Ezra Levant arrives at Davos’s World Economic Forum (January 18th) to expose its shift from economic debate to an "unaccountable world government," citing Klaus Schwab’s calls for "mastering the future" and Bill Gates’ depopulation remarks. While billionaires like Soros and Thiel defend elite secrecy, Levant highlights the WEF’s opaque power—undemocratic, irreversible, and surpassing many leaders. Avi Yamini’s team, dressed poorly to critique "health" agendas, interviews London’s Lord Mayor, who downplays China’s human rights abuses for climate priorities. Tony Blair dodges accountability on Iraq or vaccines, revealing Davos’ culture of evasion despite public influence, where real scrutiny is blocked behind security cordons. The episode reveals how globalist agendas operate beyond democratic checks, reshaping policy in private while avoiding public accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, so why are we in Davos, Switzerland, after all?
What's the big deal about the World Economic Forum?
It's January 18th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
I'm standing outside the main train station in Davos, Switzerland.
I just got off the train, and it was packed like rush hour.
There were a few Swiss on it, but it was mainly delegates, hangers-on, staff, and bureaucrats associated with the World Economic Forum that's been meeting here this week.
And yet, I was watching them on the train, as you do when you have nothing else to do.
And it reminded me of my time working in Ottawa for a couple years, or even that summer when I interned in Washington, D.C. There are some masters of the universe here at Davos, billionaires and oligarchs.
I've named some of them in previous shows, the Bill Gates of the world, the Soroses of the world.
But for every one of those, there's got to be a hundred busy bees buzzing away just doing the paperwork and the red tape and the hanging on of any large bureaucracy.
It was sort of interesting.
And of course, there's people trying to make a mark.
On the train, I overheard one fellow say he's coming in from Zurich, but he's got, because he's got this great new website for investors, and he wants to meet some investor here, and hopefully he'll make some money.
So there are some entrepreneurs embedded in this place.
There's a lot of bureaucrats who are not particularly ideologically motivated, but the people who make the decisions, the people who are truly powerful here, or perhaps more accurately, truly influential, are ideologues on a mission.
And I want to take a minute today before we show you some of our other journalism to explain why we're here.
And I was saying to my colleagues as we were driving around the Swiss Alps looking for private jet landing strips the other day, I was saying the first time I ever heard of the World Economic Forum was reading the Canadian columnist and editor, Terry Corcoran, who used to write about it every year in the pages of the Financial Post.
And he was railing against it probably 20 years ago.
And I love Terry very much.
I had the pleasure of working with him when I joined the National Post in the 90s.
But I would always read these and say, Terry, what are you banging on about?
World Economic Forum.
Those three words are so generic and so boring, you're almost asleep by the time you say the third one, World Economic Forum.
Okay, so it's a bunch of economists who have a forum.
I'm sleepy already.
And I think maybe that's part of the point of it, is who could possibly be against the World Economic Forum?
It's like I remember when I first investigated the Canadian Human Rights Commission some 20 years ago or so when I was being investigated for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohamed, who could possibly be against the Canadian Human Rights Commission?
I mean, you'd be nuts to be against those things.
Every one of those things is wonderful.
Well, that's part of their camouflage, isn't it?
The World Economic Forum is not just a group of economists meeting to air their views in a forum.
If it was, there'd be nothing wrong with that.
And I'm reminded of this clip of Peter Thiel, the most libertarian man in Silicon Valley, one of the creators of PayPal and other tech wonders, when he was accosted outside the Bilderberger meeting and he stopped to give an answer.
He was clearly irritated that he was being scrummed by paparazzi.
And they were saying, what are you talking about?
What are you doing in there?
And here's Peter Thiel giving what I thought was actually a fairly reasonable answer.
Take a look.
Hey, Peter, how are you?
Are you having a good day?
How's everything at Bilderberg?
It's good.
Can you tell us about your libertarian values and beliefs?
I was really curious if it's able to be somehow conjoined with some of the people you're meeting with, because there seems to kind of be a conflict with that.
I was wondering what you think about the philosophy.
Obviously, you know, the meeting taking place, we're just curious about what's happening.
I'll leave it at one statement, and then that's it, okay?
Okay, yeah, yeah.
I believe that's always important to exchange views with people, no matter what their perspectives are.
I believe that I'm, you know, I think that we have a lot of problems in our society and we need to be finding ways to talk to people.
We need to find ways to talk to people where not everything is completely transparent.
