Ezra Levant arrives at Davos for the WEF, where founder Klaus Schwab’s scandals persist despite his influence. High-profile attendees like Trump and Mark Carney mask geopolitical tensions—Lithuania’s unlisted jet hints at NATO-Ukraine conflicts—while BlackRock’s Larry Fink pushes $20T in ESG/DEI policies as corporate socialism. The WEF operates without democratic oversight, private jets contradict climate rhetoric, and past confrontations reveal evasive elites. Levant’s crowdfunded town hall exposes their unchecked power, proving Davos isn’t just networking but a shadowy policy hub. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Rebel News is at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
I'll give you the latest.
It's January 19th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Oh, hi, everybody.
The sun sets at 5 p.m. out here in the Swiss Alps.
So that's why it's dark out.
We traveled a great distance from Toronto, flying to Zurich, Switzerland, driving up to Klosters, the town we're in now, and then the train the last distance to Davos, the site of the annual World Economic Forum conference that they have every January.
Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, sort of pushed to the sidelines after a series of scandals, including sexual scandals and, of course, financial mismanagement.
Isn't it a shame?
Who would have thunk it?
However, while the World Economic Forum has had some rocky times for its founder, in some ways it's never done better.
I was looking at the guest list for this year's World Economic Forum, and so many world leaders are here, including plans to attend by Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States.
Mark Carney, of course, is attending.
He was a director of the World Economic Forum for years, as was Christia Freeland.
But there's at least half a dozen countries that we would call G20 countries.
When we were at the airport, the private jet airport, we saw a government jet land from Lithuania, which I didn't see on the guest list.
So there's all sorts of people meeting.
And that's the thing, where some powerful people go, other powerful people attend to, or those seeking power.
There's all sorts of NGOs here, mainly on the left, some on the right, if there's such a thing.
And of course, there's a lot of business barons.
It's a mistake, I suppose a childish mistake to think that business people are right-wing, that if you use capitalism to make money, you believe in the capitalist system.
I don't think so.
I mean, think of George Soros, who is perhaps the most effective socialist, perhaps even communist in the world.
He's made tens of billions of dollars using the capitalist system, but he would undermine and devour that system to promulgate his extreme ideas.
So there are, for example, the CEO of BlackRock, which has, I think, $20 trillion under management.
He is a full-out socialist who believes that it's easier to influence things and to inject socialism into companies from the inside than on the outside.
Just remember how Larry Fink and BlackRock work.
They invest in companies.
They might put $10 million or $100 million into a company and they'll say, well, as shareholders, we now demand that you implement DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion in a corporate setting.
They have different initials, ESG, environmental, social, and governance.
But Larry Fink has done more socialism through the tools of being an investor than any socialist, I suppose, since Lenin.
So you have this strange mix of people and a lot of tech people here too.
Not Elon Musk, but Open AI, a lot of artificial intelligence companies.
Palantir is here every year.
So it's such a weird and interesting mix.
And the thing that, of course, caught my interest at first when we started coming to the World Economic Forum about five years ago was that it was obviously an idea shop where socialist globalist talking points got hammered out.
And then all the world leaders would sort of leave here parroting the same phrase.
I mean, where do you think the phrase build back better came from or the great reset?
These are subjects of entire conference meetings here at the World Economic Forum.
They're not actual legislatures.
So to say that the World Economic Forum has power is not accurate, but it has enormous influence, if you understand the difference.
Power is a parliament can order a law.
A policeman can arrest you.
That's power.
But influence is who's whispering into the ears of the powerful people.
That's the World Economic Forum.
And I have to say, based on the guest list, they're actually more powerful than ever.
I thought they were waning in importance because Donald Trump had made obsolete so many of their projects, like, for example, global warming.
Donald Trump is going full tilt with all sorts of energy creation.
But they're adaptable.
I mean, at the end of the day, they're self-interested.
And all these oligarchs, these VVIPs, as I call them, they'll go, they'll follow the buffalo, so to speak.
And if the money is in arms manufacturing or if the money's in AI, they'll follow the money.
I think they realize that iconoclast bulls in the China shop like Elon Musk are a threat to their systems.
And they despise Elon Musk almost as much as they despise Donald Trump.
But still, they'd love to do business with him, wouldn't they?
This year, I think that at the, I mean, we haven't gone there yet.
We started the day with a visit to the private jet airfield where all these VVIPs come in.
There's a lot of fog there today.
So we only saw a few planes land.
