What Is the Nice Reset?

I’ll start by addressing the elephant within the room. Isn’t the Nice Reset merely a “conspiracy idea” concocted and circulated by “rightwing extremists?” The so-called conspiracy theories run one thing like this: the Nice Reset is a plot hatched by a technocratic international elite to ascertain a socialist-communist New World Order. The Nice Reset will abolish the property rights of the bulk, in addition to particular person and nationwide sovereignty, and wipe out the final vestiges of private freedom. It makes use of covid-19 and local weather change as pretexts to enslave what’s going to stay of humanity, utilizing unending lockdowns, experimental vaccines, and pervasive and inescapable surveillance.

In response to the New York Instances[1] and the Anti-Defamation League,[2] the Nice Reset has no foundation the truth is. Or, because the BBC claims,[3] the Nice Reset is a benign effort on the a part of “main thinkers”[4] to result in “a fairer, greener future,”[5] primarily based on a reset of capitalism. In the meantime, Time devoted a difficulty to the Nice Reset, successfully hailing it as the answer to all our issues post-covid.[6]

Klaus Schwab, the Founder and Government Chairman of the World Financial Discussion board (WEF), means that the Nice Reset is merely an try to handle the weaknesses of capitalism uncovered by the covid disaster, in addition to the looming catastrophes posed by unmitigated local weather change and environmental degradation. That is what Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret recommend of their ebook, Covid-19: The Nice Reset. It’s what quite a few paperwork on the WEF web site declare. Why, then, has the Nice Reset been construed as an enormous leftwing conspiracy to create a totalitarian one-world authorities?

I don’t imply to recommend that the reality lies someplace between denial and conspiracy. Relatively, I need to clarify simply what the Nice Reset entails, based on its architects and subscribers. I depend on the claims of Klaus Schwab and his WEF contributors, the WEF’s partnerships, developments within the U.S. and world wide, and on the implications that may be fairly drawn from proposals and their implementation. Within the course of, I additionally imply to indicate how the Nice Reset thought generates “conspiracy theories,” as if spontaneously.

Earlier than grappling with the primary elements of the Nice Reset, a historical past of the concept and its growth is so as. Though its philosophical roots might go a lot deeper, the Nice Reset could be traced to the inception of the World Financial Discussion board, based because the European Administration Discussion board in 1971. In the identical 12 months, Klaus Schwab, an engineer and economist by coaching, revealed his first ebook, Fashionable Enterprise Administration in Mechanical Engineering, written in his native German.[7] Right here, Schwab first launched what he would later name “stakeholder capitalism,” arguing, because the WEF web site notes, “that the administration of a contemporary enterprise should serve not solely shareholders however all stakeholders to realize long-term development and prosperity.”[8] Schwab and the WEF have promoted the multistakeholder idea ever since. The WEF is the supply for the stakeholder and public-private partnership rhetoric and insurance policies embraced by governments, companies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society organizations, and worldwide governance our bodies worldwide. Public-private partnerships have performed a key position within the response to the covid disaster and are instrumental within the response to the supposed local weather change disaster.

The precise phrase, “the Nice Reset,” got here into circulation in 2010 with the publication of the ebook, The Nice Reset, by the American City Research theorist Richard Florida[9]—though others declare that they used the phrase earlier than him. Florida’s Nice Reset was a response to the 2008 monetary disaster and argues that the 2008 crash was the newest in a sequence of Nice Resets, together with the Lengthy Melancholy of the 1870s and the Nice Melancholy of the Thirties. Removed from being the fallow years sometimes depicted, Nice Resets are durations of paradigm-shifting innovation and geographical reconfiguration. Schwab apparently appropriated the phrase and tailored it to symbolize his stakeholder imaginative and prescient for a brand new type of capitalism and world system.

