The way out of serfdom 84

Suddenly, with the invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russian forces, nationalism is back in favor.

So now can the anti-nationalists, the globalists, the collectivists, the World Economic Forum plotters of world socialist government, be consigned with their terrible threat to that vast overflowing dustbin of history?

Zach Weissmueller of Reason tells us that we can escape from the tyranny, we can be free, there is a way out, but it could be hard.

Oligarchy 156

The Supreme Court has no way of enforcing its rulings.

It depends totally on the legislative and executive branches of government to enforce them.

If, as now, a party takes power (“takes”, not “wins”, being the right word for how the Democratic Party has come to have it) over both the legislative and executive branches and chooses not to obey the Supreme Court, there is nothing that can be done about it. Nothing. 

The Framers of the Constitution never imagined it could happen.

Now the Democrats in power know that they need not go to the trouble of packing the Supreme Court, they can simply disobey it. Ignore it. And that’s what they’re doing.

The Court ruled that a moratorium forbidding eviction for non-payment of rent is illegal – but the “Biden” administration went ahead with it.

The  period of the moratorium was due to end about now, but the administration has decided to extend it. Again the Court has declared that it is illegal. Again the administration has imposed it.

Imposed it how? Not even by administrative order of “President Biden”.  A  woman, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who heads the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has issued the order. And the administration gladly enforces the rulings of the CDC.

Landlords may not demand rent from tenants. But they must continue to pay property taxes and maintenance costs.

One of the few journalists who have chosen to tell the public about this is John Daniel Davidson who writes (in part) at The Federalist:

An astonishing thing happened this week in Washington that didn’t get much critical coverage from a media establishment loath to criticize President Biden. At the behest of congressional Democrats, Biden flouted the Constitution and broke his oath of office by issuing a ban on evictions that he and his advisers know to be illegal.

By “ban on evictions” I mean the president issued a blatantly unconstitutional decree that renters all across America don’t have to pay rent. If landlords try to evict tenants for not paying rent, they could face criminal penalties including fines and imprisonment.

The eviction moratorium is one of the most important stories of the COVID-19 lockdowns but also one of the least covered, because the left doesn’t want to draw undue attention to its evisceration of property rights under the guise of public health.

Nationwide nearly half of the landlords are people who own a second house or apartment that they rent out. Many of these people have gone a year without receiving any rent, yet they’re still liable for taxes, upkeep, and mortgage payments. Landlords  are supposed to be able to survive because of a $46.5 billion federal government rental relief fund. The problem is, the money isn’t being used. With trillions of government aide already creating incentives for people not to return to work, the eviction moratorium creates an incentive not to pay rent.

The way all this has gone down illustrates a deeply disturbing reality about the Democrats running the pandemic response in Washington: They’re lawless, and as the pandemic drags on, they’re becoming bolder about it.

The background here is that a nationwide ban on evictions expired on Saturday. Since then, Democrats in Congress have been agitating for an extension of the ban despite a determination by the U.S. Supreme Court in June that the CDC has no legal authority to do that, as anyone with a passing familiarity of the U.S. Constitution could tell you.

The utter contempt for the rule of law shown in all of this is simply staggering.

The notion that a federal agency tasked with the control and prevention of infectious diseases could simply by fiat impose an “eviction moratorium” on the entire country, effectively nationalizing housing, is shocking and outrageous. Biden himself knows this. At a press conference on Tuesday, he said “The bulk of the constitutional scholars say it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.”

It sure isn’t. But later that same day he did it anyway.

*

What all this means is that America is no longer a democracy, no longer a free republic. It is a dictatorship.

This country is now governed dictatorially. 

The power to dictate is in the hands of an oligarchy.

The oligarchs are the very rich. The richest men who have ever lived. They are technocrats who own the means of mass communication, newspapers, television news media, the “social” media. They own the politicians through whom they will transform the world.

So it is a plutocratic oligarchy.

The plutocrats are almost all men. Their executive consists increasingly of women: women governors, public prosecutors, mayors, police chiefs, member of congress, cabinet members, directors of government agencies. Lifted into office by the oligarchs, one could reasonably call them the dictators’ “temps” – the Grand Temps of the American oligarchy.

And there is nothing that can be done to bring the dictators down.

Vote them out of power? Can we really believe that there will be fair elections ever again? If a (constitutionally required) election is held at all, it will be rigged. On the excuse that there is a dangerous virus threatening the nation so that voters must keep far apart from each other – which,  the CDC will assure them, they must do to survive – elections will be by mail and “drop box” only. Staff under the Grand Temps will collect the ballot sheets, count them in closed offices, and announce the result: a huge majority (why not 100%?) for the re-election of the oligarchs’ chosen executors.

It is more than likely that the position of Oligarch will become hereditary. Then it will be an aristocratic oligarchy. Who knows but there may even be a monarch?

The dictators of the twentieth century – Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Mugabe, Chavez – became rich by becoming dictators.

The new American oligarchic dictators became rich first, then became dictators.

They will not be satisfied with dictatorial power over America. They are “globalists”. They desire global power. Plutocrats from everywhere on earth meet at Davos, and it was there, in the small Swiss town on a mountain, that the decision was taken to “reset” the way human beings will live and how they will be governed.

The world they intend to create is very different from the world we have known.

There will be no nation states. No borders. The impoverished peoples of what was once called the Third World will continue for a time to move in vast numbers into what used to be called the First World. It does not matter to the oligarchs where people settle. The oligarchic power will extend over them all wherever they may be.

