America This Week, January 19, 2024: "The Creeping Evil of Davos"
2024-01-19 00:30:30
Welcome to America This Week, with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn, the national news wrap-up so true, we recommend you stow all sharp objects before reading. <br/><br/><a href="https://www.racket.news/s/america-this-week?utm_medium=podcast">www.racket.news</a>
All right, welcome to America This Week, I'm Matt Taibbi.
And I'm Walter Kern.
Walter, what's going on?
It's been a long New Year, you know, these three weeks since New Year. Here in Montana, it's been 30 below zero consistently. It's now warmed up a little. That's not a physical feeling of cold, it's an existential cold.
Have we used that word more in the last four years than in the previous hundred?
When I went to college in the early 80s, existentialism was still a thing, you know, camoose, art, etc. And it was a pretty heavy word to use. And it basically meant living on in the face of annihilation and death, you know, living in a world without God and only your own actions, which may be meaningless, but you must carry on nevertheless.
Right.
And now it's become just sort of an adjective for very, very much, you know, Trump is a.
very threat to democracy.
Existential threats.
Existential challenges. You know, everything's existential now. Beer probably is existential, you know, existentially refreshing.
So it's existential cold that you're living in.
Yeah. So I'm going to just, you know, use the word the way it's being used. But it was existential in the sense that it caused you to fear that you were a tiny organism, very vulnerable to, you know, the turns of the weather. And when I and I grew up in a cold climate, but when I went outside and it was both windy and 30 below, I thought, you know, I could commit suicide this way.
This is a lie down.
Yeah. Just lie down and sort of meditate and probably within five minutes, my mind would be scrambled and I wouldn't be able to feel anything. I'd start to numb up. So yeah, yeah. Suicide by cold front.
But I got through that. That was existential. See, suicide is a big existential thing.
And then actually a big part of learning how to drink in the former Soviet Union. What? You have to be conscious of not passing out in certain places.
How can you be conscious of not becoming unconscious?
Because it's I mean, people do. every year. There's a raft of I can't believe it used that term. There's a slew of stories about guys who go out ice fishing, get hammered and then forget that they're, you know, on an ice floe and then freeze to death. But there's.
but there's also always stories about sort of men who curl up on benches on the way to the subway station, or they they go out to the kiosk to get more vodka and they just never make it home. So it's sort of like you're training to be a grown man in the form of Soviet Union, is you? usually you have to learn, you have to know your measure, as Graham Greene would say, to be not so completely hammered that you forget to actually duck inside a doorway before you lie down. Although it doesn't work in the summer. That's for sure.
It looks like Appomattox outside most beer bars, at least it did when I was there. Sorry. Yeah.
Well, that's it. That's interesting. I haven't had a drink since I was 30 years old. Had to stop. Really?
But yeah, but I always maintained that vigilance that you're talking about.
I was, you know. I practiced walking straight lines even when I was sober, so that I could do it drunk.
I had all kinds of sort of boundaries in on my drinking. that caused me never to get a DUI. You know.
Get a bad fight or anything. And I did think that was the height of responsibility to be able to be really, really drunk and yet still live and not right. You know, right.
Right. Yeah. And that's a sure sign that probably you're drinking too much.
There were many sure signs. One was that I would go into bars where, like local bands were playing and promise that I could get them a record contract in L.A. I was an expansive, grandiose drinker who believed. Yeah. I wasn't mean.
I was so nice. And then I'd come back to the same bar and the band would be playing the next night. They'd said, did you call the Eagles manager and get us that contract? Oh, man. What the hell are you talking about?
That's one of those things where you wake up in the morning and it's like, who's that director who makes Inception? Christopher Nolan. You get those like extreme, like reverse zoom shots, where suddenly everything flashes back to you about all the horrible, stupid shit that you said the night before.
But here was the thing. I didn't. I didn't threaten people. I over promised. And actually, and actually, people will get angrier at you for over promising than calling them a name.
All right.
Yeah. All right. So. So no, no drinking to get me through the existential cold. And you know, then my back went out during our live stream on the Iowa caucus, really right before.
I was in severe back pain that whole time.
Yeah. So. So, mine, too. But I'm sorry. That's really weird.
OK. Really? Are you better now?
Two thirds, three quarters, I still got sort of Frankenstein vibe when I walk, you know, like keeping the back stiff. But the latest thinking on back pain and all the psychotherapeutic books about it say it's it's psychological and that the way to get through throwing your back out is to pretend your back's fine and just keep moving while you examine your emotional state to see if anything is deeply stressing you.
