Mar
6
The Great Reset: Conspiracy Theory or Serious Threat?
“The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.” — Professor Klaus Schwab, WEF
The first time I heard of the “Great Reset”, it was mentioned in a podcast. It sounded very disturbing, but I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, and I didn’t take the time to investigate it. Sometime later, a family member mentioned an article she read about it but then couldn’t find the relevant email/link. That was several weeks ago. I finally got access to the article online, read it, and decided I needed to share some of what I learned with my readers.
You may ask, “Isn’t this ‘Great Reset’ thing just a right-wing conspiracy about a plot to form a one-world government?” My first response is that some conspiracies are real, and they don’t usually stay secret for long. Let’s take a look at the evidence…
As a little bit of background, the World Economic Forum (WEF) — originally the European Management Forum — is an “international non-governmental and lobbying organisation” founded in 1971 by engineer/economist Klaus Schwab, who is still its executive chairman. Every year, this elite group of 1000 member companies, along with honored guests (e.g., investors, business leaders, political leaders, economists, celebrities and journalists), meets in the Swiss resort town of Davos to discuss how they can best affect the structure and economy of the world. Or, as the WEF itself begins its mission statement:
“The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.”
Given who is involved, they hold a lot of power, money, and influence. (Check out these two Business Insider pieces on the WEF annual meeting. You will see several familiar names and faces among the handful of attendees mentioned from 2019-2021.)
In 2018 and 2019, the WEF collaborated with Johns Hopkins University and, in one instance, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, on two projects. “CLADE X” was a simulation of a national pandemic response — specifically, to a novel strain of human parainfluenza virus with genetic elements of the Nipah virus. “Event 201” was another pandemic exercise, this time simulating an international response to the outbreak of a novel coronavirus. (This was two months before the COVID outbreak in China became news.) To quote Michael Rectenwald,
“The CLADE X and Event 201 simulations anticipated almost every eventuality of the actual COVID crisis, most notably the responses by governments, health agencies, the media, tech companies, and elements of the public. The responses and their effects included worldwide lockdowns, the collapse of businesses and industries, the adoption of biometric surveillance technologies, an emphasis on social media censorship to combat “misinformation,” the flooding of social and legacy media with “authoritative sources,” widespread riots, and mass unemployment.”
Simulations like this may be good ideas from a standpoint of “health security” and economic preparedness, etc. But, the timing and specificity seem awfully coincidental, no? I mean, ya gotta wonder how much of the actual pandemic response was engineered, or at least influenced, by powerful people who are part of the Great Reset project.
The following (along with the above quote) is excerpted from an adaptation of a talk at Hillsdale College by Rectenwald, author and Chief Academic Officer for American Scholars:
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“In June 2020, at its 50th annual meeting, the WEF announced the Great Reset’s official launch, and a month later [Klaus] Schwab and [Thierry] Malleret published their book on COVID and the Great Reset. The book declared that COVID represents an “opportunity [that] can be seized”; that “we should take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to reimagine our world”; that “the moment must be seized to take advantage of this unique window of opportunity”; and that “[f]or those fortunate enough to find themselves in industries ‘naturally’ resilient to the pandemic” — think here of Big Tech companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon — “the crisis was not only more bearable, but even a source of profitable opportunities at a time of distress for the majority.”
The Great Reset aims to usher in a bewildering economic amalgam — Schwab’s stakeholder capitalism — which I have called “corporate socialism” and Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called “communist capitalism.”
In brief, stakeholder capitalism involves the behavioral modification of corporations to benefit not shareholders, but stakeholders — individuals and groups that stand to benefit or lose from corporate behavior. Stakeholder capitalism requires not only corporate responses to pandemics and ecological issues such as climate change, “but also rethinking [corporations’] commitments to already-vulnerable communities within their ecosystems.” This is the “social justice” aspect of the Great Reset. To comply with that, governments, banks, and asset managers use the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) index to squeeze non-woke corporations and businesses out of the market. The ESG index is essentially a social credit score that is used to drive ownership and control of production away from the non-woke or non-compliant….