Libertarianism is not synonymous with radical transparency.
That's often an argument that the Stasi would make in East Germany, where everything had to be monitored by society.
And I think often you have the best conversations in smaller groups where not everything is being monitored.
And that's how you can have very honest conversations and how you can think better about the future.
I think Peter Thiel, besides being an entrepreneur and investor, is a genuine thinker.
He's a kind of public intellectual.
And he would say, I want to meet with the world's most interesting people.
I want to meet with tycoons, but also political leaders, but also NGOs and philanthropists.
I want to meet them.
I want to bounce ideas around.
I truly want to go to a world economic forum.
I don't think Peter Thiel goes to the World Economic Forum, but there's an argument for why anyone should be able to meet and talk with anyone.
And who should say you can't?
And if they want to have a private conversation because they can be more candid, well, that makes sense too.
Except if it's not really a World Economic Forum, just a talk shop.
Except if it's actually a kind of second government, a secret government, a shadow government.
And I know those words right there sound a little bit conspiratorial, but what else do you call it when Klaus Schwab, an unelected billionaire who's been running the World Economic Forum since the beginning, unfireable, I presume he literally owns it.
What do you do when he says he wants to master the future and he wants to penetrate the cabinets of the world?
Here's clips of him saying both of those things.
What does it need to master the future?
I think to have a platform where all stakeholders of global society are engaged.
Governments, business, civil societies, the young generation, and I could go on, I think is a first step to meet all the challenges.
But what is even more important is that we approach the future with a positive spirit.
When I mention our names like Mr. Smirkel, even Vladimir Putin and so on, they all have been young global leaders of the World Economic Forum.
But what we are very proud of now is the young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau, President of Argentina and so on, that we penetrate the cabinets.
So yesterday I was at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau and I would know that half of this cabinet or even more, half of this cabinet are for our actually young global leaders of the World Economic Forum.
Sorry, if you really were the World Economic Forum, economists sitting around talking and banding about ideas, you wouldn't be talking about penetrating the cabinets.
You wouldn't be talking about mastering the world.
That sounds a little bit like master and slave.
And the World Economic Forum, and that sounds good.
I like economists to talk about things like how can we get inflation under control?
How can we increase prosperity?
Canadians are falling in the rankings.
We're now so much poorer than Americans.
I heard this statistic the other day, and it was shocking to me because of the way it was phrased.
Did you know that the average African American is wealthier than the average Canadian?
That's a shocking way of comparing it, isn't it?
Because we're told that American blacks are so economically depressed, which is true compared to other Americans, and it's a national challenge and a crisis at the same time.
But the average Canadian is as poor as the average American black family.
The average Canadian is as poor as an American from Mississippi.
And so, yes, I would like a world economic forum where economists sit around and talk about solving problems, but that is not what's going on here in Davos.
What they're talking about here is creating an unaccountable, unde-electable, non-transparent, non-appealable world government.
I've always been against world governments for one obvious reason.
Where do you go if you're a refugee from it?
If you're a refugee from North Korea, you could go to South Korea.
During the Cold War, if you were in East Germany, you could go to West Germany.
In general terms, if you're from the Soviet bloc, you could free to the West.
And a few strange souls went the other direction.
There were some people who went from the West to the Soviet Union.
And I suppose that's their right.
And that's my point.
If you have 200 countries in the world, if things really hit the fan, you could leave.
I think of the Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.
Imagine if there was one world empire.
Where could you go to get away from the tyrant?
Well, what do you do when Klaus Schwab says he wants to master the future and control and regulate every aspect of life?
And what do you do when it's not just some madman giving a speech into his bathroom mirror, holding a toothbrush as a microphone?
What if that madman actually has billionaire friends like George Soros and Bill Gates and has an army of politicians coming up through the ranks in every country in the world?
My problem with the World Economic Forum is that they are not the World Economic Forum.
They are, the word world is accurate.
They do seek to dominate the world and they have chosen their designator successor to America as the hyperpower.
They have chosen China so clearly as their role model.
Again, Klaus Schwab says it.
Take a listen to him praising China as the innovative way.
I respect China's achievements, which are tremendous over the last over 40 years since the opening up and policy and reform policy came into action.
I think it's a role model for many countries, but I think also we should leave it to each country to make its own decision what system it wants to adopt.
And I think we should be very careful in imposing systems.
But the Chinese model is certainly a very attractive model for quite a number of countries.
So the world, the word world is a fit for the World Economic Forum.
