Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

The 234 people on board the Ocean Viking vessel have been granted permission to disembark in Marseille…

An NGO humanitarian vessel carrying hundreds of migrants picked up in the Mediterranean has been granted permission to dock in the French port of Marseille after the newly elected Italian government repeatedly refused it permission to offload passengers in Sicily.

A call took place on Tuesday between Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and French President Emmanuel Macron where the former emphasized the Italian government’s hard-line approach to immigration in no uncertain terms; this prompted the French president to authorize the docking of the Ocean Viking, operated by the SOS Méditerranée NGO, in France.

There are currently 234 migrants on board the vessel, which has been anchored off the Italian coast for over two weeks awaiting a safe place to dock.

The Italian government has in recent days allowed the docking of humanitarian vessels in Italian ports in order to allow vulnerable people, namely women, children, and those with medical conditions, to disembark. Italian authorities have then ordered the captains to leave Italian territory with a number of adult males still onboard, urging the ships to port in the countries responsible for operating the vessels, including Germany and Norway.

In a press release on Tuesday, the SOS Méditerranée NGO criticized the Italian government’s new approach, claiming “maritime and humanitarian laws were blatantly violated in Sicily, with the implementation of selective and discriminatory disembarkation processes of people rescued by the NGO vessels Humanity 1 and Geo Barents.

“Such a measure is not in line with the provisions outlined by the applicable international maritime and humanitarian conventions and resolutions,” said Nicola Stalla, Search and Rescue coordinator on board Ocean Viking.

Meloni, however, did not appear apologetic in a Facebook post published late on Tuesday.

“In terms of security and the fight against illegal immigration, Italians have expressed themselves at the ballot box, choosing our program and our vision,” the Italian prime minister wrote.

“Our goal is to defend the legality, security, and dignity of each person. This is why we want to put an end to illegal immigration, prevent further deaths at sea, and fight human traffickers. The citizens asked us to defend Italy’s borders, and this government will not betray its promise,” she added.

Conversations were held between Meloni and Macron, as well as between French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin and his Italian counterpart Matteo Piantedosi, during which “Italy remained firm on its position,” according to the Ansa news agency.

According to the French television channel BFMTV, Paris denounced what it perceived to be “unacceptable behavior” by the Italian authorities and eventually offered the port of Marseille for the NGO vessel to offload those on board.

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us

The concept of “fascism” was originally entered into the Encyclopedia Italiana by Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who stated that “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” Benito Mussolini would later take credit for the quote as if he had written it himself, but it’s important to note because it outlines the primary purpose of the ideology rather than simply throwing the label around at people we don’t like as a dishonest means to undermine their legitimacy.

Despite the fact that leftists today often attack conservatives as “fascists” because of our desire to protect national boundaries and western heritage, the truth is that all fascism is deeply rooted in leftist philosophies and thinkers.

Mussolini was a long time socialist, a member of the party who greatly admired Karl Marx. He deviated from the socialists over their desire to remain neutral during WWI, and went on to champion a combination of socialism and nationalism, what we now know as fascism. Adolph Hitler was also a socialist and admirer of Karl Marx, much like Mussolini. It is actually hard to find where Marx, the communists and the fascists actually differ from each other – A deeper sense of nationalism seems to be one of the few points of contention.

Though Marx saw the existence of nation states as temporary to the proletariat and to the ruling class, he noted that the industrialists were erasing national boundaries anyway. Marx argues in the Communist Manifesto with some optimism:

“National differences and antagonisms between peoples are already tending to disappear more and more, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, the growth of free trade and a world market, and the increasing uniformity of industrial processes and of corresponding conditions of life.”

Marx saw the development of corporate power as useful and the next necessary step towards socialism, noting that joint-stock companies (corporations) and the credit system are:

“The abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself.”

In other words, corporations are viewed as a tool for the eventual transition to a socialist “Utopia” and the death of free markets. Once again, we see there is very little difference in motive between the political left and the fascists. The natural progression of every form of Marxism, communism, socialism, fascism etc. all ultimately lead to a kind of globalist ideology and erasure of cultural separation. The methods might differ slightly but the end result is the same. Some think this is a good thing, but it is actually quite poisonous.