Individuals, other than the oligarchs, will own nothing. No house, no money, no clothes, no car … Not even an electric car. Not even a bicycle. Everything will be provided for them by the Global Oligarchy. What they “need” will be decided by their masters.

They will be allowed the temporary use of things – clothes, maybe a bicycle.

They will be housed, each in a tiny apartment in a vast building. (Herding people together is useful for the spreading of disease when population needs to be reduced.) They will be fed communally. There will be no families.  Breeding will be controlled. Children will be raised by staff of the Oligarchy.

Only some children will be taught to read and write and reckon. All will be taught obedience to the authorities.

Adults will be assigned jobs. The product of their labors will be distributed by the authorities.

A permanent aristocracy will rule over a world of slaves.

The Great Reset 60

The World Economic Forum is now (January 25-29, 2021) enjoying its 51st session.

It is about to change our world forever. Or hopes to. If we let it.

Its main purpose this year is to promote the implementation of the Great Reset.

The Great Reset is, according to its admirers:

A project to bring the world’s best minds together to seek a better, fairer, greener, healthier planet as we rebuild from the pandemic.

The first thing to know about the World Economic Forum, which meets annually at Davos in Switzerland, is that it is a voluntary luxury parliament of billionaires and politicians and billionaire-politicians.

The next thing to know is: what is it for, what do these people aim at, what do they want? And the answer, with no exaggeration, is: they want to rule the world.

The Covid-19 world-wide epidemic provides the would-be world rulers with their best opportunity yet for claiming that “world solutions” are needed.

So now again an arrogance of theorists [collective noun; singular verb] wants to organize the rest of us, or as many of the rest of us as can be raked in and arranged into a pattern of existence they know to be beautiful. Their aim is only to do us good. Theirs is a kindly plan for putting human affairs right and making the whole world nice, and they alone can do it. That is their conviction, their unshakable belief.

They call their plan the “Great Reset”. They will gather into their own hands all the wealth of the world (now don’t go asking what that is or how such a thing can be done!) and redistribute it equally so each gets the same share as everyone else. (No, shush, don’t ask whether they will put their own wealth in the pool for redistribution. That’s another inappropriate question. Please try not to be hostile. Please be co-operative, neighborly, communitarian, declare that you are concerned above all else for the wretched of the earth, and you will already be helping to accomplish the Great Reset.)

This economic equalizing of all – leading, they say, inevitably to the social equalizing of all (though not of course making us all equal in power with them, the rulers themselves) – is NOT to be called or thought of as Communism, or Marxism, or neo-Marxism, or even Socialism. It is “a better form of capitalism”, aka “stake-holder’s capitalism”. It is the gift to humanity of Big Business.

The Great Reset has been made gloriously implementable right now by the Covid pandemic. Universal lockdown has forced people everywhere to change the pattern of their lives. The old ways have had to go. What an opportunity this is for shaping the new ways as they ideally ought to be! For directing the arc of history the way it ought to bend!

The World Economic Forum will turn a nasty disease into a boon for humankind.

There might have been difficulties put in the way by the United States of America if Donald Trump had been re-elected president in November 2020. He was a nuisance to the would-be world rulers for three years, and would have gone on holding them back for a while yet had not Covid-19 burst upon the political scene and forced even him to accept unprecedented change.

A billionaire himself but like no other, he is a man incapable of formulating a grand theory of any sort; one who personally knows people who build things with mortar and metal, actually standing among them and listening to them, sometimes wearing a hard hat himself! That man wants each of those workers to have a say in how he [generic masculine pronoun] is ruled! He wants each of them to keep the money he earns for himself and his dependents! That man would acknowledge no world crisis needing a “world solution” (not even global warming) – until he was confronted by Covid-19. That one man could have stood in the way of the Davos plan for years to come, and perhaps even destroyed it forever!

They did their best to traduce him in the eyes of the millions of deplorable Americans who voted for him. They accused him of all the worst sins they could think of, calling him racist, xenophobe, Islamophobe, homophobe, transgenderphobe, misogynist, narcissist, climate change denier, liar, Nazi, Hitler. They tried to impress on the electorate that his face was orange, his hands too small, his hair too … too … They said he had two scoops of ice-cream when everyone else had only one. They explained why his wife and children were beneath their contempt. They did all that, and did everything they could think of to relieve the country of his leadership – and it made no difference. The deplorables continued to cheer him on, fanatically. Tens of millions of them. They said the accusations were not true. And then he actually got more votes in that November 2020 election than any other Republican candidate for the presidency had ever got before him!

Fortunately, somehow, even more votes were cast for his opponent Joe Biden, a man who loves the plan of Davos.

How can the visionaries of Davos not be grateful to the Covid virus for falling upon the world; grateful to China from where it emanated; grateful to the United Nation’s World Health Organization for promoting the great change in everyday life that nothing else could have accomplished?

You too must learn to love the vision and the plan.

Here is the face and the message of Davos. See it, hear it, learn it, obey it.

The face is that of Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum. He is introduced by Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission (the EU).

And here’s CNN, at highest sycophantic pitch, interviewing Klaus Schwab in 2020, when he and his like-thinkers were still trying to use “climate change” as the urgent disaster from which the world needed saving by them, before the happy advent of the Covid pandemic.

And here is Klaus Schwab talking about what he calls the fourth industrial revolution – the digital revolution – and how it requires globalization and social equalization.

And here he explains his “new definition of capitalism”.

And here is an appreciative article about the World Economic Forum put out for the occasion of this 51st. session. It is by Jonathan Michie, Professor of Innovation & Knowledge Exchange, University of Oxford, He writes at The Conversation:  

The 51st World Economic Forum starts on January 25 …

Inevitably, the event … aims to respond to the apocalyptic events of the past 12 months. “A crucial year to rebuild trust” is the theme, built around the “great reset” that World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab and Prince Charles launched last year.

