The Great Reset, page 28
“Why do I call him today’s Columbus? Because he is carving out new colonies,” she added.
“Bill Gates does both: he takes living resources and our seeds and biodiversity, mines it into data and wants ownership along with his friends. And Mark Zuckerberg mines your data and your behaviors and turns it into the raw material,” Shiva explained.
“You have enough data on what happened with Facebook selling data. This is a major threat to democracy,” she added.
Shiva is concerned about small farmers in India being displaced and committing suicide at rising rates as their livelihood gives way to big corporations.4
“It’s beyond Right and Left”
“I am advocating new alliances w/ people we don’t agree w/ on lots of issues. It’s beyond left & right & all about freedom vs tyranny of permanent lockdowns & rule by a small cadre of elites.” —Marc Morano on Twitter in 2021, explaining why old political paradigms don’t apply in the Great Reset5
Progressive commentator and comedian Jimmy Dore, who was a frequent on-air host for the left-wing show The Young Turks, criticized the lockdowns, Anthony Fauci, and Bill Gates during the COVID pandemic.
“Anybody who… the news media saw as being against Trump, they embraced. And so they’ve over-embraced Dr. Fauci, and they’ll never give accurate criticisms of him. We do at this show, and other people think we’re crazy. Why do you think that? Well, did you watch the segment? Oh, no. But I just think Fauci’s great. Isn’t he? Just like Bill Gates. These are all angels sent from heaven to help us,” Dore mockingly explained.6
A report titled “The Big Tech Takeover of Agriculture Is Dangerous” at the website Grain explains why activists like Shiva are opposed. “Digital agriculture is building the centralized production systems upstream that will supply Big Tech’s evolving operations downstream, which are rapidly displacing the small vendors, hawkers and other local actors who have long served to bring foods from small farmers to consumers. The stage is being set for today’s small farmers and vendors to be tomorrow’s pieceworkers for Big Tech companies.”7
Shiva ripped the World Economic Forum’s food plans. “WEF is parading fake science,” she said, adding, “for Mr. Schwab to promote these technologies [imitation meat] as solutions proves that The Great Reset is about maintaining and empowering a corporate extraction machine and the private ownership of life.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s website, Children’s Health Defense, reported that the “WEF has promoted and partnered with an organization called EAT Forum. EAT Forum describes itself as a ‘Davos for food’ that plans to ‘add value to business and industry’ and ‘set the political agenda.’ ”
As the report explained, “The organization also assists the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in the ‘creation of new dietary guidelines’ and sustainable development initiatives.”
Children’s Health Defense reported, “EAT network interacts closely with some of the biggest imitation meat companies, including Impossible Foods and other biotech companies, which aim to replace wholesome nutritious foods with genetically modified lab creations…. Impossible Foods was initially co-funded by Google, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.”
Shiva pointed to a darker purpose behind WEF-sponsored diet plans: “EAT’s proposed diet is not about nutrition at all, it’s about big business and it’s about a corporate takeover of the food system.”8
Ten Steps to Fascism
We have seen how former Bill Clinton and Al Gore advisor and feminist icon Naomi Wolf spoke out in 2020 as COVID-19 lockdowns persisted past the “fifteen days to flatten the curve.”
Wolf said, “If I’d known Biden was open to ‘lockdowns’… which is something historically unprecedented… and a terrifying practice, one that won’t ever end because elites love it, I would never have voted for him.”9 Wolf authored the 2022 book The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19, and the War Against the Human.
On her website, Wolf compared the COVID-19 lockdowns to tyranny.
“The ‘lockdown’—mislabeled a ‘quarantine’—as we are experiencing it now, has actually happened before on this planet: just not in open societies or in the contemporary West. Totalitarian and fascist societies have indeed often used mass restrictions of movement, curfews, and other ways of restricting the free association and free movement of citizens,” Wolf wrote.
“But large-scale totalitarian-style restrictions of citizens’ movements by the state are new to the postwar democratic West and unheard-of in actual open societies; even past pandemics… have not been excuses in such societies to venture into this drastic territory,” she pointed out.10
Wolf reacted strongly to the United Kingdom’s “Tier 3” COVID restrictions, which required, “People must not meet socially indoors or in most outdoor places with anybody they do not live with, or who is not in their support bubble; this includes in any private garden or at most outdoor venues.”
“What?? What?? Pure insanity. Madness. You can’t sit OUTSIDE with someone you don’t LIVE WITH? You can’t meet a potential date INDOORS OR OUTDOORS? Or a new friend? You can’t meet your grandma OUTDOORS? Am I reading this correctly? England, this is not epidemiology, this is psychological torture on a grand scale,” she explained.
“We all need to protect the health of others. But in a free society these measures except for very limited brief and temporary restrictions subject to regular constitutionally legitimate review, are voluntary,” Wolf added.11
The liberal Wolf blasted both political parties. “The playbook of fascism, I must stress, is nonpartisan, and President Trump did not invent what we are living through now. He merely built upon it. The Ten Steps of Fascism were around long before he was. But turning the Covid-19 pandemic into an opportunity for authoritarianism isn’t just an idea, it’s happening as I laid out,” Wolf explained in 2020.
