Against the Great Reset: 'The Great Regression'

Against the Great Reset28 Jun, 2022 6 Min Read
Atop the sinister Magic Mountain, dread Klaus lies scheming.

Continuing today, and for the next 16 weeks, The Pipeline will present excerpts from each of the essays contained in Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order, to be published on October 18 by Bombardier Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster, and available now for pre-order at the links. 

 

PART I: THE PROBLEM

Excerpt from "The Great Regression," by Victor Davis Hanson

The Great Reset was first concocted at the World Economic Forum in Davos by its founder Klaus Schwab as a way to assemble together global success stories like himself. His idea apparently was that grandees who have done well for themselves could do even better for the rest of us—if these anointed could just be unbound and given enough power and authority to craft rules for nearly eight billion of the planet’s ignorant.

A word of caution is needed about the pretentious and supposedly benign signature title of the Great Reset project. Assume the worst when the adjective “great” appears in connection with envisioned fundamental, government-driven, or global political changes. What was similar between Lyndon Johnson’s massively expensive but failed “Great Society” and Mao’s genocidal “Great Leap Forward” was the idea of a top-down, centrally planned schema, cooked up by elites without any firsthand knowledge, or even worry, how it would affect the middle classes and poor. So often, the adjective “great” is a code word of supposed enlightened planners for radical attempts at reconstruction of a society that must be either misled or forced to accept a complete overhaul.

When “great” is applied to a proposed transnational comprehensive revolution, we should also equate it with near religious zealotry. “The Great Reset,” after all, in all its green and “woke” glory, with all of its credentialed and “expert” devotees, is still a faith-based rather than scientific effort. Its spiritual predecessor was perhaps the eighteenth-century “Great Awakening” of Protestant evangelicalism that swept the eastern seaboard of colonial America in reaction to the secularism of the Enlightenment. But this time around the frenzy is fueled more by agnostics who worship secular progressive totems such as Al Gore or Greta Thunberg.

Given the Davos elite’s cosmic ambitions, “great” also conjures up a messianic reference to God’s “Great Plan” that should from on high reorder earthly life under a few trusted religious authorities. It recalls the notion of Alexander the “Great” of a brotherhood of man, which supposedly was to fuse conquered peoples into one vast and enlightened east-west, Persian-Hellenistic empire—albeit after, rather than before, eastern tribes were conquered, and sometimes slaughtered, in efforts to achieve a common, centrally planned purpose.

To reassure a shared brighter post-Covid-19 path ahead, Schwab drops most of the familiar globalist names that resonate power, money, seriousness, and wisdom. And the Great Resetters are now quite familiar: the world’s third or fourth richest man, Bill Gates, coming off his denials of palling around with the late Jeffrey Epstein; Jack Ma, the Chinese multibillionaire and Alibaba CEO apparently now “forcibly disappeared” by the Chinese communist government for too many candid speeches; the septuagenarian Prince Charles whose long anticipated monumental accomplishments apparently must still await his ascension to the British throne; the polymath Dr. Anthony Fauci who has laced his 2020 “noble lie” assessments of wearing and not wearing masks or achieving and not achieving herd immunity in terms of climate change, race, Chinese cooperation, and global progressive expertise; John Kerry, one of the multilateralist architects of the Paris Climate Accord and Iran Deal; and the usual rotating leaders of the U.N., IMF, World Bank, and the European Central Bank.

In its post-Covid-19 global comprehensiveness, the Great Reset has ambitions to be our greatest “woke” project yet. On examination, it is a kitchen-sink mishmash of agendas that incorporate the U.N.’s long stale “Sustainable Development” plan (“Agenda 21”), the Green New Deal, tidbits of Black Lives Matter sloganeering, critical race theory, “stakeholder” capitalism that often champions ESG, or forced corporate embrace of “environmental and social governance” over shareholder profitability, open-borders rhetoric, and boutique redistributionism dumbed down from Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Reset offers us a global Fabian socialist future, repackaged as a European Union-like top-down diktat. But above all, the agenda incorporates the pop insights of various half-educated corporate billionaires. All now find themselves in a secure enough position to dabble with Trotskyite ideas—to be foisted upon others not so fortunate and lacking their own exemptions from the toxicity of the elite’s theories.

On sale Oct. 18: pre-order now at the links above.

