New World Order: Conrad Black’s perspective

 

Klaus Schwab is is the head of the World Economic Forum (WEF). He is famous for saying that "You Will Own Nothing and You'll Be Happy."    

Conrad Black has participated in WEF sessions, so he knows whereof he speaks.  His column at The Burning Platform offers this:

As one who attended for 20 years — and, following the controversial death of Bob Maxwell, was co-leader (with the late Lord Rothermere) of the WEF media group — I found the sessions interesting and informative, and sometimes even entertaining. (On one occasion, I was speaking with the doyen of conferenciers, Henry Kissinger; when someone approached, Kissinger said, “Here comes that goddamn Indian.” I remarked that he was quoting General Custer; the networker turned out to be the prime minister of India.) Klaus Schwab thought the leaders of the international organizations he featured at Davos — the European Union, the World Bank, the United Nations, World Court, World Trade Organization and all their affiliated agencies — should play an increasingly important role to implement his vision of universal supranationalism.

As the Cold War ended, and the international left presciently clambered aboard the accelerating bandwagon of environmentalism to attack capitalism from a different direction in the name of saving the planet, Schwab became a fully paid up advocate of the most comprehensive version of the virtues of global governance. This evolution rushed back to me these last days as I watched Schwab at the G20 meeting, as part of the Business-20 portion of the summit, with his heavy Teutonic accent that sounds like the Marx brothers imitating Kaiser Wilhelm, advising the world’s 20 most prominent political leaders that the Davos reset of a universal, heavily regulated, post-national, post-religious world of synchronized egalitarian toiling was inevitable and infinitely desirable. For a moment I wondered, in Margaret Thatcher‘s phrase, “Do my ears deceive me?” They did not.

As the editor of a just-published collection of essays titled Against the Great Reset, (Bombardier Books), Michael Walsh points out, “The World Economic Forum (WEF) advocates a complete reimagining of the Western world’s social, economic and moral structures.” This book contains 18 mostly very stimulating essays from such noted authorities as Victor Davis Hanson, Douglas Murray, Roger Kimball, Michael Anton and Walsh himself (including a modest contribution from me). Klaus Schwab has expressed pride that Justin Trudeau, Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney (who converted the Bank of England into a rabid partisan of Britain’s continued membership in the European Union and a crusading promoter of militant environmentalism) are all Davos alumni. And federal Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre has publicly warned against the WEF’s globalist agenda: “Freedom means making our own decisions here at home.”

For Schwab, stakeholder capitalism means the overarching requirements of society as interpreted and enforced by an emergent international class of theoretical regulators that would enforce the interests of everyone in society in the activities of the entire private sector. He calls this the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” which, he says, is “fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.” The 2020 book, “The Great Reset” was inspired by the COVID crisis to present a full frontal exposé of the Davos ambition 50 years after its gestation: “It will steer the market towards fairer outcomes, environmental, social and governance metrics.… To ensure that investments advanced shared goals such as equality and sustainability.… And harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges.” 

As Victor Davis Hanson points out in his essay, “The viper tongue of totalitarianism is most often bathed in palliatives before it strikes.” As I wrote, the whole concept of the Great Reset is based on the fervent endorsement of “democracy, as long as everyone votes for increased public-sector authority in pursuit of green egalitarianism and the homogenization of all peoples in a conformist world,” under the direction of the Davos claque of world bureaucrats and redistributors.  . . .

Much more at the link here.  This is no wild and crazy conspiracy theory.  It’s happening today.  And recall that among the WEF / Davis alumni are Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel, Jacinda Ardern, Tony Blair, and closer to home, Huma Abedin, Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark-R), Rep. Dan Crenshaw (TX-R), Brian Deese, National Economic Council, Tulsi Gabbard, Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, Adam Kinzinger, Gavin Newsom, Samantha Power, and Rep. Elise Stefanik  (NY-R). 