Economic, well, that could mean so much, but they want to do so much more than economics.
When they say they want to replace meat with synthetic food or even bugs, that's not really an economic argument.
They claim it is about sustainability.
It's about power and control and depopulation, which is pretty gross.
If you doubt me, here's that old clip of Bill Gates.
I think this was not at the World Economic Forum.
I think this was at a TED Talk, explaining that there are billions too many people in the world.
Take a listen.
It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet.
And somehow we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero.
It's been constantly going up.
It's only various economic changes that have even flattened it at all.
So we have to go from rapidly rising to falling and falling all the way to zero.
This equation has four factors, a little bit of multiplication.
So you've got a thing on the left, CO2, that you want to get to zero.
And that's going to be based on the number of people, the services each person's using on average, the energy on average for each service, and the CO2 being put out per unit of energy.
So let's look at each one of these and see how we can get this down to zero.
Probably one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty near to zero.
Now that's back from high school algebra.
But let's take a look.
First, we've got population.
The world today has 6.8 billion people.
That's headed up to about 9 billion.
Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.
It's terrifying to me that someone who thinks there are billions too many people in the world has put himself in charge of the world vaccine system.
I find that creepy and dangerous.
World Economic Forum.
Now, the word forum, again, is a very large and general world word.
Proto-Government Powerhouses00:08:32
Our parliaments are a forum, aren't they?
The U.S. Congress is a forum, even in its own way.
The United Nations is a forum.
And when I think of the Canadian Parliament, I think, for example, everything's on the record.
It's extremely rare that Parliament has secret or what they call in-camera hearings.
Extremely rare, typically only in committees dealing with very sensitive matters such as national security.
The whole point of Parliament, you can see it's rooted in the word parlay to talk, is that they're talking for us and we can listen and we can read the transcript called the Hansert or in the U.S. it's called the Congressional Record.
You can make a presentation to your Parliament or Congress either in the form of a petition or you can appear before a committee or you can even meet with your elected official and they have a motivation to meet with you because if they tick off enough of their constituents, they could get tossed out.
What the government does is a process.
We don't just enact laws, although of course during the pandemic we gave up our legislative process.
But typically a bill is proposed.
It's debated.
It goes through three votes.
It's changed between each stage.
There's committee hearings.
then it has to be approved by the Senate and proclaimed.
That same path is similar, but tweaked a little bit differently in the UK and the US and France and other countries.
But the democratic process is by nature slower, more deliberative, and allows for change.
Our democratic system is built on the understanding that any legislation or policy is likely flawed from the start and thus needs to be improved.
And remember what Justin Trudeau said.
when he was running for office at first.
Remember why he said he admired China's basic dictatorship.
Remember that crazy statement he made?
It wasn't just that he was enamored with authoritarianism, which he clearly is.
It's a psychological thing with him.
He specifically said it was so China didn't have to bother with laws or getting permission or the legislative process.
Listen to the full answer he gave.
Justin Trudeau loves and admires communist China because the basic dictatorship allows them to move at the speed of tyranny.
Take a listen.
There's a level of admiration I actually have for China because their face it dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say we need to go green as fast as we need to start investing in solar.
I mean there is a flexibility that I know Stephen Harper must dream about of having a dictatorship that he could do everything he wanted.
And that's the difference between Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum, which is a misnomer, and a regular democracy.
We can't vote out Klaus Schwab.
We can't see transcripts of all their secret meetings.
We can't petition the World Economic Forum.
We can't say, I'm a journalist.
I have the right to appear in the press gallery.
There is no court of appeal if a constitution is violated by a World Economic Forum idea.
And which constitution would you use?
They are transnational.
They're transglobal.
If you would try and sue them under the U.S. law in a U.S. court, they would say, ha ha, try and find us in this country or that country.
They're rootless by definition.
So that's why we're here.
It's not just a talk shop or a think tank.
It's a think tank that has grown into a proto-government, but not a government that any of us would want to live under, other than perhaps Justin Trudeau would want to live in it as a sort of ruler.
The future promised by Klaus Schwab and his oligarch cronies, and we have to bring that word oligarch into our vocabulary.
Why should only billionaire thugs in Russia and Ukraine be called oligarchs?
Do you doubt that Jeffrey Bezos and Bill Gates are oligarchs by every meaning of the word?
Of course they are.
We're here at the World Economic Forum because my old friend Terry Corcoran was right 20 years ago and 10 years ago, even though I said, oh, Terry, there you go, banging on again about the World Economic Forum.