The event will be accompanied by virtual events in 430 cities across the world, to emphasise the fact that we face global challenges that require global solutions and action.

This recognises that the effects of the pandemic are likely to be increasingly compounded by other major global threats, including the climate crisis, financial crises, and social and economic inequality. To give just one example, the COVID-19 mortality rate in England in December was over twice as high in the most deprived areas than the least deprived.

See? Pure philanthropy drives the WEF.

So how successful is the WEF’s mission likely to be?

This is not the first time that global crises have required global action, but there have been mixed results in the past. After the first world war, the UK played a pivotal role in forming the League of Nations on the international stage. But this ultimately failed to deliver, with the UK’s insistence on post-war reparations undermining Germany’s economic recovery and political stability.

So the failure of the League of Nations – and therefore the outbreak of the second world war? – was Britain’s fault.

Professor Michie does his best to make the idea of an international forum managing the world’s economy nothing to be feared; rather something already tried and tested:

When the world next sought to prevent future conflicts towards the end of the second world war, the lessons were to some extent learned from last time around. The allies met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in the US in 1944 to develop policies for economic stability.

This led to a new system of interlinked exchange rates organised around a gold-backed US dollar, as well as new institutions to help manage it, including the International Monetary Fund and what later became the World Bank. This was followed in the next couple of years by the United Nations and the forerunner to the World Trade Organization. The Bretton Woods system endured until the early 1970s when the US came off the gold standard, but much of the system created in the 1940s survives in one form or another today.

And who dares say that the creation of the United Nations and the World Trade Organization was a bad thing?

The 2007-09 financial crisis, which involved the first global recession since the 1930s, led to many calls for action to prevent similar crises in future. There was some tightening of regulation, but the threat of instability remains due to excessive debts and too much speculation.

With only the 1940s seeing a really adequate response to global crises, what will make the difference this time?

The WEF’s vision of a “great reset” recognises that what is needed to tackle these crises goes far beyond economic reforms, or climate measures, or tackling a pandemic – it is all of these combined, and more. It is the idea that global action needs to be underpinned by a mission to change society, to make it more inclusive and cohesive; to match environmental sustainability with social sustainability. It follows their call to “build back better” – one echoed by many around the world.

The WEF seeks action across seven key themes: environmental sustainability; fairer economies; “tech for good”; the future of work and the need for reskilling; better business; healthy futures with fair access for all; and “beyond geopolitics” – national governments collaborating globally.

The WEF says the key is reestablishing public trust, which is “being eroded, in part due to the perceived mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic”. But this may prove difficult, given there is little change in corporate or government leadership.

The big hope is 78-year-old Joe Biden, who was US vice president for eight years during which many of these problems were mounting, not being solved.

Sadly, the main cause for optimism is the fact that today’s crises are so great that they may provoke action. Future financial crises look likely. The climate crisis is increasingly accepted to be an existential threat. And now the pandemic is a huge economic and human disaster, with further such pandemics recognised as likely because of everything from the explosion in global travel to the effects of climate change.

A key question for this year’s conference … is whether a new form of globalisation will be developed. …

A new era is required, building on the Paris Agreement to limit climate change now that the Americans are joining again – with more support of a Green New Deal geared towards achieving net zero emissions and making the global economy truly sustainable.

We need bold initiatives to tackle the threat of future pandemics; financial speculation, tax evasion and avoidance, and the threat of financial crises; and to reduce the unsustainable inequalities of wealth, income and power across the globe.

So tax avoidance is now considered morally wrong or possibly criminal. We must arrange our financial affairs so that we pay the greatest amount of tax that we possibly can.

Will corporate and political decision-makers rise to the challenge? There needs to be sufficient popular pressure – from citizens, voters, consumers, workers, educators and activists – to push governments and business to change course fundamentally.

The professor names the forerunners of this new globalist movement:

These past few years have witnessed the Occupy movement, the Me Too MovementBlack Lives Matter and countless climate crisis groups.

Who could have predicted  that all those billionaires, many of them from Wall Street, would find reason to honor and adopt the agenda of the Occupy Wall Street movement?

Yes. And BLM – a self-declared Marxist movement – will work in perfect harmony with the new capitalism and Big Business.

Calls for action have been coming from business leaders at Davos and elsewhere for years.

The hope is that this time, the scale of the emergency will finally make radical change unavoidable.

Unavoidable, the radical change that Klaus Schwab, and Prince Charles, and Bill Gates, and George Soros, and Joe Biden will manage. We have no choice but to let it happen.

And why should we not be happy about it? It will improve the world forever. Guaranteed.

The implacable anger of the ruling class 87

The ruling class of America resents an outsider seizing the levers of power.

The outsider Donald Trump did that, which is the real reason why the ruling class hates him.

That is the view of Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion. He writes about it at American Greatness:

Children in the United States are (or at least they used to be) told that in America, anyone can become president.

Of course, that has never really been true. At any given time, there are plenty of people who, for various reasons, could never become president. But the pleasing story did name a sort of half-truth that was also an ideal, an ideal that revolved around the effort to maintain a society that rewarded talent, ambition, and hard work more than it valued wealth, connections, or pedigree.

Donald Trump put that ideal to the test. The test failed.

Trump was the first candidate since Andrew Jackson really to challenge the dominant narrative. Trump was rich, which is a plus for candidates these days. But he came not just from the wrong sort of family, but also from the wrong consensus, the wrong universe of opinion and sentiment.

