Freedom is an unnatural state for humans. Very few humans in history have had the freedom to control their own lives. In every time and place, there are groups of people who think they can organize society better than before, that they know what’s best for you, that they can run your life better than you can. This book examines the latest movements in this trend and pieces them together.
Key points:
• Governments will use crises (Covid, global warming) to scare people into giving them more power. Actual solutions to such crises are ignored in favor of taking more power.
• Modern Monetary Theory eliminates the need for fiscal responsibility.
• ESG scores will control the behavior of individuals and corporations without resorting to gulags.
• Media controlled by a few large groups in bed with government makes censorship easy.
• Stakeholder capitalism puts government elites in charge of business decisions instead of customers.
Basically, the Great Reset is a plan for 21st-century fascism. It is pushed mostly by the World Economic Forum and tends to attract support by Progressives. It is a realization of the fears of Big Government (by the Right) and Big Corporations (by the Left) combined.
The book is largely nonpartisan other than the view that liberty is a great thing. It’s a surprisingly quick read, organized into short sections with clear headings, and written in a casual, conversational style. More than 500 footnotes fill the last 80ish pages. The points are supported by direct quotes that are public record. Mr. Beck encourages readers to do their own research of the topic.
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Look, I get it. When I first heard about the Great Reset, it sounded like a poorly written movie plot some struggling thirtysomething in Los Angeles cooked up in his mom’s basement between shifts at the Cheesecake Factory. But then I started to dig into the details about the Great Reset and what its most passionate supporters were saying, not just in private but publicly, on the record. And the more I learned, the more obvious it became that although the Great Reset is indeed a wile, crazy, completely out-there conspiracy theory, it is a very real one—and it has the potential to dramatically alter our world forever.
The Great Reset will not necessarily require the mass imprisonment of dissenters, nationwide confiscation of businesses, or a bloody revolution. It can achieve authoritarian goals without jackbooted storm troopers or gulags, and it includes just enough elements of cronyism and payouts to global elites to make the system palatable to the world’s wealthiest and most well-connected people. It is a kind of authoritarian, international, socialistic fascism, yes, but it’s not Marx’s socialism or the fascistic models embraced by Benito Mussolini. It is authoritarianism for our brand-new technology-rich, corrupt era. It is twenty-first century fascism.
Despite the media-contrived depictions to the contrary, nuclear is a lot better for the planet than wind or solar, which is especially important considering that the whole reason Americans are being urged to commit economic suicide with plans like the Green New Deal and Biden’s Green New Deal-lite plan—which would impose wind and solar energy on most of the country over just a couple of decades—is that wind and solar facilities are so much greener than other forms of energy production. But nuclear facilities emit four times less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than do solar farms, and wind farms require four hundred times more land than do nuclear power plants. ... Bulldozing millions of acres of land and killing millions of animals hardly sounds like green energy to me, but building these poor-performing monstrosities is just the beginning. After a few decades, when all the gigantic turbines and solar panels must be torn down, where do elites plan on putting them? I hate to break it to those of you who still think relying on wind and solar is a good idea, but you cannot just throw decommissioned wind and solar parts into a big blue recycling bin and leave it out on the street for your local garbageman to pick up. Wind turbines and solar panels create huge amounts of waste, much of it toxic, and no one has developed a clean, cost-effective way to deal with that gigantic problem. And remember, this is an issue that would come up every twenty or thirty years, as these facilities wear out.
Modern monetary theory might sound complicated, but it is actually very simple. According to MMT theorists, everyone should stop worrying so much about the national debt and deficits, because the U.S. government can print and spend as much money as it wants to in order to achieve the goals set by the federal government’s bureaucratic masterminds and political elite. That’s pretty much it.