Terry Corcoran was right.
The World Economic Forum started with a stew of bad ideas.
But those bad ideas didn't just fester.
They took root and they are now planted in governments around the world and they serve this group of this shadowy group.
There is one silver lining, and I'll close my impromptu monologue this way.
The World Economic Forum is run by Klaus Schwab, who's an incredibly powerful man by every measure.
He probably knows more important people in the world than almost anyone else, certainly more than Joe Biden, who forgets what he had for breakfast that morning.
He is a hub in a hub and spoke system.
Could say that the Secretary General of the United Nations knows more people of power than anyone else.
I'd say that might be true in terms of getting a head of state on the phone for a minute.
But in terms of actually dealing with the masters of the universe, with the titans out there, Klaus Schwab has been doing it for half a century almost.
And as opposed to secretaries general who are replaced every few years and who can be replaced, they can be voted out.
I think Klaus Schwab is one of the most powerful and influential people in the world.
But for some reason, that's not enough for him.
It's not enough that he knows he's powerful and that he is powerful.
He needs you to know it too.
There's something very strange about someone so rich and powerful and connected and influential that he feels some sort of desire to boast about it.
Let me play that penetrates the cabinets clip just one more time.
Pick a listen.
When I mention our names, like Mr. Smirkel, even Vladimir Putin, and so on, they all have been young global leaders of the World Economic Forum.
But what we are very proud of now is the young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau, President of Argentina, and so on, that we penetrate the cabinets.
So yesterday I was at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau, and I would know that half of this cabinet, or even more, half of this cabinet, are actually young global leaders of the World Economic Forum.
One of our teammates the other day said that would be like a mafia boss bragging about how powerful he is or how many people he's had, you know, assassinated.
If you are powerful, you don't need to tell people you're powerful.
They'll just find out, or maybe it's better that they never do find out.
It's like someone who's very rich constantly telling you just how rich they are.
Brother, if you were rich, we would know.
If you were respected, we would know.
If you were beautiful, we would know.
There are certain things.
If you're classy, we would know.
There's certain things that you have them and everyone knows.
And in fact, if you start to talk about them, people know you don't have them.
Klaus Schwab just can't shut up about how plugged in he is and how much more powerful he is than any given world leader.
I think it's true.
I think Klaus Schwab is probably more powerful than at least 100 different heads of state.
He's probably more powerful than many CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
But because he just can't stop boasting about it, he can't stop pumping out his plans to make you eat bugs, to make you own nothing and be happy.
That in the end may be his downfall.
When enough of the little people stand up, maybe we can topple some of these big people, the ones that my old friend Terry Corcoran warned us about for so long.
Dinner in Davos00:02:41
That's my opening monologue on the streets of Davos outside their train station.
I'll be spending the day trying to buttonhole some of these oligarchs like my friend Avi Yamini does so well.
All right, here's the rest of today's show.
And here, as you can see, we're not staying in a fancy hotel in Davos.
Those are all booked up a year in advance by the World Economic Forum.
If you're not a delegate, you can't get in to those hotels.
We're not staying in a hotel at all.
In fact, we're at a kind of large, rustic cabin a couple of towns over in a small village called Sass, and we're a little bit sassy.
It's an Airbnb, but we sort of like it.
In fact, there's a kitchen.
We cook dinner together.
This is the big dinner table where we eat and we do our video editing.
It's a little cozy.
And frankly, we're not here that much.
We are on the streets of Davos during the day and we sort of hang out in a, there's a supermarket in Davos that has a restaurant floor and they invite people, including us, to sit there in the warmth, work on their laptops.
They have free Wi-Fi.
It's actually a pretty handy way to have a base camp in Davos while we've got our affordable Airbnb out here in the village of SAS.
Anyways, it's pretty cheek by Jowell here, but we don't mind it because we're trying to be more economical than the billionaires and the oligarchs who move in for the week.
But I just wanted to make a quick introduction.
We've talked to him before, but we have three official talent.
Everyone's talented, but talent is the TB word for someone who appears on screen, of course, Avi Yamini, our chief Australia correspondent.
He went to Davos last May and really set the template for us.
I'm here on the Canadian side, and representing our UK team is one of the newest reporters of Rebel News, Callum Smiles.
Callum, how are you doing?
I'm very well.
How are you?
Good.
Now, the first thing I want to tell our viewers is that you go outside dressed even more poorly than me.