Globalism requires an overarching social dynamic, a single hive mind, otherwise it cannot survive. If people have the ability to choose or create better options (or different options) for living then globalism loses significance. The existence of choice has to be erased. This is a behavior that the political left has fully embraced and they are more than happy to work hand-in-hand with corporate oligarchs to make their ideal system a reality. Long gone are the days of the anti-corporate progressive – They LOVE corporate dominance, but only if those companies promote and enforce leftist models for society.

Mussolini’s fascism is at the root of the very corporate governance that leftists applaud and lust after today. They have far more in common with fascists than they realize.

The new fascism is a re-branded philosophy best represented by something called “Stakeholder Capitalism.” It is a term often used by globalists at the World Economic Forum and the head of the WEF, Klaus Schwab. The media friendly definition of Stakeholder Capitalism is:

A form of capitalism in which companies do not only optimize short-term profits for shareholders, but seek long term value creation, by taking into account the needs of all their stakeholders, and society at large.

But who are “all stakeholders” in the opinion of the WEF?

Well, according to Klaus Schwab they are all of human civilization, now and in the future. In other words, the goal of SHC is for corporate leaders and globalist bureaucracy to take responsibility for the entire world, not just their own employees, shareholders and profits. And such leaders would not be acting as individuals, they would be acting as a collective. In other words, SHC requires all major corporations to act as a single unit with a single purpose and a unified collectivist ideology – An ideological monopoly.

As Klaus Schwab states:

“The most important characteristic of the stakeholder model today is that the stakes of our system are now more clearly global. Economies, societies, and the environment are more closely linked to each other now than 50 years ago. The model we present here is therefore fundamentally global in nature, and the two primary stakeholders are as well.

…What was once seen as externalities in national economic policy making and individual corporate decision making will now need to be incorporated or internalized in the operations of every government, company, community, and individual. The planet is thus the center of the global economic system, and its health should be optimized in the decisions made by all other stakeholders.”

The SHC concept is deceptive on its very face because it pretends as if corporations will be held accountable by the public within some form of “business democracy,” as if the public will have a vote on what the corporations do. In reality, it will be corporations telling the public what is acceptable to think and do and corporations in conjunction with governments using their power to punish people who do not agree.

The great magic trick is that these same unified corporations use the shield of “private property” and business rights as a means to control society without repercussions. After all, a primary principle of conservatism and the US constitution is private property rights. So, stepping in to disrupt corporate governance would be violating one of our own beloved ideals. It sounds like a Catch-22, but it’s really not.

As mentioned above, corporations are at their very core a socialist concept: They are created through government charter, handed legal personhood and given special protections from government. They are NOT free market entities, and Adam Smith, the originator of most free market ideals, stood against corporations as destructive and prone to monopoly.

As long as they receive protections from government including monetary stimulus and bailouts, corporations should not enjoy the same private property protections as regular businesses do. They are parasitic creations, alien to the natural business world. In a freedom-based society they would be dismantled to prevent authoritarian outcomes.

Shareholder Capitalism is also an incredibly arrogant premise because it assumes that corporate leaders have the wisdom or objective intelligence to expand their role beyond business and into social and political spheres. This has already happened in many respects with much chaos created, but open corporate governance is the end game and it is anything but objective or benevolent.

What are some examples of this kind of corporate/political governance (fascism) in action?

How about Big Tech social media censorship leaning HEAVILY against conservatives and liberty activists? How about evidence of collusion between Big Tech companies and government, such as the Biden Administration and the DHS working closely with Twitter and Facebook to actively remove voices and viewpoints they don’t like? How about corporate leaders colluding to destroy conservative based social media competitors like Parler?

How about ESG loans funded by corporate backers such as Blackrock or globalist non-profits like the Rockefeller Foundation?

If all corporate lenders applied ESG to their loan practices, all individuals and businesses would have to adopt leftist social ideologies and dubious environmental claims in order to have access to credit. ESG is a monetary incentive created by corporate elites to keep all other businesses in line. If it continues, ESG could wipe out political opposition to globalism in the span of a single generation.

And, what about the Council For Inclusive Capitalism? This is the most blatant expression of open global fascism I have ever seen, with money elites and politicians working in concert with the UN and even religious leaders like Pope Francis. Their goal is to institute a single centralized world governing platform built around the same agendas outlined in ESG and SHC, making corporations members of a new global council which they refer to as “The Guardians.” They aren’t even trying to hide the conspiracy anymore, it’s right out in the open.

