On right-wing populism masquerading as anti-elitism
Why everyone on the right knows Klaus Schwab, but can't name a single CEO of a military-industrial-intelligence complex corporation
You have probably noticed a lot of right-wing rage-whining about the World Economic Forum (WEF), Klaus Schwab, The Great Reset, Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies producing Covid vaccines. Yesterday Rebel News, a Canadian right-wing rag founded by fracking, oil and Israel lobby money, went to Davos and did some epic hard-hitting street journalism by going up to the CEO of Pfizer to whine about the Covid vaccine, and to Greta Thunberg to whine about climate change being fake.
These clips were of course promptly posted on social media and the hacks working for the rag touted it as a brave act of journalism that the corporate media is afraid to do and you can only find on the right, the true anti-elitist, anti-establishment heroes. Look, we’re running up to the CEO of Pfizer and annoying him! Look, Greta is being annoyed by us! We’re the true radical edgy anti-elitists!
It’s a very easy con, and of course works very well on the rubes who populate the right-wing base. The CEO of Pfizer is a wealthy person, certainly part of the elite, as are all the people at Davos and the WEF and Schwab, so if we oppose them, then it means that we’re clearly anti-elitist. Meanwhile the left is afraid to do the same thing, because they’re also part of the elite. You don’t see the left talking about Davos and the WEF and The Great Reset so much, right? It’s because they’re all part of the same agenda, which by the way is also the agenda of the Chinese Communist Party, Lula, Biden, Pelosi, they’re all part of the same elites who are trying to turn everything Communist, but we’re standing in their way and bravely opposing them!
Some segments of the nominal left may also be fooled by this because on the surface it has some appealing elements to it. Yes, it’s true, the WEF and Davos and the CEO of Pfizer are part of the elites (though they give the game away when they also include Greta Thunberg in that, even though her entire purpose for going to Davos was to oppose the same elites by saying they were ignoring climate change. But pesky facts like this can be easily ignored when you’ve convinced your base that she’s a Communist who is working to realize Communism through The Great Reset). But they’re the most irrelevant, powerless, useless, weak part of the elites. What is the WEF, a business consultancy social networking group made by some self-promoting grifter like Schwab, in comparison to the vast, sprawling, all-powerful Military Industrial Complex, which includes corporations like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Haliburton, Boeing. They control every politician on both sides of the isle. They determine policy and push it through with ease. The Defense budget keeps going up. Weapons are being sold to the Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians. Taiwan is flooded with cash and weapons. The US-NATO empire’s infrastructure, it’s material base, is made-up of these corporations. Now ask any right-winger, any Republican, and Bolsonaro lover, any fanboy of Victor Orban, to name one of their CEOs. Just one of them. They don’t know who they are. Tucker Carlson’s doesn’t do epic based monologues about any of them. But ask if they know Klaus Schwab and their eyes light up like children in a candy store. They go all fucking rabid and all the deranged talking points they read in some Facebook meme rises to the top of their mind.
And that’s why they do it. That’s why all you hear about on the right-wing when they pretend to be anti-elitist are irrelevant powerless self-promoters like Schwab and the WEF, but you never hear about the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, NATO, and the vast apparatus upon which the power of the US empire is founded. You also never hear about the CIA, and when you do hear about the FBI, it’s solely to focus on its supposedly anti-Republican faction, the one that tries to create a semblance of bipartisanship by going after both Republican and Democrat excesses so that both sides of the ruling class can be satisfied that the institution is properly playing its role. Tucker Carlson, whose daddy was a CIA agent and head of a major Israel lobby group, doesn’t want to abolish the FBI when he very occasionally rants about it. No, look at what he says: the FBI has been “taken over” by “left wing radicals”, and has to be “returned to its proper role”, by which he of course means the FBI under Hoover, when it solely and explicitly targeted the broad left, and used mass violence to destroy it.
And it’s the same with Schwab and Davos and the WEF and universities, whatever elites they rail against. Not only do they pick the elites with the least actual power as a diversionary tactic, to get people away from actual powerful elites who make and implement policy, from the military to the economic, foreign and domestic; they also solely target them to make them “unwoke”, which is code for making them explicitly right-wing, or even more right-wing than they already are. They want Schwab to speak in the language of Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump. They want the WEF to speak in the language of a deranged morning conservative radio show host. That’s the only objection they have to them. They don’t care about their power and status as wealthy people who control capital. They’re capitalists to the bone, to paraphrase Nancy Pelosi. That’s fully bipartisan, there’s no disagreement there between Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow. They both believe that Klaus Schwab and all the people at Davos and the WEF and the CEO of Pfizer have an immutable, inalienable right to own capital, and to have their elite status. They just have rhetorical disagreements. Tucker wants Schwab to use different rhetoric. That’s it. Talk about how eating red meat is awesome more, and about how trans people are grooming children, and you’re in the other camp. They love you. Just look at Elon Musk, a beloved hero of the right who is much more powerful than Schwab, has much more capital under his control than Schwab and also the CEO of Pfizer, and his power is deeply intertwined with the US Military Industrial Intelligence Complex, as I have detailed here, here and here. But you see, he says the right words, so he’s magically transformed into being an epic based anti-elitist. His actual material and social status, his power, the capital he owns, the fact that he’s the nominally privatized segment of the corporate military state, which gives him tax breaks, subsidies—all that is irrelevant to the right populist. All they care about is the ephemeral, superficial, utterly irrelevant purely symbolic aesthetics of anti-elitism. Grow a beard or be a bit scruffy, wear jeans and a t-shirt, and say trans people are groomers, and voila, you’re now an epic based anti-elitist, even if you are among the wealthiest people on earth deeply embedded in the military industrial intelligence complex.