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Just out today: Against the New World Order

 

Book release Via Instapundit:

Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order  [Hardcover – October 18, 2022];  ed. Michael Walsh

Contributors include Victor Davis Hanson, Douglas Murray, Roger Kimball, the late Angelo M. Codevilla, Conrad Black, Michael Anton, and David Goldman.

Take that, Klaus Schwab.  Our household is ordering it on Kindle.  You can take a look at Mr Walsh's Introduction online at Amazon here.

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A View From Abroad

 

If you have been distressed at America’s downward spiral and dismayed by a media that will not report honestly, you are not alone. At AmericanGreatness, Conrad Black has the bad news:

After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.” 

As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”

. . .

. . . And there is no precedent for the completely avoidable and shaming debacle of the American defection from its own alliance and helter-skelter flight from Afghanistan, leaving thousands of desperate people of many nationalities who had relied upon the United States, to fend for themselves against the new terrorist regime that seized power there (and $85 billion of U.S. military hardware along with it).

. . .

The thought of the most successful alliance in history being “led” for three more years by an American president whose round-the-clock gaffes are not protected in Europe as Biden is in the United States by a totalitarian social media platform cartel and terminally biased national political media is a subject of profound and general disconcertion. 

Mr. Black’s full article is here.  I don’t agree with everything he says, but he brings a sobering perspective from our erstwhile allies overseas.

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Doctors and Doctored Numbers

image credit: powertaylor.com

At American Greatness, Conrad Black zeroes in on why this lock-down is due to both misdiagnoses (e.g., on the projected fatality rate of COVID-19) and bureaucratic over-reach:

the number of “confirmed cases”—meaning cases that have come to the attention of the medical profession—tells us nothing about the number of people infected. Nor does that number tell us what happens to the gamut of those infected. Nor is the number of deaths “hard,” because it does not distinguish between those who die of the virus and those who die merely with it (that is, they might have died even without it).

. . .

The most important fact about COVID-19, its true mortality rate, is the number who die of the virus divided by the number infected by it. No algorithms. Simple arithmetic.

In short, [Dr. Anthony] Fauci, et al., are showing themselves to be typical of our bureaucracy: over-credentialed, entrusted with too much power, and dangerously incompetent.

Learning the true figures about precisely what danger the virus poses to whom must begin by taking into account one thing we know for sure about COVID-19: that many, if not most, of those infected by this unusually contagious virus show few or no symptoms. This suggests eventual near-universal contagion.

. . .

Fauci showed how thoroughly he and his cohorts have subordinated common sense to bureaucratic authority. Having strenuously campaigned to deny the usefulness of hydroxychloroquine, having been confronted by the fact that physicians on the front lines of the battle against the virus are using it themselves, and having been asked whether he—were he to come down with illness from the virus—would use it, he weakly conceded that he would but only as part of an approved study. He cared less about describing what the drug can do and cannot do than about affirming his agency’s and the FDA’s prerogatives.

Backed by the media, Fauci and company have contended that actions by anybody, ordinary citizens, elected officials, or physicians that do not follow proper bureaucratic procedures are illegitimate. Who the hell do they think they are? We belong to ourselves. Not to them.

Black's article is here.

But maybe there is a light at the end of the tunnel.  Headline at Breitbart:  

Donald Trump Thinking of 2nd Coronavirus Task Force 

Focused on Reopening Country

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Conrad Black on the sham impeachment

Wood Print by Will Bullas via fineartamerica

Conrad Black sums it up:

A shabby fraud launched by a partisan whistle-blower who is acting on hearsay about an innocuous telephone call whose summary, though perhaps not entirely complete, was immediately released to the public cannot go much farther. It has been kept alive by a Star Chamber in which the president is not represented and the Republican questioning and calling of witnesses is done at the behest of the Democratic leadership.

. . .

