The Great Reset

A former Marxist sees the light, and uses his new lens to expose the darkness. A review of Michael Rectenwald's latest book, "The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty".

Atlanta, GA

September 30, 2023

[W]e are in process of developing a whole series of techniques, which will enable the controlling oligarchy…to get people to love their servitude.”

-Aldous Huxley

Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.”

-Klaus Schwab

Last week we contemplated the perpetual “state of emergency” in which the administrative state keeps us confined. 

This week, an eye-opening book reminds us things aren’t as bad as they seem. 

They’re worse.

Michael Rectenwald, a former Marxist, current Libertarian Party presidential candidate, and erstwhile professor at NYU (among other “esteemed” institutions), describes in elaborate detail the history, tactics, and plans of The Great Reset we seem doomed to endure. 

The label “Great Reset” sprouted after the financial crisis of 2008. But its roots delve deep into a century of soil. Rectenwald digs up the incestuous genealogy of overlapping organizations, exposing toxic silt that often stays unseen.

His trowel tunnels from the turn of last century to the beginning of this decade. From the mire he unearths the Rhodes Society, Chatham House, Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg Group, Club of Rome, the Trilateral Commission, and…

…the World Economic Forum. 

Across the decades, these agencies assembled connected interests pushing concerted agendas to control resources, consolidate wealth, and accumulate power. Like symbiotic blades on a pair of scissors, they’ve coordinated with governmental organizations like the League of Nations, UN, IMF, OECD, and World Health Organization to sever allegiance to national sovereignty.

This isn’t some wacko “conspiracy theory”. It’s a wacko conspiracy fact. The conspirators are out in the open. They admit what they’re doing, as if they’re proud of it. Because they are. All we have to do is take them at their word. In The Great Reset, Michael Rectenwald simply records what they say and interprets what it means.

Klaus Schwab, founder and chair of the World Economic Forum, first used the expression “Great Reset” in 2014. A few years later, covid became the perfect pretext to accelerate the plot. And, apparently, a well-prepared one.

CLADE X and Event 201 were “simulation” exercises in 2018 and 2019, respectively, that eerily anticipated the pandemic proclaimed in 2020. The WEF organized CLADE X in conjunction with Johns Hopkins and Event 201 in coordination with the Gates Foundation.

Lockdowns, closures, surveillance, censorship, and mass vaccination were integral parts of these prescient programs. Within a few months of Event 201, all these tactics were activated in response to the bug.

Rights were rescinded, travel restricted, and mandates imposed. A “public health” priesthood dispensed the sacraments of “The Science”: shuttering society, sticking swabs up our nose, pushing biometric identity, requiring face fabrics, and in many places making compulsory medication a passport to be in public.

There are several components to the Reset, which the WEF makes seem palatable by making it sound good. Like Febreze in an outhouse, they spray such anesthetizing euphemisms as “diversity”, “equity”, “fairness”, “inclusion”, “partnership”, “justice”, and (their favorite) “sustainability” on their odious intentions.

They announce them in bits and pieces, like bait to skeptics they assume will resist. When objections arise, those who offer them are dismissed or denounced as “conspiracy theorists” or “deniers” who endanger the public with deadly “misinformation”. This then justifies banning these dissidents from further discussion.

The promulgators aren’t subtle. The “Great Reset Summit” in June 2020 was the 51st annual meeting of the WEF. At it Schwab assured attendees, “The future is not just happening. The future is built by us, by a powerful community, as you here in this room.” 

This “future” is a nose-dive into the past, a crash landing into the Dark Ages. Fueled by climate catastrophism, it involves eradication of hydrocarbon power, agricultural processes, and free market capitalism that sustain civilization.

The unavoidable implications of “zero emissions” and “sustainable development” are that those who survive become pre-industrial peasants. Like our Medieval ancestors who relied for power on muscle, wind, water, and sun, they’ll struggle not to starve or freeze without hydrocarbons to spare them the real ravages of an indifferent climate.

The Great Reset is less about planning production than restricting output. It eliminates unapproved consumption by extinguishing noncompliant producers.  Reducing growth (of the population as well as of prosperity) ostensibly enables “equity” while “protecting the planet.”

The Reset is orchestrated by a “state-corporate-woke-cartel hybrid” run by technocrats at the WEF, WHO, UN, World Bank, and the corporations they co-opt…notably BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm, headed by the aptly-named Larry Fink.

These trans-national “public-private partnerships” facilitate a neo-feudalism comprising three classes: the exclusive elite, a downtrodden majority subsisting on a Universal Basic Income, and favored functionaries with particular “professional or scientific ability”. The latter will be accepted by the elite or relegated to the underclass, depending on whether they remain compliant with the program.