The same linguistic suspicions hold true of the use of the noun “Reset.” It assumes a year-zero arrogance that all that came before was flawed. And all that will follow, we are assured, will not be so defective. Such absolutism is reminiscent of former President Barack Obama’s grandiose promise on the very eve of the 2008 election: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America”—a transformation that birthed the Tea Party revolt just two years later, during the 2010 midterm elections, one of the greatest conservative political pushbacks of the past seventy years.

We remember that just four months after Obama’s promises of transformation, the romance of fundamental change went international with the idea of a foreign policy “reset” that focused on a new détente with Vladimir Putin. The idea was inaugurated in 2009 by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the assumption that Putin’s past territorial aggressions had arisen from an absence of dialogue and ecumenical outreach from the prior “unilateralist” George W. Bush administration. Bush supposedly had wrongly sanctioned Putin for his 2008 miniature war with Georgia that resulted in the Russian absorption of South Ossetia. And the go-it-alone “cowboy” Bush apparently had also unduly polarized Putin and thus wet the ex-KGB operative’s beak for additional irredentist acquisition.

The reactive makeover that followed from the Obama-Clinton “reset” was unfortunately an utter failure. Its pompous declarations and talk of “listening” and “outreach” ended in fresh Russian aggressiveness, most notably in the 2014 Russian invasions of both Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Such appeasement created the original seeds for Putin’s eventual spring 2022 catastrophic Russian invasion of most of Ukraine and attack on Kyiv. In addition, Russia earlier in 2013 had reentered the Middle East, on Secretary of State John Kerry’s 2011 invitation, after a three-decade hiatus. Then followed Russia’s informal partnerships with both Iran and China, and Moscow’s much greater and more comprehensive crackdowns on internal dissidents. In all talks of the Great Reset, we should then recall that Vladimir Putin apparently interpreted “reset” as American laxity to be leveraged rather than as magnanimity to be reciprocated. In cruder terms, Americans speaking loudly while carrying a twig was no way to “reset” Putin.

The telltale noun “Revolution,” of course, also makes its appearance frequently in Great Reset rhetoric, specifically in connection to Klaus Schwab’s 2017 bestselling book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution. In it, Schwab makes the now familiar argument that the internet, computers, electronic communications, artificial intelligence, and the new global interconnectedness of the prior “Third Revolution” have at last synchronized into wonderful harmony.

The supposedly never-before-seen, never-imagined fusion of the paradigms of economic, social, cultural, and political life offers us a once-in-a-lifetime—or, rather, last—chance to exploit them—even if most of us are not sufficiently equipped to appreciate the opportunity. Yet Schwab makes the fundamental error that these new technologies act as independent drivers of the way people behave and think, rather than as accelerants that nonetheless have not changed ancient fixed and predictable human behavior.

In Schwab’s way of thinking, imagine that a modern computerized high-tech pump sends forth two thousand gallons of water a minute, and therefore its essence, “water,” is now likewise “new” and different from what emerged for millennia at a rate of a gallon a minute from preindustrial hand pumps. Again, we fools outside the Davos agenda would apparently mistakenly believe that greater volume had not much altered from antiquity water’s molecular structure, chemical properties, and use in the natural world.

A glimpse of the idea that Davos-like elites can gather to discuss reset planning in an age of paradigm-changing technology is popular at the national level. A good example is the invitation-only conference on entertainment, technology, finance, and communications held each summer in Idaho at the Sun Valley Resort, hosted by the investment bank of Allen & Company. In 2021, the usual corporate and media globalist suspects showed up, among them Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings, ViacomCBS (now Paramount) chairwoman Shari Redstone, Disney chairman Robert Iger, New York City’s former mayor Michael Bloomberg, GM CEO Mary Barra, WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar, Discovery CEO David Zaslav, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, and film and television producer Brian Grazer. The premise was Platonic. A meritocracy—chosen by the metrics of either acquired or inherited wealth, influence, celebrity, or a corporation’s ability to influence millions—immune from private bias and guided by reason, should be given latitude to override the dangerous emotions of the masses.

So there are plenty of linguistic reasons alone to be suspicious of the grandiose notion of a top-down, international, and fundamental transformation of the way the world is supposed to work...

Next week: an excerpt from "China, Covid, Realpolitik, and the Great Reset," by Douglas Murray.