It was not so much his particular policies that were at issue. It was rather what he himself represented. Some people have banged on and on about Trump’s “character”, which they said was a bad character. But I do not believe that his character was ever really the issue. The issue was that he represented an existential threat to the governing consensus.

This consensus is not fundamentally Democratic or Republican. It is not really even left-wing or conservative. John Fonte came close to identifying it with his phrase “transnational progressivism.” The “transnational” part was just as important as the “progressive” element, not least because the definition of “progressive” is always a mutable and hungry thing. Yesterday’s progressive ideas routinely become tomorrow’s reactionary throwbacks because the critical thing is not specific policies but specific attitudes.

The transnational ruling class meets at Davos. It governs the EU. It conducts the raucous orchestrated evil worked continually by the UN. It is perpetually, stubbornly, ardently against the idea of people doing whatever they want to do.

It helps explain why so successful a president—has anyone in history had a more successful first term than Donald Trump?—could still be so cordially hated by the credentialed elite, both in this country and abroad.

Cordially? No. Not cordially. Bitterly. Furiously.

That elite has “gone beyond” such parochial affections as patriotism [and] national identity … To a large extent it has even “gone beyond” or at least redefined family. Donald Trump was a walking rebuke to every finer feeling with which they congratulated and fanned themselves. For four years, they stood together as one to emit a primal scream of repudiation. Nothing worked. Not the Russia collusion delusion, not the preposterous Ukrainian impeachment follies, not the dark talk about invoking the 25th Amendment, nothing.

Now, finally, their concerted assault against a U.S. presidential election may have done the trick. …

But …

Some 73 million people voted for Donald Trump. They are not retreating in silence to their caves. They are galvanized with the MAGA spirit that Trump inculcated in the country and, except for a handful of soy boys, in the Republican Party. As I write, thousands upon thousands of people are descending upon Washington D.C. for “a million MAGA march”. There is the “Women for Trump” contingent, the “Stop the Steal” contingent, and more. These are the people who are fleeing Fox News, Twitter, Facebook, not to mention CNN, The New York Times, and the entire woke establishment to create a counterforce …

I suspect that Donald Trump may have the last laugh.

Many people have bet against Donald Trump over the years. Most came to regret it. …

Donald Trump advises:

Never bet against me.”

If Kimball is right – and I think he makes a good case – the republic of the United States is not governed by the people for the people, but by a few people for their own gratification.

They risk allowing general suffrage, and occasionally the risk takes their assumed birthright of power away from them as Donald Trump did in 2016. They are trying to snatch it back by any means, however immoral, violent, and persistently arrogant.

They need to be permanently overthrown, and the movement of the people launched by Donald Trump may yet succeed in doing it. It would be the greatest historical triumph since the founding of the American republic.

Posted under United States by Jillian Becker on Sunday, November 15, 2020

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The new axis of evil: Davos and China 62

Watch this. It’s absolutely essential that we know exactly what is right now threatening us all.

A new hero of the fight for freedom, Rowan Dean, reveals with perfect clarity the plot to establish hell on earth:

Posted under China, communism, Environmentalism, Fascism, Videos by Jillian Becker on Friday, November 13, 2020

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Where hell is cool 329

The so-last-century World Economic Forum that still meets annually at Davos in Switzerland, recommends that the United States become “more like Sweden”.

Nations can learn from Nordic and other European countries when it comes to helping people scale up the economic ladder, and countries like China and the United States could reap billions by boosting social mobility, a report said Monday.

The World Economic Forum released its first “Global Social Mobility Index”, which analyzed 82 countries and suggests that governments should ensure a level playing field not just because it is the right thing to do, but it can benefit their economies.

“A level playing field” is a well-worn euphemism for Socialism among the globalists.

The release comes a day before the forum opens its latest annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland, where concerns about growing inequality are high in the minds of organizers.

“Inequality has become entrenched and is likely to worsen amidst an era of technological change and efforts towards a green transition,” the forum said.

In other words, “going green” would be a vast impoverishment, the forum admits. But – it believes – once the whole world has done it, there will be no more economic inequality. The greening – giving up fossil fuels and relying on the wind to blow us energy – will be accompanied by redistribution of money, so all people, all nations, will be equally poor, equally hungry. Except only the redistributors, the virtuous instigators of universal want. They will be well-fed.   

It has an index, “the forum” does. Inspired by the very same spirit that guides Bernie Sanders, it excites the elect with rosy conceptions.

The index ranked Denmark, Norway, Finland. Sweden and Iceland as its top five countries, registering over 80 points on a 100-point scale, while the United States came in at 27th, Russia was 39th, and China took 45th.

Somehow the notion that “social mobility” serves the cause of equality has arisen in its communal mind:

“If economies were able to improve their social mobility score by 10 points, gross domestic product would increase by 4.4% by 2030 on top of the societal benefits such investments would bring,” the forum said in a statement.

Redistribution aka Socialism has never increased GDP. It cannot. It is not a mechanism for increasing GDP. It is a mechanism for squandering wealth. And social mobility and economic equality are mutually exclusive. Social mobility occurs only with capitalism in a genuinely open society. Why don’t they know that? Who are they?

We come upon a name as the speaker of typically unintelligible patter:

Saadia Zahidi, a forum managing director for the new economy and society, said the report found that governments for now could make the greatest improvement in boosting social mobility by supporting [ever rising?] wages, quality of work [?], and “life-long learning systems”. [Systems?] “These are not things that are going to create a drag on growth,” Zahidi said. “These are actually things that are going to facilitate better growth. So that’s one aspect. The second aspect is that the gains can actually be quite big.”