It is also worth considering how digital currencies could be used to control economic behavior. If all currency were to become digitized and physical mediums of exchange were phased out, then banks, financial institutions, and governments would be able to track and control nearly every transaction in the world. Although there is no way of knowing exactly how they might try to use this unprecedented power, it is not hard to imagine how it could expand the authority of elites and impact regular folks on a daily basis. We have all heard about local governments’ attempts to tax—and in some cases ban—certain unhealthy foods, everything from foods containing trans fats to sugary drinks. In a world with a centralized digital currency, what’s to stop the ruling class from putting a limit on the number of Cokes you buy each week? Or the number of burgers you eat? Or the number of alcoholic beverages you consume or cigars you smoke? What’s to stop elites from preventing you from buying alcohol, cigarettes, or Twinkies entirely? They are bad for you, you know.
The Great Reset is a machine manufactured to usher in a new, highly sophisticated, technologically advanced, twenty-first century brand of international fascism, one with a corporate twist. But powerful machines like the Great Reset cannot operate without fuel. That is what modern monetary theory provides, by offering seemingly endless amounts of money that could be used to pay for just about anything government, corporations, and financial institutions can dream up.
Although you will not hear Great Resetters openly calling for authoritarianism, the Great Reset is clearly a new kind of soft authoritarianism that is not too far off from the merging of markets, corporatism, authoritarianism, collectivism, and modern technology that has been embraced by the Communist Party of China in recent decades. ... Openly calling for a takeover of the global economy by the ruling class would immediately alienate 90 percent of the general population, but by tying in the Green New Deal, a government jobs guarantee, and a host of other large social welfare programs, they have managed to win over some progressives and socialists who care deeply about those issues. And by painting the movement as a pro-business, pro-capitalism plan to improve the economy, they have managed to win over some establishment political figures on the right. But at its core, the Great Reset is not truly pro-socialism, and it’s not pro-capitalism either—it’s just a rebranding of the same old tired ideas that elites have pushed a million times before: “Give us more power, and we promise we’ll take care of you and fix the world’s ills. Let us manage more of the economy, and we promise you’ll all be wealthier for it. Give us the authority to punish the ‘bad guys’ in society, and we’ll save the planet from annihilation.”
Stakeholder capitalism is an economic system in which companies are effectively required to put social justice causes and/or the goals of elites—which, of course, vary wildly depending on the parties involved—before profits, supply and demand, the desires of consumers, and other market forces that normally direct capitalist systems, which, don’t forget, have created the most prosperous, healthy, safe societies humankind has ever known. ... Or put in much clearer terms, in a stakeholder capitalist system, companies should first serve the collective according to the demands of the ruling class in government, not their customers and owners. Stakeholder capitalism is just another way of saying “collectivist capitalism,” which really is not capitalism at all.
The consolidation of stock ownership in the hands of a small group of investment management companies is a relatively new and exceedingly dangerous development. The three largest stock index fund managers—BlackRock, Vanguard, and Sate Street Global Advisors—have quadrupled their average combined stake in S&P 500 companies over the past two decades.
The world’s massive social media infrastructure and online publisher model have also contributed to the conspiracy theory pandemic. Most publishers and many authors earn much of their money by getting clicks on articles they produce, so the more outrageous the article, the more likely it is that the publisher and author will have a big payday. How many hundreds of millions of dollars did the media earn by churning out literally thousands of Trump-Russia collusion stories, most of which ended up being based on false information? It is probably to calculate, but I can say this for certain: they made a heck of a lot more money with the collusion narrative than they would have made without it. The truth didn’t matter; the money did.
The United States has faced challenges and crossroads before, and they have come in many forms. But I am not sure that the country has ever experienced anything quite like the Great Reset. Never before have so many Americans been as eager as they are today to give away their freedoms to global elites. Never before have so many powerful U.S. business interests worked with such vigor to betray their country in pursuit of a lucrative new crony deal. Never before have American politicians and activist groups so openly demanded that more power be given to the ruling class and been [typo, my fault] by the media, Hollywood, and academic institutions with joy and excitement.