Progressives Miscalculate the Personal Impact of the Great Reset – Ricochet

Recently I read a fascinating and disturbing issue of Imprimis, the free publication from Hillsdale College. This issue, based on a speech by Michael Rectenwald, focused on the Great Reset, and although I have read other articles on this ugly program of transformation, I learned two important facts that I didn’t realize: (1) the process has already made remarkable headway in its implementation, and (2) in the opinion of the author, it can still be stopped.

More than these points, however, I suddenly realized that the majority of the Progressive community which is working hand-in-glove with this movement has no clue of the devastation that will be wrought on their own lives. Having lived in the land of milk and honey, with prosperity, freedom, and opportunity, they will be expected to give all of that up just like the rest of us peons and drones. They may think they will be part of the elite, but the upper echelon of the movement will be the primary beneficiaries, with everyone else far below.

And it will not be pretty.

Let me tell you some of the facts that surprised me (although some of you may already be aware of these). The Great Reset began long before the COVID pandemic:

It can be traced at least as far back as the inception of the WEF, originally founded as the European Management Forum, in 1971. In that same year, [Klaus] Schwab, an engineer and economist by training, published his first book, Modern Enterprise Management in Mechanical Engineering. It was in this book that Schwab first introduced the concept he would later call ‘stakeholder capitalism,’ arguing ‘that the management of a modern enterprise must serve not only shareholders but all stakeholders to achieve long-term growth and prosperity.’

I was especially surprised to learn that two events inspired the Great Reset. The first:

In May 2018, the WEF collaborated with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security to conduct ‘CLADE X,’ a simulation of a national pandemic response. Specifically, the exercise simulated the outbreak of a novel strain of a human parainfluenza virus, with genetic elements of the Nipah virus, called CLADE X. The simulation ended with a news report stating that in the face of CLADE X, without effective vaccines, ‘experts tell us that we could eventually see 30 to 40 million deaths in the U.S. and more than 900 million around the world—twelve percent of the global population.” Clearly, preparation for a global pandemic was in order.

The second event was a simulated response to the outbreak:

The CLADE X and Event 201 simulations anticipated almost every eventuality of the actual COVID crisis, most notably the responses by governments, health agencies, the media, tech companies, and elements of the public. The responses and their effects included worldwide lockdowns, the collapse of businesses and industries, the adoption of biometric surveillance technologies, an emphasis on social media censorship to combat ‘misinformation,’ the flooding of social and legacy media with ‘authoritative sources,’ widespread riots, and mass unemployment.

Essentially, corporations and the government will be partners in this new endeavor. Business monopolies will thrive; government will reflect the authoritarian actions of the Chinese, “making a two-tiered system”: government and corporations will be on top; the rest of us will be trapped in socialism. And crises present additional opportunities for the Great Reset to move forward:

The draconian lockdown measures employed by Western governments managed to accomplish goals of which corporate socialists in the WEF could only dream—above all, the destruction of small businesses, eliminating competitors for corporate monopolists favored by the state. In the U.S. alone, according to the Foundation for Economic Education, millions of small businesses closed their doors due to the lockdowns. Yelp data indicates that 60 percent of those closures are now permanent.

And how have ordinary Progressives miscalculated the effect the Great Reset will have on them?

Such policies reflect the ‘fairness’ aspect of the Great Reset—fairness requires lowering the economic status of people in wealthier nations like the U.S. relative to that of people in poorer regions of the world. One of the functions of woke ideology is to make the majority in developed countries feel guilty about their wealth, which the elites aim to reset downwards—except, one notices, for the elites themselves, who need to be rich in order to fly in their private jets to Davos each year.

For anyone who doubts these outcomes, you only need to look at all the Americans who feel guilty for their supposed “systemic racism” and how easily they were persuaded that they suffered from a racism that was impossible to overcome. Feeling guilty about their wealth is only the next step.

The cost of calling one’s self a racist is relatively small; in fact, some people think their groveling has raised their esteem among their cohorts. But when people find that they have to give up their earned prosperity; when they realize that they won’t be permitted to do many things without the government’s permission; when they realize what it really means to live with less, with no opportunity to progress—yes, really progress to more affluent lifestyles—new cars, new clothes, new homes, new investments—they will realize, too late, that they have relinquished their lives to the real oppressors: the government and corporations.

The author of this Imprimis issue ended with this profound and insightful comment:

But let me end on a note of hope. Because the goals of the Great Reset depend on the obliteration not only of free markets, but of individual liberty and free will, it is, perhaps ironically, unsustainable. Like earlier attempts at totalitarianism, the Great Reset is doomed to ultimate failure. That doesn’t mean, however, that it won’t, again like those earlier attempts, leave a lot of destruction in its wake­—which is all the more reason to oppose it now and with all our might.

The ongoing question is: how do we educate Progressives of the darkness ahead, as they continue to enable these forces?

*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from Ricochet.com can be found here ***