Narratives of the Right: The New World Order, The Great Reset, and Digital Jails
According to the Right, wealthy elites attending the World Economic Forum’s annual conference in Davos are part of a globalist plot with the goal of the 'enslavement' of humanity in 'digital jails.'
*Narratives of the Right is a weekly analysis of the narratives that are permeating the far right. This week, Narratives of the Right is available to all subscribers to Radical Reports.
The World Economic Forum’s annual conference in Davos, Switzerland is the perfect vehicle for the far right to generate paranoid conspiracy theories about the “New World Order” and “The Great Reset” and “Digital Jails.” The far right narratives surrounding Davos center around the claim that the wealthy elites attending the conference are part of a nefarious scheme to depopulate the world through various orchestrated crises and impose a global authoritarian government through an Orwellian digital surveillance system.
“I don’t like to lean into conspiracy theories.”
Russell Brand, the comedian and actor who transformed into a “just asking questions” YouTube personality with more than 6 million subscribers, has spent the last few years going further and further and further down the conspiracy rabbit hole.
Brand, who fills his slickly edited videos with the kind of rapid-fire rhetoric of a bizarro hipster version of Ben Shapiro (occasionally interrupted by hawking probiotics supplements), shapes his arguments around vaguely coherent critiques of the excesses of late stage capitalism blended with a palatable flavor of libertarianism.
“I don’t like to lean into conspiracy theories,” Brand said in a recent video. “Some people believe there was already an agenda to introduce digital ID before the pandemic… Now that there has been a pandemic, we have to ask ourselves was it incredible foresight, or was it an agenda?”
Brand is an example of how far right conspiracy theories can reach larger audience, as his persona as a free thinking health and wellness guru has a much wider appeal than the dark and nihilistic corners of far right Telegram channels.
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the conspiracy theories, such as the Great Reset, that surround Davis is how they blur the lines between valid criticisms and fantastical conspiracy theories. As Naomi Klein explains these conspiracy theories “actually makes it harder to hold the Davos set accountable” for many of the actually problematic proposals at the conference, “since legitimate critiques have now been blended together with truly dangerous anti-vaccination fantasies and outright coronavirus denialism.”
‘What we are signing up for is a digital jails.’
Some right-wing media outlets have devoted a significant amount of coverage to Davos, including the MAGA media organization Turning Point USA, the Canadian right-wing website Rebel News, and far right conspiracy theories Jack Posobiec’s Human Events podcast.
Noor Bin Ladin, the QAnon adherent, MAGA influencer, and niece of Osama Bin Laden, told TPUSA’s Savanah Hernandez that WEF’s agenda is to implement a social credit system through digital IDs, and “in fact what we are signing up for is a digital jails.”
The far right’s obsession with digital IDs concerns the collection of personal data by the government or corporations through everything from smartphone COVID-19 tracking apps to digital medical records, while remaining seemingly oblivious to the amount of personal data being collected by the various social media platforms on which they published their content “live from Davos.”
‘Elitist Paranoiacs at Davos’
The commentary on Davos within right-wing media focused on a variety of different narratives, with a particular focus on the perceived hypocrisy of the participation of American diplomats, lawmakers, and other prominent individuals.
Blaine Holt, retired Air Force general and commentator, writes at Newsmax that the “elites’ private jets are dutifully returning to Davos,” and that “mostly unelected special people will not be rolling out ideas that bring more liberty or prosperity to the masses.” Holt claims “WEF’s utopian vision of a new world order” amounts to “enslavement,” and also claims that the WEF is somehow responsible for DirecTV dropping Newsmax.
Andy Schlafly, the founder of right-wing Conservapedia, writes in World Net Daily that “perhaps the global elite have already decided to toss Biden overboard, by finding classified documents at his home and office and using the same prosecutorial modus operandi that has been inflicted on Trump. By fanning the flames of this scandal Dems could nominate a fresh new candidate, such as the carefully nurtured Pete Buttigieg who was touted as an ‘emerging leader’ on the WEF website.”
Daniel Greenfield, a fellow at the far right David Horowitz Freedom Center, writes in Front Page that “Davos is becoming toxic. Times are tough and nobody really wants to be seen hobnobbing with the elites when people can’t afford bread, milk or eggs. That doesn’t mean that anything has substantively changed. The elite circuit is huge, but this particular stop for the private jets may have peaked.”
‘Demonic Pedos’ and ‘Jewish Cabal’
Beyond the commentary from right-wing media figures and far right social media influencers, when you examine the subtext of these various conspiracy theories you find the influence of antisemitic tropes—which are stated explicitly within far right online spaces. In far right Telegram channels with ten of thousands—sometimes hundreds of thousands—of subscribers, you’ll find explicit and virulent antisemitism as well as the expressions of violent fantasies about defeating the ‘global Jewish cabal.’ This undercurrent of antisemitism is ever present, and it is coded into ever mention of George Soros or the international banking system.