“During the administration of President Obama, I (and several others) warned that Democrats were taking the authoritarian structures built up by George W. Bush, and adding news levels of oppression on the foundation already laid,” she wrote.
“The war on whistleblowers intensified under President Obama’s Department of Justice: He subpoenaed reporters such as James Risen. He advanced the prosecution of Chelsea Manning. President Obama went after more people under the Espionage Act than had any previous President, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Examples of his push to build up further the structures of fascism he inherited, could go on and on,” Wolf explained.
“But since he was a telegenic President with an uplifting rhetorical style, not to mention the otherwise inspiring fact that he was our first President of color, these abuses of democratic processes went disregarded by the left and by most mainstream media. The problem with Fascistic processes and institutions being built up, though, is that then they are there for the next President, the one you don’t like, to use and to abuse. And here we are.”
Now, Wolf points out, “We have very little time before we reach a point of no return.” She explained in September 2020 that we have reached step ten of the “Ten Steps to Fascism”: “Suspend the Rule of Law.”12
Wolf had originally laid out the “Ten Steps to Fascism” in 2007.13
“It Pains Me to Say This”
Susan Collins, liberal Republican senator from Maine, expressed doubts about the Centers for Disease Control. “I used to have the utmost respect for the guidance from the CDC. I always considered the CDC to be the gold standard. I don’t anymore,” Collins confessed.
According to Dr. Sanjay Gupta of left-leaning CNN, Collins “might be right to question the guidance.” Gupta admitted, “It pains me to say this, but I see where she’s coming from, Senator Collins, on this.”
“In the end, the CDC needs to be just a science-based organization,” Gupta asserted. “What does the science say? You don’t need to wear a mask outside. It’s just one of these things that, again, we’ve known this for some time.”14
“In Bed with the Chinese”
We have seen how Glenn Greenwald, an award-winning journalist who worked for Salon and the left-wing UK paper The Guardian, took notice of the ACLU’s reversal on vaccine mandates. Greenwald seemed to make a significant political shift as the COVID lockdowns accelerated the Great Reset.
When conservative talk show host Glenn Beck interviewed Greenwald in 2021 about the Great Reset, Greenwald compared it to China’s social credit system.
“Are you looking into the Great Reset? And if you have… what are your feelings on it?” Beck asked.
“Of course. First of all, that is already being done in China. Right? These kinds of numeric, or quantitative evaluations of various citizens and then determining which rights they do and don’t have. It’s becoming increasingly digitized so there are no humans making these decisions. It’s all done algorithmically.”
Greenwald added, “Wall Street and Silicon Valley are in bed with the Chinese, they are tied at the hip.”15
Greenwald had previously warned about the U.S. government using clandestine surveillance under the guise of counterterrorism. Greenwald earned wide recognition for his reporting on whistleblower Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency.16
In 2020, Greenwald faced censorship head-on from his own media outlet, The Intercept, which he had cofounded in 2013. “The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles,” Greenwald wrote in his October 29, 2020, resignation letter.17
Greenwald’s concern focuses on the expansion of authoritarianism in the United States. “Go back to the debate right after the 9/11 attack when all of these radical proposals were introduced to increase power in the hands of the government like the PATRIOT Act, and the argument at the time was don’t worry, these are temporary measures, they are only going to be in place for as long as is necessary to get this crisis, this emergency, under control,” he explained.
“20 years later, the PATRIOT Act is very much in place. Every four years it’s renewed without any opposition, its uses and application have wildly expanded beyond its original intention, it’s almost never used for terrorism, it’s used for all varieties of other means for the government to spy on its citizenry,” Greenwald added.
“When you start building these bureaucratic apparatuses that vest power in the hands of the state to control the lives of citizens in the name of some temporary crisis, it never is temporary, it never goes away, there’s never a political motive to dismantle it,” he offered. “These powers once vested are going to be very difficult to pry out of the hands of government.”18
“This Has Gotta Stop”
Musician Van Morrison, known for such hit singles as “Brown Eyed Girl,” released three songs to protest the COVID-19 lockdowns: “No More Lockdown,” “Born to Be Free,” and “As I Walked Out.”
“No More Lockdown” included these lyrics:
No more taking of our freedom
And our God-given rights
Pretending it’s for our safety
When it’s really to enslave.19
Morrison also collaborated with Eric Clapton on a fourth song against lockdowns called “Stand and Deliver.”20 In August, Clapton, known for songs such as “I Shot the Sheriff,” released another anti-lockdown song: “This Has Gotta Stop.”21 In May 2021 he had said, “I’ve been a rebel all my life, against tyranny and arrogant authority, which is what we have now.”22
“The Nazis Didn’t Just Show Up One Day”
Commentator Dave Rubin, former host of the progressive show The Young Turks railed against the lockdowns. Rubin said he had been “a lifelong Democrat” but finally voted for the GOP in 2020.