Klaus Schwab takes special care to mention often that global crisis events are the “opportunity” that is needed to push the public into the arms of Stakeholder Capitalism through a nexus point called “The Great Reset.” Meaning, he thinks that widespread fear and desperation must exist (or be engineered) to perpetuate the SHC framework quickly.

Obviously, the globalists are on a shrinking timeline, though it’s hard to say why. They are tearing off the mask faster in the past two years than they have in the previous decade. More than likely they understand to some degree that if they go too slow the public will have time to mount a defense against them.

They will conjure all kinds of distractions and scapegoats to prevent liberty minded people from hitting them back. They’ll aim us at Russia, they’ll aim us at China, they’ll aim us at useful idiots among the leftists. They’ll aim Russia, China and the leftists at us. They will try to send us to war, they will call us insurrectionists, they will call us terrorists, they will say we started the whole collapse and that we are to blame for the world’s ills. None of this matters. What matters is that the globalists at the top pay the price for the harm they cause.

When the head of the snake is removed, only then can we sort out who is to blame; who were the heroes, who were the villains, and who were the idiots. Only then can we rebuild with true freedom in mind.

By Ye Xie, Bloomberg markets live reporter and analyst

Another day, another measure to support the beleaguered Chinese property sector. Developers rallied Wednesday after Beijing expanded a funding program to support debt sales by private companies, including builders.

It’s a positive that the authorities are doing more to bolster the housing sector. But it’s another bandage that’s unlikely to turn around the market.

Stocks of developers such as Country Garden Holdings and CIFI Holdings surged after the National Association of Financial Market Institutional Investors widened the bond financing program to about 250 billion yuan ($35 billion) for private companies, including developers.

The program, first introduced in late-2018, is one of the “three arrows” that the People’s Bank of China uses to help private companies raise capital. The other two channels include bank loans and equity financing.

In September, Bloomberg reported that policymakers have asked state banks to increase lending to developers to ease their liquidity crunch. After firing the first arrow, Beijing is now pulling the trigger on the second one.

But as Nomura’s economist Lu Ting pointed out, there are reasons to question the effectiveness of the program. First, new home sales revenue is the largest funding source for developers, far more than any other channels. It accounted for 53% of overall funding for developers last year, compared with 12% from bank loans.

In the first nine months, new home sales contracted 31%. At this rate, developers’ funding from home sales will fall by 3.3 trillion yuan ($456 billion) this year, according to Nomura’s estimate. That’s too big of a funding hole.

Secondly, the $35 billion bond financing quota is for all private companies, not just for developers. Builders accounted for 15% of all private bond issuance between 2018 and 2020, before falling to around 9% in 2021, according to Nomura.

Lastly, developers still need to pay off a large amount of maturing bonds in coming months, with about 30 billion yuan worth of onshore debt due by March. The implication is that even if they can access the bond market, the net fundraising would be limited after paying off the debt.

All in all, the second arrow is literally more like an arrow, not a bazooka.

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is expected to undergo continued expansion and modernization following last month’s CCP five-yearly national congress, which made key revisions to the Communist Party constitution. This included changes on the nation’s military posture.

One of those revisions stated the need to “elevate our people’s armed forces to world-class standards” – according to an addition to the party constitution, as translated in the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. This is being seen as aimed at expansion of deployed assets overseas, also following widespread reports within the past year that Beijing is seeking to establish a string of bases on Africa’s Atlantic coast. 

The revised constitution included an official explanation published alongside it which stated “Overseas safety and security has become a major issue that we must address” – in particular citing the need for beefed-up counterterror forces to better protect against attacks on Chinese institutes and companies in foreign countries.

According to further commentary of the changes via the SCMP:

Drawing on examples from China’s military defeats in the 19th century, it said international politics still followed the “law of the jungle”, with the strong in charge and able to uphold their will. The impact of a lagging military on national security would be fatal, it added.

It remains that compared to the United States or even Russia, China’s oversees military presence is tiny or almost non-existent. China has had a naval facility which opened in 2017 in Djibouti, long considered its main and lone military base abroad – not counting reports of one or possibly two outposts in Tajikistan, and the string of small bases in China’s backyard, on manmade island-bases in the South China Sea.