On the WEF annual assembly in 2014, Schwab declared: “What we need to do in Davos this 12 months … is to push the reset button.”[10] By this he referred to an imaginary reset button on the world financial system of “neoliberal” capitalism. A graphic depiction of a reset button would later seem on the WEF’s web site. In 2017, the WEF revealed a paper entitled, “We have to reset the worldwide working system to realize the SDGs [Sustainable Development Goals]” of the United Nations (UN).[11]

Subsequent, the WEF organized two occasions that eerily anticipated covid-19, which turned the first inspiration for the Nice Reset undertaking. In Might 2018, the WEF collaborated with the Johns Hopkins Heart for Well being Safety to conduct the CLADE X Train, a “tabletop” simulation of a nationwide response to a pandemic.[12] The train simulated the outbreak of CLADE X, a novel pressure of a human parainfluenza virus with genetic components of the Nipah virus. In response to Homeland Preparedness Information, the CLADE X simulation demonstrated that “[t]he lack of each a protecting vaccine and a proactive worldwide plan for tackling the unfold of a catastrophic international pandemic resulted within the demise of 150 million individuals throughout the Earth.”[13]Clearly, preparation for a world pandemic was so as.

Just a little over a 12 months later, in October 2019, the WEF’s uncanny prescience was once more on show, solely this time with larger precision. Together with the Invoice and Melinda Gates Basis, the WEF teamed up with Johns Hopkins College to stage one other pandemic train, referred to as Occasion 201. Occasion 201 simulated the worldwide response to the outbreak of a novel coronavirus—two months earlier than the covid-19 outbreak turned worldwide information and 5 months earlier than the World Well being Group (WHO) declared it a pandemic. The Johns Hopkins Heart for Well being Safety’s abstract of the train carefully resembles the precise covid-19 situation, together with obvious foreknowledge of so-called asymptomatic unfold:

Occasion 201 simulates an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people who finally turns into effectively transmissible from individual to individual, resulting in a extreme pandemic. The pathogen and the illness it causes are modeled largely on SARS, however it’s extra transmissible locally setting by individuals with gentle signs.[14]

The CLADE X and Occasion 201 simulations anticipated virtually each eventuality of the covid disaster, notably the responses by governments, well being businesses, standard media, social media, and components of the general public. The responses and their results included worldwide lockdowns, the collapse of companies and industries, the adoption of biometric surveillance applied sciences, an emphasis on social media censorship to fight “misinformation” and “disinformation,” the flooding of social and legacy media with “authoritative sources,” widespread riots, and mass unemployment.[15]

These premonitory workouts and different covid curiosities have contributed to the “plandemic” narrative—hypothesis that the covid-19 disaster might have been staged by international elites centered across the WEF as an alibi for initiating the Nice Reset. Along with the pandemic train simply referenced, Swiss Coverage Analysis factors to the WEF’s position in selling digital biometric identification techniques, thrusting its Younger World Leaders into main roles within the governmental administration of the covid disaster, and advocating the vaccination of kids as “an entry level for digital identification.”[16]

On June 13, 2019, the WEF signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the UN to type a partnership centered on advancing the UN “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Growth.”[17] The WEF revealed the “United Nations-World Financial Discussion board Strategic Partnership Framework for the 2030 Agenda” shortly thereafter.[18] The WEF promised to assist “finance” the UN’s local weather change agenda. The framework additionally commits the WEF to serving to the UN “meet the wants of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” together with offering property and experience for “digital governance.” Agenda 2030 seems to have been tailored to accommodate the UN-WEF partnership. It adopts the stakeholder idea launched by Schwab a long time earlier than. The phrase “stakeholders” is used a minimum of 13 instances within the 2030 decision. The Nice Reset, then, could also be understood, partially, because the WEF’s contribution to Agenda 2030.

In June 2020, the WEF held its Nice Reset summit because the fiftieth annual assembly of the World Financial Discussion board—delayed and refocused because of the covid disaster—and introduced the Nice Reset’s official launch.

