political suicide? How can the call for democracy in Gaza and the West Bank be reconciled with Hamas as the most popular group among Palestinians? Can Israel’s fractious governing coalition survive?
Both Hamas and Israel have a long record of agreeing to demands under pressure but sabotaging their implementation at points of vulnerability. The broad Arab support could weaken as difficulties arise. The presence of the internationally toxic Tony Blair on the Peace Board could derail the project. Hamas has reportedly called on all factions to reject Blair’s involvement. Hamas official Basem Naim, while thanking Trump for his positive role in the peace deal, explained that ‘Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims and maybe a lot [of] people around the world still remember his [Blair’s] role in causing the killing of thousands or millions of innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq.’
It would be a stupendous achievement for all the complicated moving parts to come together in stable equilibrium. What cannot and should not be denied is the breathtaking diplomatic coup already achieved. Only Trump could have pulled this off.
The very traits that are so offputting in one context helped him to get here: narcissism; bullying and impatience; bull in a china shop style of diplomacy; indifference to what others think; dislike of wars and love of real estate development; bottomless faith in his own vision, negotiating skills, and ability to read others; personal relationships with key players in the region; and credibility as both the ultimate guarantor of Israel’s security and preparedness to use force if obstructed. Israelis trust him; Hamas and Iran fear him.
The combined Israeli-US attacks to degrade Iran’s nuclear capability underlined the credibility of threats of force against recalcitrant opponents. Unilateral Israeli strikes on Hamas leaders in Qatar highlighted to uninvolved Arabs the very real dangers of continued escalation amidst the grim Israeli determination to rid themselves of Hamas once and for all.
Trump Is Likely to Be Overlooked
Russia has sometimes been the object of the Nobel Peace Prize. The mischievous President Vladimir Putin has suggested Trump may be too good for the prize. Trump’s disdain for and hostility to international institutions and assaults on the pillars of the liberal international order would have rubbed Norwegians, among the world’s strongest supporters of rules-based international governance, net zero, and foreign aid, the wrong way.
Brash and public lobbying for the prize, like calling the Norwegian prime minister, is counterproductive. The committee is fiercely independent. Nominees are advised against making the nomination public, let alone orchestrating an advocacy campaign. Yet, one laureate is believed to have mobilised his entire government for quiet lobbying behind the scenes, and another to have bad-mouthed a leading rival to friendly journalists.
Most crucially, given that Scandinavian character traits tip towards the opposite end of the scale, it’s hard to see the committee overlooking Trump’s loud flaws, vanity, braggadocio, and lack of grace and humility. Trump supporters discount his character traits and take his policies and results seriously. Haters cannot get over the flaws to seriously evaluate policies and outcomes. No prizes for guessing which group the Nobel committee is likely to belong to. As is currently fashionable to say when cancelling someone, Trump’s values do not align with those of the committee and the ideals of the prize.
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