Cracks Begin to Show at Davos

Trepidation flows like honeyed vinegar at the elite's annual humanity-hating bash.

The WEF 2024 at Davos—the premier globalist retreat—was held from January 15-19. In many ways it was a special one, because it was the first such conclave where the elites displayed a palpable fear and apprehension for the direction society is headed, and the blowback being received from an increasingly defiant humanity.

Officially, climate and mis-/disinformation dominated their program’s agenda, which was sponsored under the byline: “Rebuilding Trust.”

Now what could possibly lead the elites to think they’ve broken our trust? one wonders. It will become clear in their every gesture during the proceeding breakdown of the symposium, that the elites are terrified of their very self-created turmoil.

Here is the full length report they released on the eve of the convocation. The entire thing is modeled after the following risk hierarchy, showing the two-year and ten-year outlooks of risks, ranked in order:

It’s clear that in the short term, mis/disinformation gives them the most sleepless nights. This is, according to them, owing to the fact that the next two years will be rife with crucial global elections during which disinformation will play a leading role. For the ten year outlook, they naturally beat the climate bongos full-tilt because that remains their savviest gravy train.

From the opening pages they begin with the following admission, acknowledging that the majority of attendees believe the unipolar world model will cease to dominate in the coming decade:

These transnational risks will become harder to handle as global cooperation erodes. In this year’s Global Risks Perception Survey, two-thirds of respondents predict that a multipolar order will dominate in the next 10 years, as middle and great powers set and enforce – but also contest - current rules and norms.

The elites’ lack of self-awareness, however, is always gobsmacking. Reading through the pages, one is startled to realize that all their listed reasons for why the world is trending toward these haphazard waters, point directly to the elites’ own mismanagement of global affairs. For instance, they believe the world is hurtling toward this ‘dangerously unstable’ multipolarity because trust in Western institutions, particularly of the global leadership variety, has eroded. Well, have they asked themselves why that could possibly be?

The US and its vassals in the UN have run roughshod over the developing world for several decades now, waging unremittent war, terror, and chaos anywhere they saw fit. The global south sat silent biding their time only because they lacked the ability to properly resist. But now that they’ve gained such an ability, we are supposed to forget the West’s dizzying rampage and flagrant flaunting of their hypocritical “Rule of Law” and “Rules Based Order”?

They do come close to a semblance of self-awareness in the next section, where they cite unelected billionaires propelled to new heights of power and influence by the AI age as particular worries:

This comes directly on the heels of the announcement that Microsoft has just surpassed the $3 trillion market cap threshold, passing Apple as once again the world’s most ‘valuable company’. Apple and Microsoft together combine for over 13% of the entire S&P 500.

We’ve seen first hand how much power Bill Gates has wielded during his ascendency to some type of unelected global policy influencer. The WEF writeup rightly fears that the ‘self-referencing’ character of AI startup growth will allow companies who make breakthroughs in such technologies, which include quantum computing, to wield vast powers by virtue of the ubiquity of their ‘dual-use, general purpose’ technologies.

Microsoft’s $3T market cap is a larger pool of money than the GDPs of the majority of countries on earth. A single corporation wielding that much power can only be compared to the globe-spanning East India Company of the 1600-1800s, which had its own private army and could bowl over entire nations with ease.

But let’s get to the more interesting aspect witnessed at this year’s conclave: the quiet revolt of the globalists.

This year, one was finally left with the distinct feeling that not all globalist technocrats are on the same page any longer. Such groups function as a byproduct of heavy in-group pressure to conform to the slated orthodoxy. Various mechanisms maintain uniformity, from business incentives to outright threats and the dangling of kompromat. So when globalists begin to revolt against their own, challenging the narrative, breaking rank on the sacrosanct and pedestaled agenda, it speaks of a defining ‘dam-breaking’ moment.

The latest Davos retreat was marked by several such instances. The most publicized being that of Javier Milei’s big ‘globalist-busting’ speech billed—by him—as “[planting] the ideas of freedom in a forum that is contaminated by the 2030 socialist agenda."