And there's a whole book on this. And I know a lot of people who go on TV all the time, for whom back pain is, you know, a professional risk and affliction. And they swear by this method. So that's what I've been using.
All right. I don't know. I think if a doctor tried that on me, I might punch him, actually.
But that's, I feel, that way about a lot of things lately. So maybe that's just not definitive. So, OK.
We last spoke during the Iowa caucuses, which was pretty interesting, I have to say. But this week is also marked by another,
I would say, far more sordid ritual in politics, which is the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. We're going to get back to Iowa. Yeah. But this this has gradually become one of the most loathsome things that happens on schedule in the world. And it feels like it gets worse and worse every year.
What did you notice so far from the headlines this week? Do we need to explain to people what this is?
The Davos World Economic Forum is sort of like the Cannes Film Festival, or for oligarchs. Yeah, for oligarchs, except they are the films. They're little. They give these frightening TED talk kind of presentations to each other. They never show the audience.
So it's unclear if all the CEOs and heads of state actually show up for the speeches or if they're back in the ski lodge with their high-priced prostitutes.
I was going to say that a singular feature of Davos is that it takes place in this kind of extremely exclusive sort of ski and buggery resort for the filthy rich. Not just, I got a million and a half dollars, you have to have a hundred million dollars to be somebody there.
Right.
Sorry. Go ahead.
And I've come to call it Starbase Davos because, first of all, it has a sort of 80s science fiction feel in its staging. They are up on this blue stage that, for some reason, they stand like 10 feet apart. It looks like the meeting of some imperial congress in a science fiction film. But it's got this very dated aesthetic. It reminds me of, like Epcot or one of those, you know, 70s visions of the future.
It's archaic in strange ways. It's what a 1955 science fiction writer would imagine. a world congress in 2008 would look like, but not necessarily 2024..
Anyway, they give these speeches. I mean, we're still in the explanatory phase. They give these speeches, which are actually meant for dissemination. I always think, why are they giving away on the World Wide Web these talks that people are spending, you know, a hundred grand to go attend in person? Shouldn't it be a little more secret?
Right. Well, yeah, they always say things that are horrifying.
Intimidating. It's the World Intimidation Congress, it's the way I see it.
Right. Yeah. And the thing you mentioned about how far away they were, one of the classic images, maybe we can splice this in later, but from this event was the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. I like to call Ursula von evil. She's, first of all, everybody, everyone with Davos looks like a late stage Westworld, cyborg, you know, and she's somebody, she's like a rich person's ice princess, fantasy or something like that.
She's a perfect looking Aryan creature. anyway. She's on a podium all the way to one side of this gigantic stage with this huge W.E.F. backlit thing. And then all the way to the other side, slouched in a chair, is Klaus von Schwab.
And it's just this really bizarre visual that they did. And then she gives a speech, which is kind of terrifying. in conjunction with the Schwab speech. She gives a speech basically saying that the singular threat to humanity over the course of the next two years is going to be misinformation and disinformation.
People like you and me, Matt, really. Exactly. That's what I hear when they say that.
Right, right. That's what they mean. And, you know, it's a... They're always talking sort of slightly in code in these things. So they will say things like, you know, we have to get together and collaborate to rebuild trust in institutions and undo the damage that disinformation has caused.
Right. But what they mean by that, you know, is censorship. And they don't come out...
They want to rebuild trust by force. Trust, which was traditionally something that we granted voluntarily, will now be coerced or forced by the fact that you won't have any alternative but to trust, they think, which means that we won't trust them at all. But, in other words, not only do they speak euphemistically, they speak illogically, in a kind of paradoxical, mind-melting way. It's like saying, you know, we're going to regain your love and we're going to do it by shooting everybody else who you love until you just love us.
Do they really think this way? Yeah. See, before you get into it, I think the whole thing is meant to normalize a kind of.
slack-jawed passivity of an audience standing before an elite. that doesn't need to make sense.
Actually, that's a really interesting point, yeah, because they very carefully call the audience.
Right.
I mean, even if you're legit media, you have a tough time getting in there.
And you see what we're used to, Matt, you know, if you watch the US Congress or the Parliament, or even a cable news show, you're used to watching debate, questioning, sometimes fake debate, as on cable news, but they always are alone and, how can I put it, unimpeded in their pronouncements. And that's what they want us to get used to, are these, you know, royal proclamations again.
Right. Right. And, yeah, so we had at Davos,
Klaus von Schwab, is it von Schwab or just Klaus Schwab? Now I'm confusing my own egos.
It might be, the last name means from Swabia, which is part of Germany. And it could be von Schwab. He may, for, you know, aesthetic reasons and not wanting to, you know,
conjure up the spectacle of Kaisers and so on, not use von, but.
