Brownstone Institute
Why Do Friends of Freedom Dread the World Economic Forum?

From the Brownstone Institute
BY
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 Yaccarinoās appointment as Twitter boss because she is an Executive Chair with the World Economic Forum (WEF). Hereās 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, Bidenās Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, hailed his fellow attendees as āextraterrestrialā for their devotion to saving the earth. Greenpeace complained that āthe rich and powerful flock to Davos in ultra-polluting, socially inequitable private jets to discuss climate and inequality behind closed doors.ā Being a climate change activist is āthe privilege of rich and elite folksā 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. āWEF 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,ā 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 Chinaās COVID crackdown as a ārole modelā and āa very attractive model for quite a number of countries.ā
WEF is whooping up the āGreat Resetā ā ābuilding back betterā 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 peopleās lives. American entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy wrote, āThe 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.ā Billionaire Elon Musk, who was not invited, scoffed, āWEF is increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and donāt want.ā Musk ridiculed the WEFās āMaster the Futureā slogan: āAre they trying to be the boss of Earth!?ā
Sounds good to WEF attendees.
Freedom of speech is the greatest barrier to inflicting the Great Reset. Law professor Jonathan Turley observed, āDavos has long been the Legion of Doom for free speech.ā Accordingly, the biggest peril the self-proclaimed āGlobal Shapersā are targeting is āThe Clear and Present Danger of Disinformation.ā
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 āmost existentialā of every other major challenge that we are grappling with as a society.ā 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 thatās 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, āWhen we make mistakes, we acknowledge them in public and we correct them.ā 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 āinformation ecosystem.ā 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 ā the lowest rating of any of the 46 nations surveyed. A Gallup poll revealed that ā86 percent of Americans believed the media was politically biased.ā Practically the only folks who donāt recognize the bias are the people who share the mediaās slant.
Serendipitously, the WEF also had a panel on āDisrupting Distrust.ā 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 āno lockdownsā 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 VÄra JourovĆ”, European Commission vice president. She declared that the United States āwill have soonā laws prohibiting āillegal hate speech,ā like Europe has. JourovĆ” previously urged expanding hate crime laws to ban āsexual exploitation of women.ā 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 Pandoraās 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, āIf you espouse hate, if you espouse violence, youāre 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.ā Whatās next ā a federal Cordiality Czar with the prerogative to purify every tweet?
Disinformation panelist Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) blamed āmisinformationā for not being able to āget people to take a COVID vaccine.ā But the false claims by Biden and top officials that vaxxes prevent infection and transmission werenāt misinformation ā 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 wasnāt an outrage ā 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, āAs the election approached in 2020, the FBI overwhelmed Twitter with requests, sending spreadsheets with hundreds of accountsā to target and suppress. The official browbeating continued until very recently. In an internal email from November 5, 2022, the FBIās National Election Command Post sent the FBI San Francisco field office (which dealt directly with Twitter) āa long list of accounts that āmay warrant additional actionāā ā that is, suppression.
The FBI pressured Twitter to torpedo parody accounts that only idiots or federal agents would not recognize as humor. Taibbi wrote, āThe master-canine quality of the FBIās relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which āFBI San Francisco is notifying youā it wants action on four accounts.ā
The WEF is calling for a āGlobal Framework To Regulate Harm Onlineā ā that is, worldwide censorship. One of the WEFās favorite stars ā a certified WEF Young Global Leader ā 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 āweapons of war.ā She told the United Nations last September: āWe have the means; we just need the collective willā to suppress ideas that officialdom disapproves. Journalist Glenn Greenwald derided Ardernās pitch as āthe face of authoritarianism ⦠and the mindset of tyrants everywhere.ā 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 ādisinformationā 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: āYou will own nothing and be happy.ā The slogan was inspired by an essay the WEF published from Danish Member of Parliament Ida Auken: āWelcome to 2030: I own nothing, have no privacy and life has never been better.ā But the antiāprivate 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 āown nothingā phrase. Monck absolved WEF because the phrase in the video came from āan essay series intended to spark debate about socio-economic developments.ā Monck claimed the phrase āstarted life as a screenshot, culled from the Internet by an anonymous anti-semitic account on the image board 4chan.ā Bigots or zealots on 4chan howled in protest about that phrase. But as Elon Musk quipped, āWould 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.ā
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 ācorrupt circle-jerk.ā 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: āThe largest matters on earth are at stake (supposedly) yet the conferees donāt argue. They donāt debate. All points seem smugly settled. Itās an ego orgy.ā The hypocrisy was beyond hip-deep. Journalist Michael Shellenberger noted, āWEF doesnāt engage in even the minimal amount of transparency through public disclosure that it constantly preaches to corporations and philanthropies.ā
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 ā or at least their rulers ā can no longer afford. But the benevolence of dictators is almost always an illusion created by their fawning supporters. And this yearās 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.
