Tag Archive for: World Economic Forum

You Will Own Nothing and Have Joy!

“A republic, if you can keep it.” — Benjamin Franklin’s response to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”


The World Economic Forum (WEF) predicted that, by 2030, individuals would own nothing and be happy and joyful.

Here are 8 predictions made by the WEF:

Does this sound familiar? It should because it mirrors the Kamala’s platform for 2024.

Comparing the WEF’s 8 Predictions for the World in 2030 and Kamala’s 2024 Platform

WEF: You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.

WATCH: Kamala Harris wants YOU to Own Nothing and Be Happy

WATCH: Tim Walz makes the case to elect Trump because, “we can’t afford 4 more years of this!”

WEF: Whatever you want you’ll rent. And it will be delivered by drone.

Remarks by Vice President Harris at a Campaign Event in Raleigh, NC — Homeownership and what that means — it’s a symbol of the pride that comes with hard work.  It’s financial security.  It represents what you will be able to do for your children.  And sadly, right now, it is out of reach for far too many American families.  There’s a serious housing shortage in many places.  It’s too difficult to build, and it’s driving prices up.

WEF: The U.S. won’t be the world’s leading superpower. A handful of countries will dominate.

WATCH: ‘Superpower’ USA Struggling To Keep Election Safe? After Trump Claims Iran Hack Attack, Kamala Says…

WEF: You won’t die waiting for an organ donor. We won’t transplant organs we’ll print new ones instead.

The National Library of Medicine published on May 19, 2022 3D Bioprinting of Human Hollow Organs stating, “3D bioprinting is a rapidly evolving technique that has been found to have extensive applications in disease research, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine. 3D bioprinting might be a solution to global organ shortages and the growing aversion to testing cell patterning for novel tissue fabrication and building superior disease models. It has the unrivaled capability of layer-by-layer deposition using different types of biomaterials, stem cells, and biomolecules with a perfectly regulated spatial distribution. The tissue regeneration of hollow organs has always been a challenge for medical science because of the complexities of their cell structures. In this mini review, we will address the status of the science behind tissue engineering and 3D bioprinting of epithelialized tubular hollow organs. This review will also cover the current challenges and prospects, as well as the application of these complicated 3D-printed organs.”

WEF: You’ll eat much less meat. An occasional treat, not a staple for the good of the environment and our health. A billion people will be displaced by climate change. We’ll have to do a better job of welcoming and integrating refugees.

WATCH:

Kamala Harris Caught Chanting ‘Down With Deportation’ In Unearthed Video

Invasion of the U.S.A. by Criminal Illegal Aliens

Border Czar Kamala Harris has lost over 325,000 migrant children to human traffickers

WEF: Polluters will have to pay to emit carbon dioxide. There will be a global price on carbon. This will help make fossil fuels history.

In a September 10, 2024 The Washington Post published a column titled Kamala Harris’s climate policies, explained by , and  who wrote:

As vice president, Kamala Harris helped pass the largest government investment into climate and clean energy initiatives, and grants to states to help recover from extreme weather events.

Causes of climate change

Q: Do you believe that climate change is largely driven by human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels? If not, is there a different cause you would cite?

A: Harris calls climate change an existential threat and says the United States needs to act urgently to address it. As a presidential candidate in 2019, she released a $10 trillion climate plan that calls for investing in renewable energy, holding polluters accountable, helping communities affected by climate change and protecting natural resources. As California attorney general, she prosecuted oil companies for environmental violations. As vice president, she was the tie-breaking vote in the Senate for the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided about $370 billion to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below their 2005 levels by the end of this decade.

Climate change and extreme weather

Q: Do you believe climate change is making disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires and heat waves more intense?

A: Harris has said the United States must take action to fight climate change in the face of increasing drought, floods, hurricanes, wildfires and sea level rise. As vice president, Harris announced more than $1 billion in grants in 2022 for states to address flooding and extreme heat exacerbated by climate change. “The frequency has accelerated in a relatively short period of time,” she said. “The science is clear. Extreme weather will only get worse, and the climate crisis will only accelerate.’’