Right. Right. Okay. So here's, here's Schwab's speech and Davos 2024 welcoming remarks by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman.
And he uses these words over and over again. The theme this year is trust. Right. So here we get into the meat of his address, and I can't do the X and I won't try, but unfortunately it's a key part of the whole effect. To break the cycle, we need a paradigm shift.
We must rebuild trust, trust in our future, trust in our capacity to overcome challenges and, most importantly, trust in each other. Trust is not just a feeling, trust is a commitment to action, to belief, to hope. To achieve this, we must rediscover and embrace the narrative that has driven humanity since its inception, acting as trustees for a better future.
Has any narrative driven humanity since its inception? Why would there be war if some narrative had been driving us the whole time? What is he talking about? Why is he trying to slip past these gigantic, erroneous statements that don't stand up to one second of reason?
I mean, I mean, I think you make, you make a good point, right? Like maybe the, maybe. the idea is to condition people to just sit there and listen to gibberish and think it makes sense.
Yeah. Anyway, sorry.
But no, no, it's okay. No, but you see, you see how he goes on, and this is, this is a sentence that really kind of triggered me.
This, wait, this is the right one, hang on, I'm sorry.
The narrative isn't about short-term gains, short-term gains or individual successes. It's about stewardship, about preserving and enhancing our world for current and future generations. It's about understanding that our actions today have far-reaching consequences tomorrow. And this whole idea of like stewardship, it's just, it's so weird because nobody elected these people. And I don't even remember giving permission to our presidents to go off and have inaccessible meetings with other world leaders, you know what I mean?
Jake Sullivan was there, you know, sitting, nodding along, you know, getting little messages in his ear, no doubt, like we just bombed the Houthis again, and he pretends he didn't hear it, you know, goes on with the conversation. But stewardship, stewardship is, you know, according to my last dictionary, something that you award someone, you make them your steward, you take your power, and you temporarily, under certain conditions, grant it to them, you know, my good and faithful steward, as in the Bible, come back to me, or, you know, when you're leaving your estate, you appoint a steward, and then you come back and find out if you still have livestock, and whether the forest has been burned down or something.
But we didn't grant them a damn thing. They just appropriated it. So for stewardship, really, they mean our arrogant appropriation of authority. By trust, they mean our coercive threat to eliminate all other sources of information and all other bonds. But I really do think it's pure gibberish.
I mean, it's a little, it's like a one level above the corporate doublespeak that you hear, you know, in a human resources meeting or at a company picnic, where the attainable.
goals, and, you know, yeah, right.
But it's, you know, an inverted vocabulary presented on a stage that looks like, you know, Starship, Alpha Centauri, right, right, by by people who don't look approachable, okay. You know, Ursula and Klaus don't look like people you could go up and speak to.
No, they look like people who you could open their necks and, you know, electronically reconfigure them. I'm sorry. I can't get away from that image of them.
But that is part of the intimidation game.
Also that, being far apart from each other, suggests I am not approachable, I exist in a force field of self-sufficient grandeur.
Anyway, yeah, the whole thing is mostly theater. And remember, since it's international, it's being translated, you know, we, we, we hear it in English, but a lot of it's not occurring in English. So it also gets us used to the thought that it's sort of supranational and above our heads, that these are, you know, world appointees who don't necessarily represent any particular culture.
Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the general tone, especially this time of Schwab speech, if you, if you tweak some words, just a little bit, and I, I'm not one of these people who watches, you know, these documentaries about socialist or communist takeovers of the world, or Marxist or whatever, but he does lift a lot of language from sort of Lenin's vanguardism ideas, right?
The thing I just mentioned, he said, there's a singular drive, which animates mankind. That's very Hegelian language. You know, that's, that's, that's Germanic, historical inevitability right there. You know, what is that singular drive?
I don't know. I don't know.
I guess for power.
Capital? I mean, yeah.
Yeah, no, I mean, in other words, they want to portray themselves as at the tip of some kind of historical spear, the very vanguard. I mean, this is progressivism weaponized.
But it's tweaked, though, right? It's that we're not the vanguard of the proletariat. We're the vanguard of, like, progress or something like that.
Yes, they're the vanguard of some, of some ineffable historical will. that is not that of any particular group or so on. But, you know, here at home, where we have these constant paroxysms of conscience and fear about white supremacy in our politics.
We never, we never identify these people as the true avatars of it, because I've never seen anything whiter or more supremacist.
You have to go back to Hitler's Eagle's Nest to see something scarier than this group. Yeah. Sorry.