In essence, he purported to have attended the WEF meet for the sole purpose of subverting the globalists from the inside out. Make of that what you will—I myself am quite ambivalent on Milei, with a heavy lean toward the skeptical side. But it’s undeniable that his speech—particularly the latter half of it—did serve as a bit of a throat-clearing moment to the statists and globalists present.

Most notable was that—on the grand stage of the WEF itself—he signally rejected the mandate of ‘climate change’, or humans being responsible for any natural changes in the environment at all. This sally alone is something one wouldn’t have expected to hear declaimed from the tribune of the world’s quintessential climate-grifting institution.

The remainder of his polemic was lackluster, as he dragged on about that terrible stalking horse of “socialism”, imputing it to be the main holdfast of the WEF elite, and thus conveniently positioning himself as the big bold iconoclast.

In reality, Schwab and his ilk couldn’t care less about such semantic framings—they are expert at co-opting and appropriating any system to their ends. If you give them control of a “socialist” country, they will use their puppet leader to impose top-down mandates via ‘central planning’ that suit their agenda; give them a ‘free market capitalist’ one, and they will use their vast transnationalist corporations to uproot and capture all industries, rolling them into the global mega-monopoly. In other words: it isn’t one system against the other, it’s humanity vs. a cabal of financial elites controlling the Western banking system, and as extension of that, all corporations and industries.

Next up on the list of the unprecedented Davos revolt: Stephen A. Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone.

Blackstone CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman tells the Davos crowd that the US is not prepared for four more years of Biden's $2 trillion deficits, 8 million illegals invading America, and a debt-to-GDP ratio going higher and higher. He's right.

Followed by CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, who states very urgently: “If you do not control the borders, you are going to destroy our country.”

This X thread captured the stunning zeitgeist shift best:

There's something extremely important here that is not being recognized, but those who can read between the lines are realizing it and it's scaring the shit out of people: Elements of the Davos class **are preparing to defect to the Trump/populist movement.**

The world right now is terrifying to the Davos Class. Everything is going wrong, the populists have entered the inner sanctum and are openly saying "you guys are the problem your doom is coming," and there's a feeling the neoliberal intl. system is at the edge of the abyss.

The economy — which is what is keeping the US-led international order (i.e., neoliberal order, aka the American empire) afloat for now — is looking BAD. Even if Trump were to *lose* the presidential election, its understood that things would break.

And they don't think Trump is going to lose. These people, clueless as they can be, also see the opinion polls and can sense where things are going.

This sense of impending doom is creating A LOT of panic/denial in Democrat and neoliberal circles. Election's unwinnable, stealing it again is harder this time because everyone's wised up...

The legitimacy of their system ("meritocracy"/expert rule) is collapsing ("adults in the room" is now a joke), the international environment can't hold (see: Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, the Red Sea, etc), the rainbow coalition at home is starting to tear itself apart...

Democrats and neoliberals — who've spent 8 years convincing themselves and everyone else that Trump is an impending dictator — are convinced Orange Hitler is about to take over the Reichstag. And at this point, Trump has said "fuck it, I'll be the monster you think I am."

Here's the thing though: while Democrats and progressives screaming that their ship is sinking and the icy water awaits, some of the cooler-headed neoliberal centrists are looking at the lifeboats and thinking "...actually, maybe there's an out here."

For these Davos class types, this isn't their first rodeo. These financier/business types lived through the rise of Putin and the purging of the oligarchs, Xi doing similar and imposing "requirements" for companies wanting market access, etc.

Now, a good number of them *genuinely believe* that a repeat of that may be in the cards for the US. Wanting to survive, at the very least SOME of them will be willing to do a deal with the proverbial devil. Especially if he's hinting "sign up now or else."

“And what if I DON'T sign up?" they reason. "Do I REALLY wanna take a risk being on the Trump admin shitlist? In a populist, anti-elite environment? With an impending recession/depression? In an increasingly multipolar global environment?"

….So if you're a Davos class type — in finance, private equity, multinational business, certain think tank/academic/nonprofit types who depend on political connections — your gut instinct is to SURVIVE at all costs. If that means a deal with the populist, well then...