But one of the things that I think is on the mind of delegates, we'll know for sure as the week unfolds, are geopolitics.
The Ukraine, the government of Ukraine always had a pavilion here where they would make the case against Russia and the case for Western support.
But now with Donald Trump and his ambitions in Greenland and his moves in Venezuela and a potential war in Iran, geopolitics, I think, is suddenly thrust to the forefront.
And you can see that in the guest list too, all the NATO countries, including the leader of NATO, who is here.
Anyway, so it's going to be a very interesting week.
And I'm here with my Australian colleague, Abiy Yamini.
We left Calgary, sorry, I left Toronto and then flew to Zurich.
And I did that route.
I listed it to you.
Well, Abi had to leave Melbourne, Australia, fly to Abu Dhabi, and then from there to Zurich and there to take the car and the train.
It's just, I can't even imagine his 30-plus hour journey, but we do it every year because we are not, perhaps, if not the only, certainly one of the only independent journalists are here.
By that, I mean there are always regime journalists who are here who pay 50 grand, 100 grand, 200 grand to be part of the World Economic Forum.
And they get pride of placement and they get to MC big panels with fancy VIPs.
I mean, here's an example of how it works.
So let's say you had various world leaders on a panel.
That's enormously prestigious to be the moderator of that panel.
All right.
Who's got a quarter of a million dollars that they're willing to pay Klaus Schwab for the honor of being a moderator of a panel involving three world leaders?
Like that's one of the ways that influence and connection and closeness of power has been monetized by Klaus Schwab over the years.
I hear he makes hundreds of millions of dollars every one of these get-togethers in Davos.
And you can see it.
Everyone wants to be at the center of the action, center of the power, and center of the money.
But who's there to represent ordinary people?
Now, that question is partly answered in a regular democracy with checks and balances.
Think of our Canadian government.
We have a House of Commons and we have a Senate, which can slow down at least the House of Commons.
We have checks and balances in the form of the court system.
We have transparency, whether it's a lobbyist registry or even just the fact that debates are publicized and there's a record of them and then there's committee hearings.
There's all sorts of ways we try to democratize our system of power in Canada.
None of those things happen here.
There's no official opposition.
to Klaus Schwab.
There's no lobbyist registry.
There's no question period.
There's no transcript of these meetings.
So in that way, it's a kind of crypto government.
Like I said before, they don't have actual power.
They have tremendous influence, but they are a policy shop.
They are a lobbying shop.
And it wouldn't surprise me if in closed doors, behind closed doors, in smoky rooms, all sorts of deals were being hatched, especially when it comes to these wars that are afoot.
Anyways, we did, like I said, we spent most of our time traveling, but we did manage to get a visit into the private jet airfield that we attend every year.
We flew commercial.
We told you the route we took.
But there's actually one private jet for every four delegates on average here at the World Economic Forum.
Can you imagine?
These are the folks telling you and me to live a smaller carbon footprint.
We went there today, but there was a lot of fog, so much fog, I was worried no planes would land.
And indeed, when we got there at the airport, that's what they told us.
Nonetheless, we did see a Lithuanian military craft land with an enormous security detail.
Let me show you a little bit from our trip to the airport, the private airport preferred by the private jet class.
Here, take a look.
Ezra Levant here, along with my colleague Avi Amini, we're at the Alten Rhine Airport.
It's a small private airport in Switzerland that's the closest to the Davos World Economic Forum Conference.
This is not a commercial airport like Zurich or Geneva where you can get a flight from Toronto or Melbourne.
This is a private jet airport.
We come here every year because it's so incredible to watch the masters of the universe, that's what I call them, who fly in private jets only.
And some of them fly in a jet here and then take a helicopter for the last part of the journey to Davos to tell the rest of us, reduce your carbon footprint, don't eat so much meat, turn down your thermostat in the winter.
Now, it's super foggy here now, so I don't know if they've temporarily paused landing the aircraft.
On our way in, we saw about six aircraft parked here.
One of the things that aircraft do is they land here, disgorge their VVIPs, take off again, and park at another airport where there's more room.
So understand what they do.
They fly in a private jet from, let's say, London to this Alton Rhine private airport, let off their VVIPs, and they don't park.
They go on another flight to park.
Then they take a flight back to pick up their VVIPs and go.
I can't imagine a more carbon-intensive lifestyle, but that's how the rulers of the universe operate.
Over the last five years that we've been here, we've recorded their carbon footprint.
We've asked them about how is this worth it, especially after the era of COVID, where we learned how efficient Zoom is in comparison.
