Committed to improving the state of the world? Who do those people at Davos think they’re fooling? The only world most of them want to improve is their own!
If you’ve read even a few of my journal entries, it should be fairly clear this humble spirit hates Donald Trump and disparage his MAGA “base” as much as anyone, but. . . if you want to empathize with MAGA grievance real quick, consider the annual “World Economic Forum” in Davos, Switzerland. Forget about the “coastal elites,” the “liberal elites,” the “cosmopolitan elites” and all the other ridiculous boogeymen Trump and his Republican allies have created, the folks who visit Davos every year are the REAL elites, the true “globalists”—billionaires and centimillionaires, along with corporate chieftains (aka “titans of industry”), prominent diplomats and other government officials, NGO executives, international journalists, and a collection of assorted “thought leaders” tagging along in exchange for outrageous fees. My apologies if I left anyone out.
At the risk of sounding like a Fox “News” host, these are people who fly around the world on private jets, but upon arriving in Davos discuss “climate transition” and “decarbonization projects.” Except for the fact that many of the (mostly male) attendees are aging out, their culture and mentality appear remarkably similar to those of a bunch of precocious tech “bros” with no boundaries. Many of them claim they want to “improve the state of the world,” (someone’s cautiously scaled-down version of “save the world”), but if that’s true, they might consider not doing the world so much harm in the first place. They feign passionate concern for humanity, but many are the very people responsible for economic inequality throughout the world. Vladimir Putin may be the person most responsible for the devastating increase in world hunger these last couple of years (based on reducing Ukraine’s grain shipments), but if the Davos crowd stopped exploiting their own elitist advantage, the state of the world would begin to improve and, in time, fewer people would need saving.
As One Pundit So Aptly Described Davos, “It’s Nothing but a Bunch of Rich People Licking Each Other Up and Down.”
The Davos crowd is generally opposed to regulation and lobbies for every benefit government can bestow on big business and the wealthy, most especially reducing their tax burden so they can stash even more money in places like the Cayman Islands and Switzerland (they probably visit their money while they’re in Davos). And here’s where we have the opportunity to relate to our angry, aggrieved MAGA compatriots: above all, the folks at Davos fancy themselves better than everyone else and entitled to their lofty status in the world. If these people don’t stir up grievance in you, nothing will. If there’s anything that could unite all but the top 1% of the top 1% of polarized Americans, it’s anger directed at the Davos crowd.
Apparently this year’s attendees generally consider the possibility of Donald Trump’s reelection a “geopolitical risk” to the world economy and thus a cause for serious concern. Many of them benefited directly from Trump’s fraudulent “middle class” tax cut for the rich, but if Trump allows NATO to collapse and Putin overruns Europe, who’ll be there to protect their global economic interests? But on the positive side, as Alex Soros, the son of MAGA world’s favorite boogeyman George Soros, said at this year’s forum, “Trump is already the president at Davos, which is a good thing because the Davos consensus is usually wrong.”