Under any scenario, the wheels are coming off this disgraceful Democratic garbage cart in all directions. Impeachment will fizzle ignominiously while the former administration is arraigned on serious charges from the Russian scandal, and the Democrats will wallow in their squalid failure to produce a feasible candidate for the White House. Normalcy, for which the country longs, is not dead; it is reawakening at last.

I hope he’s right. Read the entire column here.

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An odds-on prediction or wishful thinking?

Bruce Plante cartoon credit: laprogressive.com

Conrad Black has another provocative analysis of the national political landscape (“The Fatuous Democrats” at National Review online here):

As the revelations of political manipulation and malfeasance in the FBI and the intelligence agencies under the Obama administration and the early Trump days oozes out of the slowly accelerating investigation of those events, and from the self-serving books of people who are prime targets for indictments, the character of the Democratic opposition is evolving in unusual and even exotic ways. The Clinton party, founded as “new Democrats” who favored the original Gulf War and whose standard bearer declared “the end of the era of big government,” has been renounced as abusive of women and generally insufficiently progressive. After 25 years as the Napoleon and Josephine of the Democracy, the Clintons have been banished to the broom closet, an embarrassment from another day.

The successor royal political couple, the Obamas, isn’t faring much better. He presided over the deluge of slime that his Justice Department, FBI, and intelligence agencies poured over the 2016 election and its aftermath, and that is now finally being exposed. The extent to which the former president was involved in the Clinton-email whitewash and the false applications for surveillance of the Trump campaign will become a matter of high public interest. Practically the entire Obama legacy was Obamacare, Green Empowerment and the Paris Climate Accord, and the Iran Nuclear Treaty. All were disasters and all have been dismembered or repudiated. Mr. Obama was cranking up to being a long-term, high-prestige ex-president. There have not been such since Mr. Truman and General Eisenhower. President Johnson and President Nixon and George W, Bush left office in too much controversy; President Ford and President Carter were not successful enough to have great impact, President Reagan was elderly and in declining health, President Bush Senior enjoyed a bit of it, but not the great eminence of Truman and Eisenhower, two-term victorious war-time leaders identified with great enterprises such as the Marshall Plan and the founding of NATO.

The Democrats placed all their bets on Hillary Clinton, and kept raising the ante in the misplaced belief that President Trump could be driven from office as a traitor, a crook, and an incompetent. They bet everything and will lose everything, and some of their prominent personalities will be doing the tap dance before the grand jury in the run-up to the next election. Their vast media claque will suffer a severe lapse of credibility and ratings, given how heavily invested they are in peddling hatred and contempt of the president, which has vastly exceeded fair comment and any acceptable standard of journalistic professionalism.

. . .

If whoever limps through the Democratic nomination process looks and sounds anything like this group and is weighed down by the hare-brained nostrums the party worthies have been spouting in the last few months, they will provide an entertaining variation on what will then be the lengthy and numerous legal trials of some of the stars of the Clinton and Obama administrations.

Mr. Black’s column is here. He seems confident that miscreants at FBI, DOJ, etc. will be indicted, while many other pundits and readers expect nothing to happen to any of them.

Mr. Black's column further describes -- in unflattering terms -- the leading contenders so far in the Democratic presidential primary race.  It's an expanding field; Battleswarm blog has the latest update on the "Democratic Presidential Clown Car."

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So where are the indictments?

image credit: downtrend.com

Conrad Black at American Greatness sums it up in “The Greatest Constitutional Crisis Since the Civil War”:

For more than two years, the United States and the world have had two competing narratives: that an elected president of the United States was a Russian agent whom the Kremlin helped elect; and its rival narrative that senior officials of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, and other national intelligence organizations had repeatedly lied under oath, misinformed federal officials, and meddled in partisan political matters illegally and unconstitutionally and had effectively tried to influence the outcome of a presidential election, and then undo its result by falsely propagating the first narrative. It is now obvious and indisputable that the second narrative is the correct one.

. . .