But as Foreign Policy, The Economist, and other Western geopolitical-focused publications have long previewed, China has ambitions for many more, especially in Africa. “Tanzania, Cambodia, and the UAE are on China’s wish list— and now Kiribati, within striking distance of Hawaii,” an FP report stated in summer 2021.

China’s military ambitions abroad, via The Economist

This week President Xi Jinping again reaffirmed his commitment to focusing on “preparing for war” with the country’s security “increasingly unstable and uncertain,” according to his latest declaration.

By Michael Kern of OilPrice.com

Russia’s oil production could drop to as low as 9 million barrels per day (bpd) in December when the EU embargo on imports of Russian crude oil enters into force, Russian news agency TASS reported on Wednesday, citing analysts at the Energy Development Center. “We expect that production in December will fall by 1.5-1.7 mln barrels per day compared to the June-October average, or 14%,” according to a report from the Energy Development Center cited by TASS.

The expected sharp drop in Russia’s oil production will lead to a spike in international oil prices, also considering that the OPEC+ group is reducing the target production as of November, the experts said.  

Russia’s oil production, excluding condensate, for October came in well below its production quota for the month, at just 9.9 million bpd, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said earlier this month.

Russia’s October production was 1.1 million bpd below its quota of 11 million bpd assigned under the OPEC+ agreement, but mostly in line with Novak’s estimates made last month. 

For November, Russia’s oil production quota under the OPEC+ pact will drop from 11 million bpd to 10.5 million bpd.

In October, Russian oil production, including condensate, was 1.47 million tons of oil per day, or 10.78 million bpd. The October production was slightly down from the 10.8 million bpd reported for September 

However, the production decline could accelerate from November as the EU prepares to introduce an embargo on imports of Russian crude from December 5, Russian business daily Kommersant reported at the end of October, quoting sources familiar with the situation.

Analysts have estimated that around 2 million bpd-3 million bpd of Russian oil and products may have to find new homes after the EU embargo enters into force. Russia has redirected a large part of its flows eastwards to Asia, but it may not be able to accommodate immediately and find willing buyers for the trade flows previously going to Europe, especially with the ban on services handling Russian oil cargoes unless the oil is sold at or below a certain price cap.  

After Peloton’s former CEO and co-founder, John Foley, made a series of demand miscalculations for Peloton bikes during the pandemic and eventually resigned as shares in the company cratered, he’s back in the spotlight with a new venture: direct-to-consumer rug business. 

Foley’s new company is called “Ernesta.” According to Forbes, he started the custom rug company with two other co-founders from Peloton. 

Transitioning from slapping an iPad on a bike or treadmill to selling custom rugs seems like an unlikely path for the former billionaire. But maybe after borrowing millions of dollars worth of stock collateralized with Peloton shares and receiving repeated margin calls from Goldman Sachs, the rug business is his best bet to make a rebound. 

On Monday, Ernesta announced $25 million in venture capital funding. The company is stacked with ex-Peloton managers and is hoping to take a slice of the high-end rug market. 

Foley told Forbes the company “plans to sell 50 different styles of machine-made, custom-cut rugs in five colors each.” 

“With Peloton, we didn’t know if it would be a success or not, but I knew that working with good people was a valuable way to spend my time.

“Rugs might seem like a potentially uninteresting category, but there’s probably at least one in your house. They’re ubiquitous, and people don’t spend a lot of time worrying about them,” Peloton and Ernesta co-founder Hisao Kushi told Forbes. 

Custom Market Insights released a report in July that showed more than 100 million rugs are sold in the US yearly. The rug market is expected to expand from $18 billion this year to $25 billion by 2030. Foley said for Ernesta to be successful, it needs to capture only a fraction of such volume. 

“I want to show discipline, I want to show profitability and have a real focus on unit economics,” Foley said

“Ernesta won’t attempt to vertically integrate its supply chain. Instead, the company will work with business-to-business partners in Georgia to source rolls of carpet in bulk, then cut them to order in a New Jersey warehouse to ship either directly or through logistics partners,” Forbes said. 

At least Foley can now sell Peloton customers a fancy rug for their bike. What a dramatic shift for the former billionaire … from bikes to rugs. 