Zahidi said she considered the index as warning sign or even a solution “to the trend towards entrenched inequality”.

How did Zahidi get there? Who is listening to her? Hers is a voice from the fog of Davoses past.

Would it be good if America became more like Sweden?

Not only socialists but all sorts of other romantics such as libertarians hold Sweden to be the model nation for prosperity, security, and happiness. As near to a utopia as earth has to show.    

So what is Sweden really like?

Bruce Bawer writes at Front Page:

Poking around YouTube the other day, I stumbled across a 2018 documentary that was written and hosted by Johan Norberg, a 46-year-old Swedish economist who is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank in Washington, and who is one of his country’s leading boosters of free trade and free markets. This was hardly Norberg’s first venture into the documentary form: in 2003, Britain’s Channel 4 aired Globalisation is Good, in which Norberg celebrated the prosperity created in Taiwan and Vietnam through the outsourcing of factory jobs from the U.S. – but neglected to breathe a word about the catastrophic impact of that outsourcing on millions of American workers.

Norberg’s 2018 documentary is entitled Sweden: Lessons for America? In it, he traces Sweden’s economic ups and downs over the last couple of centuries: once a dirt-poor land in the grip of guilds and regulations, Sweden embraced the free market and low taxes – resulting in a century of burgeoning prosperity – only to “screw it up” in the 1960s by introducing a big-government welfare state that charged Pippi Longstocking author Astrid Lindgren a 102% income rate and Ingmar Bergman 139%. (He fled to Germany.) From 1976 to 1995, Sweden went downhill; interest rates hit 500%; IKEA moved its headquarters abroad. But the story, as Norberg tells it, has a happy ending: the 1990s brought reforms – deregulation, lower taxes, school vouchers, widespread privatization of public services, no minimum wage – that resulted in a first-rate climate for entrepreneurship and innovation and a “very productive private economy” that yields enough wealth to fund generous welfare benefits and pensions. America, we’re urged in Norberg’s conclusion, should look to Sweden as a model.

Some observers would contest Norberg’s explanation of how Sweden attained economic success. “It got to be one of the richest countries in the world,” Swedish comedian Aron Flam said on a 2017 podcast, “by staying out of two world wars and selling arms to both sides” and, during the Cold War, relying on NATO (which it never joined) for free defense. But let’s put history aside for now and focus on the present. At the outset of his documentary, Norberg promises to show us “what it’s like to live in Sweden today”. When it comes to this topic, his show is a masterpiece of evasion – one that echoes much of the nonsense one often encounters in glowing libertarian accounts of the “Swedish model”. Libertarians, when they talk about Sweden, like to deny that Sweden is socialist, even though the country was ruled for decades by a party that identified as socialist; in any event, the fact remains that Swedes are, by nature, collectivist, statist, consensus-oriented, and anti-individualistic – scared to challenge received opinion and eager to join in ostracizing those who do.

They’re also, thanks to years of suicidal immigration policies, living in a social, economic, and cultural nightmare – to quote Flam, “a slow, simmering war zone“. In the cities, violent crime, shootings, gang rapes, car burnings, massive explosions, and even grenade-throwing have become routine. Just in the last couple of weeks, the chief of the National Police, Anders Thonberg, has put in an urgent request for backup from the military, and Ulf Kristersson, head of the Moderate Party, has charged the government with losing “control of what is happening in Sweden”. …

In a January 13 blog post, a cleric named Helena Edlund observed that in her hometown of Malmö it became normal some time ago “to wake up to bombs and bullets”; now, she laments, the same is the case in the most exclusive parts of central Stockholm, where she lives now. “I have lost count of the friends whose family members have been robbed, beaten, raped, or had their cars burned or stairs blown up,” she wrote. “For those who have lived in relative security in the country’s more privileged areas, this is something new, but those who live in vulnerable areas have had it this way for many years.” The same politicians whom Norberg extols unreservedly for making today’s Sweden wealthy and dynamic are accused by Edlund of having “destroyed” the country with their open-border policy and their readiness to roll out the welcome mat for “terrorists”.  Addressing those pols, Edlund asks: “What advice do you have for those of us who loved Sweden’s peace and security? Where should we go to seek asylum?”

The perpetrators of all this mayhem, of course, are Muslims, either immigrants or the children of immigrants – people to whom Sweden provided refuge and whom it has rewarded lavishly for not working. Most of them reside in no-go sharia enclaves where even the cops fear to tread. In 2016, a 60 Minutes Australia film crew was beaten by Somali migrants in Rinkeby, a no-go zone in Stockholm that is also known as “Little Mogadishu”. (“This,” said host Liz Hayes, “is a country that’s barely coping”; in an interview, an activist told her that Sweden is “on the brink of an economic and cultural disaster.”) Last September, a news team for Sweden’s SVT was targeted by stone throwers at the construction site for a new mosque in Stenhagen (“stone grove”), a no-go zone in Uppsala.

Then, last December 12, journalist Joakim Lamotte ventured, video camera in hand, into the town square of another no-go zone, Kronogården in the city of Trollhätten, thereby attracting the attention of several dozen young Muslim men, most of them masked, who (as can be seen here and here) gradually closed in on him, verbally harassed him, demanded that he leave “their” turf, and finally struck him repeatedly and stole his video equipment. Several police officers were present, but did nothing to protect Lamotte and made no arrests, even though a couple of them were also physically assaulted by the thugs.

