Emperors with no Clothes

No, the World Economic Forum is not going to force you to eat insects. Instead, this year's edition proves to the world how Davos is now weaker than ever.

The consumption of insects can offset climate change in many ways. We’ve been conditioned to think of animals and plants as our primary sources of proteins, namely meat, dairy and eggs or tofu, beans and nuts, but there’s an unsung category of sustainable and nutritious protein that has yet to widely catch on: insects.

Such were the macabre proposals of Indiana University Professors Amrou Awaysheh and Christine Picard published on the website of the World Economic Forum in February 2022 regarding the alleged sustainability benefits of abandoning the consumption of traditional meat, a cornerstone of human diets for millennia, and replacing our main source of protein with… bugs. While this author, and I would hope many of you, are no fans of inhumane industrial agriculture, Awaysheh and Picard’s propositions stretch far beyond the boundaries of what most humans consider digestible. Four years later, the proposal has not only failed to (beyond the most zealous climate campaigners) modify our eating habits, but has also struck a gold mine for conspiracy theorists. And now, the likelihood that this year’s NCAA football national champions Curt Cignetti and Fernando Mendoza have followed the disgusting advice of some of their institution’s faculty members seems vanishingly low.

Awaysheh and Picard’s gross-out proposal represents the epitome of why millions of people despise the World Economic Forum. In context, the World Economic Forum is a Switzerland-based think tank founded in 1971 by German economist Klaus Schwab whose stated mission “is to improve the state of the world through public-private cooperation” with the values of “integrity, impartiality, independence, respect, and excellence.” With such seemingly banal and harmless self-descriptions, why all the commotion? According to American author Michael Schellenburger, “Davos” (the name colloquially given to the WEF after the Alpine village that hosts their annual meeting) is a “cult wrapped in a grift wrapped in an enigma” whose secrecy, which Schwab has fiercely guarded, and promotion of so-called Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investment standards, is little more than a “Ponzi Scheme” with the intent of artificially inflating the stock values of low-quality ESG products Schwab supports and ultimately incorporating greater social control over global capitalism.

In essence, while Klaus Schwab may not have the power to force any of us to consume insects, it’s clear that his personal agenda exceeds mere do-gooding and crosses the line into greater elite control over our daily lives. And that’s no conspiracy theory, just an honest fact.

As stated before, every January, a who’s who of global CEOs, elected heads of state donning unusual eyewear, central bankers, irrelevant former heads of state like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, and even celebrities like David Beckham and Matt Damon gather in the Swiss village of Davos in order to supposedly propose their enlightened ideas on how to solve the world’s problems. While Davos summits of decades past have occurred in an environment where this clique had largely unfettered control over the global economic and political order, it’s clear that even its organizers (Schwab himself was ousted in scandal last year) admit they “are operating in the most complex geopolitical environment since 1945.” Now, these elites gaze from their Alpine perches on a world in which Donald Trump makes clear that the United States will no longer support Davos’ vaunted World Order while Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin build their own parallel institutions.

And one of the three members of this unholy trinity, complete with more than 300 lieutenants, is set to attend the World Economic Forum and force the world to recognize that the new administration will look for the interests of America First, and if the corporate executives, central bankers, and European and Canadian heads of state don’t like it, then too bad.

Tuesday, January 20

Before President Trump delayed (thanks to a technical glitch on Air Force One) arrival in Switzerland, the Davos crowd held nothing back in their disdain for the Trump administration, especially over the latter’s insistence on incorporating the Danish territory of Greenland into the United States. The Belgian Prime Minister accused Trump of treating Europe like slaves. The Danish delegation boycotted Davos entirely. An aviator sunglass-wearing French President Emmanuel Macron, claiming an eye infection but more likely hoping to intimidate the American administration by going full Tom Cruise, blasted the Trump Administration’s “new colonial approach,” and insisted in English that “We do prefer respect to bullies…. We do prefer rule of law to brutality.” Likewise, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former central banker whose country reportedly now fears a US military invasion, was met with a standing ovation when he warned of a “rupture” caused by “great powers… using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion” while indirectly accusing the United States of pursuing Canadian “subordination.”

