The Great Reset, Explained

Just a few months after the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world and prompted governments to impose draconian lockdowns, a group of global elites introduced what is known as the Global Reset.

Championed by the World Economic Forum—host of the posh Davos, Switzerland, meeting for the jet-setting crowd—ideas connected to the Great Reset were embraced by the likes of President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and King Charles III.

“We need nothing short of a paradigm shift, one that inspires action at revolutionary levels and pace,” then-Prince Charles said in a video launching the project in June 2020. “We simply cannot waste any more time—the only limit is our willingness to act, and the time to act is now.”

What exactly is the Great Reset? And how would it radically transform our civilization as we know it?

Michael Walsh, editor of “Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order,” answers those questions and more on this episode of “The Daily Signal Podcast.” Walsh, a novelist, author, longtime contributor to Time, and founding editor of Breitbart, assembled an all-star lineup of authors to produce the book.

Listen to the full show or read a lightly edited transcript of the interview below.

Rob Bluey: Let’s start at the beginning. What is the Great Reset?

Michael Walsh: The Great Reset is, if you were to believe our friends on the Left, a right-wing nut conspiracy theory. So, we’ll start with that proposition and then we’ll point out that we must have the most effective conspiracy theory in the history of right-wing nut conspiracy theories because it’s actually up on their own website.

That would be the World Economic Forum based in Geneva and Davos, Switzerland, and they have used the COVID pandemic panic to beta test their notion for how the world ought to be organized around a kind of oligarchical elite core of international businessmen, celebrities, and political figures.

And in short, it’s a way to rejigger capitalism and turn it into something, in my opinion, that’s as close to Italian fascism as we’ve seen since the 1930s. That is a collaboration between government and big business to control the population, and in so doing, fight climate change. And I put air quotes around climate change every time I use that word. The sustainable energy, green power, all of the crackpot ideas that are currently being forced down our throats are derived from notions of the Great Reset.

And to just finish this brief introduction to them, Klaus Schwab, who is the head of the World Economic Forum, and a colleague of his, Thierry Malleret I believe his name is, wrote a book recently called “COVID-19: The Great Reset.”

So, the link between the enforced lockdowns and the abrogations of our First Amendment rights especially, and COVID and the COVID impositions, is very clear in their minds and they want to do it again.

So, in short, they gave us a test and as far as they’re concerned, we passed with flying colors. We stopped our freedom of speech, we stopped going to church, we let them close our churches down, they broke up freedom of assembly. All of the things we thought were not only guaranteed to us by the Constitution, but by God, as the Framers of the Constitution pointed out, all of our natural rights were gone overnight and we gave up without a fight.

So, we’re not off to a good start, but we hope that “Against the Great Reset” will be ammunition for all of those of us who want to fight back against this.

Bluey: We sure do, and the book is fantastic in that regard. Before I ask you about it, I do want to get your personal thoughts, though, because I sense that you yourself were quite disappointed with some institutions or Americans who just blindly went along with what they were being told.

What were you thinking about during that time of COVID when you saw, whether it be churches or governments, politicians, business leaders, just adopt these ideas and shut down society in effect for several months? In some cases or in some states, it seems like we’re still dealing with the repercussions.

Walsh: That’s correct. Well, as it happened, I had just gone home to Ireland, where I live a great deal of the year, and we were settling in and glad to be back when the two weeks to slow the spread or flatten the curve, whatever nonsense they were selling, was imposed on us.

And I recall sitting in one of our locals there in my little village out on the west coast of Ireland and saying, “They will never let us go. This is a complete lie. Now that they’ve got you doing what they want you to do, they’re never going to let you go without a fight.”

And it took, as you just noted, Rob, two years plus, and in some places it’s still going on. I see people in masks in the supermarket, to whom I say, “Hey, a little early for Halloween, isn’t it, buddy?” Because we all had to take the mask care and abuse for the last two years in this psychotic regime that had been imposed upon us.

The doctors’ offices still have signs up which say, “Masks must be worn.” I choose to ignore those signs because the only way you can fight back is to just not do it, and finally enough people did. This, in a way, is what’s called Irish democracy, which is acknowledging the rule and then ignoring all of the actual restrictions. But here we are.