The woman at the center of sexual abuse accusations against former Jeffrey Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz has ‘corrected the record,’ and now says she may have been mistaken.

In addition to dropping her defamation lawsuit against Dershowitz, accuser Virginia Giuffre, formerly Virginia Roberts, made the following statement:

“I have long believed that I was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to Alan Dershowitz. However, I was very young at the time, it was a very stressful and traumatic environment, and Mr. Dershowitz has from the beginning consistently denied these allegations,” she said. “I now recognize I may have made a mistake in identifying Mr. Dershowitz.”

According to both parties, there were no payments involved in the settlement, which also included other related lawsuits.

Dershowitz notably represented Epstein in his earliest criminal case.

Giuffre, meanwhile, said that both Epstein and his ‘madam’ Ghislaine Maxwell raped her. She reached a settlement with Epstein in 2009 after he pleaded guilty in Florida to procuring a prostitute under the age of 18.

Later, Giuffre said Dershowitz raped her six times in three states, as well as the US Virgin Islands at Epstein’s property.

Dershowitz has maintained his innocence the entire time.

“As I have said from the beginning, I never had sex with Ms. Giuffre,” he said, adding “I have nevertheless come to believe that at the time she accused me she believed what she said. Ms. Giuffre is to be commended for her courage in now stating publicly that she may have been mistaken about me.”

At the Epoch Times notes, The settlement also involved Dershowitz’s countersuit against Giuffre, a defamation suit from lawyer David Boies against Dershowitz, and a countersuit from Dershowitz against Boies.

“I agree with Mr. Dershowitz and Ms. Giuffre that the time has come to end this litigation and move on,” Boies said in a statement. “I know that Alan Dershowitz has suffered greatly from the allegation of sexual abuse—an allegation that he has consistently, and vehemently, denied.”

Boies had said in a complaint that Dershowitz was trying to “distract attention from his own misconduct” when he launched “a campaign to attack and vilify each of the lawyers who have represented his victims,” including Giuffre.

Dershowitz, meanwhile, now says his claims that Boies engaged in an extortion plot and tried to induce perjury “were mistaken.”

Giuffre also accused Prince Andrew of raping her. She had produced a photograph showing her with the prince and Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking and sentenced more recently to 20 years in prison.

Giuffre’s lawsuit against Prince Andrew was settled in February. The details were not disclosed.

Currently, US semiconductors are a measly 10% of global production. Most chips are produced in Asia, particularly South Korea and Taiwan, and the Biden administration has pushed the Chips and Science Act to boost development and production domestically. 

The CHIPS Act earmarks $52 billion to revert a decades-long trend of US production shifting abroad to low-cost labor regions. There was evidence some of this production is being reshored, according to a WSJ report, revealing Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest contract chipmaker, is laying the groundwork for a second US factory in Arizona. 

People familiar with the plans told WSJ that TSMC would soon announce one of the most advanced semiconductor plants just north of Phoenix, Arizona, next to another one of its chip factories. They said the investment in the new plant could be upwards of $12 billion, similar to what was committed in 2020 to build the factory beside it. 

TSMC is making a big bet on the revival of US semiconductor production after increasing US-China tensions led Washington to pass the CHIPS Act to spur domestic semiconductor manufacturing. 

“TSMC’s new facility would manufacture so-called 3-nanometer transistors, some of the tiniest and most lightning-fast currently possible,” the people said. 

In a statement to WSJ on Wednesday, TSMC confirmed it was constructing a building to “potentially” house a second chip plant at its site in Arizona. The statement said it would add more advanced chip capacity there, though a final decision has yet to be announced. 

The Biden administration’s move to rebuild semiconductor production in the US comes after a massive chip shortage in Asia that caused supply chain snarls for manufacturers of automobiles, electronics, and defense systems. The expansion signifies that reshoring supply chains from China and surrounding countries will ensure secured chip production during wartime. 

TSMC, whose production plants are based primarily in Taiwan, has begun to diversify over the past year due to invasion threats by China.

In August, TSMC Chair Mark Liu told CNN that if China were to invade Taiwan and seize the world’s most advanced chip factories, it would cause devastating supply chain disruptions worldwide. 

Apart from domestic initiatives, the Biden administration has slapped China with export restrictions on advanced chips and curbed the sale of chipmaking equipment. The restrictions attempt to slow advancements in China while buying the US time to rebuild its chip production base.  