Simply months into the covid disaster, on July 19, 2020, and a mere month after the annual assembly, Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret revealed Covid 19: the Nice Reset. Steve Umbrello, the Managing Director on the Institute for Ethics and Rising Applied sciences on the College of Turin, wrote in his educational evaluation of the manifesto:

Though not unattainable, the pace at which a ebook on this specific matter, proposing these theses, was produced[,] does play into the conspiratorial aesthetic that the ebook has since induced. Though the authors are clear about writing and publishing the ebook inside a month’s time, this neither confirms the veracity of such claims nor dispels suspicion from those that query its expediency.[19]

The quick interval between the WHO’s declaration of a pandemic and the ebook’s publication will not be the one issue that has fed “the conspiratorial aesthetic” surrounding the Nice Reset. Schwab’s writing with Malleret and different WEF statements have stoked the speculations. The co-authors declare, with out obvious remorse or disgrace, that covid-19 represents an “alternative [that] could be seized,”[20] and “we should always benefit from this unprecedented alternative to reimagine our world,”[21] and “ the second should be seized to benefit from this distinctive window of alternative,”[22] and “[f]or these firms the pandemic is a novel alternative to rethink their group and enact constructive, sustainable and lasting change,”[23] and “[f]or these lucky sufficient to search out themselves in industries ‘naturally’ resilient to the pandemic [like Big Digital Tech], the disaster was not solely extra bearable, however even a supply of worthwhile alternatives at a time of misery for almost all.”[24] This final sentence could also be suggestive of the Nice Reset’s general plan.

The Nice Reset combines resets in all conceivable domains of human life: financial, environmental, geopolitical, governmental, industrial, technological, social, and particular person.

The Nice Reset ushers in a bewildering financial amalgam, what I’ve referred to as “company socialism”[25] and “capitalism with Chinese language traits,”[26] or what Giorgio Agamben later referred to as “communist capitalism.”[27] Schwab and firm euphemistically name this technique “stakeholder capitalism.”

Stakeholder capitalism entails the behavioral modification of companies to profit “stakeholders.” A stakeholder is anybody or any group that stands to profit or lose from company conduct—aside from opponents.

Stakeholder capitalism consists of not solely company responses to ecological points resembling local weather change, “but in addition rethinking their [corporations’] commitments to already-vulnerable communities inside their ecosystems.”[28] That is the “social justice” side of stakeholder capitalism and the Nice Reset. Governments, banks, and asset managers use the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) index to squeeze non-woke gamers out of the market. The ESG index is basically a social credit score rating for ranking companies. The collectivist planners drive possession and management of manufacturing away from the non-compliant.

One of many WEF’s many “strategic companions,”[29] BlackRock, Inc., the world’s largest asset supervisor, is solidly behind the stakeholder mannequin of the Nice Reset program. In a 2021 letter to CEOs, BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink declared that “local weather danger is funding danger,” and “the creation of sustainable index investments has enabled a large acceleration of capital in the direction of firms higher ready to handle local weather danger.”[30] Fink states that the pandemic accelerated the stream of funds towards sustainable investments:

We have now lengthy believed that our purchasers, as shareholders in your organization, will profit when you can create enduring, sustainable worth for all your stakeholders…As an increasing number of traders select to tilt their investments in the direction of sustainability-focused firms, the tectonic shift we’re seeing will speed up additional. And since it will have such a dramatic affect on how capital is allotted, each administration group and board might want to think about how it will affect their firm’s inventory.

Fink’s letter is greater than a report back to CEOs. It’s an implicit risk. In the meantime, funding based on the ESG index and different monetary instruments is gaining the power of regulation within the U.S., with the Biden administration’s latest “U.S. Local weather-Associated Monetary Danger: Government Order 14030.”[31]

Schwab and Malleret pit “stakeholder capitalism” towards “neoliberalism,” “a corpus of concepts and insurance policies … favouring competitors over solidarity, inventive destruction over authorities intervention and financial development over social welfare.”[32] That’s, “neoliberalism” refers to what’s in any other case referred to as the free market. Stakeholder capitalism is thus against the free enterprise system. It means not solely company cooperation with the state and NGOs but in addition vastly elevated authorities intervention within the economic system. Schwab and Malleret promote “the return of ‘huge’ authorities,”[33] as if it ever retreated: If “the previous 5 centuries in Europe and America” have taught us something, they assert, it’s that “acute crises contribute to boosting the facility of the state. It’s all the time been the case and there’s no purpose why it ought to be totally different with the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Schwab and firm erect the strawman of neoliberalism because the supply of our financial woes. However the governmental favoring of industries and gamers inside industries—or corporatism, in any other case referred to as financial fascism,[34] and never honest and free competitors—has been the true supply of what Schwab and his ilk apparently decry. The Nice Reset vastly will increase corporatism or financial fascism.