For all the shadowboxing between the “woke” and anti-“woke” factions of the ruling class, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, in its essence they are pursuing the exact same strategy of self-legitimization through symbolic acts, as as means of deflecting away from and intentionally obfuscating any concern for the material and economic, that is, for actual, real politics. Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow want their elites to speak the right language, while keeping their social status and power untouched. They are flipsides of the same coin, and the same goes for all the hacks and grifters who populate the right-wing conservative and “left”-wing liberal mediaspheres. From the MAGA populist to the BlueMAGA Biden and Kamala diehards, they’re all solely after symbolic, rhetorical shifts, because that’s their job as members of the media class. They deal in language, they trade in rhetoric, their business is words and manipulating them. So they see the world solely through that lens. Ideology-production is their game, their profession, and they know what they have to do to be successful at it in whatever faction they’re working in of the media class.
Knowing what game is being played is the beginning of enlightenment, which here means seeing through the grift of right-wing populism, and why everyone knows the name of Klaus Schwab, but no one can name a single CEO of a corporation that is part of the military industrial intelligence complex, and you will never, ever see a rag like Rebel News or Tucker Carlson Tonight doing epic based street journalism hounding them with questions about why they are murdering millions in Yemen and selling weapons to Bin Salman and enabling mass rape in Egyptian jails and stealing oil from Syria and so and so on.
And the one thing you will never hear any of them talking about under any circumstances is the power of the Israel lobby and its deep ties to and embeddedness is in that same military industrial intelligence complex. In fact the opposite: they all sing the praises of Israel, they can’t get enough of it, as they simultaneously claim to be “America first”. Biden says openly that if Israel did not exist, they would have to invent it so as to protect US interests in the region, and Trump, Bush, Obama, Clinton, Tucker Carlson, Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, they all nod in agreement.
Again, that’s called ruling class ideology, and you’ll never see that being discussed in right-populist rags, because they’re agents of the ruling class, whose job is to manufacture consent for it, just like their liberal counterparts who they’re so desperate to make themselves appear to be different from aesthetically.
Now if you want to know about an actual shadowy group of wealthy powerful people who have shaped the world in their neoliberal capitalist image and have killed hundreds of millions as a result of their policy proposals actually being implemented across the globe, check out the Manhattan Institute, set up by Reagan’s CIA director and Antony Fisher, who also set up a whole host of other influential policy-making neoliberal think tanks like the Atlas Network.
No one the right or liberal side knows any of of these names. They’re the actual powerbrokers, the policy-making apparatus of the ruling class, and so they’re hidden from view by the media class. No epic monologues and street hounding of any of these people. No, only talk about Schwab and the some irrelevant social networking organization called the WEF. It’s a grift all the way down, and it’s done for specific purposes: to divert attention away from actual sources of power toward meaningless symbolic ephemera that the base can get all agitated about without it mattering even one iota in actual policy terms. The abandonment of real politics for its faint, barely recognizable image.
A final note:
I appreciate your writing on this issue so much! Carlson and Maddow are flip sides of the same coin. I do wish the left would cover WEF however - the left seems to avoid talking about it just as the left avoids criticizing Soros. It seems the left and right each stake out a territory and avoid each others turf. Your excellent writing exposes this. If I could write I would investigate how the left avoiding this topic and the right only dealing with a fraction of the facts in a “limited hangout” style allows the “public/private” fascistic alliance to hide in plain site at these forums https://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2023/01/20/at-wef-zelenskyy-urges-speed-and-resolve-in-ukraine/amp/
One issue I have with RW populists is their false non-interventionism. People like Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Saagar Enjeti, Josh Hawley, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, etc. say that they're anti-war and non-interventionists and oppose endless wars in the Middle East and the proxy war in Ukraine. But in reality, the reason they oppose endless wars in the Middle East and the proxy war in Ukraine isn't because of a principled non-interventionism or a principled opposition to war, but because they want to use those resources to militarily oppose China. And they openly admit this. You can't claim to be anti-war and then support militarily opposing another country.
Just something else that shows that RW populism is a fraud.