The OP pulls from this new Bloomberg article:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-19/davos-sees-the-global-economy-settling-into-strange-new-dynamic

The six-member panel was charged with summarizing the mood in Davos after a week where participants tended to put a brave face on the global outlook, accentuating the likelihood that a deep recession will probably be avoided despite unprecedented monetary tightening to bring inflation under control.

The article summarizes the mood as tense, with the fretting elites even openly invoking the possibility of the Dollar being dethroned as global reserve currency:

“If we don’t resolve this (fiscal issues), something’s going to happen to the dollar,” he said. “If the United States can’t get its fiscal act together, at some point, people are going to do what they did to the British pound and the Dutch guilder years ago.”

Some continued to wear ‘brave masks’ but others were vocal in their disbelief at what’s happening:

Harvard University Professor Ken Rogoff worried that “the geopolitical situation is like nothing I’ve seen in my professional lifetime.”

Finally, the crowning moment of emphatic WEF disillusionment came from Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts who roundly gored the wide-eyed technocrats with his unique brand of eloquent incision:

Roberts’ polemic is what Javier Milei’s aspired to be. He gave the fusty elites a piece of mind, disrobing them on precisely the issues everyone else is so afraid to broach. The truth is, many of the world’s elites—even from the ostensibly globalist cut—do not agree with the more extreme shifts of late. They simply know they have to carry the water jug for BlackRock and co. to avoid certain corporate and social ‘penalties’.

It’s why there’s fairly good chance that in the coming years we will see some kind of reorientation: the more reasonable among them will shift back over to the side of rationality. In that light, the Davos meeting could be seen as one of the early canary-in-coalmine moments for the direction of things.

The elites are stratified like everything else, which means the more radical and fringe contingents will continue bearing the vanguard’s lance to push ahead into new territory. That’s why despite the obvious fractures and nervousness pervading their class for the first time, the ultra-radicals amongst them have continued to push their extreme platforms forward.

The latest threat being prototyped at Davos, ‘Disease X’:

WHO director general Tedros Ghebreyesus got accosted on his way to Schwab’s soiree by an intrepid reporter: “When will you release Disease X?”

Naturally, the goal behind such fear-gen is to rattle our bones enough to keep the ink from drying on the mRNA gene therapy approvals via the age-old ‘endless tension strat’, as well as dress the psychological table for the eventuality of a new fake pandemic to lock us down at another key point, allowing the cover up of another historic financial or election fraud.

The climate agenda won the top billing for the event as usual. Some of the recognizable mainstays who’ve tirelessly rolled the fraudulent boulder up the hill for years again fed their cud to the choir:

The winner for the most glaring assault on rationality was Swiss banker Hubert Keller for his lecture on how bad coffee is for the environment, with the implication that those with a conscience should be drinking far less of it (not to mention the even graver implication that the elites will one day come for our coffee entirely):

“Everytime we drink coffee, we are putting CO2 into the atmosphere.”

Le eyeroll.

And while these mincing dandies tête-à-têted their way through the perverse halls of Klaus Schwab’s Imaginarium, out in the blasted no-go-zones of their demesnes the downtrodden hordes had broken into a Bacchanalian frenzy; the Parisian rite in particular was an offal offertory for the ages:

Macron, all the while, cosplayed with the Swedish royals—indifferent to his people’s cry of the soul:

Juxtaposition évocatrice!

The condemnations weren’t limited to coffee, but as per usual, to the entire food supply, which the elite claim is ‘carbonizing the planet’:

Corporate news joined the choreographed Malthusian foray. This segment effectively classifies children as carbon-accumulators:

An environmental lobbyist told viewers of British News channel GB News Tuesday that having children presents a “moral issue” because of the amount of carbon they will produce over the course of their lifetime.

Donnachadh McCarthy argued that people should have fewer children, and that having only one child is “great”.

