Davos

Friday

Freddy Gray

The odious attempt to compare Trump’s health to Biden’s

Trump Derangement Syndrome has become horribly over-diagnosed. Now, anyone who expresses doubts about his wondrous abilities – or just fails to repeat the White House’s preferred talking points – risks being branded a "TDS" sufferer. It’s boring. Still, there remains a large faction of elite journalists, social-media influencers and political actors who loathe Donald Trump with a pathological intensity and who feel their mission in life must be to undermine him by whatever means necessary. They have spent the last decade condemning Trump and his supporters as conspiracy loons even as they leap from one dark theory to the next – Trump is a Russian asset! A closet Nazi! An Al Capone-style mobster! A serial rapist and possibly even a pedophile!

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greenland
Blake Neff

How Trump’s Greenland strategy could imperil his legacy

President Trump has returned home from Davos, Switzerland, basking in the glow of his latest diplomatic Houdini act. For weeks, the President made Europe shudder with fear and sputter with rage as he abruptly escalated his demand for a total US takeover of Greenland. He said he was ready to launch an invasion or reignite a trade war to do it, even in the face of threats that such an act would destroy NATO. On Truth Social, the President shared a post suggesting NATO was a greater threat to America than Russia or China, along with AI slop depicting not just Greenland but also Canada under US dominion.

Wednesday

Ben Domenech

Will Trump face a domestic backlash over his Greenland caper?

It began, as most things do under Donald Trump, with an idea that struck outside observers as a lark. An interested party – in this case, billionaire Ron Lauder – suggested to the President during his first term that the United States should acquire Greenland, a move that would represent the largest expansion of US territory since the purchase of Alaska from the Russians more than 150 years ago. The notion was reportedly considered and then left on the shelf, like so many ideas in Trump’s first term. Yet time away from the presidency gave it more resonance. Now the President is back on the case – and he seems very committed to the move, to the shock and horror of European observers who never took his Arctic ambitions seriously.

greenland
greta thunberg davos
Dominic Green

Trump, Greta and the Profits of Doom

There’s money in misery, so the world’s corporate elite welcomes eco-catastrophist Greta Thunberg to its cult center at Davos. There’s also money in optimism, the fuel of markets and speculation — but Davos doesn’t like Donald Trump. Strange that a legendary capitalist turned deregulating politician is the odd man out on the magic mountain of money, but a socialist child who calls for overriding democracy and the forced transformation of national economies is a spiritual figurehead for the masters of moolah.The smart money at Davos is on Greta, because the risks are lower in the command economy that Greta and her drones want. The outcomes are pre-ordained, and all innovation is fixed between business and government.

Tuesday

Charles Lipson

Trump’s credible threat at Davos

The headline from Trump’s Davos speech is clear: I won’t use military force to take Greenland. That’s what the President told the world’s leading politicians and business executives at the World Economic Forum. That declaration was very good news for all of them and for US investors, who immediately started buying stocks, erasing about half the losses suffered Tuesday, when the threat of force seemed possible. They all knew that carrying out that military threat would shatter the institutional foundation of Western security: NATO and US-European relations. Instead of military threats, Trump emphasized America’s disproportionate contributions to European defense since World War Two. It was finally time for them to bear a fair share of the burden.

davos Trump
davos
Roger Kimball

Donald at Davos: Trump teaches a lesson to the crybabies back home

It’s actually sort of cute, at least from a distance. There the Democrats are, playing on their hobbyhorses with all the other neighborhood children. Wobbly Chris Matthews is there, rubbing his leg and shouting. Hello, Chris! There’s Don Lemón and Rachel Maddow and Pastor David French and Bill Kristol all in a circle with their little friends from the New York Times and the Washington Post. They’re doing their nervous war dances, sending smoke signals, and hopping along on their make-believe mares, tilting at that giant windmill called Donald Trump, the evil genie they assemble daily to subject to ritual excoriation. What would they do without him?

Friday

Cockburn

The Biden family’s free beach banquet

Writer: kicking Biden off the ticket comparable to ‘rape culture’ At the latest count, seventeen House Democrats and one senator have made the egregious yet ruthlessly pragmatic decision to call for Joe Biden to step aside as the Democratic nominee and allow a mentally fitter candidate to run in his place. A deluge of further letters was anticipated after the end of the NATO seventy-fifth anniversary summit last night. Biden is thought to have staved off the reaper for a while with a not-entirely-awful press conference performance yesterday evening. And some online pundits have been eager to point out that Democratic primary voters should not be robbed of their agency.