How to address climate change

Q: Should climate change be addressed through government action or market forces?

A: The Biden-Harris administration’s signature Inflation Reduction Act represents the largest infusion of government cash into climate and clean-energy initiatives. Harris and Biden sought to put the U.S. on a path to cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. Under Harris’s climate plan as a 2019 presidential candidate, she advocated for a blend of government action and market forces to combat global warming. “A climate pollution fee can play an important role as one of several interrelated policies to reduce emissions and hold polluters accountable…” she said. “However, history shows us that reliance on market mechanisms alone can often leave communities behind.”

Clean energy tax credits

Q: Do you support clean-energy tax credits such as those for electric vehicles?

A: In 2022, Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides hundreds of billions of dollars in government subsidies for electric cars and other clean-energy technology, including tax credits for clean-energy and energy-efficiency home projects. She has been a proponent of electric vehicles and as a senator supported a national zero-emissions vehicle standard. In May, she visited Detroit to announce federal grants for smaller companies making electric-vehicle parts.

WATCH: Climate Czar John Kerry: ‘The First Amendment Stands as a Major Roadblock for Us Right Now’

WEF: You could be preparing to go to Mars. Scientists will have worked out how to keep you healthy in space. The start of the journey to find alien life?

NSA.gov states, “Mars remains our horizon goal for human exploration because it is one of the only other places we know where life may have existed in the solar system. What we learn about the Red Planet will tell us more about our Earth’s past and future, and may help answer whether life exists beyond our home planet. Like the Moon, Mars is a rich destination for scientific discovery and a driver of technologies that will enable humans to travel and explore far from Earth.”

WATCH: 6 NASA Technologies to Get Humans to Mars

WEF: Western values will have been tested to the breaking point. Checks and balances that underpin our democracies must not be forgotten.

WATCH: Kamala Harris speaks with Oprah Winfrey about our power in a democracy | Harris-Walz 2024

On September 24, 2024 The Hill published an article titled Harris’s agenda mirrors the Democratic Socialists of America by public policy and political analyst Merrill Matthews who wrote,

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, is a communist and Marxist and refers to her as “Comrade Kamala.” While it’s doubtful that Trump’s name calling helps him win over voters, if he has to call her something, he should have tagged her as a socialist. That’s because Harris’s major policy proposals are almost identical to those promoted by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

The DSA lists 10 policy positions under the heading “Our Platform.”

First up is “Deepening and Strengthening Democracy.” Of course, President Biden, Harris and nearly all Democrats repeatedly claim “democracy is under attack” and that Trump is a “threat to democracy.”

The DSA says it wants to “end minority rule” by getting rid of the Senate and the Electoral College. Harris would likely settle for ending the Senate’s filibuster so bills and all presidential appointments could be decided by a majority vote.

In addition, the socialists want to add seats to the U.S. Supreme Court (court packing) and impose term limits on the justices. Harris and most Democrats are pushing both SCOTUS reforms.

The DSA’s second item is “Abolition of the Carceral State” (“carceral” refers to prison and jail time). The DSA wants to “defund the police” — where have you heard that before? — and “free all incarcerated people.” Harris supported the “defund” movement and eliminating bail for some crimes until those positions became political liabilities. Now she tries to hide her soft-on-crime policies by stressing her background as a prosecutor.

Under “Abolish White Supremacy,” the DSA wants the government to pay reparations to Black people, “extend and expand sanctuary protections across the U.S.” and “end environmental racism.” Harris is on board with all of those, or at least she used to be.

There is a long DSA list of demands under “A Powerful Labor Movement,” including a right to unionize and an end to “right to work laws.” Isn’t the Biden-Harris administration supposed to be the most pro-union in history?

One of the DSA’s biggies is “Economic Justice,” where we find a whole host of demands, including free public college, canceling all student loan debt and medical debt and massive new regulations. Harris’s “opportunity economy” includes all three.