And, you know, I was wondering on the way up here, will this be the year that they finally practice what they preach?
And as we're driving in, the reaction you are having to seeing that many private jets parked here, showing us that this year, in fact, if anything, it possibly has more jets than ever.
You know, it's sort of fun to be a plane spotter.
And I don't know if we can pick it up on the camera.
This plastic window, this private airport is so media friendly.
I gotta give them a big thank you.
I don't know if Air Force One is going to land here, if this is not high security enough.
I don't know how he's getting here.
I heard it's via Greenland.
I'm not sure.
There's so many private aircraft that come in here in the one week of Davos.
It's enough to keep the lights on.
Well, I think it's worth mentioning that when we were physically walking into this small complex, this is a very tiny airport.
You saw three or four VIP drivers waiting to take their passengers.
And the black limos.
And it's a tiny airport.
And I don't know if you saw it on the way in.
We'll film it on the way out.
They have sort of a welcome Davos delegates with some free snacks as if they're not having free snacks on the private jets.
So the fact that there are, I think, three or four black limos at the front either tells me they're just hanging out here because they have nowhere else to go or they are waiting for a jet that is about to arrive in the next, I don't know, half an hour.
I saw a statistic that one out of four delegates at Davos flies private.
One out of four.
That's a stunning thing.
I don't think one in 10,000 normal people fly private, but for these folks, it's one in four.
I remember when Greta Tunberg came and we scrummed her, and she was actually, she spent 20 minutes with us.
She gave us no useful answers, but she was with us for 20 minutes.
She didn't have a script ready.
She didn't know what to say.
She'd never had a useful answer, just by the way.
Well, and I asked her if she had ever flown in a private jet.
Have you ever been on a private jet, even once?
I own 100 private jets.
Well, have you been on how about once?
Have you ever been on a private jet?
All the time, yes.
I wonder why you won't answer me in a straight answer.
We didn't fly private.
Ezra wouldn't pay for that jet.
But WEFReports.com, you can catch all our reports all week and help fund our economy-class tickets to get here and our economy, Airbnb, which if you looked at the price tag, doesn't feel economy.
It's very expensive just to be in and amongst these rich and famous here that are shaping and delegating to the world how we have to live.
Yeah.
Special thanks to Alton Rhine Airport for being so accommodating for us.
We'll stick around for a while and see if we can catch any planes.
One, two, three, four, five BMWs and Mercedes.
Who are the VVIPs here?
About 10 staff and about 10 vehicles pulled up here, including police.
Here comes one cop right now.
How are you?
Who's coming and going?
Do you know?
It looks like they're about to pick somebody up.
They're preparing to pick somebody up, and this is quite a large convoy, Pavel.
Oh, you know what?
This is the kind of thing you would see for maybe a prime minister.
And remember, there's a lot of military on the highways around here, too.
It's a very, I mean, think about it.
Donald Trump alone.
When that man moves, you have an enormous security blanket.
Who are you picking up?
Do you know?
I don't know.
You don't know?
Are you sure?
I don't know.
I'm sorry.
Good Guesses About Flights00:04:42
No, that's okay.
I had to ask.
There's a nice car.
Which one do you is that?
Is that the one you drive there?
Oh, yeah.
All three.
Oh, yeah.
Looks nice.
Are they all electric?
Not electric?
No, these are real cars.
You need real power on the mountain room, not electric.
You need real cars.
Electric.
You just told it to come here, prepare.
you don't know what for.
You're either very good at keeping secrets or...
I'm a good mama.
I'm a good mama.
That was a military aircraft built for long hauls.
Fascinating.
Well, our keen-eyed, eagle-eyed videographer Lincoln Jay identified the military aircraft as being from Lithuania with checks out.
I mean, Lithuania, of course, is a small country of former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
It was part of the Soviet Union and it is now in really in the front line.
The Baltics and Russia are in a kind of a military, I don't know, I wouldn't call it a standoff, but both sides have done a little saber rattling.
It's not surprising that if that is the head of Lithuania, that he's got such a security retinue.
What do you think?
We're speculating here, but it all fits.
And look at the kind of entourage he's got and the kind of convoy that's going to be taken, led by police.
Here's something else to think about.
Donald Trump is coming to town.
And so imagine all the NATO countries wanting to have a sit-down with him.
And they have a beautiful welcome area with fresh fruit and juices.
And then some of the prestige newspapers that are members of the World Economic Forum, they have special editions.
Here's the New York Times.