Whereas permitted company stakeholders usually are not essentially monopolies, the tendency of the Nice Reset is towards monopolization—vesting as a lot management over manufacturing and distribution in these favored companies as doable, whereas eliminating industries and producers deemed both pointless or inimical. To convey this reset about, “[e]very nation, from the US to China, should take part, and each trade, from oil and fuel to tech, should be remodeled,” writes the authoritarian Schwab.[35]

Unsurprisingly, stakeholder capitalism has been seen as a brand new method to reaching socialism, even by socialists.[36] As I’ve advised, stakeholder capitalism tends towards “company socialism,” or “capitalism with Chinese language traits,” two methods of understanding the general economics of the Nice Reset.

Anthony C. Sutton, the late historian and Hoover Institute scholar, described company socialism as follows:

Outdated John D. Rockefeller and his nineteenth century fellow capitalists had been satisfied of 1 absolute fact: that no nice financial wealth may very well be amassed below the neutral guidelines of a aggressive laissez faire society. The one positive highway to the acquisition of huge wealth was monopoly: drive out your opponents, cut back competitors, eradicate laissez-faire, and above all get state safety to your trade by means of compliant politicians and authorities regulation. This final avenue yields a authorized monopoly, and a authorized monopoly all the time results in wealth.

This robber baron schema can be … the socialist plan. The distinction between a company state monopoly and a socialist state monopoly is basically solely the identification of the group controlling the facility construction…We name this phenomenon of company authorized monopoly—market management acquired by utilizing political affect—by the identify of company socialism.[37]

The company-socialist tendency is towards a two-tiered economic system, with monopolies and the state on prime, and “truly present socialism” for almost all under. “Truly present socialism” is socialism because it actually is, versus how Marx and his epigones claimed it could be.[38]

“Capitalism with Chinese language traits” is a play on the Chinese language Communist Occasion’s description of its financial system. A number of a long time in the past, as China’s rising reliance on the for-profit sectors of its economic system might not be credibly denied by the CCP, its management permitted the slogan “socialism with Chinese language traits” to explain its financial system. Formulated by Deng Xiaoping, the phrase turned an integral part of the CCP’s try and rationalize Chinese language for-profit growth below a socialist political system.

In response to the occasion, the rising privatization of the Chinese language economic system was to be a brief section—lasting 100 years if essential(!)—on the best way to a classless society of full socialism-communism. The occasion leaders claimed, and nonetheless keep, that socialism with Chinese language traits is important in China’s case as a result of China was a “backward” agrarian nation when socialism was launched—too early, it was advised. China wanted a capitalist booster shot.

With the slogan, the occasion was capable of recommend that China had been an exception to the orthodox Marxist place that socialism arrives solely after the event of capitalism—though Marx himself deviated from his personal system late in life. On the identical time, the slogan allowed the CCP to substantiate the orthodox Marxist place. China’s socialist revolution had come earlier than developed industrial capitalism—an exception to orthodox Marxism. Capitalism was thus launched into China’s financial system later—a affirmation of orthodox Marxism.

Stripped of its socialist ideological pretensions, socialism with Chinese language traits, or the Chinese language system itself, quantities to a socialist or communist state more and more funded by “capitalist” financial growth. The distinction between the previous Soviet Union and up to date China is that when it turned apparent {that a} socialist economic system had failed, the previous gave up its socialist financial pretenses, whereas the latter has not.