“I have been a lifelong Democrat. I have voted for Obama twice, I voted for Gore, I voted for John Kerry, this is the first time I ever voted for a Republican president,” the host of The Dave Rubin Show explained in October of 2020.23
Rubin did not hold back his disdain for the COVID lockdowns. “I don’t think it’s hyperbolic at this point to say there was virtually no science behind any of this—that the lockdowns did absolutely nothing. I mean, we know that. We absolutely know that the lockdowns did nothing. They have inflicted a psychological condition on people to now make us afraid of each other, to make us turn on each other,” Rubin said in 2021.
“The irony is these are the people who call all of us Nazis. But the Nazis didn’t just show up one day…. It is a process of othering people, saying the worst things about people. And now it’s not just that our political views are odious and should be silenced and kicked off Big Tech and everything else. It’s that we are literally killing people by not wearing masks,” Rubin explained.24
Elon Musk Takes the Red Pill
Tesla founder Elon Musk, a climate change activist who endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 and Andrew Yang for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020,25 turned politics on its head in 2020.
“Give people their freedom back!” Musk demanded in spring of 2020, when the coronavirus lockdowns were in full swing.
“FREE AMERICA NOW,” he declared in all caps on Twitter.
On the COVID lockdowns, Musk held nothing back. “The extension of shelter-in-place—or as I would call it, forcibly imprisoning people in their homes, against all constitutional right, and in my opinion infringing on people’s freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong, and not why people came to America or pulled this country—what the fuck?” Musk asked.26
Musk attacked virus-modeler professor Neil Ferguson over his “absurd fake science.”27 He also ripped CNN. “What I find most surprising is that CNN still exists,” Musk wrote.28 “Take the red pill,” he urged, calling the lockdowns “fascist.”
“This is not freedom—give people back their goddamn freedom!” he demanded.
Musk fully supported the protests in Canada against vaccine requirements and COVID lockdowns. “Canadian truckers rule,” Musk tweeted. “If you scare people enough, they will demand removal of freedom. This is the path to tyranny,” Musk wrote later the same day.29
“Take the red pill” was Musk going full Matrix. The 1999 film depicts the character Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, taking a red pill that opens his eyes to the reality that the world he lives in is a fake creation.
Musk even defiantly took on Alameda County, California, officials and announced he was going to defy the lockdowns and open up his production line. “Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me,” Musk wrote. Alameda County relented and re-opened.30
Stand-up comic, mixed martial arts commentator, and popular podcast host Joe Rogan ran afoul of social media censors and rose to even greater prominence by featuring guests challenging the COVID narrative.
Rogan has held politically left views for years. “I am not right-wing at all,” Rogan declared.31 “I think I’ll probably vote for Bernie… He’s been insanely consistent his entire life,” Rogan announced in early 2020.32
But like many other figures on the Left, Rogan expressed shock about the digital-ID agenda of the Great Reset. “This is going to introduce the social credit score system,” Rogan said in a 2021 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, his podcast on Spotify. “That’s a bizarre thing to do, to openly do. Why do you think they openly discuss it that way?… Because the Great Reset has always been this gigantic conspiracy theory among the online folks, ‘Like this is all part of the Great Reset.’ Well, when he [Klaus Schwab] wrote a fucking book called The Great Reset, you’re like, ‘Hey man, shouldn’t you be hiding this?’ ”33
Comedian Jimmy Dore also spoke out publicly about the Great Reset. Dore expressed concern over digital vaccine passports and showed clips of the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab bragging about how he has trained young leaders like Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. “So now you know… the rest of the story…. Justin Trudeau has been groomed…. Everything will be on your digital ID, and you see… they want to do that so now they can control you…. As soon as you start to go against the establishment, they can use that because now they’ve got you, and they can shut you down,” Dore said on his program, The Jimmy Dore Show.
“Why do you think that it doesn’t matter if you vote Democrat or Republican or for Justin Trudeau? Because they all serve the same corporatist neoliberal agenda that serves Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, Big Pharma, fossil fuel companies. That’s who runs our country. We’re not a democracy,” Dore explained.34 “The quicker people realize that, that both parties are not on their side—they only serve the oligarchy; we are in fact in an oligarchy….”35
Civil liberties activist Jenin Younes joined the chorus of figures on the political left speaking out against the COVID mandates. Younes has described herself as “formerly left-leaning, now politically homeless.”36
“How do people not see the dangers of ‘show me your papers’ regimes? We’re just implementing a system where petty bureaucrats have total control over our freedom of movement?” Younes, an attorney with the D.C.–based New Civil Liberties Alliance, wrote.37 “Yesterday someone I went to college with wrote and told me how sad it was to see I’ve joined the alt right. If opposing government tyranny and public health coercion that has no basis in logic, science, or ethics makes me alt right, then call me Marjorie Taylor Greene,” she quipped.38
English actor and comedian Russell Brand has gotten attention attacking COVID mandates and exposing the Great Reset. Brand has a long history as a left-wing activist; in 2013 he declared, “I’m a bit of a tree-hugging, Hindu-tattooed, veggie meditator”39 and said he supported “a socialist egalitarian system based on the massive redistribution of wealth, [with] heavy taxation of corporations.”40