The extent of the criminal misconduct of the former law enforcement and intelligence chiefs is now notorious, but to make the right point here, it has to be summarized. The fact that the officially preferred candidate lied to federal officials about her emails and acted in outright contempt of Congress and the legal process in the destruction of evidence, was simply ignored by the FBI director, who announced that she would not be prosecuted, though he had no authority to make that determination.

The full report is here. It’s one to Bookmark. Most of us are wondering if the new AG is convening grand juries. Mr. Black concludes:

This entire monstrous travesty is finally coming apart without even waiting for the horrible disappointment of the special counsel’s inability to adduce a scrap of evidence to justify his replication of Torquemada as an inquisitor and of the Gestapo and KGB at rounding up and accusing unarmed individuals who were not flight risks. . . .

Without realizing the proportions of the emergency, America has survived the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. All those who legitimately oppose or dislike the president, including traditional high-brow Republicans who find him distasteful, should join in the condemnation of this largely criminal assault on democracy, and then, if they wish, go out and try to beat him fair and square, the good old-fashioned way, in a free election. But they must abide by the election’s result.

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"a frenzy of primal extremism"

Conrad Black’s take on President Trump and the potential historical impact of his policies is encouraging. Black concludes:  

Donald Trump’s greatest achievement may be the total annihilation of the Democratic Party in its present mutated and degraded form. The Democrats have been allowed to slither to their present state of moral degradation with the witless and spineless collaboration of look-alike Republicans who are easy to defeat, like McCain and Romney, or can be survived, like Reagan and the Bushes, or destroyed, like Nixon.

Faced with a Trump they could not defeat and cannot destroy, Democrats appear to be entering a frenzy of primal extremism. If the Democrats go to the voters next year as the party of infanticide, open borders, a 70 percent top personal income tax rate, and the practical abolition of private health care, they will vanish more quickly, and with less distinction, than the Whigs, who at least had serious leaders like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln before their party imploded. This thronging riff-raff of Democratic presidential aspirants couldn’t lead the country across Washington’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, and won’t get an invitation to try.

The full article at American Greatness is here.

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Trump’s Rhetorical Knockout Blow by Conrad Black

Cartoon credit: Pixshark.com

We all saw reactions to the President’s Oval  Office speech on border security and the rebuttal by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Some of the “memes” were pretty funny. But the most thoughtful commentary that I have seen so far comes from Conrad Blackin his article for National Review, “Trump’s Rhetorical Knockout Blow.” Some highlights:

The president was clear, factually unchallengeable, and credible, and Speaker Pelosi and Senator Schumer looked and sounded like a waxworks animated illustration of the embalmer’s art and her ventriloquist, the bearer of the broadest forehead since Pericles. The president spoke of a national-security, economic, and humanitarian crisis, and they spoke of the federal employees who are about to miss a paycheck. After Tuesday night’s eight-minute speech by the president from the Oval Office, the satisfactory resolution of the impasse over the government shutdown is fairly obvious. The president cannot abandon the border-security issue now, and the Democrats think they have him in a corner. The Democrats entered into this contest for the public’s support believing that as soon as the first paycheck is skipped, the lackey national media will be in 24–7 interviews with the sick wives, children, and relatives of the 800,000 unpaid federal employees. Public opinion will heave, the Republican senators will collapse, and the president will be splendidly humiliated.