The Nice Reset represents the event of the Chinese language system within the West, solely in reverse. Whereas the Chinese language political class started with a socialist political system and launched privately held for-profit manufacturing later, the West started with a level of capitalism and is implementing a socialist political system now. It’s as if the Western oligarchy seemed to the “socialism” on show in China, and stated, “sure, we would like it.” This Chinese language-style system consists of vastly elevated state intervention within the economic system on the one hand, and the type of authoritarian measures that the Chinese language authorities makes use of to regulate the inhabitants, on the opposite.

Now, let’s take a look at up to date developments and the way they’ve been shifting on this route.

The draconian lockdown measures employed by governments simply so occur to have completed what company socialists just like the WEF and their collaborators apparently wished finished. They’ve destroyed small companies, thus eliminating opponents for company monopolists. Because the Basis for Financial Schooling reported, within the U.S. alone, hundreds of thousands of small companies closed their doorways as a result of lockdowns.[39]Yelp knowledge signifies that 60% of enterprise closures at the moment are everlasting.[40] In the meantime, the Massive Digital giants—together with Amazon, Apple, and Fb—appreciated huge positive factors. Throughout the three months ending in June 2020, for instance, Amazon’s “quarterly revenue of $5.2bn (£4bn) was the largest for the reason that firm’s begin in 1994 and got here regardless of heavy spending on protecting gear and different measures because of the virus.”[41] A knowledge evaluation from Harvard College, Brown College, and the Invoice and Melinda Gates Basis discovered that government-mandated lockdowns devastated lower-income-earning staff and benefitted these on the prime.[42] In the meantime, research have proven that lockdowns did nothing to mitigate the unfold of covid-19.[43]

Developments advancing the Nice Reset agenda embody unfettered immigration, journey restrictions for in any other case authorized border crossing, the Federal Reserve’s unrestrained printing of cash, the following inflation, rising taxation, the elevated dependence on the state, the supply-chain disaster, the restrictions and job losses as a result of vaccine mandates, and the prospect of private carbon allowances.[44] Altogether, these and different such insurance policies represent a coordinated assault on the bulk. Mockingly, in addition they symbolize the “equity” side of the Nice Reset—if we correctly perceive equity to imply leveling the financial standing of the “common American” with these in much less “privileged” areas. And this is likely one of the capabilities of woke ideology—to make the bulk in developed international locations really feel unworthy of their “privileged” existence and consumption patterns, which the elite are within the means of resetting to a diminished and static new regular, however not for themselves.[45]

The company stakeholder mannequin of the Nice Reset spills into its governance and geopolitical mannequin: states and favored companies in “public-private partnerships” answerable for governance. The configuration yields a corporate-state hybrid largely unaccountable to the constituents of nationwide governments.

The comfy relationship between multinational companies and governments has even aroused the scorn of some lecturers.[46] Some word that the UN-WEF partnership and the governance mannequin of the WEF symbolize not less than the partial privatization of the UN’s Agenda 2030, with the WEF bringing company companions, cash, and supposed experience on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4-IR) to the desk. And the WEF’s governance mannequin extends effectively past the UN, affecting the structure and conduct of governments worldwide. This usurpation has led political scientist Ivan Wecke to name the WEF’s governmental redesign of the world system “a company takeover of world governance.”[47]

That is true, however the WEF mannequin additionally represents the governmentalization of personal trade. Beneath Schwab’s stakeholder capitalism and the multistakeholder governance mannequin, governance will not be solely more and more privatized, but in addition and extra importantly, companies are deputized as main additions to governments and intergovernmental our bodies. The state is thereby prolonged, enhanced, and augmented by the addition of huge company property. These embody funding directed at “sustainable growth” to the exclusion of the non-compliant, in addition to using Massive Knowledge, AI, and 5G to observe and management residents. Within the case of the covid vaccine regime, the state grants Massive Pharma monopoly safety and indemnity from legal responsibility in trade for a automobile to broaden its powers of coercion. As such, company stakeholders change into what I’ve referred to as “governmentalities”[48]—in any other case “personal” organizations wielded as state apparatuses, with no obligation to reply to pesky constituents. Since these companies are multinational, the state primarily turns into international, whether or not or not a “one-world authorities” is ever formalized.

