This is not the first book to appear in recent times critiquing the Great Reset, Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum, and related matters. Some of these volumes I have already reviewed here. But Against The Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order, by Michael Walsh, is the newest and perhaps the best. At nearly 500 pages, the collection of essays found here is first-rate.
The editor has assembled a great lineup of leading intellectual heavyweights, including Douglas Murray, Victor Davis Hanson, Conrad Black, Roger Kimball, Angelo Codevilla, David Goldman and a number of others. All up the book has 16 important essays, plus introductory and concluding pieces by Walsh.
All the key issues are examined here: Covid tyranny, socialism, globalism, economics, politics, China and the social credit system, Big Tech, national sovereignty, the WHO, the WEF, Schwab, Bill Gates, critical theory, green energy, population matters, politicised science, cultural Marxism, climate alarmism, health fascism and so much more.
It is good that all the bases are so carefully covered here. Given the rapid pace at which the nefarious agenda items of the Davos elitists are being realised, this book could not be more timely. The plans the activists have for their globalist utopia are not something that lie ahead – all this is already well underway.
Walsh explains early on why such a volume is so very much needed. It will be too late if we wait around for the history books to look back on the Great Reset. The issue NOW is whether “the formerly free world of the Western democracies will succumb to the paternalistic totalitarianism of the oligarchical Resetters.”
And he is right to speak of how the secular left West is so receptive to all this: “In an age of atheism and disbelief, note the religious fervor of neo- and cultural-Marxism and the messianic quality of Schwab’s anti-humanistic Great Reset.” Quite so. Once you ditch Christianity, plenty of false religions will rush in to take its place.
His closing paragraph nicely informs us of just where we are heading in the Schwabian dystopia: “The satraps of Davos don’t want to simply reset a post-Covid world. Or a post-fossil fuels world. Or even a post-racial world. They want to run it, forever, and while they no longer have need of a god, they’ll always need an enemy. They may not believe in a power higher than themselves, but they certainly believe in demons, and their most irksome devil is you.”
Others pick up on the quasi-religious nature of all this. As Hanson puts it in his essay, “When ‘great’ is applied to a proposed transnational comprehensive revolution, we should also equate it with near-religious zealotry.” Marxism and radical greenism have both been pseudo-religions, and they come together in the Great Reset.
He and others of course note how Schwab and Co have capitalised on Covid, and want the whole world under their thumb in order to ‘keep us safe’ from further pandemics, including climate change disasters they assure us are just around the corner.
Many of the writers give us terrific descriptions of who these folks are and what they want. But I especially like how Conrad Black characterises our Davos Divines:
Davos is for 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. . . . The Covid-19 pandemic caused Davos Man to break out of his Alpine closet and reveal the secret but suspected plan: the whole world is to become a giant Davos—humorless, style-less, unspontaneous, unrelievedly materialistic, as long as the accumulation and application of capital is directed by the little Alpine gnomes of Davos and their underlings and disciples.
John Tierney carefully looks at how science and medicine were politicised during Covid, and concludes his chapter with this dismal outlook:
The Great Reseters will create jobs for the laptop class and subsidies for crony capitalists while stifling the economic growth that lifts people out of poverty. While promising “environmental justice,” they will burden the poor and the despised middle class with regressive taxes and higher energy costs. Their war on fossil fuels will be devastating to sub-Saharan Africa, where half the homes still lack electricity, but it won’t stop technocrats from flying to Davos for conferences on “climate equity.”
Hmm, did we not pretty much see all of that during the past few years? We will just be getting more of the same. The elites then, as during the past few years, will not feel any ill effects from this. It is us, mere peons, who will fully face the awful consequences.
And history of course is under attack here. As Jeremy Black writes:
History’s place at the fore of culture wars is no surprise. The destruction of alternative values, of the sense of continuity, and of anything short of a self-righteous presentist internationalism, is central to the attempt at a “Great Reset”. Moreover, in a variety of forms, including cultural Marxism and, particularly and very noisily at present, critical race theory, such a “reset” is part of a total assault on the past, one that is explicitly designed to lead the present, and determine the future.
And with the assault on history goes an assault on open discussion and free debate. He continues: “What is possibly most striking is the apparent suspension of any real sense of critique of the new order. Maybe, debate is so beneath you when you possess all truth. Much better just to steamroll people into compliance. Debate is seen as oppressive. Those who hold contrasting views are readily dismissed and shunned…”
And of course, freedom itself is going to be the biggest casualty here. As Walsh says in his concluding piece: “The Great Reset’s gambit is to mask and cloak itself, like an obedient handmaiden, in good intentions while stealing you blind and enslaving you. It positively radiates concern for its billions of fellow men even as it consigns them to indefinite house arrest.”
But on a lighter note, humourist Harry Stein manages to find a ray of hope in all this:
When the Soviets banned typewriters, the good guys produced samizdat by hand and continued on with the business of undermining an empire. We’ve now got podcasts and Substack and the emergence of alternative social-media platforms. We’ve got Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais, and The Babylon Bee. The truth is, we couldn’t be more fortunate in our enemy. Dissident wise guys looking to bring down the Iron Curtain had only the likes of anabolic women weightlifters and a glowering Leonid Brezhnev as material, but in our current war with the elites we’ve got high school “girl” track stars with balls, a non compos mentis Biden, and largely peaceful demonstrators trashing our history and burning down our cities. Tell me that isn’t funny. Better yet, tell it to Klaus Schwab and his band of anti-merry men. We’re already laughing at them, too!
It should be noted that a wide spectrum of views is found here with the authors. Sure, they all oppose Schwab and the Davos madness big time. But other differences exist. Consider religious convictions: we have Christians and non-Christians writing here. Walsh for example prefers talking in terms of ‘Greek and Roman’ instead of ‘Judeo-Christian’. Contrast that with how James Poulos concludes his helpful chapter on Big Tech.
He says our “technoethical elites” are worried about whether they can “wield powers denied them by God. In this fateful moment, our digital politics is revealed to be a spiritual war. To survive victorious, we must remember: the greatest spiritual weapon against errant human reset is divine revelation.”
In sum, the revolutionaries always want to create a new world order, but always end up destroying man and civilisation in the process. Nothing new here. But the Davos elites have no interest in history. We should, however. If we will not learn from history, the prospect looks very bleak indeed. Hopefully, a volume like this will wake up enough people to take a united and forceful stand against this great globalist evil.