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7 comments on “Against the Great Reset: 'The Great Regression'”

  1. I used to say 'did you see that great, big, huge'.....I use to say that a lot until I heard others say it and then realized how stupid it was to describe the size of something that way. In their minds it is 'great' in this regard. But because of its size, it must/will fail but probably not until after much world-wide damage to humanity.

  2. The Sun Valley Resort in 2021 did not have Peter Thiel who co-founded PayPal and funded Facebook. Peter founded Stanford's Stanford Review in 1987 for diversity of opinion and was its first editor-in-chief. Those that followed in his footsteps at the Review are now with him in launching a populist takeover of the GOP. Thiel has the ear of Trump. They plan on a populist battle against the Great Reset. They should all be given a complimentary copy of your upcoming book. You are probably aware of many of them: Ken Howery co-founded PayPal and the Founders Fund with Thiel. Stephen Cohen and Joe Lonsdale founded Palantir Technologies alongside Thiel. Josh Hawley AG then Senator, Blake Masters just won AZ Congressional House primary wrote a book "Zero to One" with Thiel. J.D. Vance won OH primary for US Senate seat was President of a Thiel venture capital fund. And so on. They are all on preparing for the battle and your book can be a tool.

  3. Wow! Im so enriched n inspired by The Pipeline publication on a push back campain to end Schwabs founder of WEF and his counterparts on d diabolical dystopian feudeo arbitray so called a ' New World Order'/ Great Reset( 4th Industrial Revolution).
    I have read much on Great Reset and in my mind been always contemplating an unquenchable craving to write a counter narrative book that exposes the Great Rest in my own understanding of it ...as been asking myself where are d humans , people who are awake n reasonable to raise up their hands and say 'No More Of This Nonsense'.

    Thank You The Pipeline.org.From today onwards , I follow you and willing to support you guys.

    I cant wait for Oct 18 for the 18 Theses on Great Regression.
    Thank you again your attempt to save humanity to this selfish gredy maniacs who only have themselves to view as the only people to enjoy all the earthly resources of the earth , money,poer to control all inhabitantd of the earth, to enslave hunans technocratic and monitor them through survallance biomeyric and microchips.lThese evil to the core haters of humanity especially the middle class, workers, civil servants, nd poor people.
    They are set to achieve their ugle hellish Great Reset by means of all evil actions like cancel culture, depopulate the world to 3.5 billion, reduce humans' capacity to think for themselves by toxic vaccinations that are not made to end diseases or viruses but to fiel them in human bodies causing varients to endless vaccinations that destroy natural imune systems of humanity.They want to achieve this Great Reset by introducing Lab synthetic food replacing organic food to change human behaviour, strip ofg all personal rights, persoanal freedoms be taken out, censor our movements, control our minds, thoughts, feelings, destroy democrasies n replace them by a Totalitarian regime like Communist China.
    They are set to do this inhuman, unethical move by creating wars, planned starvation like supply chains ordered to stop producing food and tell them to make synthethic foods.By skyrocketing fuel , gas and energy to destroy middle class to lower clasd of d poor ( begiousie) or proliterate , unemployed class ...to controll them as they say its eadiet to control poor and hungry people.These Great Reset perpetrators are rotten to the core and moral bankcrupt idiots.
    Finally they wsnt to attack n kill humans by viruses rhey create in d labs followed by killer jabs to finish up d works done by their viruses and by collapsing world Economies cause huge Economic ressesions etc.

  4. "... cooked up by elites without any firsthand knowledge, or even worry, how it would affect the middle classes and poor."

    But even if they had that knowledge, that would n0t be enough. They have to know what the INDIVIDUAL faces ... EACH and EVERY one, n0t some hypothetical "average citizen" ... to have the knowledge they need t0 get the answers right. And even then human frailty will get in the way.

    This is why all such grand, elite top-down plans fail to deliver.

    This is why respect for individual liberty is so important ... to maintain the ability to reject their wrong answers and find the right 0nes ourselves and with our neighb0rs.

  5. The use of the word great when describing sex, as in "I had great sex last night." Not we had, but I had, thus implies the other party probably didn't. This is similar to 'The Great Reset". Great for whom?

  6. Most often I use the word "Great" in a sarcastic sense. I see no need or reason to change that.

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