Everyone with the slightest familiarity with the issue as it has arisen has seen the Democrats go from semi-zealots of border security to vapid opportunists laser-focused on the simplest aspect of unpaid federal employees. The president reminded the country of the proportions of the illegal-immigration issue — of the humanitarian tragedy, of the drug crisis, and of the crimes of an appreciable number of the illegal immigrants. The tactical problem of the Democrats is that they are so cynical they think no one will notice that they have come down steadily from $1.3 billion for border security to zero, in their conviction that they can put the unpaid federal employees’ problems ahead of what is an immense national crisis. They evidently believe that the endlessly repeated mantra of “the wall” as immoral, like 19th-century elocution students learning to spell by repeating such triumphalist expressions of literacy as “W-A-L-L spells wall,” will distract the country from the real problem. Their proposition to “open the government” (by Trump’s total capitulation and we will go back to interminable fruitless negotiation about the real problem) won’t fly. It is indicative of the serene complacency of the Democrats that they expect their control of the national political media to remain so airtight that no appreciable share of the public will dissent from their strategy, which is to give lip service to “border security” while portraying the president as peddling, as one of their lesser spokesmen put it last week, “a medieval fifth-century solution for a 21st-century problem.” The fact that he missed the middle ages by several hundred years is a rounding error for the Democrats, as they point to the Washington Post’s claim that the president has uttered 7,600 lies since he was inaugurated.

. . .

This torrent of illegal migrants is not the sort of immigration that is justly celebrated at Ellis Island or the Statue of Liberty, of responsible people soberly determining to make their way to a new country, to enter it legally and become civic-minded contributors to their new nationality. It more closely resembles the movement of large masses of people, en bloc, ahead of the barbarians and into the territory of the Roman Empire in the third to fifth centuries a.d. They had no interest in Rome, but were terrified by the Asiatic hordes driving them westwards. Of course, this is not exactly what we have on the southern border of the United States now, though the effluxion of millions of refugees from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa into Europe in the last decade more closely approximates that than it does conventional immigration.

And it concludes:

The painful truth is that the American government has failed to deal with immigration, health care, infrastructure, and even abortion, though it at least managed to fumble that into the lap of the courts. It is a shambles, and the Democrats have tried to prevent Trump from dealing with any of it with this mendacious idiocy about collusion with Russia, and the nasty fantasy of removal from office by impeachment. Ultimately, the country will reward this president for getting the country’s government to function usefully, even as many regret that those elected to rule in difficult times are not always those that would be selected by typecasting studios.

Read the rest here .

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Trump craziness

Glenn McCoy cartoon via trump-conservative.com

Last week, Conrad Black wrote a column on the Trump presidency and the continuing temper tantrums on the left. It was published by the New York Sun with the colorful title “Trump’s Foes Beat Retreat To a Rat-Infested Trench And Wave 25th Amendment.” Mr. Black contrasted Michael Wolff’s recent “demonography” [Fire and Fury] and concomitant media pronouncements concerning Trump’s mental incapacity, with President Trump’s negotiations with members of Congress about illegal immigration – live in front of the TV cameras. Mr. Black’s column concludes:

To appreciate what has happened, a little perspective is needed: Mr. Trump’s candidacy was a joke; then he was unelectable, then his election could be invalidated, then he could be impeached, and then he could be removed for past harassment of women, or violating the Logan Act, or obstruction of justice, and now mental incapacity.

Donald Trump is a strange cat and an acquired taste, but he is one of the most vivid, and one of the most astoundingly successful figures of American history. I predict that a year from now, David Brooks and Bret Stephens will be at least closet supporters, even if they have socio-cultural clothespins on their noses.

Black’s column is here. And in related comments on social media about how crazy Trump is: 

             The people calling Trump “mentally ill”:

·         Dress like genitalia to protest Trump [see below: Eye Bleach caution alert]

·         Scream at the sky

·         Think there are 63 genders

·         Think that cutting off your genitalia is normal

·         Need “safe spaces” to protect their feelings

Photograph credit: dailywire.com

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Conrad Black on the anti-Trump narratives

Bob Gorrell cartoon via The Federalist Papers 

Amidst all the media hysteria and political posturing in the aftermath of the Charlottesville riot, IMHO, Conrad Black is still thinking through the reporting and editorializing quite clearly. This piece is on the American Greatness website, and here are just a few morsels:

Almost everything about the Charlottesville riot was disgraceful except the conduct of the president. The move to take down the statue of General Robert E. Lee was nonsense. Lee has few rivals as the greatest general in American history (Grant, Sherman, MacArthur, and Eisenhower perhaps). He opposed the secession of Virginia from the Union but, as was common in the South then (and has not entirely died out in any region of the United States today), believed he owed his first loyalty to his state over the United States. He was less dedicated to the virtues of slavery than was Charlottesville’s most famous son, Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University, neighbor at Monticello, and, of course, author of the self-evident truth “that all men are created equal.”

