Do these people honestly think that Schwab is in cahoots with AOC and using the pandemic to put BP out of business with the full cooperation of BP? Of course not. But President Donald Trump is on his way out, and the Green New Deal is popular precisely because it is as far away from Davos as it could be, grounded in a polluter-pays ethos and in programs like a jobs guarantee and universal health care that enjoy broad working-class support. For right-wing politicians and the oil companies that back them, the more climate action can be conflated with an organization known for its traffic jams of private jets and its Bond villain founder, the easier it will be to resist any climate plan at all. That's why the earliest alarmism about the Great Reset came from the Heartland Institute, ground zero of the climate change denial machine.
This messaging is gaining traction not because people are suckers but because they are mad and they have every right to be. Lockdown policies have demanded months of individual sacrifice for the collective good without providing the most basic collective protections to keep families from slipping into starvation and homelessness, or to keep small businesses afloat. Meanwhile, trillions have been spent to backstop markets and bail out multinationals, and pandemic profiteering is rampant. Is it any wonder that so many find it entirely plausible that the same elites who expect them to swallow all the coronavirus-related sacrifices while they party in the Hamptons and on private islands would also be willing to exaggerate the risks of the disease to get them to the accept more bitter "green" medicine, for the common good? As that first Davos theme made clear, trust between the people and the mountaintop has been broken and it most certainly has not been rebuilt.
For a glimpse of how all of this fits together, take a look at what is going on in Alberta, Canada, under its truly reprehensible premier, one Jason Kenney. Kenney came to power pledging to serve as a shameless valet for the Alberta oil patch, specifically its extra-fast-planet-cooking tar sands. He promised to ram through all pipelines, no matter the opposition, and create a "war room" to surveil all opponents.
Back in March, in the early days of the pandemic, I observed that Kenney deserved the award for the most craven COVID-19 disaster capitalist because he had just laid off 20,000 education workers, supposedly to cover pandemic costs, even as he lavished $7 billion in public subsidies on the Keystone XL pipeline, despite the lockdowns having created a massive glut in crude oil. He followed up in the fall by laying off 11,000 health care workers, a clear effort to use the Covid-19 crisis to open the door to partial U.S.-style health care privatization.
It has surprised no one that Kenney has also presided over a U.S.-style coronavirus explosion, with the province's positivity rate recently topping 10 percent (higher than the average south of the border). Now Kenney, a self-proclaimed big-government-bashing libertarian, has been reduced to begging Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for funds to build field hospitals.
Is it any wonder he has been looking to change the subject? Last week, Kenney did exactly that, selecting a question about the Great Reset during a Facebook livestream. The premier feigned horror at the idea that Klaus Schwab could possibly see Covid-19 as an opportunity to advance policy goals, describing the plan as a "grab bag of left-wing ideas for less freedom and more government" and "failed socialist policy ideas." Warming up to his subject, he declared: "I'm not going to be taking any policy direction from Klaus Schwab and his ilk. " Heck no! We are not going to exploit or take advantage of a crisis to advance a political agenda. " It's very distasteful and regrettable that influential people would explicitly seek to take advantage of a crisis like this to advance their own political vision and values."
The online right rejoiced: "Jason Kenny Shows Real Leadership Rejecting Klaus Schwab's New World Order!" declared one outlet, and I can't bear to link to the many, many others.
Sadly, Kenney's aversion to crisis opportunism comes late for the thousands of newly unemployed education and hospital workers in his province, or for the hundreds of patients who will soon be getting treatment in its field hospitals. And though Kenney was quick to say that the Great Reset was not a conspiracy theory and that the coronavirus is real, his statements were immediately seized upon by the growing numbers of people who are seriously convinced that COVID-19 is a hoax cooked up by Davos globalists to eliminate their private property, poison their brains with 5G, and take away their right to go to the gym.
In Alberta, thousands of those people participated in maskless "Walk for Freedom" marches last week. I have no doubt that Kenney meant it when he told them to cut it out, just as he no doubt wants Covid-19 to stop ravaging his province, along with his reputation. But what he wants far more is to stop the momentum toward climate action in coronavirus recovery plans so the oil companies that underwrite his party and government can wring out a few more profitable quarters. And he, along with growing numbers of similarly craven politicians the world over, sees fueling the Great Reset conspiracy as the most effective means of achieving that goal.
None of this is to say that Schwab's Reset push is benign and unworthy of scrutiny. All kinds of dangerous ideas are lurking under its wide brim, from a reckless push toward more automation in the midst of a joblessness crisis, to the steady move to normalize mass surveillance and biometric tracking tools, to the very real (though not new) problem of Bill Gates's singular power over global health policy. The irony, though, is that the fact-Vitamix currently whirring around the Great Reset actually makes it harder to hold the Davos set accountable for any of this, since legitimate critiques have now been blended together with truly dangerous anti-vaccination fantasies and outright coronavirus denialism.
It also makes it harder to talk about the profound realignment our economies and societies desperately need, a vision a group of us laid out in the short film we released way back in October called "The Years of Repair" because now all talk about how we change for the better in response to the cruelties that COVID-19 has unveiled is immediately smeared as part of the Great Reset. As the historian Quinn Slobodian recently wrote, years after "The Shock Doctrine" was published, "the right was now appropriating this narrative for its own ends." Meanwhile, the less fantastical but extremely real shock doctrine maneuvers currently waging war on public schools, hospitals, small farmers, environmental protections, civil liberties, and workers' rights receive a fraction of the attention they deserve.
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