I was very disappointed. I was especially, as a Catholic, disappointed in the Catholic Church. And again, I’m in Ireland when this is happening. We had 700 years-plus of English occupation and a half a millennium of proscriptions against our land ownership, our language, our religion, our family structure, our property. All of that had been so abused and abolished by the English.

The only thing that was against that was the Catholic Church. And in those days, we had the famous hedgerow priests who would come and offer Mass behind the bushes, basically, out of the countryside and hope that no one ratted them out because they would be killed.

Well, this time the Catholic Church in Ireland folded like a cheap suit, and I think it lost whatever remaining respect it used to have from the people of Ireland. Now, project that across the world. You saw that Canadian pastor being arrested in his own church. This is something I don’t think you ever expected to see, Rob. Certainly I never did.

Bluey: You mentioned Klaus Schwab at the World Economic Forum. There are some other high-profile individuals, King Charles, President [Joe] Biden, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—all were using this language. I find it interesting that you say that they describe it as a conspiracy theory when they themselves have embraced the language and the ideas behind the Great Reset.

Walsh: Embraced it? They invented it. It’s on their website. You can go. You can look it up. I encourage everybody listening to go to the World Economic Forum website, look up Great Reset, and you will see multiple videos about it. And the tagline on one of them is, “You will own nothing and be happy.” That’s what they want for you. Oh, you’ll eat bugs, too. That’s kind of a little piquant refinement that they’ve added. But these people are both malevolent and insane simultaneously, and we must be prepared to fight them.

Bluey: Your book helps us prepare for that fight, and it’s incredibly important in sending a message to those global elites who are trying to restructure our civilization. Tell us about how you were able to pull together this all-star collection of authors and really deep thinkers into just what I would describe as an incredibly powerful tome that really takes on this idea.

Walsh: Oh, thank you for that compliment, Rob. Basically, it helps being 73 years old and having been in the journalism business since 1972.

So there’s a kind of winnowing effect that’s caused either by death or retirement for those of us who’ve been at it for a long time, because I’m lucky enough to know almost every one of the people in the book that we included in the book personally. Those that I didn’t, obviously, we knew of each other via reputation or mutual friends, and I cast a fairly wide net and I got about a 95% agreeable response rate. A couple guys we couldn’t get, much to my chagrin, but if we do another book, which we have planned in the works, I’ll certainly ask them as well.

But I must say, everybody was absolutely great. I was very tough in terms of what I wanted and the kind of essays I wanted from each person, and they gave it to me without much of a fight, and we worked over it and worked over it, because one thing I didn’t want to do, Rob, was have it be journalism between hard covers.

I started in newspapers. I was at Time magazine for many years as their chief classical music critic, and later on a foreign correspondent during the Cold War. So, I spent the years between 1985 and 1991 very often behind either the Berlin Wall or the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Union itself.

I wanted something that would last, so all of these essays are written not to be topical, but to be pertinent to now. It’s a little bit like the movie business. When you do a movie, you know it’s going to be at minimum two years before this thing gets produced, if it ever does. So, it can’t be so au courant around that it’s old and tired by the time audiences get to it.

So, I hope that we have a book that’s as current as we can possibly make it, given that it was written 18 months ago, and I hope the audience takes it to heart and employs some of the stratagems and tools of analysis that we’ve provided.

Bluey: You do have an incredible list of authors, including Victor Davis Hanson, Conrad Black, Michael Anton, Roger Kimball, and many others. We’ll provide a link to all of them in the transcript and show notes for this interview. Tell us about some of the arguments, maybe some of your favorite arguments that the authors outline in the book.

Walsh: It’s like choosing your favorite child, I mean, after you’ve spent all this time on it, I would say each essay is unique, so I broke them up into six different categories. The political, the personal, the economic, the ineffable, which is the three essays that come at the end of the book. Each writer, and they were all male except for our wonderful Janice Fiamengo from Canada, was assigned to a topic and basically delivered on that topic.

I must say, I had a couple of writers that I approached and said, “I’d like you to write for this book,” and the author said, “You can’t tell me what to write,” because I gave them suggested topics. And I said, “Well, I have to because I don’t want 18 essays on the same subject.” So, we didn’t use them, unfortunately.