Yeah, yeah. Ursula Klaus. I mean, they take us for fools. You know, I tweeted last week, is it farmers and diesel mechanics in Iowa who we should fear are white supremacists? Or is it these, you know, global Bond villain, mastermind Ted, talk from hell people?
And they just look like black Nazis. And I'm sorry.
The normalization of Nazi aesthetics is a real trend over the last year. And nothing could be more forthright, third right and forthright. Maybe this is the fourth than what we're seeing here.
You've seen the movie. Obviously, we've talked about this movie, Starship Troopers. Oh, yeah. All right. So one of the brilliant things that it's Paul Verhoeven, right?
That's the director, isn't that? Yeah. Um, so he, he kind of cons the audience into slowly accepting Nazi ideas and Nazi aesthetic throughout the movie. And you don't notice the subtle costume changes, the subtle changes in the backdrop, in the fonts, but they they're moving in the audience in that direction the entire time. And you're right.
There's been a lot of that in the last year, the sort of triumph of the will style, you know, presentation of certain leaders, and,
and we're being, I guess, conditioned to think that that's okay. It's, it's creepy. And the other thing is, like, I was introduced to Davos a long time ago, probably before most Americans were because I was living in Russia. Um, at, at this moment in time, when a lot of deals that had to do with, uh, the construction of Russia's future were being brokered at Davos. So there was an infamous meeting, I think it was in 95 or 96, where, uh, one of Yeltsin's or a team of Yeltsin's people met with a bunch of the Russian oligarchs, and they kind of made this back room deal.
that was, and there were some Western aid advisors there. Basically, the idea was, we're going to privatize a bunch of huge oil companies to you guys. And in return, you're going to massively support Yeltsin's reelection campaign. And everybody's going to walk away happy because we're going to, we're going to stave off the communists. This is all done in like in, in some hotel room in Switzerland.
And the news trickled out to Russians later. And, and, and for a very good reason, they, they began, the Russian people started to have a very negative opinion of this Davos meeting, um, long before we did. And I think this idea that there are sort of huge consequential arrangements being made, um, that we are not invited to, not allowed to participate in about, about things like censorship. I mean, the Von Evil is talking about her digital services act and talking about how, you know, it needs to be expanded and all these things. Do you, do you doubt for a minute that they're talking about, you know, plans to do more of that at this, at this place?
Oh, so my thesis about Davos, uh, is that it is meant to normalize the specter or the spectacle of proclamation style government. And that, you know, it, it, it's sort of like a consumer electronics show where they show you, uh, products that aren't yet on the retail market, but are making their way through the supply chain.
So it's kind of a, it's kind of a preview of what the new products are going to be. It's a trade show. It's a trade show for evil ideas, quasi authoritarian government. basically. Yeah.
And, and, and it's meant to kind of get you, it can't get you excited about them in the same way, you know, uh, the Las Vegas electronics show might get you excited about a mini transporter that allows you to go across the street on a beam of pure energy, but they can do the next best thing and make you afraid, which is a form of excitement. So I also tend to think they overstate threats and they overstate their, they overstate their plans in order to get people talking about them, which is a weird way of making them come true. Um, get, get people afraid, get people babbling and, uh, and gossiping, and then bring it in, because by then it's kind of old news. You've kind of feared it into existence. Um, and, and I don't know how they plan to restore trust or, or get rid of all missing disinformation.
They never talk about how they're going to do it, in the sense that, like, they still haven't answered who's going to be the authority on that. They still haven't answered how is some super computer going to go through every statement for factual, uh, content and give it a score and rank. Um, they're never, they. just, in other words, they leave out all the interesting details and just tell you, this is what's coming. Um, and they, they did that about Ukraine this week.
I don't know if you saw, you know, she was on stage, I think with Jake Sullivan or somebody talking about, no, maybe it was another, it was maybe.
I think it was Schwab. She was, she was talking about, yeah. Uh-huh. Um, there will always be attempts to push us off track, for example, with disinformation and misinformation, and nowhere has there been more of that on this issue, on the issue of Ukraine. So let me provide you with some real information.
Russia is failing on strategic goals. It is first and foremost, a military failure. We haven't forgotten that when Russia invaded Ukraine, many feared the key of would fall within a few days, blah, blah, blah.
Um, and then she just goes on and on and on, but it's all about how. Ukraine's winning the war. Um, Ukraine's better future is called Europe. And it was with immense joy that last month we decided to launch the negotiations of a session for Ukraine's EU membership. This will be Ukraine's historic achievement and it will be Europe responding to the call of history.
Um, so, another call of history, uh, meme there, uh, they really do want to hypnotize everybody into thinking that history is some kind of.
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