“Why can’t our leaders imagine anything other than a future of privation and control?” wonders Michael Brendan Dougherty in an article about the latest World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He doesn’t try to prove or debunk any theories about what’s going on, but he does marvel that leaders who attend the conference keep feeding the worst fears of humanity.

The World Economic Forum is a perennial subject for conspiracy theorists and QAnon people, having long since eclipsed the Trilateral Commission, the Bildeberg Group, and Bohemian Grove. The 2020 confab at Davos was billed as “The Great Reset” and promoted the ideas of German industrialist Klaus Schwab for rebuilding society and the economy after the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s from the creepy WEF promotional videos making “8 Predictions For the World in 2030” that the menacing phrase, You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy, emerged.

The other predictions were that there would be new climate taxes, and you will get 3D printed organs rather than organ donations, migrants will be welcomed, and you probably won’t be eating much meat. The word “reset” started making its way into speeches by Joe Biden, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, and New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern. You’ve seen resistance to the way of life depicted by the Great Reset whenever some young conservative says, “I will not live in a pod. I will not eat the bugs.”

Davos is an invaluable networking opportunity for its participants. It allows CEOs a nice chance to lobby the U.S. government for help and warn the Irish prime minister about raising taxes all over the same lunch. But Schwab’s obsessions with global political cooperation, environmentalism, and “the fourth industrial revolution” — his idea that the next great leap in capitalist productivity will come from integrating technology with the human person itself — guarantees that the presentations will be a mix of utopian globalism that somehow combine visions of global austerity (to reduce carbon) with nightmares about a handful of corporate and political leaders having direct access to your amygdala.

Dougherty then shows video of several people saying crazy things — a Pfizer executive talking about “ingestible pills” with a tracking chip for compliance, a Chinese conglomerate big wig opining about an “individual carbon footprint tracker” that would score people for climate effect, and Microsoft’s CEO discussing how close white-collar workers are to having an artificial intelligence “copilot for every cognitive task.” Rather than imagine ways to truly better humanity through food production or environmental cleanup, Daugherty says, they come up with these strange things.

He concludes:

For the Davoisie, the future is your guts wirelessly reporting you truant and then a text message buzzing on every device in the house, warning your pets to exit the room while it is flooded with gas to sedate you into compliance with Pfizer. Afterwards a Chinese multinational informs you that the gas-flooding and Pfizer SWAT-team incident have brought about serious penalties to your carbon score, thereby deferring your long-awaited meat ration by several more years. As a help in the future, Microsoft’s cognitive copilot will be taking over even more duties and tasks previously assigned to you.

It is actually a crisis for our global elites that every idea they have for solving problems involves subtracting more of our humanity and freedom from human civilization. The only vision they have of the future is of a population drugged, fed on fake food, entertained by phones strapped to their faces, and controlled by machines. They see our unhappy reaction to this, and their imagination only comes up with more elaborate gags for us, and dreams of unsolvable mazes to drop us in.

These ideas seem, almost word for word, like the hackneyed lines in a first draft of a dystopian movie, the words stuffed into the mouths of characters to identify them as the supervillains in the plot before James Bond, or Jason Bourne, or Ethan Hunt shows up to impale them on their expensive flatware.

… The Davos elite are presenting themselves as incurable villains. People who talk this way are almost begging for red-blooded men to rise up in anger to depose them violently. Honestly. It feels like a dare.

Read the whole thing here.