How did Lamotte’s fellow Swedish journalists respond to this horror show? By mocking him and expressing support for his attackers. Robert Aschberg, a prominent Aftonbladet columnist, accused Lamotte of being a profiteering, self-dramatizing attention-seeker; Mathias Ståhle of Svenska Dagbladet tweeted that Lamotte’s account of being beaten and robbed made him “giggle”. The Swedish media’s take on this story was so egregious that even the BBC ran a report calling them out and treating Lamotte sympathetically.

The BBC did that? It must have been on a day when pigs were seen flying.

Fortunately, after decades of polite PC silence, more and more Swedes are finally admitting that they’re in deep trouble – hence the fast-rising support for the upstart Sweden Democrats, who call for serious immigration controls. Yet too many mainstream politicians and journalists remain in denial. Legislator Isabella Lövin asserted in 2016 that Sweden, with “the world’s first feminist government” …

It may have been the first, but most Western European countries now have them. The European Union is led by wymyn. Even where there are still some males in positions of power, the system is gynocratic – pacifist, emotional, conciliatory …

… is nothing less than a beacon of hope for the Western world; as of last November, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven was still sticking to the line that the underlying cause of all this lawlessness is high unemployment in certain neighborhoods; the felons’ cultural and religious backgrounds, he insisted, are irrelevant. In Sweden: Lessons for America?, Norberg lauds the newspaper Aftonbladet; in a bracingly blunt 2019 op-ed about elite Swedish views on immigration, Norwegian author Kjetil Rolness accused that paper (the flagship publication of the Swedish elite) of “almost pathological denial of realities, in favor of wishful thinking and virtue signaling”.

In 2016, the Spectator ran an unusually frank article by Tove Lifvendahl, the political editor of Svenska Dagbladet, about Sweden’s immigration challenges; but its subtitle was telling: “We’ve taken in far too many people and we’re letting them down badly – especially the children.” This is the Swedish establishment mentality in a nutshell: even when they’re being honest about the problem, they reflexively feel obliged to express more concern for immigrants than for native Swedes  

The anarchy in the streets is only part of the big scary picture. Norberg’s documentary portrays a Sweden where retirement homes, pensions, schools, and health care are just plain terrific. On the contrary: the immense cost of providing for immigrants (Muslims make up over 8% of Sweden’s population, the second highest figure in Europe, and the yearly bill for housing, feeding, and clothing the huge percentage of them who are on the dole is colossal) – has drained more and more money from basic services and benefits for hard-working native Swedes (this, moreover, in a country where people with jobs are so heavily taxed, supposedly to cover those basic services and benefits, that a citizen with a purportedly decent income has to struggle to get by). In recent years, while the national mainstream media have all but ignored this mass redirection of taxpayer funds, alternative news sites and local papers have told one horror story after another about retired Swedes who’ve been unceremoniously tossed out of their residences to make room for newly arrived Muslims.

Mass immigration, Swedish businessman Henrik Jönsson told Dave Rubin on a January 17 podcast, is causing Sweden to go broke “because we have the most expensive welfare system in the world”. And yet last year the Swedish parliament, the Riksdag, voted to increase the annual number of immigrants. Rolness, again, had it right when he wrote that too many Swedes prefer foreign refugees to Swedish babies; similarly, Swedish journalist Kajsa Norman assailed police and media for downplaying assaults on Swedish girls by Muslim men, maintaining that “sympathy for the refugees trumps sympathy for the girls”.

What did Sweden: Lessons for America? have to say about this crisis that seems destined to drag Sweden into anarchy, civil war, and/or sharia? Nothing whatsoever. … Does he mention that Jews are leaving Sweden in droves because of Muslim harassment (and worse)? No. For that matter, while touting Sweden as an economic success story, Norberg omits to mention its dramatic decline in GDP, GDP per capita, and current account balance during the last few years (a trend that was already clear when he made his documentary).

None of which should surprise anybody. Norberg is one of those libertarians who, for all their repeatedly professed love of liberty, refuse to oppose the disastrous immigration policies that have already done serious damage to individual freedom throughout the West – witness, for example, the prosecution in Britain, Austria, Denmark, Canada, and elsewhere of citizens accused of offending Muslims.

Watching Norberg’s documentary on Sweden, one can’t help thinking of an observation by Aron Flam: “Swedes don’t really understand the concept of liberty.

Nor do the fantasists who run the World Economic Forum.

Davos goes down 101

Have those arrogant globalist elites trying to rule the world been stopped at last?

Have the nationalists, slowly awaking from their passivity and apathy to vote for Brexit and Donald Trump, to put on yellow vests and shout angrily in the streets of their Western cities, stopped them?

We quote Michael Barone writing at Investor’s Business Daily on 2/1/2019:

Turnout at Davos was lousy this year. President Trump, preoccupied by the government shutdown, was a no-show at last week’s World Economic Forum there. So were British Prime Minister Theresa May (Brexit) and French President Emanuel Macron (“gilets jaunes”). Chinese President Xi Jinping, Davos’ 2018 star, and Russian President Vladimir Putin weren’t there either. Neither were some of the usual financial and media big names.

From all of this, you might get the impression that the world’s political, financial and media elites have lost much of their prestige these days, which, of course, they have.

It’s an enormous contrast with elites’ sunny confidence, over much of the quarter century after the fall of the Soviet Union, that they could remake the world … 

Consider Mexico. The NAFTA trade agreement was proposed by the Reagan administration, negotiated by the Bush administration and ratified by the Clinton administration, with plenty of support from both parties, especially Texans (Lloyd Bentsen, the Bushes) close to the border. They hoped to make Mexico more like the United States, and to regularize Mexican immigration.

