Klaus Schwab: The Safe Villain

Why the Right is fixated on the WEF founder as the root of all evil

The American Right has a seriousness problem. Rather than facing reality, too many of our commentators and public figures turn to harmless conspiracy theories and railing against safe targets. The Klaus Schwab fixation embodies this tendency.

The World Economic Forum’s meeting in Davos this week initiated a renewed focus on the group’s chieftain. Schwab is one of the Right’s most hated villains. Commentators regularly depict him as the evil mastermind of COVID, globalization, economic decline, wokeness, and a host of other ills–all supposedly part of Schwab and the WEF’s “Great Reset” plan.

Schwab makes it easy for the public to vilify him. He looks and talks like a Bond villain. The bald head, the oddly-shaped face, the thick German accent, the insane proposals, and the strange outfits all make him seem like he has a vendetta against His Majesty’s Secret Service. It’s hard to resist focusing on the guy who looks like evil incarnate from central casting. 

Schwab’s Dr. Evil appearance is not the only reason he’s the Right’s favorite bogeyman. The WEF founder is seen as a direct threat to the quality of life of westerners. He allegedly wants you to live in a pod, eat bugs, and own nothing. 

Schwab supports a lot of other crazy ideas, such as nanochip implants and policies ripped from an Alex Jones fever dream. 

Schwab and the American Left have very different goals. We can see the differences between the two in how they treat an issue they both hold dear: climate change. Many of his proposals for dealing with climate change are about making westerners accept a lower quality of life, so the bug eating claim isn’t that far off. Threats to quality of life obviously make people very mad. We witnessed this last week in the outrage over the Biden administration’s suggestion to ban gas stoves. People do not want to live in the pod–they want to live the nice middle class lifestyle promised by the American Dream. Anyone who infringes on that promise is seen as an enemy. 

Liberals don’t want to convince Americans to accept lower living standards, they want to redistribute white middle class wealth. The Green New Deal, liberals’ grand plan to save the environment, reflects their primary concern–and it’s not the environment. The GND is a racial wealth redistribution scheme that does little for the environment, but does take white tax dollars and gives it to non-whites. The GND focuses more on money for black communities than it does with putting us all into pods. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the GND’s main shills, insisted it would actually bring a higher quality of life to America. 

No American politician would openly support the Schwab agenda. Europe is a different story, but our main concern here is Americans. America’s main threats are anti-white racism, mass immigration, demographic replacement, and the ideologies that support these developments. Schwab does not influence these trends. The real culprit is the Globalist American Empire.

Schwab is a convenient and safe scapegoat to blame for our situation because he’s an identifiable figure, he  isn’t elected by anyone, he looks evil, and you won’t be called a bigot for attacking him. All people–regardless of color, creed, or political affiliation–can unite to see Schwab as their enemy. It’s no surprise much of the popular animus against Schwab originates from a Joe Rogan episode where a minority guest outlined the globalist’s scheme for world domination. If Joe Rogan feels safe in expressing an idea, it’s probably not that dangerous. 

The GAE makes for a less convenient villain. For one, it’s no particular person. It’s a constellation of institutions that have been around for many years. There’s no GAE figure with a sinister accent to point to as the mastermind. The GAE is made up of elected officials and carries the veneer of democracy. Its agents can claim you voted for its policies, which the WEF’s shills can’t say for Schwab. 

The GAE also suffers from the fact that it’s American. American conservatives are desperate to find a foreign enemy and are hesitant to identify the root of their problems in their own regime. Schwab’s thick accent allows the right to be both patriotic and unabashedly right wing. How many other positions let right-wingers do that today?

Moreover, the GAE’s agenda appears less outright evil than Schwab’s alleged schemes. The GAE doesn’t want to put you in a shoebox apartment and take away your meat. It does want to make your community more “diverse,” erase your cultural heritage, and make you pledge allegiance to George Floyd. For a lot of people, that doesn’t sound so bad. As long as they get their chicken wings and NFL, they’ll accept the GAE agenda. People are also more leery of appearing to be racist in their critiques against the modern world. It’s much safer to say you don’t want to live in a pod rather than admit you don’t want to live in a majority non-white country.

Some conservatives get this. Anti-woke activist Christopher Rufo, who still has this author blocked on Twitter, smartly argues why the Right should stop obsessing over the WEF. “[T]he obsession with Klaus Schwab, Davos, and the WEF is misguided, as they have little real power over life in America. It's also enervating, as it shifts the locus of control to far-away figures, while constructive action can be taken at home. Stay focused,” he tweeted. “I want the political Right to be effective and the focus on the WEF is a distraction and an inferiority complex. If, instead of the WEF, we focused on civil service reform, institutional governance, anti-ESG legislation, and higher education reform, we'd be much better off.”

Rufo is right. The WEF focus doesn’t lead to serious activism or solutions. It just leads to more grifters talking about how the globalists are going to put chips in you and shut down Buffalo Wild Wings. Meanwhile, your kids’ school teaches them to hate themselves for being white and how to change their gender. 

The obsession with safe conspiracy theories instead of harsh truths is only getting worse. The nadir of this may be right-wingers embracing the idea that the deep state assassinated Martin Luther King because he was about to unite the multiracial working class against the globalists. This idea is perfect right-wing bait because it’s both crazy and won’t get you canceled. That’s the sweet spot many of our spokesmen aim for.

That’s why you hear so much about Klaus Schwab. Saying a goofy German wants to take away your steaks attracts a larger audience than saying blacks commit 60 percent of America’s murders. It also won’t get you banned. These incentives drive the Right’s conspiracy-mongering and reluctance to state basic truths. Why state uncomfortable truths when you get more engagement claiming Klaus Schwab is the Antichrist?

It’s not exciting to say, but it’s a fact that no one man is responsible for our plight. It’s the institutions and ideology Americans built up over the last 90 years that are to blame for our present ills. This makes for less clickbait headlines, but it’s the truth. The only way to change this is for Americans to look inwards and reform the country we live in. The enemy is not some shadowy globalist or secret cabal based in Davos. It’s the corrupt structures and twisted values propagated right here in the U.S. of A.