Rectenwald reminds us “This is just the kind of tiered social structure that characterized Communist nations.” That’s not coincidental. Nor is the “woke” agenda that permeates the plan.

“Woke capitalism” is a means by which corporations offer “rhetorical placebos” instead of monetary emoluments. It implies “inclusion” but culminates in “capture.” Do what you’re told or you’ll be left out.

Larry Fink described wokeness as a “tectonic shift'“, a way of identifying who’s with the program, on the team, and to be spared the fate of being cast aside. For those who’ll be ejected, ESG is the catapult.

BlackRock has constructed numerous “Environmental, Social, and Governance” ETFs that exclude corporations that don’t toe the line. As Fink put it, “this will have a dramatic impact on how capital is allocated, every management team and board will need to consider how this will impact their company’s stock.” 

It’s like a mafia goon telling a neighborhood shop owner, “that’s a nice livelihood you have there; would be a shame if something happened to it.”

Rectenwald makes an insightful point about the potency of woke as a weapon. Unlike socialism or communism, which promise prosperity, “woke” ideology lowers expectations, and convinces its “privileged” targets they should live with less.

It shames people into compliance, and exposes those unwilling to go along. Duly identified, these malcontents can then be castigated and cancelled as “racist” anti-science “deniers” afflicted with a wide array of reactionary “phobias.”

In a diabolical design Rectenwald aptly analogizes to Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the Great Reset collectivizes farmland into exclusive ownership by elite overlords. Onerous restrictions and requirements will drive small ranchers and farmers out of business, after which banks and barons can buy the properties at reduced rates. 

This is already underway, as part of “the greatest transfer of landed wealth in human history.” Farms are coalescing into the portfolios of a wealthy few. Unlike the small fry being forced to sell, the new owners can afford the restrictions of “sustainable” strategies by which our narrow diets will be prescribed (and proscribed).

Naturally, this lunacy promises “no net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050”. Its implications are mass misery and widespread famine. Rectenwald is right to call this the “largest Great Leap Backward in human history.”

Central bank digital currencies are the chute by which they’ll corral the cattle. “Electronic cash” will be presented as advantageous and “convenient”, enabling faster settlement and facilitating Universal Basic Income for disgruntled masses struggling to survive. 

The Chinese government has already rolled this out. They simply bribed citizens to adopt the app. It paid them the equivalent of $31 if they did, and millions eagerly took them up on the offer. With so many Americans unable to afford the basics, the pitch here will fly right over the plate.

But there’s a curve on the way from mound to mitt. The government would control access to these accounts, and actions of those tethered to them. What we buy, how much we eat, and where we go can be easily restricted by disabling our allotment of digital currency.

Whether gasoline, guns, gold, or red meat, the government can prohibit purchases it deems inappropriate. It can also compel or constrict activities as prerequisites for accessing our allotment. Every move we make could be scrutinized, and potentially punished.

Digital IDs will accompany these Kafkaesque currencies. Such indelible markers already exist. Like sludge under the baseboards, they’ve slowly oozed onto the scene. The digital data is already there.

Based on freely available discussions and documents from the WEF, the ultimate objective is the transhumanist metaverse of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, in which they own everything and we own nothing.

As sinister and screwed up as Twentieth Century Communist regimes were, they at least had the stated goals of increasing crops, advancing industrialization, and making “the proletariat” more prosperous (no matter how untenable their malevolent methods might have been).

But the Great Reset employs moronic means to achieve imbecilic ends. It openly advocates reduced growth and declining prosperity. Its pre-industrial energy and neo-Malthusian ideology are fundamentally anti-human, aside from a relentless devotion to the cult of themselves (who are excluded from the restrictions to be imposed on us).

Avoiding this madness seems an unviable option. But not an impossible one.

Like flashlights on cockroaches, many books expose policies or plots that will do us harm. But few offer ways to refuse or how to fight back. Rectenwald does, with nine ideas to defy this fate.

I have no idea whether everything in this book will happen. But given that a lot of it is already underway, it’s probably best to assume much of it will and hope most of it won’t.

With two sons entering adulthood, I have to be optimistic. Pessimism isn’t an option. But it does provide incentive to prepare. As George Bernard Shaw put it, “the optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.”

Human beings aren’t lab rats to be bossed around by technocratic busybodies setting digital traps. At some level, any governance relies on the consent of the governed. There are more sheep than shepherds, and the cattle outnumber the cowboys. 

It’s time the herd sharpened its horns, and started the stampede of the Great Resist. 

JD