In fact, you were wearing shorts the other day, and it is snowing.
It is minus 10.
Now, this is part of your approach to health and being chilly, am I right?
I am partial to a cold shower or two.
I do enjoy a cold shower.
But you're also going outside in the winter.
I mean, today you put on a shirt, but anyway, I won't linger on it, but it's, I mean, I'm the Canadian.
I'm supposed to be going out with very little on in the winter.
Let's move on to substantive things.
You were on the streets of Davos like we were, and I recognize Canadians.
Avi recognizes Australians.
Substantive Things Discussed00:04:42
We all recognize international figures, like, for example, the CEO of Pfizer that we caught on the street.
But you would recognize Brits in the way that obviously a Canuck would never do.
Tell me a little bit about the Lord Mayor of the City of London that's different than Sadiq Khan.
Tell me who he is, and then we'll throw the clip of your interview.
So the City of London is a very interesting place.
It's almost like the Vatican in Italy.
Many people think the Vatican's just a city in Italy.
It's not.
It's its own country.
And the same goes for the city of London.
It's not actually part of the United Kingdom or even Europe.
So it makes you wonder, why does the Lord Mayor of the City of London, a country that is much smaller than Greater London, the county, why is he here in Davos as a member or contributor to the World Economic Forum?
Why does someone of a country so small have such a large say on global policy?
Yeah, I didn't even know he was a person.
I mean, I always thought it was Sadiq Khan.
Well, here, let's watch your interview with him.
Take a look.
And speaking of the re-emergence of China, is this speaking about them in terms of are they a growing threat?
Are they a potential partner?
What's the sort of relationship you're discussing?
Well, we were just really listening to others talking about the re-emergence and the extraordinary speed with which that's happening after COVID.
As we know, there's been a huge incidence of COVID, but also a significant recovery.
So there's been a sort of a herd process in China, and everybody's emerging from that.
And we're seeing now very strong growth coming out of China.
That's important from a global economic point of view because it'll stimulate the Asian region, but it'll also help prompt a recovery in our economies which are struggling at the moment with recession in the West.
But putting economics to one side, because obviously everyone wants to see a strong economy in every single nation state.
But does the human rights issue bother the leaders here at the World Economic Forum?
Because as we've seen in China, we saw them go for that zero COVID policy.
They were even locking people in their own homes.
Does that not concern the leaders here?
Human rights issues are always a concern for leaders and businesses around the world.
But also, you have to understand, the biggest challenge facing the world is climate change.
Of course, he thinks global warming is the most important crisis in the world.
But of course, he doesn't really believe that.
If he did, he wouldn't come to Davos by jet and helicopter and SUV and other fossil fuel burning ways.
I mean, he's obviously a liar and a hypocrite.
I understand that you bumped into Tony Blair on the street today.
I actually did too.
He would not say one word to me, not one syllable, not even hello.
It just didn't even seem normal.
I mean, he doesn't have to answer my question.
And by the way, my questions were very gentle with him.
Did you have any better luck with him?
No, I had just as much luck where I got absolutely nothing from him.
I had more conversations with his entourage than him.
But it's interesting, isn't it?
When it comes to being on Sky News or discussing whether to take the entire country into Iraq or telling people they are stupid if they don't get a vaccine, he's more than happy to talk.
But as soon as he's proven wrong about something, and I like to stress the point, there's nothing wrong with being wrong about something, provided when you're proven wrong, you just hold your hand to him and say, I got it wrong.
I offered him the opportunity not once, but twice, to just admit he was wrong and even apologize for it.
And he didn't even look me in the eye once.
He just kept his eyes to the floor and had his entourage leading the way.
You know, it's interesting.
There's a lot of people at Davos who truly have become, I mean, some of them are loved, there's no doubt about it, but many of them are hated.
And frankly, to be fair, you can't be the prime minister or president of any country for years and years and years without amassing a big enemies list.
I mean, there's an old saying, friends come and go in politics, but enemies accumulate.
And Tony Blair, I think, has had a particularly like a lot of people hate him.
People accuse him of being a war criminal.
They accuse him of so many things.
And there's a lot of people like that at the World Economic Forum.
And when they're behind their security cordon, they can all let their hair down and relax.
But as soon as they step out, then they're subject to real questions by accountability journalists, as opposed to the puffball questions from the official accredited journalist Callum.
Great work out there on the streets.
I'm sure in the days ahead, you'll be able to get a few other big shot Brits.