Of course, you had to assume “Gender and Sexuality Justice” would be on the DSA’s list, which includes “reproductive justice for all” (i.e., abortion) and a “guarantee of queer-friendly and gender-affirming healthcare.” Harris embraces both.

Next is the “Green New Deal,” which isn’t green or new. The GND has always been a social justice program masquerading as environmental policy. Harris was one of the original GND co-sponsors.

Under the topic of “Health Justice” the DSA supports Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) Medicare for All bill — which is a government-run health care system and has no resemblance to Medicare. Harris was a co-sponsor until she decided it would be a political liability.

The ninth DSA item is “Housing for All.” Wait, has Harris been talking about expanding government-built housing and providing a $25,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers? Yes, come to think of it, she has.

The DSA’s last heading proposes “International Solidarity” and “Anti-imperialism.” It’s not clear what Harris’s foreign policy is, but it likely reflects Biden’s appeasement policy with respect to China and Iran.

To be sure, the DSA’s agenda goes into much more depth on each major point than Harris does. But then who doesn’t go into more depth that Kamala Harris? So, while it’s possible that Harris would disagree with some DSA sub-points, it’s undeniable that she agrees, or has agreed, with the socialists on their major themes.

Harris has tried to separate herself from some of her past publicly stated positions — thus hoping to be “unburdened by what has been.” But she hasn’t made a meaningful shift on any issue. She made that clear in her softball interview with CNN’s Dana Bash when she asserted her “values haven’t changed.” That was a wink to anyone who was concerned Harris might have moved toward the center.

Her values — and those of today’s Democratic Party — are essentially identical to those of the Democratic Socialists of America. The only major difference is DSA members aren’t trying to hide their socialist beliefs; Harris is.

The Bottom Line

Mary Rooke in a Daily Caller column titled Walz Solidifies Harris Policy Position That Would Transform Country As We Know It wrote, “The issue is that Democrats like Walz and Vice President Kamala Harris use the expression “fire in a crowded theater” to excuse the suppression of a wide variety of speech protected under the First Amendment. Anything Democrats consider ‘hate speech,’ ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ is grounds for censorship in their view.”

The destruction of the First Amendment will fundamentally transform America into a Marxist dictatorship.

The Harris platform mirrors that of the World Economic Forum.

That is the reality of what is as stake on November 5th, 2024.

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness under our Constutional Republic or Democrat Socialismo under Harris/Walz.

©202. Dr. Richard M. Swier, LTC U.S. Army (Ret.) All rights reserved.

Who is directing the war on agriculture and nutrition?

Billionaire organizations and foundations, government agencies, and activist pressure groups are funding and coordinating a global war on modern agriculture, nutrition, and Earth’s poorest, hungriest people. Instead of helping more families get nutritious food, better healthcare, and higher living standards, they’re doing the opposite and harming biodiversity in the process.

The World Economic Forum wants to reimagine, reinvent, and transform the global food system to eliminate greenhouse gases from food production. Central to its plan are alternatives to animal protein: meal worm potato chips, bug burgers instead of beef patties, and meat loaves and sausages made from lake flies, for instance. Fixing the WEF’s toxic workplace is apparently a low priority.

A UN Food and Agriculture Organization report advises that turning “edible insects” into “tasty” food products can create thriving local businesses and even promote “inclusion of women.”

Created to alleviate global poverty, the World Bank has decided the “manmade climate crisis” is a far greater threat to impoverished families than contaminated water, malaria, and other killer diseases, hunger, or even two billion people still burning wood and dung because they don’t have reliable, affordable electricity. It has unilaterally decreed that 45% of its funds – an extra $9 billion in FY2024 – will be shifted to helping the poor “better withstand the devastation of climate change.”

(The Bank has also decided that even more of its taxpayer funding – $300-million instead of “only” $70-million – should be gifted to the Palestinian Authority, which pays terrorists to murder Israelis.)