Brownstone Institute
RCMP seem more interested in House of Commons Pages than MP’s suspected of colluding with China

From the Brownstone Institute
ByĀ
Canadians shouldnāt have information about their wayward MPs, but the RCMP canāt have too much biometric information about regular people. Itās always a good time for a little fishing. Letās run those prints, shall we?
Forget the members of Parliament who may have colluded with foreign governments. The real menace, the RCMP seem to think, are House of Commons pages. MPs suspected of foreign election interference should not be identified, the Mounties have insisted, but House of Commons staff must be fingerprinted. Serious threats to the country are hidden away, while innocent people are subjected to state surveillance. If you want to see how the managerial state (dys)functions, Canada is the place to be.
In June, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) tabled itsĀ redacted reportĀ that suggested at least 11 sitting MPs may have benefitted from foreign election interference. RCMP Commissioner Mike DuhemeĀ cautioned againstĀ releasing their identities. Canadians remained in the dark until Oct. 28 when Kevin Vuong, a former Liberal MP now sitting as an Independent,Ā hosted a news conferenceĀ to suggest who some of the parliamentarians may be. Like the RCMP, most of the countryās media didnāt seem interested.
But the RCMP are very interested in certain other things. For years, they have pushed for the federal civil service to beĀ fingerprinted. Not just high security clearance for top-secret stuff, but across government departments. The Treasury Board adoptedĀ the standard in 2014Ā and the House of Commons currentlyĀ requires fingerprintingĀ for staff hired since 2017. The Senate implemented fingerprinting this year. The RCMP have claimed that the old policy of doing criminal background checks by name is obsolete and too expensive.
But stated rationales are rarely the real ones. Name-based background checks are not obsolete or expensive. Numerous police departments continue to use them. They do so, in part, because name checks do not compromise biometric privacy. Fingerprints are a form of biometric data, as unique as your DNA. Under the federalĀ Identification of Criminals Act, you must be in custody and charged with a serious offence before law enforcement can take your prints. Canadians shouldnāt have information about their wayward MPs, but the RCMP canāt have too much biometric information about regular people. Itās always a good time for a little fishing. Letās run those prints, shall we?
Itās designed to seem like a small deal. If House of Commons staff must give their fingerprints, thatās just a requirement of the job. Managerial bureaucracies prefer not to coerce directly but to create requirements that are āchoices.ā Fingerprints arenāt mandatory. You can choose to provide them or choose not to work on the Hill.
Sound familiar? Thatās the way Covid vaccine mandates worked too. Vaccines were never mandatory. There were no fines or prison terms. But the alternative was to lose your job, social life, or ability to visit a dying parent. When the state controls everything, it doesnāt always need to dictate. Instead, it provides unpalatable choices and raises the stakes so that people choose correctly.
Government intrudes incrementally. Digital ID, for instance, will be offered as a convenient choice. You can, if you wish, carry your papers in the form of a QR code on your phone. Voluntary, of course. But later there will be extra hoops to jump through to apply for a driverās licence or health card in the old form.
Eventually, analogue ID will cost more, because, after all, digital ID is more automated and cheaper to run. Some outlets will not recognize plastic identification. Eventually, the government will offer only digital ID. The old way will be discarded as antiquated and too expensive to maintain. The new regime will provide the capacity to keep tabs on people like never before. Privacy will be compromised without debate. The bureaucracy will change the landscape in the guise of practicality, convenience, and cost.
Each new round of procedures and requirements is only slightly more invasive than the last. But turn around and find you have travelled a long way from where you began. Eventually, people will need digital ID, fingerprints, DNA, vaccine records, and social credit scores to be employed. Itās not coercive, just required for the job.