But for example, Conrad writes about capitalism and that’s twinned with Mike Anton writing about socialism. Roger Kimball, who’s a dear friend and the publisher of my books, “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and “The Fiery Angel,” he wrote about the nation-state. Richard Fernandez, who’s a contributor to PJ Media when I was there and now contributes to our website called the-pipeline.org, wrote about the conflict and relationship between science and religion. James Poulos wrote about technology and the scary future it has in store for us. Salvatore Babones, who’s an American living in Australia, wrote a wonderful piece about the future of transportation. All under the rubric of under the Great Reset.

So, every single element we considered is, what’s the effect that this reset could possibly have on these different aspects of life? I bring up the rear with an essay on art, and does art flourish under totalitarianism? And I base some of this in part on my own experiences in the Soviet Union with Soviet art, and tell a few more stories from the good old days.

So, it’s got something for everybody. Each essay is roughly the same length, so we could get into it in-depth, and each writer had his say. And everyone, as I’ve said, cooperated wonderfully and signed off on the final product, so it’s as good as it gets, as the movie title goes.

Bluey: Thank you for your work editing all of them and putting it together in such a comprehensive and effective package. I think that readers will find it quite effective, and I’m glad to hear that you have other works in mind in the future. Before we get to that, I did want to ask you about one of the authors. You dedicate the book to Angelo Codevilla, who is obviously a well-known thinker who unfortunately passed away. Tell us about his contribution and why it was important to remember him in this way.

Walsh: Obviously, when we commissioned it, no one had any idea of what the future would hold for Angelo and for the rest of us. It was quite tragic when he died not long after having turned in his big piece, which is about education.

Angelo, former professor at Boston University, a very well-known distinguished thinker, translator of Machiavelli and among other things, and a dear friend of mine, delivered a piece on how—really, in a way, it’s kind of the central piece of the book because we are in for such a bad future given the current state of education, which is essentially indoctrination now into leftist methodology and thought.

And we dedicated the book to Angelo, I think, by consensus because he’s a fallen comrade, as you and I, we should tell the listeners, go back to the early days of the Andrew Breitbart big sites. And again, when you have a fallen comrade, you honor his memory and try to carry on the work that he did.

So, I hope that these essays are all worthy of the memory of Angelo. God knows his own essay is quite spectacular.

Bluey: It certainly is. And Michael, you mentioned throughout this interview your biography and some of the amazing things that you’ve been able to do. Of course, you and I worked together when you were leading Big Journalism with Andrew Breitbart. Did you ever imagine that we would be in the situation we are today with this populist revolution that we see among conservatives? Obviously, the election of Donald Trump and so much of what I think Breitbart was championing back years ago, before it arrived in the political scene. Tell us about this moment that we’re living through right now and based on your life experiences, where you think we’re going in the future.

Walsh: I have a lovely anecdote if I may, Rob, talk about that. Right after Trump was elected, I was in the old executive office building right across from the West Wing. You know it well.

We were looking out the window, I was visiting with Sebastian Gorka and Mike Anton, actually, and I looked out the window and there were some dignitaries coming and going at the front door of the White House, and you can see them from this angle.

And I turned to both Seb and Mike and said, “It’s so rewarding to me,” this was now 2017, “that seven years ago when we launched Big Journalism, and slightly before that, when Andrew launched Big Government with the late Mike Flynn and Big Hollywood with John Nolte,” I said, “seven, eight years ago, we were four or five guys with laptops. That was it. And now, we have a president of the United States in the White House who, in part, benefited from the revolution that we led.”

And this gets to me to the point that I really want to make is, to all of our listeners, Heritage, to the foundations, we all have to cooperate. We will hang separately if we don’t hang together. But you have to believe in what you’re doing and put your life and your fortune and your sacred honor, certainly your careers, as we all did, on the line in order to stand up for what you believe in.

We don’t need cowards in our movement and we don’t need to play it safe. We need everybody to take these tools and use them. Because if you think back, Rob, to the Bolshevik Revolution, the communist revolution in the Soviet Union and Russia, they didn’t start it. They piggybacked onto somebody else’s revolution against the czar and then they moved in, and they could only move in because they had the intellectual infrastructure to do it.

Now, Russia was hardly anything like the United States, and it was a dysfunctional economic basket case, so they were able to seize power.