There has been some convergence, with life in much of Mexico resembling Texas, but also with large parts of California resembling Mexico. Illegal immigration surged up until the 2007 economic crisis.

Even more ambitious was the bipartisan elites’ project of bringing China into the world trading system. The hope was that an increasingly prosperous Chinese populace would demand more freedom and democracy. That hasn’t happened; instead, Xi Jinping has regressed toward one-man rule.

Meanwhile, serious academic studies have substantiated non-elite charges that Chinese imports have cost America hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs. In return, American consumers have been able to buy clothes, toys and gadgets at increasingly low prices. But for many, it is at the cost of the dignity and sense of self-worth achieved by earning a paycheck.

The chief project of European elites, the “ever-closer” European Union, has arguably worked out worse. The Euro currency that was supposed to tie Europe together has instead (as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher predicted) widened the rift between the Mediterranean countries and an increasingly dominant Germany. Britain voted for Brexit — leaving the EU — in 2016, and elites, despite astonishing contempt for voters, have so far failed to reverse that verdict. …

In each case, these elites have underestimated the force and persistence of national cultures

Perhaps the success of American military leaders in transforming post-World War II Germany and Japan turned out to be misleading. Those two countries drew on ethical and parliamentary traditions rooted in those societies and not wholly destroyed by short periods of dominance by Nazi thugs and murderous militarists. Mexico and China have different traditions, and there is no vital tradition of European unity.

Elites are impatient with people they regard as their inferiors. If you question Eurocrats’ undemocratic drive for an “ever-closer Union”, you are told that without the EU, France and Germany would once again go to war — obvious nonsense. If you advise more respect for nationalist traditions, you are told that all nationalists are Nazis — obvious nonsense again.

If you say that competition from low-wage workers in Mexico and China might cause substantial job loss in the United States, you are told what every college grad learns in Economics 101 (but what sounds counterintuitive to non-college grads), that free trade benefits both importers and exporters. You can argue that Mexican immigration and Chinese job competition peaked before 2007, but they still obviously rankle many voters.

So the political, financial and media elites have taken beatings at the ballot box … Their failures to make course corrections and their lack of respect for decent nationalism have been costly. Something to talk about if they slink back to Davos next year.

“Slink back” is good!

But to answer our opening questions: No, there is still many a battle ahead before Merkel, Macron and May – probably never accepting that they were wrong – are driven from power. The rickety EU is not yet about to be pushed over to explode in a cloud of dust. And in the US, because badly educated 18-24 year olds who have no stake in the economy are allowed to vote, there is a real danger of socialist environmentalist race-obsessed feminist globalists coming to power in the next decade.

Our rulers on high 114

The World Economic Forum meets this month, 17-20 January, in the Swiss Alpine city of Davos, “the highest city in Europe”.

At Fox News, Peter Schweizer exposes the nasty facts about the World Economic Forum – the dirt on Davos:

Later this month hundreds of private jets are expected to descend on a small town in the canton of Graubünden, Switzerland, for a few brief days.

They will be carrying the elite of the elite, who will be attending the World Economic Forum (WEF).

Held in the beautiful Alpine mountain resort of Davos-Klosters, attendance [at it] is strictly by invitation only. Basic membership in the WEF costs $50,000. A premium membership can set you back $500,000. But in recent years the WEF has enjoyed another source of income. Since 2013, the Obama administration has been sending foreign assistance dollars to the WEF through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). According to government records, the tab to taxpayers thus far is $26 million.

Davos attendees include a global elite, including heads of state, business titans, and celebrities. There are cocktail parties sponsored by multinational corporations and dinners catered by world-class chefs and served by bartenders performing magic tricks.

Celebrities like Leo DiCaprio and Bono mingle with current heads of state and tech billionaires from around the world. Attendance is so tight for the 2017 event the WEF is considering housing staff in “temporary containers” to make room for guests.

This is without a doubt the most connected non-profit on the planet.

The organization boasts that it “provides a platform for the world’s 1,000 leading companies to shape a better future’.

The globalist missionary zeal of the organization combined with its luxurious parties has earned it – the Davos meeting – the nickname “Burning Man for Billionaires.”

Not surprisingly, the WEF is also flush with cash. According to the non-profit’s 2015-2016 annual report, the organization took in $223 million (current exchange rate) in revenue, most of it from membership dues and partnership fees.

Despite the obvious wealth of the WEF and its members, USAID has given “assistance” to the WEF in the form of tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money.

Since 2013, USAID has given the World Economic Forum $26,091,370 under its Foreign Assistance to Programs Overseas initiative, which comprises nearly two-thirds of all grant and other funding WEF took in over that time period.

So why is USAID, which is supposed to focus on disaster relief and poverty relief, subsidizing such an organization?

According to the federal government’s spending website usaspending.gov, it’s unclear. The money came in sizable grants of $9.5 million in 2013, $11.1 million in 2015, and $5.7 million in 2016.

The taxpayer money began to flow the same year USAID administrators began attending the luxurious confab. USAID administrators Rajiv Shah (2011-15) or Gayle Smith (2016) have attended every Davos meeting since 2011.

In 2013, USAID changed its mission statement to make its prime goals to “end extreme poverty and promote resilient, democratic societies”.  Well, Switzerland is a “resilient democratic society”. They got that part right.

According to government contract reports, it’s unclear if taxpayer funds were taken by the WEF and sent to Africa or Asia, but it doesn’t seem so.

The “principal place of performance” of these grants was Switzerland, with the “recipient” city of Cologny, where the WEF has its headquarters. Not surprisingly, a search of online real estate records reveals the town has a substantial luxury real estate market.