As if the financial and governmental resets weren’t dramatic sufficient, the technological reset reads like a dystopic sci-fi novel. It’s primarily based on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4-IR). The 4-IR, we’re informed, follows the primary, second, and third industrial revolutions—the mechanical, electrical, and digital, respectively.[49] The 4-IR builds on the digital revolution, however Schwab sees the 4-IR as an exponential take-off and convergence of present and rising fields, together with Massive Knowledge; synthetic intelligence (AI); machine studying; quantum computing; and genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR). The consequence is the merging of the bodily, digital, and organic worlds. The blurring of those classes in the end challenges the very ontologies by which we perceive ourselves and the world, together with “what it means to be human.”[50]

The particular functions embody a ubiquitous Web, the Web of Issues (IoT), the Web of Our bodies (IoB), autonomous automobiles, sensible cities, 3-D printing, robots, nanotechnology, biotechnology, supplies science, power storage, and extra.

Whereas Schwab promotes a selected imaginative and prescient for the 4-IR, there may be nothing unique about his formulations. Transhumanists and Singularitarians (or prophets of the technological singularity), resembling Ray Kurzweil and plenty of others, forecasted these and extra revolutionary developments, lengthy earlier than Schwab heralded them.[51] The importance of Schwab’s and the WEF’s tackle the brand new technological revolution is the try and harness it to a selected finish, presumably “a fairer, greener future.”

But when present 4-IR developments are any indication of the longer term, then Schwab’s obvious optimism is misplaced, and the 4-IR is grossly misrepresented. These developments already embody Web algorithms that feed customers prescribed information and ads and downrank or exclude banned content material; algorithms that censor social media content material, and consign “harmful” people and organizations to digital gulags; key phrase warrants primarily based on search engine inputs; apps that monitor and hint covid suspects and report violators to the police; robotic police with QR code scanners to determine and spherical up the unvaccinated and different dissidents; and sensible cities the place everyone seems to be a digital entity to be monitored, surveilled, and recorded, whereas knowledge on their each transfer is collected, collated, saved, and hooked up to a digital identification and social credit score rating—to call a couple of of the panoptic manifestations of the 4-IR.

In brief, 4-IR applied sciences topic human beings to a technological administration that makes surveillance by the NSA appear like youngster’s play. And Schwab lauds developments that join brains on to the cloud and allow the “knowledge mining” of thought and reminiscence, a technological mastery over decision-making that threatens autonomy and undermines any semblance of free will. The 4-IR accelerates the merging of people and machines, leading to a world wherein all info, together with genetic info, is shared, and each motion, thought, and unconscious motivation is thought, predicted, and presumably even precluded. Naturally, Aldous Huxley’s Courageous New World involves thoughts. But Schwab touts brain-cloud interfaces as enhancements, as huge enhancements over commonplace human intelligence.

Except taken out of the fingers of corporate-socialist technocrats, the 4-IR will represent a digital, inescapable jail of physique and thoughts.

When it comes to the social order, the Nice Reset guarantees “inclusion” in a “shared future.”[52] However the subordination of “netizens” implies financial and political disenfranchisement, a hyper-vigilance over self and others, and social isolation—or what Hannah Arendt referred to as “organized loneliness”[53]—on a world scale. Within the age of covid, this organized loneliness is already manifest in lockdowns, masking, social distancing, and the exclusion of the “unvaccinated.” The “Alone Collectively” public service announcement produced and circulated by the Advert Council in March of 2020 represented organized loneliness succinctly.[54]

In Google Archipelago, I argued that leftist authoritarianism is the political ideology and modus operandi of what I name Massive Digital, and that Massive Digital is the vanguard of a nascent world system. Massive Digital is the communications, ideological, and technological arm of an rising corporate-socialist totalitarianism. The Nice Reset is the identify that has since been given to the undertaking of creating this world system.