In their recent book on the Great Reset, Schwab and Malleret pit “stakeholder capitalism” against “neoliberalism,” defining the latter as “a corpus of ideas and policies … favouring competition over solidarity, creative destruction over government intervention, and economic growth over social welfare.” In other words, “neoliberalism” refers to the free enterprise system. In opposing that system, stakeholder capitalism entails corporate cooperation with the state and vastly increased government intervention in the economy.
Proponents of the Great Reset hold “neoliberalism” responsible for our economic woes. But in truth, the governmental favoring of industries and players within industries — what used to be known as corporatism or economic fascism — has been the real source of what Schwab and his allies at the WEF decry.
While approved corporations are not necessarily monopolies, the tendency of the Great Reset is toward monopolization — vesting as much control over production and distribution in as few favored corporations as possible, while eliminating industries and producers deemed non-essential or inimical. To bring this reset about, Schwab writes, “[e]very country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.”
Another way of describing the goal of the Great Reset is “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” — a two-tiered economy, with profitable monopolies and the state on top and socialism for the majority below….
Schwab and Malleret write that if “the past five centuries in Europe and America” have taught us anything, it is that “acute crises contribute to boosting the power of the state. It’s always been the case and there is no reason it should be different with the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The draconian lockdown measures employed by Western governments managed to accomplish goals of which corporate socialists in the WEF could only dream — above all, the destruction of small businesses, eliminating competitors for corporate monopolists favored by the state. In the U.S. alone, according to the Foundation for Economic Education, millions of small businesses closed their doors due to the lockdowns. Yelp data indicates that 60 percent of those closures are now permanent. Meanwhile companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google enjoyed record gains.
Other developments that advance the Great Reset agenda have included unfettered immigration, travel restrictions for otherwise legal border crossing, the Federal Reserve’s unrestrained printing of money and the subsequent inflation, increased taxation, increased dependence on the state, broken supply chains, the restrictions and job losses due to vaccine mandates, and the prospect of personal carbon allowances.
Such policies reflect the “fairness” aspect of the Great Reset — fairness requires lowering the economic status of people in wealthier nations like the U.S. relative to that of people in poorer regions of the world. One of the functions of woke ideology is to make the majority in developed countries feel guilty about their wealth, which the elites aim to reset downwards — except, one notices, for the elites themselves, who need to be rich in order to fly in their private jets to Davos each year….
As if the economic and governmental resets were not dramatic enough, the technological reset reads like a dystopian science fiction novel. It is based on the Fourth Industrial Revolution — or 4-IR for short. The first, second, and third industrial revolutions were the mechanical, electrical, and digital revolutions. The 4-IR marks the convergence of existing and emerging fields, including Big Data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, quantum computing, genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. The foreseen result will be the merging of the physical, digital, and biological worlds, which presents a challenge to the ontologies by which we understand ourselves and the world, including the definition of a human being.
There is nothing original about this. Transhumanists and Singularitarians (prophets of technological singularity) such as Ray Kurzweil forecasted these and other revolutionary developments long ago. What’s different about the globalists’ vision of 4-IR is the attempt to harness it to the ends of the Great Reset….
Just as Schwab and the WEF predicted, the COVID crisis has accelerated the Great Reset. Monopolistic corporations have consolidated their grip on the economy from above, while socialism continues to advance for the rest of us below. In partnership with Big Digital, Big Pharma, the mainstream media, national and international health agencies, and compliant populations, hitherto democratic Western states — think especially of Australia, New Zealand, and Austria — are being transformed into totalitarian regimes modeled after China.”
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Now, back to the question posed in this post’s title: Is the Great Reset a mere fabrication of conspiracy-theorists OR a genuine threat to freedom in America and the world? OR, just so we cover the middle-ground, is the Great Reset a real agenda (as the data strongly suggests) but either a good thing (if you are woke and globalist) or somehow neutral? You tell me…
* Portions of this article have been informed or “Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.”
P.S. Here’s another article you might want to read: “What’s Up with the Great Reset?”
