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Before James Bond converted to Islam, before he got knocked up in a Palestinian refugee camp, and before he was given a prize for social media moderation from some anti-racism centre linked to the British government, he was quite the dude.
Once, after having laid flowers at his late wife’s grave, Bond was summoned back to London in a helicopter (For Your Eyes Only with Roger Moore as Bond). But a baddie had hacked the chopper’s controls, so sent him on a demented ride intended to kill him.
But Bond managed to eject the dead pilot and snap the hacked cable. The baddie was then revealed: he was bald, in a wheelchair and had a white cat. Now in control, Bond scooped the wheelchair up with a landing skid then deposited its occupant down a cooling tower.
That baddie – Ernst Stavro Blofeld – has long been considered the inspiration for Klaus Schwab, the founder and former chair of the World Economic Forum (WEF). On Monday evening this week, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) broke the news that the organisation had started an investigation into claims that Schwab had been fiddling his expenses.
Ultimate supervillain
Schwab was the world’s most recent ultimate supervillain, with most stories about decline in the West, the state of the media, and the growing distrust between politicians and the people who elect them ending at his door. The WEF subsequently, but particularly since 2020, came to be cast as a grotesque spectacle of multinational corporations blending into policymakers until they could not be distinguished – a place where billionaire asset strippers and robber barons surfaced as anti-racism campaigners and climate-change experts.
Schwab was pilloried. In 2020, memes of him wearing suspenders and frolicking at a clothing-optional beach flooded the internet, possibly because he didn’t appear interested in using Google’s right-to-be-forgotten scheme to remove another picture of him wearing the outfit you’d expect of a Nazi astronaut (that photo is real, apparently, but its context is unknown).
His defenders intervened; from Canada to New Zealand, officials and their media quickly linked criticism of Schwab with anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, science denying, homophobia, transphobia, and climate change denying. Schwab was a progressive, they said, just an old guy living in a converted Swiss alp – who only wanted to help. With things like vaccines and migration.
It was the political scientist Samuel Huntington who first coined the term “Davos Man” to describe the notorious profile attending the WEF at the start of every year. “Davos Man” was wealthy and concerned himself with matters of globalisation to the point where he felt little or no loyalty to any nation. For all his pandering and feigned empathy, Davos Man had one objective, arguably revealed in 2020 when his profile initiated the greatest upward transfer of wealth in history.
Did Schwab know that under his roof, capitalism was being poisoned? Probably not: he was too busy – by his own admission – ”penetrating cabinets”.
The most interesting story about Schwab is one not widely known. Schwab is German and Davos is in Switzerland. His parents were Swiss who moved during the Third Reich, and his father worked for an industrial manufacturer linked to the Nazis. His attempts to procure himself Swiss citizenship were unsuccessful despite the former President of the Swiss Federation lobbying for him to be given citizenship honorifically.
How did this not happen? What did the Swiss know? Those wily old bankers keep plenty secrets; perhaps one of those is about Schwab.
Height of intrigue
But speculation is the height of intrigue here. The WSJ claims that the WEF investigation is following two lines: “events” arranged by his wife to which she would travel in excessive luxury, and cash withdrawn from ATMs to pay for Schwab’s “preferred” masseuses.
Seriously? Happy endings? Not space lasers, or global ID chipped into brains, or flooding a populous valley near a gold deposit to bring down the price of local housing before swooping in, enslaving the local men and stealing their women? The end for people supposedly central to Western civilisation’s collapse should theoretically involve a Waco-like siege where the good guys surround a hollowed-out mountain for days, battling an army of mercenaries before the baddie makes a BLM fist, declares that trans rights are human rights then throws himself into a magma chamber.
Yet Schwab got bust because his wife flew first class to Abu Dhabi and stayed at the Four Seasons? Pathetic.
That’s more telling about us. In our rush to locate culprits, Schwab was too easy a candidate – how he looked, the causes he supported, things he said. But the architecture of the WEF was overlooked: ultimately, it needed capital to remain prominent, and hyping its influence – i.e penetrating cabinets – are the sorts of things all grifters say. There can be no doubt that our worst Western habits were aroused by WEF sentiment, from modern HR corporate culture and its practice of positive discrimination, to grooming a generation of climate fatalism. But to suggest that Schwab himself beat the path here isn’t remotely accurate.
Far from being a plot, the WEF descended into – particularly in the last half decade – a circus of aloof oddballs partially vying for social recognition, and partially attempting to distance themselves from the exploitative methodologies they had earned reputations for. Yet all it took to castrate the wayward ambitions of the feudal tech barons, the trans-humanists, and the sun-blocking enthusiasts was brutal realism, delivered apparently effortlessly, from Argentina’s Javier Milei earlier this year.
The rabbit holes were never worth it. In the end, Schwab is just another Sepp Blatter guy who stands accused of diddling his claims. How disappointing.
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