This letter was originally published as a guest post at Coffee & COVID, a hysterical, informative, and action-oriented daily news roundup that is on my top-ten list of must-follow Substacks. I was deeply honored when attorney Jeff Childers told me he was reaching out to Substackers he admired to guest-blog for him while he was kicking tyrannical butt in trial, and I proudly joined Tessa Lena in stepping into Jeff’s unfillable shoes. He gave me a choice of three topics, one of which was “A Letter to Klaus Schwab,” so how could I resist an opportunity to add this enticing entry to my Letters series? Thank you for the invitation and inspiration, Jeff!
I know how much you like playing super-villain, Klaus, but you’re really more of a mediocre-villain. C+ at best. Sorry to break it to you.
No matter how hard I try, I can’t summon terror, rage, or even disgust when I behold your dopey, dull, doltish demeanor. The most I can muster is pity. And cringe. Lots and lots of cringe.
Fawning over Henry Kissinger, for example. Like a tongue-tied seventh-grader crushing on a rock star backstage, you tumble over yer verds, a goofy smile frozen on your flushed face as you bat your eyelashes at your dreamy guru.
You were equally smitten with David Rockefeller protégé, “collectivist global government” advocate, self-described socialist, multimillionaire, suspected bribee, climate change godfather, Agenda 21 instigator, and WEF Cofounder and Executive Chairman Maurice Strong, whom you described as follows after his death in 2015:
“He was one of the most extraordinary personalities I ever met.… He was my mentor since the creation of the Forum: a great friend; an indispensable advisor; and, for many years, a member of our Foundation Board. Without him, the Forum would not have achieved its present significance.”
This is a man who once mused about a “fiction book” in which a global cabal torpedoed civilization to save the planet:
“What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group’s conclusion is ‘no.’ The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
What’s weird is that sounds exactly like the Club of Rome’s origin story.
I’m sure it’s just a case of coinciditis. There’s a lot of that going around these days.
After predicting two thirds of the population will die off by 2031 (interesting choice of year) in his autobiography, Where on Earth Are We Going?, Strong dreams a little dream:
“A glimmer of hope for the future of our species and its potential for regeneration.”
In a 1972 BBC interview, he admits to having gotten into trouble for raising the idea of reproductive licenses:
“Licenses to have babies incidentally is something that I got in trouble for some years ago for suggesting even in Canada that this might be necessary at some point, at least some restriction on the right to have a child.”
Championing a one-world government, Strong writes:
“The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental co-operation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of global environmental security.”
You certainly have a type, Klaus.
And then there’s your cuddle session with Albert Bourla where you got all gooey and bonded over those silly anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist far-right–wing extremists saying mean, misinformationy things about you both.
Your girlish infatuation with father-figure strongmen probably stems from your daddy issues. Growing up as the son of a Nazi collaborator couldn’t have been easy, especially one who:
“led the Nazi-supported German branch of a Swiss engineering firm into the war as a prominent military contractor. That company, Escher-Wyss, would use slave labor to produce machinery critical to the Nazi war effort.”
It must be irksome trying to keep that Totenkopf jammed in the closet.
You were seven when Germany surrendered to the allies. A certain axiom comes to mind:
“Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.”
Smart dude, that Aristotle.
But it was your dad, not you, who abetted Nazis, I hear you saying. You were just a boy, sins of the father notwithstanding.
Fair enough. But you went on to work for Escher-Wyss. Remember, Herr Professor? You put it on your factsheet.
There’s no shame in that, you might say. Plenty of people are proud to work for IBM, to which the Final Solution owed its astounding efficiency. And some of the world’s most popular automobile corporations—BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, and Volkswagen—made bank during the Third Reich. I won’t even get into I.G. Farben. (You’ll find these all on the Successful Rebranding Campaigns masterclass syllabus.)
So maybe Escher-Wyss reformed just like those wholesome multinationals had. But—yes, another but—while you served on the board in the sixties, Escher-Wyss (later Sulzer AG) “began secretly procuring and building key parts for nuclear weapons” and “helped South Africa’s apartheid government develop their illegal nuclear weapons program.”
Oops. That doesn’t sound so good. Better stuff that uhlaka lwamathambo back in the closet, too.
Despite your grandiloquence, claims of inventing stakeholder capitalism, and vaunts about having “penetrate[d] the global cabinets of countries with our WEF Young Global Leaders,” you strike me as a big-ticket huckster, a carnival barker to Davos Man with “an incredible knack to smell the next fad.”
You glom onto lasciviously opulent, illustrious, world-spinning philanthropaths, flattering them to curry favor as they pipe metric tonnenweise of Swiss francs into your accounts.
Your nephew, Hans Schwab, exposed your history of avarice when he described a last-minute ownership change in a business contract once you got a whiff of the plump sums involved:
“He said, ‘This needs to get done right now.’
“I had never heard of the Schwab Foundation, and I suddenly had to change all of the contracts. I knew it was his little thing that he was cooking up. Suddenly, in the last hour, he could see that there was going to be huge sums of money involved, the sort of money that he had never seen before, and he wanted to put it in a structure over which he had 100 percent control.”
You’d think the blandished billionaires would see through your long con, but they’re just as vapid as you and feed off flummery.
The middling-minded lap up your how-to manuals on virtue-signaling the world into destruction—from COVID-19: The Great Reset to The Great Narrative to The Fourth Industrial Revolution to Stakeholder Capitalism to Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Normally, I would read a book before bashing it, and I have perused excerpts of The Great Reset here and there. Thankfully, braver souls than me have suffered those soul-evaporating pages for the rest of us.