Occasionally the curtain is pulled back. The federal government unleashed the Emergencies Act on the truckers and their supporters in February 2022. Jackboots in riot gear took down peaceful protesters for objecting to government policy. Authorities revealed their contempt for law-abiding but argumentative citizens. For an honest moment, the government was not incremental and insidious, but enraged and direct. When they come after you in the streets with batons, at least you can see whatās happening.
We still donāt know who colluded with China. But we can be confident that House of Commons staffers arenāt wanted for murder. The RCMP has fingerprints to prove it. Controlling the people and shielding the powerful are mandates of the modern managerial state.
Republished fromĀ theĀ Epoch Times
Brownstone Institute
The WHO Cannot Be Saved

From the Brownstone Institute
ByĀ
ĀIf we were designing a new WHO now, no sane model would base its funding and direction primarily on the interests and advice of those who profit from illness. Rather, these would be based on accurate estimates of localized risks of the big killer diseases. The WHO was once independent of private interests, mostly core-funded, and able to set rational priorities. That WHO is gone.
The WHO was originally intended primarily to transfer capacity to struggling states emerging from colonialism and address their higher burdens of disease but lower administrative and financial capabilities. This prioritized fundamentals like sanitation, good nutrition, and competent health services that had brought long life to people in wealthier countries. Its focus now is more on stocking shelves with manufactured commodities. Its budget, staffing, and remit expand as actual country need and infectious disease mortality decline over the years.
While major gaps in underlying health equality remain, and were recentlyĀ exacerbatedĀ by the WHOās Covid-19 policies, the world is a very different place from 1948 when it was formed. Rather than acknowledging progress, however, we are told we are simply in an āinter-pandemic period,ā and the WHO and its partners should be given ever more responsibility and resources to save us from the next hypothetical outbreak (likeĀ Disease-X). Increasingly dependent onĀ āspecifiedā fundingĀ from national and private interests heavily invested in profitable biotech fixes rather than the underlying drivers of good health,Ā the WHO looks more and more like other public-private partnerships that channel taxpayer money to the priorities of private industry.
Pandemics happen, but a proven natural one of major impact on life expectancy has not happened since pre-antibiotic era Spanish flu over a hundred years ago. We all understand that better nutrition, sewers, potable water, living conditions, antibiotics, and modern medicines protect us, yet we are told to be ever more fearful of the next outbreak. Covid happened, but it overwhelmingly affected the elderly inĀ Europe and the Americas. Moreover, it looks, as theĀ US government now makes clear, almost certainly a laboratory mistake by the very pandemic industry that is promoting the WHOās new approach.
Collaborating on health internationally remains popular, as it should be in a heavily interdependent world. It also makes sense to prepare for severe rare events ā most of us buy insurance. But we donāt exaggerate flood risk in order to expand the flood insurance industry, as anything we spend is money taken from our other needs.
Public health is no different. If we were designing a new WHO now, no sane model would base its funding and direction primarily on the interests and advice of those who profit from illness. Rather, these would be based on accurate estimates of localized risks of the big killer diseases. The WHO was once independent of private interests, mostly core-funded, and able to set rational priorities. That WHO is gone.
Over the past 80 years, the world has also changed. It makes no sense now to base thousands of health staff in one of the worldās most expensive (and healthiest!) cities, and it makes no sense in a technologically advancing world to keep centralizing control there. The WHO was structured in a time when most mail still went by steamship. It stands increasingly as an anomaly to its mission and to the world in which it works. Would a network of regional bodies tied to their local context not be more responsive and effective than a distant, disconnected, and centralized bureaucracy of thousands?
Amidst the broader turmoil roiling the post-1945 international liberal order, the recent US notice of withdrawal from the WHO presents a unique opportunity to rethink the type of international health institution the world needs, how that should operate, where, for what purpose, and for how long.
What should be the use-by date of an international institution? In the WHOās case, either health is getting better as countries build capacity and it should be downsizing. Or health is getting worse, in which case the model has failed and we need something more fit for purpose.
The Trump administrationās actions are an opportunity to rebase international health cooperation on widely recognized standards of ethics and human rights. Countries and populations should be back in control, and those seeking profit from illness should have no role in decision-making. The WHO, at nearly 80 years old, comes from a bygone era, and is increasingly estranged from its world. We can do better. Fundamental change in the way we manage international health cooperation will be painful but ultimately healthy.
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