Thursday

Carol Roth

The elite’s war on wealth

Wealth comes from ownership. Being involved in the financial industry for nearly thirty years, and spending the past dozen-plus years in the media helping people create economic freedom and wealth for themselves and their families, I know that wealth being derived from ownership is an indisputable truth. More concretely, wealth comes from the ownership of assets that increase in value over time. Ownership is a subject people tend to greatly misunderstand. We misconstrue where wealth comes from, and we misinterpret the benefits of hard work and taking risks. You can meet a poor construction worker putting in eighty hours a week for someone else. You can find professional athletes declaring bankruptcy as soon as their multimillion-dollar contracts end.

Monday

Jason Morgan

Washington’s yes-men in Japan

It was nighttime in Davos, 8:31 on January 18 to be exact. Japanese journalist Ganaha Masako had been standing out in the cold for three hours near the entrance to a building which, she had heard, was being used as a venue for a World Economic Forum event that evening. Ganaha had picked up on some additional chatter. Klaus Schwab, the head of the WEF, was rumored to be inside. It was a long shot, but Ganaha wanted to ask Schwab some questions about globalism. And then, suddenly, Schwab appeared. Fleshy cheeks jiggling slightly as he shuffled along the snow-dusted sidewalk, he stepped cautiously out of the WEF event forum with a few handlers. Ganaha pointed her camera at Schwab and asked him for an interview. He ignored her and kept shuffling along.

Thursday

Roger Kimball

The beautiful people turn their private jets towards Davos

Larry Fink is unhappy. The grand panjandrum of BlackRock, the world’s largest and most odoriferously PC pile of pelf, can’t understand why the Lilliputians of the world are singling him out for abuse. Having jetted in on his private plane to the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos in order to join the squads of beautiful people warning about the environmental dangers of gas stoves, the moral virtue of eating bugs not meat, and the need to “recalibrate” our understanding of free speech, the poor little rich boy is pouting because people are waking up to the totalitarian reality of what the WEF stands for. What is that reality?

Tuesday

Cockburn

A deluge of deviants in Davos?

Sex workers take Switzerland! As the World Economic Forum gets underway in Davos, it's not just politicians and business leaders flying in for a few days: droves of prostitutes are said to be heading into the Alpine resort town. Cockburn can’t pretend to be surprised: what more do we expect from the 1 percent? One visiting escort told German tabloid Bild that she's charging $700 per hour or $2,500 per night. She also said she preferred the visiting Americans and Brits as bedfellows: "Unfortunately, Germans are stingy when it comes to tips." Customer details, given their high profiles, are typically hush-hush — politicians could get in big trouble back home if their excursions became public.

prostitutes davos

Tuesday

Guy Shepherd

Time for Europe to man up

The End of History has ended. It officially ended with Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History in the early Nineties. It's a book that captures the optimistic zeitgeist of that decade — born of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of communism. The basic idea was that once communism faded away — the reality, not the ideal, which will forever exist in the minds of many intellectuals — the world would become a more liberal, democratic and commercial place. It was an argument with real legs. East Germany was digested by the West without a burp. The Baltic states prospered. Asia took off. A rising commercial tide lifted all boats.

sanctions putin russia davos oligarch

Sunday

They/Them

Wokeyleaks does Davos

The second in a regular column by an anonymous whistleblower operating deep within the heart of the Social Justice Movement. To protect their identity, they will go under the code-name ‘They/Them’. Wokeyleaks is a confidential news-leak organization for anyone who wishes to divulge classified information (and hilarious anecdotes) about woke culture without fear of getting canceled. Thank you! We have been completely overwhelmed by the huge number of brave Edward Snowflakes out there that have messaged us on our encrypted email (wokeyleaks@protonmail.com). Of all the Wokeyleaks we’ve received, perhaps the most jaw-dropping is from an employee at one of the largest arms companies in the world — Northrop Grumman.

davos wokeyleaks

Tuesday

Ben Sixsmith

What is the Great Reset?

The phrase has shot throughout the fringes of Right-Wing Twitter like a virus through a karaoke bar. According to Pauline Hanson of the Australian party One Nation it is an attempt to establish a 'socialist left Marxist view of the world’. James Delingpole describes it as a 'global communist takeover plan’. This might sound like something cooked up in the lizard-stalked imagination of a nut but it refers to a real phenomenon. The World Economic Forum, which organizes the annual conference Davos, has launched an initiative called, yes, 'the Great Reset’. It has its own website. So, it is not just a feature of hot-headed conspiratorial fantasies. It exists. But as what?

great reset