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Why Do Friends of Freedom Dread the World Economic Forum?

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY James BovardJAMES BOVARD

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 ā€œextraterrestrialā€ for their devotion to saving the earth. Greenpeace complained that ā€œthe 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 ā€œthe 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. ā€œWEF 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 China’s COVID crackdown as a ā€œrole modelā€ and ā€œa very attractive model for quite a number of countries.ā€

WEF is whooping up the ā€œGreat Resetā€ — ā€œbuilding 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 people’s lives. American entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy wrote, ā€œThe 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, ā€œWEF is increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and don’t want.ā€ Musk ridiculed the WEF’s ā€œMaster the Futureā€ slogan: ā€œAre 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, ā€œDavos has long been the Legion of Doom for free speech.ā€ Accordingly, the biggest peril the self-proclaimed ā€œGlobal Shapersā€ are targeting is ā€œThe 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 ā€œmost 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 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, ā€œWhen 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 ā€œinformation 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 — the lowest rating of any of the 46 nations surveyed. A Gallup poll revealed that ā€œ86 percent of Americans believed the media was politically biased.ā€ 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 ā€œDisrupting 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 ā€œno 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 Věra JourovĆ”, European Commission vice president. She declared that the United States ā€œwill have soonā€ laws prohibiting ā€œillegal hate speech,ā€ like Europe has. JourovĆ” previously urged expanding hate crime laws to ban ā€œsexual 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 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, ā€œIf 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.ā€ What’s next — a federal Cordiality Czar with the prerogative to purify every tweet?

Disinformation panelist Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) blamed ā€œmisinformationā€ for not being able to ā€œget people to take a COVID vaccine.ā€ 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, ā€œAs 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 FBI’s National Election Command Post sent the FBI San Francisco field office (which dealt directly with Twitter) ā€œa long list of accounts that ā€˜may warrant additional actionā€™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, ā€œThe master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which ā€˜FBI San Francisco is notifying you’ it wants action on four accounts.ā€

The WEF is calling for a ā€œGlobal Framework To Regulate Harm Onlineā€ — 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 ā€œweapons of war.ā€ She told the United Nations last September: ā€œWe have the means; we just need the collective willā€ to suppress ideas that officialdom disapproves. Journalist Glenn Greenwald derided Ardern’s pitch as ā€œthe 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 ā€œdisinformationā€ 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: ā€œYou will own nothing and be happy.ā€ The slogan was inspired by an essay the WEF published from Danish Member of Parliament Ida Auken: ā€œWelcome to 2030: I own nothing, have no privacy and life has never been better.ā€ 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 ā€œown nothingā€ phrase. Monck absolved WEF because the phrase in the video came from ā€œan essay series intended to spark debate about socio-economic developments.ā€ Monck claimed the phrase ā€œstarted 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, ā€œWould 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 ā€œcorrupt 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: ā€œThe 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.ā€ The hypocrisy was beyond hip-deep. Journalist Michael Shellenberger noted, ā€œWEF doesn’t 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 — 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.

Author

  • James Bovard

    James Bovard, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is author and lecturer whose commentary targets examples of waste, failures, corruption, cronyism and abuses of power in government. He is a USA Today columnist and is a frequent contributor to The Hill. He is the author of ten books.

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Brownstone Institute

RCMP seem more interested in House of Commons Pages than MP’s suspected of colluding with China

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From the Brownstone Institute

ByĀ Bruce PardyĀ 

Canadians shouldn’t have information about their wayward MPs, but the RCMP can’t have too much biometric information about regular people. It’s always a good time for a little fishing. Let’s 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 country’s media didn’t 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 shouldn’t have information about their wayward MPs, but the RCMP can’t have too much biometric information about regular people. It’s always a good time for a little fishing. Let’s run those prints, shall we?

It’s designed to seem like a small deal. If House of Commons staff must give their fingerprints, that’s just a requirement of the job. Managerial bureaucracies prefer not to coerce directly but to create requirements that are ā€œchoices.ā€ Fingerprints aren’t mandatory. You can choose to provide them or choose not to work on the Hill.

Sound familiar? That’s 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 doesn’t 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 driver’s 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. It’s 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 what’s happening.

We still don’t know who colluded with China. But we can be confident that House of Commons staffers aren’t 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

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Brownstone Institute

The WHO Cannot Be Saved

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From the Brownstone Institute

ByĀ David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone InstituteDavid Bell,Ā Ramesh ThakurRamesh ThakurĀ Ā 

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.

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 WHO’s 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 ā€˜inter-pandemic period,’ 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 ā€˜specified’ 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 WHO’s 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 – most of us buy insurance. But we don’t 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 world’s 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 WHO’s 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 administration’s 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.

Authors

David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute

David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. David is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.

Ramesh Thakur

Ramesh Thakur, a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.

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