Simply as Klaus Schwab and the WEF hoped, the covid disaster has accelerated the Nice Reset. The response to the covid-19 scourge has consolidated the grip on the economic system of monopolistic companies above, whereas advancing “actually-existing socialism” under. In partnership with Massive Tech, Massive Pharma, the legacy media, nationwide and worldwide well being businesses, and compliant populations, hitherto “democratic” Western states are being remodeled into totalitarian regimes modeled after China, seemingly in a single day. I needn’t present a litany of the tyranny and abuses. You’ll be able to examine them on various information websites—till you’ll be able to not examine them.[55]

The Nice Reset, then, will not be a conspiracy idea; it’s an open, avowed, and deliberate undertaking, and it’s effectively underway. However as a result of capitalism with Chinese language traits or corporate-socialist statism lacks free markets and will depend on the absence of free will and particular person liberty, it’s, satirically, “unsustainable.” The overwhelming majority is not going to settle for the Nice Reset’s makes an attempt to lock them away in an financial, governmental, and technological jail. Like earlier makes an attempt at totalitarianism, the Nice Reset is doomed to fail.

Notes

[1] Davey Alba, “The Baseless ‘Great Reset’ Conspiracy Theory Rises Again,” New York Times, Nov. 17, 2020.

[2] “‘The Great Reset’ Conspiracy Flourishes Amid Continued Pandemic,” Anti-Defamation League, December 29, 2020.

[3] BBC Monitoring and BBC Reality Check, “What Is the Great Reset—and How Did It Get Hijacked by Conspiracy Theories?” BBC News, BBC, June 23, 2021.

[4] “Leading Thinkers to Meet in Dubai for Great Narrative Meeting,” World Economic Forum, September 28, 2021.

[5] Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset (Geneva: Forum Publishing, 2020), p. 57.

[6] “The Great Reset: How to Build a Better World Post-Covid-19,” Time. Time, October 21, 2020.

[7] “Klaus Schwab,” World Economic Forum, Accessed October 27, 2021.

[8] “Klaus Schwab,” World Economic Forum, Accessed October 27, 2021.

[9] Richard L. Florida, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2010.

[10] “WEF Chairman Hopes Forum Will Help Push ‘Reset’ Button on World Economy,” YouTube. YouTube, July 31, 2015.

[11] Homi Kharas, “We Need to Reset the Global Operating System to Achieve the SDG. Here’s How,” World Economic Forum, January 13, 2017.

[12] Julia Cizek, “Clade X, a Tabletop Exercise Hosted by the Center for Health Security.” Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, January 7, 2019.

[13] Kim Riley, “Mock Clade X Pandemic Decimates Human Population; Denotes Global Pre-Planning Needs,” Homeland Preparedness News, May 21, 2018.

[14] JHCHS website, “The Event 201 Scenario: A Pandemic Tabletop Exercise,” Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, October 18, 2019.

[15] Tim Hinchliffe, “A Timeline of the Great Reset Agenda: From Foundation to Event 201 & the Pandemic of 2020.” The Sociable, July 20, 2021.

[16] “The WEF and the Pandemic.” Swiss Policy Research, October 27, 2021.

[17] “World Economic Forum and UN Sign Strategic Partnership Framework,” World Economic Forum, Accessed October 27, 2021; “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development | Department of Economic and Social Affairs,” United Nations. United Nations, Accessed October 27, 2021.

[18] “The United Nations-World Economic Forum Strategic Partnership Framework for the 2030 Agenda,” World Economic Forum.

[19] Steven Umbrello, “Should We Reset? A Review of Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret’s ‘Covid-19: The Great Reset,’” The Journal of Value Inquiry, February 17, 2021, 1–8, p. 7.

[20] Schwab and Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset, p. 57.

[21] Schwab and Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset, pp. 18-19.

[22] Schwab and Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset, p. 143.

[23] Schwab and Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset, p. 173.

[24] Schwab and Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset, p. 204.

[25] Michael Rectenwald, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom, Nashville, TN: New English Review Press, 2019, pp. 54-65 and 123-24; Michael Rectenwald, “The Great Reset, Part II: Corporate Socialism,” Mises Wire, December 31, 2020.

[26] Michael Rectenwald, “The Great Reset, Part III: “Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics,” Mises Wire, December 28, 2020.