Of course, most of the better and lesser-known environmental pressure groups are also deeply involved in food, agriculture, and energy policy campaigns: Greenpeace, Sierra Club, EarthJustice, Friends of the Earth, Pesticide Action Network, Center for Food Safety, La Via Campesina (The Peasant Way), Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, and countless others.

Like the rest of the “agro-ecology” movement, they deride and malign modern agriculture as a scourge inflicted by greedy mega-corporations. They oppose fossil fuels, pesticides, herbicides, and biotechnology. They extol “food sovereignty” and the “right to choose.” But their policies reflect top-down tyranny and bullying, with little room for poor farmers to embrace modern agricultural technologies and practices.

In addition to WEF, FAO, and World Bank support, these hard-green organizations have the ideological, organizational, and financial backing of the US Agency for International Development, EU agencies, and a host of progressive and far-left American, European, and other foundations.

The US-based AgroEcology Fund was created by the Christensen FundNew Fields Foundation, and Swift Foundation. Its funding and programs are overseen by the New Venture Fund, which helps “charitable” and “educational” organizations direct funds to programs that align with what many characterize as neo-colonialist and eco-imperialist goals.

Other major players include the Schmidt Family Foundation, Packard Foundation, Ford Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and Ben and Jerry Foundation.

This is serious money – hundreds of millions of dollars per year in food, agriculture, and climate change funding. It completely overshadows the piddling $9,000 that Kenyan farmer Jusper Machogu raised via donations to his “climate realism” website – much of it given to neighbors so they could drill water wells, buy tanks of propane, or get connected to the local grid.

And yet Mr. Machogu incurred the wrath of the BBC’s “Climate Disinformation Officer.” (Yes, the Beeb actually has such a position.) The CDO attacked him for “tweeting false and misleading claims” about climate change and saying Africa should develop its oil, gas, and coal reserves – instead of relying entirely on intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar. Even worse, the farmer had the temerity to accept donations from non-Africans, including “individuals with links to the fossil fuel industry and groups known for promoting climate change denial.”

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors is another major donor to agro-ecology outfits. It’s part of the legacy of guilt-ridden oil money from John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Co. corporate trust – an inheritance that includes nearly 1,000 climate-related institutions, foundations, and activist organizations.

As Canada’s Frontier Centre put it, “Every time you hear a ‘climate change’ scare story, [the person writing it] was PAID. He is a Rockefeller stooge. He may not know it, but his profession has been entirely corrupted.” Far worse, I would add, the writer and his (or her) organization are complicit in perpetuating global poverty, energy deprivation, hunger, disease, and death – because the fearmongering drives destructive energy and food production policies.

Alone or collectively, these policy corrupters must not be underestimated in this war to preserve and expand modern energy, agriculture, and global nutrition. Thankfully, there is increasing pushback. Many families simply do not want to be trapped in poverty, disease, mud-and-thatch huts, an absence of educational opportunities for their children, and a future of backbreaking, dawn-to-dusk labor in little subsistence-farming fields.

That’s especially so when films, news stories, and cell phones present American and European farming equipment and practices – and the crop yields, wealth, health, homes, leisure time, and opportunities that accompany those modern agricultural systems.

Poor farmers also see China, India, Indonesia, and other countries rapidly industrializing and modernizing by using oil, gas, and coal. They see rumblings of change in many countries that are intent on charting their own courses, with fossil fuels as the energy foundation for that growth. They’re rejecting the eco-colonialism and eco-imperialism that wealthy Westerners seek to impose on them.

They are getting the message that humanity has faced climate fluctuations and extreme weather events throughout history … and survived them, dealt with them, adapted to them, prospered. That there is no real-world evidence that manmade greenhouse gas emissions – especially the trivial amounts generated by agriculture – have replaced the powerful natural forces that caused past climate changes.

They increasingly realize that organic and subsistence farming requires vastly more land – which would otherwise be wildlife habitats – than modern mechanized farming to get the same yields. Plowing those habitats would decimate plant and animal diversity.