Intel Corp. and memory maker Micron Technology Inc. are also investing in new US chipmaking factories as global supply chains are rejiggered due to national security threats.  

Authored by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,

International Man: The World Economic Forum (WEF) describes its mission as the “international organization for public-private cooperation.”

What do you make of the WEF and the power it wields?

Doug Casey: “International organization for public-private cooperation” is a code phrase for economic fascism – which is to say, the hand-in-glove melding of the political power of the State with the economic power of corporations.

Things like the WEF, and other NGOs (non-governmental organizations), institutes, and think tanks, have proliferated in recent years. They’re almost all destructive parasites on productive society.

Almost all of them are leftist, statist, and collectivist in orientation. They’re typically populated by intellectuals and academics and funded by tax-exempt foundations, usually set up by elderly do-gooders interested in leaving a “legacy.”

The WEF is by far the most successful of the breed. Instead of just cadging donations so intellectuals could hang around and seem prestigious, in 1971, Klaus Schwab formed a club where the rich and powerful could discuss ideas with other members of the overlord class. Political and financial types could find a philosophical home, disguising the quest for money and power with a patina of benevolence. It’s become an amazingly large and powerful organization. They have roughly 800 full-time employees, most of them very highly paid. They have an annual budget of over $300 million. Their balance sheet indicates that the WEF is worth over $1 billion, funded by major corporations who give it millions of dollars, as do various governments. Most of the world’s political leaders and corporations are members.

Schwab was very clever to have put together an organization where the richest, most powerful, and most influential people in the world are charged huge amounts to be introduced to each other and talk about how they can become even richer, more powerful, and more influential.

It seems clear that members of the WEF have to toe the party line or be disinvited. Nobody wants to be excommunicated from the WEF or cut off from association with other rich and powerful people. It’s safe to say that WEF members share a common philosophy, one that’s in line with Schwab’s weltanschauung.

FWIW, I think it’s wrong for public corporations to make political, charitable, or indeed any kind of contributions. A corporation’s raison d’etre is to generate money for its shareholders, not allow management to play big shot. Managements often like to give away shareholders’ money; it costs them nothing, but they reap the prestige of giving. Better that the money be distributed to shareholders so they can dispose of it as they wish. If that were the case, outfits like the WEF would have a lot less money and power. And wouldn’t be in a position to promote the pernicious ideas it does.

For instance, it would appear that Klaus Schwab actually originated, or at least popularized, the term “stakeholder.” Stakeholderism believes that business is obligated to treat employees, customers, local residents, and anyone who claims to be affected by business as if they had some right to what a company produces. People who identify as stakeholders easily develop into mooches and leeches. Schwab was also an early supporter of the ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) movements. And political correctness in general.

With as much money, power, and influence as the WEF has, it’s easy for them to groom up-and-comers. They created several sub-organizations for people who are under 40 years old—where they can reinforce their beliefs that the world ought to go in a certain way—under the direction of WEF-type people.

Schwab has to be complimented for having built the WEF from nothing and making himself one of the most powerful people in the world. But the WEF is a dangerous and despicable organization. It’s basically what’s known as a self-licking ice cream cone—it serves no useful purpose but to perpetuate itself and its members.

International Man: Yuval Noah Harari is a key adviser to the WEF.

He has risen to fame as reviewers and editors have anointed him as a public intellectual.

What’s your take on the rise of Harari?

Doug Casey: Harari is a perfect example of how, when an organization like the WEF gets in the back of somebody, they can make him rich, famous, and influential. These people all feed each other and scratch each other’s backs.

Harari apparently came from a perfectly average middle-class Israeli family, but I would think that he’s got to be worth at least $50 million, just based upon sales of 30 million copies of his books. He appears to be an ideal court intellectual, living quietly with his husband in a modest suburb of Tel Aviv, promoting the party line.

International Man: Harari has made several disturbing statements, including:

“Covid is critical because this is what convinces people to accept, to legitimize, total biometric surveillance.

We want to stop this pandemic. We need not just to monitor people, we need to monitor what is happening under their skin.

Governments want to know not just where we go or who we meet. Above all, they want to know what is happening under our skin.”

What do you think about this?