[27] Giorgio Agamben, “Communist Capitalism,” Ill Will, December 15, 2020.

[28] Forum, World Economic. “The Bold Steps Business Leaders Must Take On Social Justice,” Forbes Magazine, January 26, 2021.

[29] “Strategic Partners,” World Economic Forum, Accessed November 1, 2021.

[30] Larry Fink, “Larry Fink CEO Letter.” BlackRock. Blackrock, Inc. Accessed March 9, 2021.

[31] “A Roadmap to Build a Climate-Resilient Economy,” whitehouse.gov, Accessed October 27, 2021.

[32] Schwab and Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset, p. 78.

[33] Schwab and Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset, p. 89.

[34] Thomas J. DiLorenzo, “The Rise of Economic Fascism in America,” Mises Wire, August 27, 2021.

[35] Klaus Schwab, “Now Is the Time for a ‘Great Reset,’” World Economic Forum, June 3, 2020.

[36] David Campbell, “Towards a Less Irrelevant Socialism: Stakeholding as a ‘Reform’ of the Capitalist Economy,” Journal of Law and Society 24, no. 1 (1997): 65–84.

[37] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and FDR: the True Story of How Franklin D. Roosevelt Colluded with Corporate America. Forest Row: Clairview Books, 2013, Chapter 5.

[38] Roger Scruton, Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought, 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan Publishers, 2007), s.v. “Actually existing socialism.” Credo Reference.

[39] Jon Miltimore, “America’s Small Business Owners Have Been Horribly Abused during These Riots and Lockdowns. That Will Have Consequences.” FEE Freeman Article. Foundation for Economic Education, June 5, 2020.

[40] Anjali Sundaram, “Yelp Data Shows 60% of Business Closures Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic Are Now Permanent,” CNBC. December 11, 2020.

[41] Jon Miltimore, “America’s Small Business Owners Have Been Horribly Abused during These Riots and Lockdowns.”

[42] Brad Polumbo, “New Harvard Data (Accidentally) Reveal How Lockdowns Crushed the Working Class While Leaving Elites Unscathed,” FEE Freeman Article, Foundation for Economic Education, June 17, 2021.

[43] The Editorial Board, “Opinion | Lockdowns Didn’t Stop Covid,” The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, May 9, 2021; Casey B. Mulligan, “Working Paper: The Backward Art of Slowing the Spread,” https://bfi.uchicago.edu, April 2021.

[44] Francesco Fuso Nerini, Tina Fawcett, Yael Parag, and Paul Ekins, “Personal Carbon Allowances Revisited,” Nature Sustainability (2021).

[45] Michael Rectenwald, “The Great Reset, Part V: Woke Ideology,” Mises Wire, February 23, 2021.

[46] Steven Umbrello, “Should We Reset?”; Steffen Roth, “The Great Reset. Restratification for Lives, Livelihoods, and the Planet,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 166 (February 3, 2021): 1–8; Alexander Trauth-Goik, “Repudiating the Fourth Industrial Revolution Discourse: A New Episteme of Technological Progress.” World Futures 77, no. 1 (2020): 55–78; Kasper Schiølin, “Revolutionary Dreams: Future Essentialism and the Sociotechnical Imaginary of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in Denmark,” Social Studies of Science 50, no. 4 (2019): 542–66.

[47] Ivan Wecke, “Conspiracy Theories Aside, There Is Something Fishy About The Great Reset,” openDemocracy, August 16, 2021.

[48] Michael Rectenwald, “The Google Election,” Mises Wire, November 10, 2020.

[49] Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (New York: Crown Business, 2016), pp. 6-8.

[50] Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, p. vii.

[51] Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (London: Duckworth, 2006).

[52] “Stakeholder Capitalism: A Manifesto for a Cohesive and Sustainable World,” World Economic Forum Blog, Jan. 14, 2020.

[53] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. New Ed. with Added Prefaces, New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973, p. 478.

[54] “Covid-19 PSA – Alone Together – Youtube,” May 24, 2020.

[55] Lori R. Price contributed the second half of this statement in conversation.

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