In the meantime, European capitals have been blazing—supermarkets in dystopian Paris empty owing to the widespread farmer strikes:

Even today, as European leaders met at the EU summit in Brussels, devastation seethed around them; a statue of industrialist John Cockerill was symbolically unthroned right in front of the parliament:

Rubber bullets and water cannons were deployed against hundreds of European farmers protesting outside the EU Parliament building in Brussels on Thursday. The farmers threw eggs, set off fireworks, and started fires near the building while demanding that European leaders stop punishing them with more taxes and rising costs imposed to finance a so-called 'green agenda.'

But worry not, the White House, for one, is setting an example by replacing John Kerry with a new more ‘wholesome’ Climate Czar:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/white-houses-podesta-replace-kerry-us-climate-envoy-wash-post-2024-01-31/

Doesn’t it simply fill you with relief that some of this administration’s brightest luminaries are being assigned to the most pressing tasks?

But the final most immediately troubling focus from the globalists was on ‘disinformation’. Most striking was that their tone matched the urgency expressed at other issues outlined earlier. Here too they evinced a growing fear of losing the narrative war and alienating the populace.

This came on the heels of sweeping layoffs in the entire news media and publication/print industry:

Taylor Lorenz broke it down in a widely circulated must-watch explainer:

ZeroHedge covered it also:

Everyone is going down!

BuzzFeed and Vice Media, two onetime darlings of digital media that have shrunk in size and relevance in recent years, are likely to get even smaller.

BuzzFeed, whose stock has lost more than 97% of its value since the company went public in 2021, is looking to sell its food sites, Tasty and First We Feast, according to people familiar with the situation. Meanwhile, Fortress Investment Group, which took over Vice in bankruptcy last year, is in talks to sell its Refinery29 women’s lifestyle-focused site, other people said.

So what is the issue, exactly—why is the entire industry ‘cratering’, as Lorenz put it? And why are the elites suddenly displaying such rare and uncharacteristic self-awareness in their horror of being replaced?

The WEF symposium took a stab at the dilemma:

They admit that people are actually, for once, demanding…accountability from their journalism. They want to know how their news is sourced, where it’s coming from and why. This is after years of corporate news outlets taking their free ride for granted, totally eroding their own trustworthiness and reliability by cutting corners, skirting rules, and generally following highly unethical and politicized ‘unwritten rules’. This includes modern new normals like lazy “anonymous sources” standing in for obvious politicized leaks, and things of that nature.

But the biggest issue of all, of course, is the new predominance of social- and alt-media—a topic I covered extensively in this article:

Particularly ever since Musk lowered the guardrails with his acquisition of X, [mostly]free information has flowed unhindered by the obsolete gatekeeping relics of the corporate media. This is primarily why the Davos consortium has pinned ‘disinformation’ to the top of the enemies list in their short term timeline.

The dastardly dame Von Der Leyen highlights just that in her speech:

It’s no small surprise then that she lists the EU’s rollout of the “Digital Services Act” as the pinnacle in subduing this existential ‘freedom of speech’ bugbear that’s got them so rattled. The DSA is a topic I expounded on as well:

Not to mention looked ahead to the mass clampdowns that were sure to come down the pipeline, given how badly the establishment’s trust had been eroded.

After all, is it any wonder that people like this can’t figure out why no one takes them seriously anymore?

The above isn’t a joke, by the way. Several of the legacy news powerhouses have decried China’s lax censorship recently, when it came to their golden goose of Israel: NYTimes and CNN amongst them. Did you ever think you’d live to see the upside down Orwellian propaganda take such a turn as to lambaste China for being too free?

The people who lectured us on the dangers of reading outside the lines are now terrified that we’ve ignored them, and continue to think for ourselves.

That’s the problem with these globalists, to hide their crimes they must keep doubling down—but to do so requires ever more effort and increasing complexity of improbable and nonsensical dot-connecting and excuse-making gymnastics. It’s sort of like the theory of relativity and the speed of light: the closer toward the speed you get, the more preposterously unrealistic the energy requirements become.

It feels more and more like the elites are reaching their 0.99c level, and the absurdity of their layer-caked concoctions are near to bursting at the seams.

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