Doug Casey: Well, he really wants to transform the world, and it’s kind of clever the way he proposes to do it.

His book Sapiens, which I read about 10 years ago, is a competent enough summation of how humans evolved over the course of the Pleistocene during the last 2.5 million years. It doesn’t make any cosmic breakthroughs but tells a basically correct story. He explains how technology started to take on a life of its own and how we changed the world. And how technology’s now changing us at the rate of Moore’s Law. Fair enough.

The problem lies in his projections of how and where humans will evolve over the years to come. In particular, who will guide that evolution. And if things continue advancing at the rate that they are, it’s likely that machines will integrate with humans.

I see no problem with that. If you voluntarily want to replace body parts with mechanical parts—a new knee, a new heart, be a $6 Million Man—that’s wonderful. Taking it one step further, if you can put a chip in your brain and instantly access all the knowledge on the Internet without going through a computer, that could be even more wonderful, except for the fact the Social Credit System and hackers will have access to your chip.

The problem is that the WEF people think that they know what’s best for the rest of humanity. And they feel it’s for the good of all that they be closely monitored, controlled, and guided. They’ve made statements to the effect that most people are “useless eaters,” which is probably true at this point. Or it will be once everybody gets a Guaranteed Annual Income—enough to keep them sated with avocado toast and vanilla lattes while they watch cat videos at the local Starbucks. They’d really like to do without superfluous humans and just have the elite calling the shots. Humans that remain would amount to serfs. The WEF have said, “You’ll own nothing and be happy.” They’re very bold.

It’s very disturbing how they talk about guiding the advance to the next stage of human evolution. As pessimistic as I am about the current state of the world and where it’s going, I still believe in The Ascent of Man— but I believe it can only happen if individual liberty is maximized. From the point of view of personal freedom, Harari is actually talking about regressing to feudal times. Albeit a kinder and gentler version, where wise solons like Klaus and Yuval are in charge.

As far as I can tell, his values are antithetical to those of Western Civilization. But he’s an effective mouthpiece to convince the hoi polloi that their leaders have their best interests at heart. And I suppose they do. At least the way a farmer has the best interests of his dairy—or beef—cattle at heart.

International Man: Harari has often described a high-tech totalitarian future where a small elite with access to the latest technology evolves into different beings. At the same time, drugs and video games pacify the masses until their eventual extinction.

What are your thoughts about this dystopian future? Is it inevitable?

Doug Casey: Harari projects a certain inevitability to the evolution of technology, and he may actually be right.

I don’t mind change. Rapid technological progress has been accelerating for the last 10,000 years and, with a little luck, will go hyperbolic with the evolution of nanotechnology, computers, biotech, space exploration, robotics, and artificial intelligence. These are all good things.

The question is whether these things will be imposed upon humanity or will they be something that individuals can adopt or not as they choose? To me, this is the essential ethical and moral question.

Harari, and for that matter, the rest of these WEF people, never examine any ethical or moral issues.

For instance, Harari is very big on transgenderism, which he seems to want to make into a political hobby horse—where it’s not just accepted as a psychological aberration, but is almost imposed on society, whether you like it or not.

He’s a vegan. I have no problem with being a vegan. It’s just that he wants to impose his views of the correct way to deal with animals (absolutely including humans) on everybody else. He’s certain that he knows what’s best for everybody else.

I’ve long believed in the arrival of the Singularity, which Ray Kurzweil has discussed in detail. I think it’s a good thing. Technological progress has always been a good thing—whether we’re talking about the invention of gunpowder that allowed the average man to overthrow his medieval rulers, or the printing press, that allowed peasants to access the knowledge of the ruling classes.

But the problem is that the bad guys usually get control of technology first. The powers-that-be use tech to impose their will upon the little people until the cat gets out of the bag.

I’m all for the rapid evolution of technology, even though it’s very dangerous because the power-mongers, the bad guys, and the minions of the State usually get it first.

On the bright side, I suspect that under the influence of Schwab and his muchacho de mantequilla Harari, the WEF will collapse. The snakes in the snake pit will eventually turn on each other. Optimism is warranted because stupid ideas have always come and gone throughout history. Evil is usually vanquished over the long run.

The WEF is promoting destructive ideas in a dangerous time. If you value free thought, free minds, and free markets, recognize the WEF as an enemy.

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