Intellectual Malpractice – Davos in Retrospect

“The world is shaking, but not because of Donald Trump. He is the reaction.”

There is a causal or common resentment that is fostered when one is jealous of the circumstances or abilities of another. Then there is toxic, incurable resentment, created when one does for another what they could not do for themselves and is loathed for it. It is exaggerated further when the truth is plain for all to see.  

This is precisely what happened at the 56^th World Economic Forum (WEF) last month. Donald J. Trump showed up with five members of his Cabinet in tow, all there to deliver a postmortem on globalism.

(Mr. Trump is only the second sitting President, after Ronald Reagan, to attend Davos in person, and he was even less welcome.)

The WEF is an international “think tank” based in Switzerland – their yearly conference meeting in exclusive Davos – hence the nickname – fancies itself the home base of the New World Order with its globalist agenda of managed economies, specifically the managed economic decline of the West, open borders, and third world migration, and the end of nation-states.

The world’s elite ruling class is all in on the agenda, mainly because they have much and want more.

But the story of Davos’ 56′ is that the world they have collectively supposed was theirs for the taking – just listen to what they say – has been thrown into turmoil, anger, confusion, denial, and political acrimony not seen in our lifetimes.

And it’s a grand thing, long overdue.

The “you will own nothing and be happy” crowd, that is Davos, has collectively been working to collapse capitalism and free markets for these decades, committed to the concept of global governance, and its theoretical assumptions that you, Mr. and Mrs. Average citizen, will give up your comfortable life for a much less comfortable life for the sake of world government and something called security.  

And if you don’t want to give up that lifestyle? Well, the options available are pretty straightforward, and none of them end well for the reluctant.  

President Trump, like President Reagan, has a dim view of collectivist or communitarian industrial-grade organizations that purport to be one thing and are obviously, by their actions, quite another. Start with the United Nations and run down the list of thousands of public and private foundations and think tanks that are parasites, feasting off of taxpayers worldwide. They promote anti-human policies, many purposefully designed to destroy families and communities and whole nations.  

They serve radical socialist, Marxist dogmas long abandoned through experience by normal people. And at their core, these organizations are godless in their determination to remake humans in their own image. The larger community must subsume the individual, and freedom is to be replaced by the façade of security, until it too collapses under the burden of its contradictions with reality.

The President confronted the Davos crowd with awkward truths about which he has been consistent since his first term in office. The Western world has, for generations, grown up under the umbrella of American military might and has largely escaped the financial burden of self-defense, leaving it the luxury of being a back-set driver. In addition, their NATO contributions are nowhere close to what they promised when joining NATO.  

This allowed the European nations to shift their resources elsewhere and to erect trade barriers under the guise of value-added taxes (VAT) while manipulating the marketplace with government subsidies for their various industrial sectors, such as Airbus. In conjunction, through taxation, too many restrictive regulations, and unhelpful governments, a great deal of European industry was, like the United States, hollowed out and sent overseas, along with the jobs.

President Trump put it succinctly, “The consequences of such destructive policies have been stark — including lower economic growth, lower standards of living, lower birthrates, more socially disruptive migration, more vulnerability to hostile foreign adversaries, and much, much smaller militaries.”

And the Davos crowd is gung-ho on mass legal and illegal migration, or more crudely stated, allowing nearly forty-five million people from second and third-world countries into every Western society over the decade, ripping apart social comity and law enforcement asunder, diverting massive amounts of aid otherwise going to native citizens, driving up both house prices and crime, while lowering wages. The best of all worlds if you’re trying to sabotage and destroy modern civilization through population replacement, which is clearly the case, as it is in the US.

But while the corporate media complex and Western leaders flew into instant hysteria about the US abandoning the West, NATO, and European peace and stability, that isn’t what the President was saying.

“The United States cares greatly about the people of Europe… and we believe deeply in the bonds we share… That’s why issues like energy, trade, immigration, and economic growth must be central concerns to anyone who wants to see a strong and united West.”

Call it tough love. Like a young adult still living in their parents’ basement, the President is helping them help themselves. He is a proponent of each country doing things that help its citizens thrive and grow – unique among the politicians of the West.

Leaders in the West, like the UK’s besieged PM, Sir Keir Starmer, and France’s fading Macron, ran to the nearest microphone to denounce the President, but none more vehemently than Canada’s appointed Prime Minister (or Governor as the President referred to him), Mark Carney, who fluffed up like a peacock for his rant. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” the PM declared. He went on to urge the “middle powers” to act. “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.”

Belgian PM Bart De Wever instead channeled his inner Antonio Gramsci, the famous early twentieth-century communist theorist who proposed taking over society’s institutions one by one. “If the old is dying and the new is not yet born, then you live in a time of monsters,” presumably meaning the US. He bluntly stated, “Dependence on the United States had bred leniency, but repeated transgressions now force a choice between accommodation and dignity. If you back down now [to the US], you’re going to lose your dignity.” While the transgressions weren’t detailed, he went on to talk about building an autonomous Europe, but did not specify how it could be done. Of course, it can’t.   

There were some calmer voices, including NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who defended Trump’s NATO record and warned Europe cannot defend itself alone. Now, a few weeks on, Davos is in the rear-view mirror and reality is back. In an interview on Fox News, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent stated that PM Carney was” very aggressively walking back some of the unfortunate remarks he made at Davos.”

Reality is biting back. The world is shaking, but not because of Donald Trump. He is the reaction. He is, as I wrote earlier, a classic disruptor like Ronald Reagan (here).

Globalism and its dark ends are now obvious. Nation-states and regular citizens are fighting back, while at the same time, the Red Dragon, China, now sets its sights on a dynastic dream of world domination.

The real question out of Davos is whether the English-speaking world and Europe will, or can, reclaim their heritage and save the civilization that they largely built.