A USAID official, when asked to comment, said this:

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) works with public and private partners to advance America’s security and prosperity by promoting resilient, democratic societies and ending extreme poverty. USAID has awarded grants to the World Economic Forum (WEF), including an innovative public-private partnership to spur economic growth and reduce poverty by reducing the time and costs to trade in developing countries. USAID remains committed to stringently vetting, tracking and evaluating the results of awarded grants, to include those disbursed to the WEF, and to its public and private sector partners.

How the global elite choose to spend their time is their business, but U.S. taxpayers should not be subsidizing their social lives.

The 47th annual World Economic Forum convenes on January 17th and the theme is “responsive and responsible leadership”.

In keeping with that idea, the responsible thing for the incoming Trump administration to do would be to halt grants and funding of this elite organization with taxpayer dollars.

Victoria Friedman writes at Breitbart:

The political and business elite, who attend the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, are beginning to admit their push for globalization and open borders contributed to the worldwide populist backlash and the rejection of the mass integration project.

Harvard professor and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund Kenneth Rogoff told Bloomberg that following WEF 2016 he “started to grow concerned” then-candidate Donald J. Trump would become the next president of the U.S. because his fellow frequent attendees of the gathering in the Swiss town of Davos were certain that Mr. Trump would not win. “A joke I’ve told 1,000 people in the months since leaving Davos is that the conventional wisdom of Davos is always wrong,” said the former IMF chief who is scheduled to attend Davos again this year along with some 3,000 other members of the political, business, media, and academic elite.

“No matter how improbable, the event most likely to happen is the opposite of whatever the Davos consensus is,” he added.

Davos also failed to predict the rise of populism in Europe, Italy’s rejection of constitutional change that led to the resignation of Prime Minister Mattheo Renzi, or the UK voting to leave the European Union (EU) which Forbes described as the “populist revolt against Davos Man”.

Davos Man” was coined by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington who described “these transnationals” as “[having] little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations”.

One of the eight Oxford University academics set to attend the meeting, Ngaire Woods, dean of the Blavatnik School of Government, said, “There has to be some humility. For 30 years the elite have said, ‘We’re managing globalization, and we’re making it work for everyone’.”

“They cannot just keep repeating that,” added the frequent Davos visitor.

However, WEF founder Klaus Shwab has alleged that globalization was an “easy scapegoat” for world angst, and argued that populism wasn’t the answer, saying, “We cannot just have populist solutions”.

Good grief, no! Imagine a world in which people make their own choices instead of being forced to do what their betters know is best for them!

With populism high on the agenda at Davos, one of the sessions will include a panel of psychologists offering thoughts on “cultivating appropriate emotions in a time of nationalist populism”.

It’s not enough that we must act as they wish; we must also think and even feel according to their superior understanding of what is “appropriate”.   

Managing Director of the IMF Christine Lagarde, who was found guilty in December of criminal negligence in an arbitration case over the misappropriation of funds, expressed that she wanted to rehabilitate the appearance of globalism. She said she wanted a “move toward globalization that has a different face, and which is not excluding people along the way”.

“Globalism” – aka their rule from the commanding heights – must somehow be made to look nicer. 

Lagarde will be headlining a session at Davos entitled: “Squeezed and Angry: How to Fix the Middle Class Crisis” along with hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio.  Days before the EU referendum vote, the French lawyer belittled Brexit voters by implying they were small-minded, called for a “united Europe”, and launched a report claiming a ‘Leave’ vote would lead to half a million job losses.

It didn’t – quite the opposite. But then, as Professor Rogoff said, the wisdom of Davos is always wrong

Also anticipated to attend the exclusive conclave is billionaire open borders activist and founder of the Open Society Foundations George Soros, who admitted involvement in Europe’s Migrant Crisis and called national borders “an obstacle” [to world communist government] …

George Soros has bought himself the power to spread despair and death on at least three continents. The fact that he attends the Davos SUMMIT is enough all on its own to condemn the World Economic Forum and all its works.  

The arrogance of this new royalty, the risen Left which marched through the institutions of the West and reached this snow-capped peak, is typified by the reaction of the European  Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström who, when asked a question by a poverty campaigner regarding the unpopular Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal between America and the EU, which was opposed by millions of Europeans, responded,“I do not take my mandate from the European people”.

Many of these kings and queens were Communists in their youth (and would still say they are “on the Left”). They “identified” with the “masses”. Their aim was to overthrow the ruling class and establish a “dictatorship of the proletariat” – represented of course by them, the intelligentsia, bourgeois intellectuals hungry for power. They got power. They are using it to destroy nation-states, to abolish borders, to pour the Third World into the First World, to make themselves rich at the expense of the powerless – to rule the globe.

The British and American electorates woke up to what was happening to them and saved themselves; the British by voting to leave the Union of Socialist European Republics aka the EU, the Americans by voting against the Left and for Donald Trump, champion of the people. Now dozens of rebel populist movements in Europe are clamoring for the chance to do the same.

The New Royals of Davos hope to destroy them by calling them “neo-Nazi” movements.

Because the rebels are patriots, the New Royals call them “xenophobes”. Because they do now want the savage Third World to flood their countries and impose nasty primitive alien ways on them, the New Royals call them”racists”. Because they do not want to be conquered by Islam they are called “Islamophobes” – fear of terrorism and sharia cruelty being deemed an “inappropriate emotion”.

From Davos go out the bat-winged minions of the earthly devils to implement their evil schemes. They must be stopped.

Power to the People!