. . .

As the day unfolded, it was clear that orders had been given to the local police to ensure that a serious fracas occurred. The police did nothing to disperse the armed groups on each side, on several occasions herded them toward each other to encourage combat, and then withdrew at times to facilitate the violence. It must be assumed that orders for an insufficient law enforcement and ineffectual rules of engagement emanated ultimately from the governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, the ne plus ultra of Clintonian zeal and cynicism, and former Democratic Party chairman.

. . .

The facts of Charlottesville should be ascertained by impartial investigation, prosecution, and exposure, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions has promised they will be.

This incident is of a piece with the mindless violence at Berkeley and other university campuses. The nihilists and anarchists of both sides want bloody conflict and vandalism, and most of the Democrats and the anti-Trump Republicans and the national media are trying to pin the phenomenon on Trump. . . .

Read the whole thing here.

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Conrad Black: Choose Sides in This Civil War

image credit: tothedeathmedia

Conrad Black has a sobering if scary take on the minefields and treachery that President Trump has to deal with every day. Here are a couple of paragraphs (and considering the “Never Trump” bias of National Review, I am somewhat surprised that NR published the piece in the first place):

Trump opponents need to understand what the alternative is. The battle lines have been so sharply drawn, in what is now a bloodless civil war for direction of U.S. public policy, that the two sides cannot really communicate with each other. There is a commendable candor in Kellyanne Conway’s statement: “They hate us and we hate them.” . . .

. . .  There is now unfolding what must be the last civilized debate about the trajectory of events in Washington before the civil war moves from the heavy and frequent skirmishing that has intensified since the election to the fight to the death that seems inevitably to impend. The president said in a powerful address to a very enthusiastic audience in West Virginia last week, where he received the grace of conversion to the Republican party of the formerly Democratic governor, Jim Justice, that the entire special-counsel investigation into relations between the Russian government and the Trump campaign is “a total fabrication” and “an attempt to [reverse] one of the greatest political defeats in American history.” So it is.

. . .

Whether [Robert] Mueller conducts himself professionally or not, there is no excuse for a special counsel to have been appointed, and the president was (as he need not have mentioned publicly) badly let down by Sessions. The scramble of nominal Republicans such as Lindsey Graham, and drooling partisan Democrats such as Chris Coons, to pass redundant, grandstanding legislation to protect Sessions and Mueller is nauseating. Trump ran against and defeated both parties, the Clintons, the Bushes, and Obama, and most of their close collaborators in the Congress. The war continues and until the president has enough economic progress, or enough time without gaffes that the hostile media can amplify into a wall of noise, or a sudden foreign-policy success such as with North Korea or even Venezuela, if he wants to start moving the needle of the polls upwards, he will face the problem of cowardice and lethargy in his own party. Senator McConnell’s statement in Kentucky this week that Trump was responsible for the almost total failure of the Republican Congress to achieve anything in the past six months was just more self-serving claptrap from a familiar and very tiresome source. . . .

. . .

This is a civil war and the apostate conservatives should realize that, if Trump loses, they don’t get a new Reaganism in the Republican party and renewed importance and self-importance for themselves; they get the semi-permanent return of those responsible for the decline of America, the sleazy transformation of America into an ineffectual force in the world and into an inert, economically stagnant welfare state. The choice, for sane conservatives, is Trump or national disaster. . ..

Read the whole thing here.

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