Based on these comments, and many more, it’s obvious that the Trump delegation is walking into a hostile environment filled with an old guard of elites devoted to a legalistic mindset and would probably rather see the President and his associates dead than controlling the vast machinery of the United States government. However, if Davos is so determined to point their finger at the United States for everything wrong in the world, let me remind everyone that it was only at the last minute when the invitation of the Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragachi’s was revoked. Evidently, Davos would rather surround itself with representatives of a regime who massacre their own people than believers of Trump’s America First philosophy.

Wednesday, January 21

Beyond the ruckus over Greenland, the other hot topic at the World Economic Forum was something that will have a far more profound impact on our lives in the decades to come than whichever nation controls a certain strategic island in the Arctic: Artificial Intelligence. Some highlights: OpenAI chief global affairs officer announced the company’s intention to release its first marketable device in the second half of this year. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made headlines when he predicted that pharmaceutical companies will shift their research models from traditional laboratories to “AI innovation labs,” an eventuality this author agrees is inevitable. Meta’s new president and vice chairwoman Dina Powell McCormick, a former Goldman Sachs executive who worked under Presidents Bush and Trump, called on tech companies cooperate on “core values” such as energy efficiency and ethical safeguards, to ensure that the human race is not one day devoured by algorithms. All we humans can do is hope McCormick’s predictions come to fruition.

Of course, following the series of tirades by foreign leaders against them, all cheered on by American liberals like former Vice President Al Gore and California Governor and likely future presidential candidate Gavin Newsom, you can be rest assured that President Trump and US cabinet officials were bound to respond. As for Newsom, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is certainly not impressed with his leadership, remarking,

Outward migration from California, a gigantic budget deficit, the largest homeless population in America, and the poor folks in the Palisades who had their homes burned down. He is here hobnobbing with the global elite while his California citizens are still homeless. Shame on him. He’s too smug, too self-absorbed, and too economically illiterate to know anything.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, known for his abrasive demeanor, reportedly harangued the European Union’s failed energy policy so severely that European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde walked out. And true to form, the President of the United States pulled no punches against his critics. Macron’s sunglasses were mocked. Denmark, a nation enraged by the president’s saber-rattling against their territory, is in Trump’s words a weak and ungrateful country who “fell to Germany after just six hours of fighting and was totally unable to defend itself or Greenland” and “would be speaking German” had American soldiers not fought to save Greenland and Denmark in World War II. Similar shots were fired by the president at our northern neighbor: “Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way. They should be grateful also. But they’re not. I watched your prime minister yesterday. He wasn’t so grateful. They should be grateful to us. Canada. Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”

Ultimately, Trump assured the audience, and the world, that he would not use military force to acquire Greenland, and announced that the United States and NATO would engage in serious diplomacy to reach a solution that will somehow satisfy all parties. While these announcements avert a catastrophic crisis in the already shaken transatlantic relationship, it is now painfully obvious that there are two entirely different worldviews represented at the World Economic Forum. While the old elite cling to their legalistic notions of the rules-based international order and refuse to let go of hara-kiri energy policies, there is a new elite on the rise which rejects the old ways of Davos and seeks a new path based on strong, sovereign states with zero tolerance for any alleged ingratitude. Trump’s speech reflected a long-held view in the United States that Europe would have succumbed to Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or total obliteration if not for our help, and therefore must cease their double-dealing and moral grandstanding.

While Europe will certainly not welcome this criticism, they must accept the contempt to which millions of Americans, particularly conservatives, feel for the hypocrisy of the continent, or more geographically accurately, peninsula’s political elite.

Concluding thoughts

If there’s one conclusion regarding the sorry state of the World Economic Forum I can offer, it is that the organization is less a diabolical conspiracy to control every facet of your life and more a useless echo chamber whose ideas, including those as disgusting as consuming insects, have found little traction in the real world. With the Trump Administration making plain that alternative forms of societal development exist, all the Davos elites can do is sit in their Alpine fortress and sulk about everything that has gone wrong for them. Yes, Donald Trump’s threats regarding Greenland were undoubtedly crude and contemptuous, and certainly do not reflect how this author would engage in diplomacy. However, they have exposed the Davos clique, and all the elected and unelected officials who align with their worldview, as little more than, in the words of the most famous Dane of all time Hans Christian Andersen, emperors with no clothes.