But what I say to the young people, or I say to this to people who write in on our site, which I’ll mention its name again, the-pipeline, like oil pipeline, dot org. They’ll say, “Yeah, it’s all very well for you writers. Yep, yep, yep. But what are we going to do?” Well, I can’t tell you what you’re going to do. I can only give you the intellectual framework for you to decide what you’re going to do.

Us putting out programs and white papers in 20 point, that’s the job for politicians. But our job as communicators, Rob, and you know this well, and so many people that you and I know in common who worked at Breitbart have spread out into the larger culture, our job is to communicate with people, to alert them to the danger, and explain to them why it’s happening and why it’s important to combat it.

The details are done at the grassroots level, which is not where we are in this book, obviously. It’s on the thinking level. But you need that in order for a successful revolution to happen.

Bluey: We certainly do, and I hope many of our Daily Signal listeners take that to heart and use this as an opportunity to arm themselves with this information that you’ve put together. And also, to put a plug in for The Pipeline, I hope that we’ll provide a link in the transcript, again, in the show notes. But thank you for the work that you do there, and I also saw that you’re featuring your essay from the book this week. So, it is very nice for readers who want to check it out in advance to go to The Pipeline. Again, it’s the-pipeline.org.

Michael, let me ask you in wrapping up here, there are so many people who have been allies and champions to push back, and one of them is Steve Bannon, who has been in the news recently. I know he’s a big supporter of this book and the project that you’re working on. What can you tell our listeners about Steve, your relationship with him, and his contributions to this effort?

Walsh: I’m glad you asked that question. Steve and I go back quite a bit, as you might expect, and he’s public enemy No. 1 to so many people on the Left, but Steve Bannon is the most courageous person I know. Honey Badger, as he’s sometimes called. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly. He goes after what he wants. He speaks his mind.

And the fact that he’s been, provisionally at least, sentenced to jail for having defied the wishes of the Committee on Public Safety, if I may refer back to the psychotics of the French Revolution and Madame Defarge herself, [Rep.] Liz Chaney, the fact that he’s defied these people so bravely and so openly, he’s a real, may I say as a fellow Irishman, a real Irish type, too stubborn to know when to quit. And if we don’t have men like Steve out front doing it, then we’re in trouble. But we need more of them.

And something I’ve often said, especially in Hollywood where I’ve had a very productive screenwriter career—I’m a lifetime member of the Writers Guild of America, which you can’t join. They join you once you start selling scripts to major studios. People say, “How am I going to make it? I can’t come out of the closet. I’m afraid I’ll lose my job.” Well, stop being afraid. No one likes a whiner. Stand up for what you believe in. Take an example like Steve Bannon or the late Andrew Breitbart or whoever else comes to mind at the moment and follow them and be like them.

I think that’s the most effective way we can possibly fight back, and I think we hope to deliver a beating to the Democrats. After that, I hope we can take back the White House in 2024.

Bluey: You said this is the first of many maybe other books that will come in a series. Tell us what you have in store for the future.

Walsh: If this book is successful, and we’re off to a very good start, and thank you for your help and Heritage for its help, there’ll be more books.

Now, provisionally, I have thought of calling them “against something.” And let me really quickly, Rob, I mention in the introduction of the book the idea of “against X” is a very, very old, historically-honored tradition. You had Demosthenes against Philip II of Macedon. You had Cicero against Mark Antony, and their works were called “against something.” You had Tertullian, early Christian theologian, against Marcion, against Marcion. So, we’re against the Great Reset, but we’re against a lot of other things, too.

And I’m working on—I can’t tell you exactly what it’s going to be right now. But since we’re off to a good start with this book—and your listeners can help us by going out and buying this book. This book is an interesting combination of private financing, which allowed us to pay our writers very, very well, and commercial publishing led by Adam Bellow, Saul Bellow’s son, the great New York editor who started his own press, now called Bombardier Books at Post Hill Press.

If this combination is to work, and that’s the way to make it work, to get around some of the proscriptions against conservative thought in the mainstream media, then we need the support of your listeners, Heritage members, people all over the country. Otherwise, we can’t do it. So, give us a hand.

That’s basically all I can tell you about that right now. But there will be more and they will be against some of the things I guarantee you you’re against.

Bluey: Thank you again for taking on the leadership role of editor and assembling an outstanding piece of work here. And to Adam Bellow and everybody else at Post Hill Press, we appreciate their work.

Walsh: My pleasure. Thanks, Rob.