How do you feed 10 billion people sustainably?
Here's the Financial Times.
We're here to discuss global needs.
Here's Barons.
Some attend summits.
We move mountains.
So it's a major propaganda exercise because there's so many BVIPs here.
Journalists are here, sure, to interview them, but in softball interviews.
But it's a kind of off-the-record lobbying event.
There's no lobbyist registry.
Nothing's on the record.
So a lot of deals are being done behind the scenes.
There's different layers to the World Economic Forum.
There's the ideology being forced on the rest of us, but there's billions of dollars of deals cooked up.
And I guess they roll out the red carpet for the private jet class.
I went on the website flightaware.com, which is a very interesting way to track flights in and out of any airport.
And let me read to you some of the flights that have landed here when it wasn't too foggy just today.
So the last private jet that landed came from Geneva.
Just stop and think about that for a second.
Geneva is in Switzerland.
You could drive it, but two people flew in a jet from Geneva to Altenrine.
I don't know how many thousands of liters of jet fuel they burned.
That would be like driving your car one block to the convenience store.
Flying a private jet from Geneva to Altenrine, just incredible.
I see flights from Al Maktoum, which I believe is in the United Arab Emirates, from London Luton Airport, from Boca Raton, California, from Speyer.
I don't know where that is.
I'm going to guess Germany or Austria, Nuremberg, Vienna, Oxford, Berlin, London.
The Royal Air Force Northalt suggesting that a senior person from the UK came on it.
Farnborough Airfield, same thing.
My point is that there are so many flights coming in.
We just were not able to see them during the fog.
And three people told us that it was the fog that was delaying the mass arrival.
I can understand why the prime minister or president of Lithuania needs to come for security reasons in a private aircraft.
That makes sense to me.
I think for most of the others flying private jets, I think it's just they can afford it.
Why wouldn't they?
It's not like they're going to live the lifestyle that they prescribe to the rest of us.
You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.
Well, I wish I could have shown you more private planes, but it was just so foggy.
And I was using a website called, I think it was Flight Monitor.
There's FlightAware.
That's it, flightaware.com.
It's a pretty cool website.
If you actually are curious, you can go there and see where every plane in the world is.
You can search by tail number.
You can search by airline, by route.
You can even just look at an airport.
So I looked at the airport and I saw all the flights that were coming and going and planned.
And it's pretty amazing.
But of course, things stop when it's super foggy.
But tomorrow we're going to get up at the crack of dawn, even before dawn.
Dawn here is about 7 a.m.
Sunset's about 5 p.m.
So there's only about 10 hours of working sunlight, it being the winter time.
Questions Unanswered00:05:39
We're going to get to Davos just after, I'm going to guess 7.30.
And we're going to get to work right away.
And you know what we do?
We try and scrum oligarchs as we see them walking down the street.
Some of them have meaningful conversations with us.
Many of them just run away.
It sort of bothers me when they do, because these are smart people.
I mean, we may disagree with them and they may be diabolical.
Some of them may be downright evil.
But I think, for example, of all the questions I put to Larry Fink of BlackRock last year, he absolutely could have answered them.
In fact, he could have answered them with a slam dunk that made me sort of look dumb, but instead, he just refused to answer questions from a ruffian like me.
Here's a clip of that.
Mr. Fink, are you going to follow Donald Trump's plan and get rid of DEI and ESG in your companies?
BlackRock really is the opposite of Donald Trump in so many ways.
Are you going to change it all in light of the U.S. presidency?
How has Donald Trump have you talked to Donald Trump since he was elected?
Is the World Economic Forum a counterpoint to Donald Trump?
Why are you running away from simple questions?
Just answer a question.
Have you talked to President Trump yet?
Why are your bodyguards pushing away journalists, Mr. Fink?
They're simple questions.
Is it that hard to answer a question that you need bodyguards and to swerve through traffic?
Is the next four years going to be bad for business with Donald Trump in charge?
Is peace the last thing you want on this world?
Which makes more money for you, war in Ukraine or peace in Ukraine?
Ezra Levant, my name, Mr. Fink.
Did you just take a photo of you?
Am I supposed to be scared?
Is that a threat, Mr. Fink?
Are you used to bullying your way through life?
No, no, no, no.
Is that how you've lived your entire life without having look at this?
Push back, mate.
Don't push me, bro.
Don't push me.
When was the last time you answered a question that you didn't know was coming?
Why are you so unaccountable?
Isn't that what you love about the World Economic Forum?
