The ‘Great Reset’ Is Very Real and a Grave Threat to Democracy

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Not every global conspiracy of wealthy elites bent on world domination has its own publicly available website. But the Great Reset, proposed by members of the World Economic Forum, is an exception. Complete with a published list of co-conspirators (including Amazon, Google, Huawei Technologies, Saudi Aramco, and Volkswagen), the Great Reset launched in June 2020 with a mission statement that reads as follows (emphases are mine):

“The Covid-19 crisis, and the political, economic and social disruptions it has caused, is fundamentally changing the traditional context for decision-making… As we enter a unique window of opportunity to shape the recovery, this initiative will offer insights to help inform all those determining the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of a global commons. Drawing from the vision and vast expertise of the leaders engaged across the Forum’s communities, the Great Reset initiative has a set of dimensions to build a new social contract that honours the dignity of every human being.”

When the World Economic Forum talks about “leaders” and their “expertise” they are not talking about the democratically elected leaders of sovereign nations. They are talking about the officers of the global corporations that make up “the Forum’s communities.”

When they talk about “fundamentally changing the traditional context for decision-making,” they are not talking about giving more power to voters and their democratically elected representatives. They are talking about empowering unelected government bureaucracies that will work in partnership with corporations to enact global policies which enrich corporations and impoverish the middle class.

Take the World Economic Forum’s campaign to push global environmental, social, and governance investment rules on financial institutions worldwide. The strategy here is to take all the most painful and unpopular policies that the far Left wants to enact (like ending fossil fuel development) and transfer the responsibility for enacting those policies to faceless regulators and investors.

President Joe Biden brought this closer to reality when he directed the Department of Labor to force investment managers to use ESG guidelines when making their investment decisions. He also directed the Securities and Exchange Commission to develop rules forcing American corporations to adopt ESG reporting requirements.

In neither case did Biden issue a new regulation that specifically cuts fossil fuel use, but the intent and outcome of these regulatory moves will accomplish exactly that. By forcing ESG guidelines on corporations and investment institutions, Biden and the ESG movement are choking off the investments needed to bring fossil fuels to market. The result is higher energy prices that hurt poor and middle-class families the most. The woke consulting, accounting, and legal firms that implement these rules all make out like bandits.

A new book published earlier this week, Against the Great Reset, documents the intellectual origins of the Great Reset, details how global elites are conspiring to make them richer and us poorer, and also explains how we can take power back from global corporations and unelected government bureaucrats.

Edited by New York Times bestselling author Michael Walsh, Against the Great Reset features 18 essays about different aspects of the Great Reset including, Victor Davis Hanson on the goals of the Great Reset, Roger Kimball on sovereignty and the nation-state, Michael Anton on socialism, John Tierney on America’s botched COVID response, and James Poulos on the role of Big Tech.

In his essay painting the COVID lockdowns as a “trial run” for the Great Reset, Tierney writes:

“The Great Reset is hailed as a unifying project, a chance for everyone to join in sacrificing for the common good, just as we all did during the pandemic. But the pandemic sacrifices were not only useless but harmful, and the suffering was not shared equally. The brunt was borne by the most vulnerable members of society. In the United States, income fell among all social classes at the start of the lockdowns, but it quickly rebounded for upper-income workers — such as the Great Resetters and others in the laptop class. A year into the pandemic, affluent workers were earning more than they did before Covid, but middle-income workers’ earnings still hadn’t fully recovered, and lower-income workers’ earnings were down nearly 25 percent. Students from disadvantaged families fell farther behind in school, and children in poor countries went hungry. Blue-collar employees lost jobs so that professionals at minimal risk could feel safer in their home offices. Silicon Valley profited from lockdowns that bankrupted brick-and-mortar businesses around the world.”

“The Great Reset will be more of the same,” he adds.

Unless we stop it, it absolutely will.

Reporting from The Washington Examiner.

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