Meet GARM, the World Economic Forum’s Swiss army knife for woke-ifying Planet Earth

The Global Alliance for Responsible Media is attacking the problem of ‘harmful content’.

Sales of Bud Light beer tanked by 21.4 percent in the fallout of the Dylan Mulvaney saga. Apparently frat boys don’t particularly relate to a creepy man prancing about in pink teenage girl costumes.

While big brand Anheuser-Busch has claimed their Bud Light blunder was a one-off, cultural commentator Michael Knowles has uncovered striking evidence to the contrary.

In a Twitter thread this week, Knowles set tongues wagging with the revelation that AB InBev, Bud Light’s parent company in Europe, has signed up to a World Economic Forum initiative that is a veritable holy grail of wokeness.

Transheuser-Busch is still scrambling over the Mulvaney beer can as sales continue to tank. But it’s caught between a rock of customers and a hard place called “GARM,” a WEF-backed operation which was subpoenaed Friday by @Jim_Jordan and the House Judiciary. Here’s why:🧵

— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) May 8, 2023

The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) dubs itself “a cross-industry initiative established by the World Federation of Advertisers to address the challenge of harmful content on digital media platforms and its monetization via advertising”.

By “harmful content”, GARM means views about climate change, gender, sexuality or race that are more than five minutes old and happen to be grounded in reality.

GARM has created standards that “limit or entirely demonetize platforms that contain ‘hate speech’ on ‘gender identity,’” and “insensitive… treatment of debated social issues”.

Liking what it saw, the World Economic Forum gobbled up GARM as a “flagship project” in its “Platform For Shaping the Future of Media, Entertainment and Culture” just months after the project’s launch in 2019.

As highlighted by Knowles, last year AB InBev spent 105 pages genuflecting to GARM’s wokery in its 2022 Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) report.

Bud Light’s use of Dylan Mulvaney in their advertising, in other words, was anything but a mistake.

“One might think that Bud Light could just apologize and admit that men aren’t women,” Knowles reflected. “But no matter how much Bud Light and parent company AB InBev might wish to rein in the radicalism, they can’t abandon the agenda. They’re mired in World Economic Forum/ESG gobbledygook.”

Knowles adds that “AB InBev has embraced a litany of woke initiatives, from ESG to DEI, along with a full endorsement of transgenderism. They now foot the bill when employees choose to mutilate their bodies.”

And, “AB InBev not only indoctrinates all their managers with ‘unconscious bias training’; it also insists that *external* suppliers submit to the pro-trans ‘diversity’ agenda too.”

Far from being the only company to jump in bed with GARM, Adidas, BP, Goldman Sachs, Lego, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Nike, P&G, Hershey, Disney, Unilever and Walmart, are among the litany of colossal corporations to sell their soul to the World Economic Forum’s woke agenda.

Also under the sway of GARM are all of the biggest social media platforms. Warns Knowles, “GARM is so powerful and controls so much advertising money (like that of Bud Light) that YouTube, Meta (FB & IG), Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, and others are writing pages of reports as to how they are going to run their platforms to appease GARM standards.”

This revelation alone is bone-chilling, given that GARM’s so-called “misinformation” policies were introduced in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yes, thanks to initiatives like GARM, we were (un)reliably informed that lockdowns were the best thing since sliced bread, the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis was an unhinged conspiracy theory, bodily autonomy is a disposable human right, and the vaccines will most certainly protect against infection and transmission.

Who needs facts when we have thought police like GARM?

In concluding his thread, Knowles warned, “Don’t look away. If we don’t put an end to this growing scheme of control and deceit, Bud Light’s inability to apologize and admit that men can’t be women will be the least of our problems.”

Fortunately there are a few US lawmakers seeking to hold the World Economic Forum to account. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, issued subpoenas to GARM’s governing body, the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA). Jordan believes the group may be corralling its constituent members to behave in a way that violates US anti-trust laws.

The outcome of these legal proceedings remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: wokery has transcended colleges, corporations and even culture itself. It’s now a global mob shakedown.

And like Bud Light, it’s on the nose.

AUTHOR

Kurt Mahlburg

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg

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