You control everything.
Why do you think you deserve so much power?
Hey, Abby, Minnie.
Should I be scared now?
Which of your former directors do you want to run Canada, Mark Carney or Christia Freeland?
Don't push me, bro.
What?
What are you getting violent for, man?
I could push just like you get, man.
Let's try, buddy.
Look at these thugs.
They fund wars around the world and you question them.
They try not only to intimidate you, but physically assault you.
What's with taking photos of journalists who ask you prickly questions?
Or a couple years ago, our most famous interview with Albert Borla, the CEO of Pfizer.
Of course, he had answers to all of our questions.
I wasn't the first one to ever raise those issues.
I was just the first one to raise it to him personally.
And for some reason, it was offensive to him that someone did.
Tell me he couldn't have answered these questions.
Take a look.
Mr. Poorla, can I ask you, when did you know that the vaccines didn't stop transmission?
How long did you know that without saying it publicly?
Thank you very much.
I'm sorry.
I mean, we now know that the vaccines didn't stop transmission, but why did you keep it secret?
You said it was 100% effective, then 90%, then 80%, then 70%.
But we now know that the vaccines do not stop transmission.
Why did you keep that secret?
Have a nice day.
I won't have a nice day until I know the answer.
Why did you keep it a secret that your vaccine did not stop transmission?
Is it time to apologize to the world, sir?
To give refunds back to the countries that poured all their money into your vaccine that doesn't work, your ineffective vaccine.
Are you not ashamed of what you've done in the last couple of years?
Do you have any apologies to the public, sir?
Are you proud of it?
You've made millions on the backs of people's entire livelihoods.
How does that feel to walk the streets as a millionaire on the backs of the regular person at home in Australia, in England, in Canada?
What do you think about on your yacht, sir?
What do you think about on your private jet?
Are you worried about product liability?
Are you worried about myocarditis?
What about the sudden deaths?
What do you have to say about young men dropping dead of heart attacks every day?
Why won't you answer these basic questions?
No apologies, sir.
Do you think you should be charged criminally for some of the criminal behavior you've obviously been a part of?
How much money have you personally made off the vaccine?
How many boosters do you think it'll take for you to be happy enough with your earnings?
Nothing?
Outrageously Priced Airbnb00:02:52
Who did you meet with here in secret?
Will you disclose who you met with?
Who did you pay commissions to?
In the past, Pfizer has paid $2.3 billion in fines for deceptive marketing.
Have you engaged in that same conduct again?
Yeah, I think that part of the problem of being so high up in the mountains here, so hard to get to, is that it really looks and starts to resemble what it is, which is a club.
This is a very fancy club and you're not part of it.
And if a citizen journalist manages to sneak in and get a question to a prince, well, they're more offended than anything.
That's why we're doing it.
We've done it every year.
And I think people really associate covering Davos with rebel news and we're proud to do that.
I want to say we are crowdfunding our trip as always.
This is a very humble Airbnb.
The kind of place that would, all four of us are staying here, the kind of place that would probably cost, I don't know, $300 a night in any normal season.
But I'd have to check.
It's about $5,000 a night.
I think it works out to about $25,000 for the week we're here because of the World Economic Forum.
They literally multiply by 10 or more, by 20.
The price, because every one of the hotel rooms in the whole region is bought up.
Every hotel room, every Airbnb, they just simply sop them up.
And you can't blame local homeowners.
In fact, last year, the local homeowner said only one week a year does he Airbnb his place, just the one week of Davos, and that practically pays his mortgage for the whole year.
And I know that sounds insane, but there's simply no other way to get.
We're not even in Davos, I remind you.
We're in closters and trained right away.
So it's so hard to get there that when we get there, it's almost like we stumble upon this sort of paradise for VIPs.
Like they walk around without security, without assistance, because they think they're in this protected getaway.
And they pretty much are until we show up.
If you can help me cover the cost of our journey in this outrageously priced Airbnb, please do.
Go to WEFreports.com on Thursday night at 7 p.m. Eastern Time, 5 p.m. Mountain Time, which is 3 a.m. here.
We're going to have a private Zoom town hall meeting for anyone who chips in $100 or more.
And if you've given in our last two emails, you'll be on the invite list.
But if you want to help us out, we'll have a private catch-up with you on Thursday night at 7 p.m. Eastern Time.
Anyways, that's the show for today.
We're just getting our feet under us.
Tomorrow, we're going to have so much for you because we're going to spend at least 10 hours walking the streets of Davos.