That locking up fossil fuels and relying instead on biofuels and plant-based feedstocks for thousands of essential products would require even more acreage. So would mining for massive amounts of metals and minerals to manufacture wind, solar, and battery technologies.

Most importantly, they understand that humanity today has far greater wealth, far more knowledge, far better technologies, and resources than any past generations.

To suggest that we cannot adapt to climate changes or survive and recover from extreme weather events is simply absurd. To suggest that farmers should revert to … or remain stuck in … ancient farming practices and technologies – to save the world from computer-generated manmade climate disasters – is eco-imperialism at its most lethal.

South Africa’s electricity minister recently said his country will not be “turned into a guinea pig for a worldwide Green New Deal.” Hopefully, all developing countries will soon apply that same attitude to anarchists who would use the world’s poor as guinea pigs in global agricultural and nutrition experiments.

AUTHOR

Paul Driessen

EDITORS NOTE: This CFACT column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Liberal State Declares War On Small Farmers And Homesteaders

War on food is spreading in U.S. through land-use restrictions, geoengineering and waves of propaganda. Remember, it really is all about depopulation.


The World Economic Forum warned us several years ago that its ultimate goal was to destroy the middle class. How else would you explain their slogan: “You will own nothing and learn to like it“?

This mantra is playing out in real time in the state of Oregon, and other states, in various forms which we will get into in this article.

Small farmers are under attack in the Beaver State, which has begun shutting down family farms throughout the state under the guise of water conservation and groundwater protection.

The owner of Yanasa Ama Ranch shared a 20-minute video explaining what is going on in Oregon as bureaucrats erroneously classify small family farms and homesteads as “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs, in order to shut them down. Any feeding area that has a concrete, rock or gravel floor falls into this category, which would include most small dairy or egg farms.

If you have two or three milking cows, the rancher explains, you are now targeted by the state for closure.

The rancher further explains in the video:

“The state of Oregon has effectively shut down small farms and market gardens on a large scale, and they’re actually sending out cease-and-desist letters to farms and they’re using satellite technology to find their victims and send them these letters that say you can’t operate.”

The below video is 20 minutes but the most critical information is contained in the first 5 or 6 minutes. Note that he says most of these anti-farming, anti-private property laws start in places like Washington and Oregon but end up spreading to other states over time. That is so true!

Wake up folks. The tyranny is gaining ground. The war on food is heating up and will inevitably cause a major worldwide famine at some point. Remember what I’ve said in previous articles, that depopulation is the ultimate goal of the globalists. There is no other explanation behind their rabid lust for World War III, their relentless pushing of toxic vaccines, harmful chemicals sprayed in the atmosphere and put in our food, their celebration of abortion and all things LGBTQ+, and the list goes on. The more death and sterilizations they can foster, the happier they will be.

There was some good news on the atmospheric spraying this week. The state Senate in Tennessee has passed a bill banning all such spraying within its borders, whether it be for geoengineering or other purposes. (See story here).

The globalists are also waging war against small farms and homesteaders on the propaganda front.

The far-left media group Media Matters, funded by George Soros and other globalists, recently put out a hit-piece article targeting homesteaders as “white nationalist” and “anti-government.” How dare they seek to grow their own food! They must be racists! See video below.

I keep hearing that the CFR-Trilateral-WEF-UN globalists are “running scared.” That may be true, but I wouldn’t bet on it. As long as we see horror stories like this one out of Oregon I am of the opinion that these global predators are only just getting started. If they were at all fearful they would be pulling back on some of their most harmful policies in the war on food. Instead, they continue to pressure farmers to cull their flocks of birds, radically reduce the size of their bovine herds, and now they’re trying to render their farmland useless through nefarious “water protection” policies. Their goal is to put all small farmers and homesteaders out of business and force them into the cities, where people are more easily surveilled and controlled. We cannot allow them to succeed. Find small farmers in your area and support them.

Let me know in the comments below if your state is showing any signs of joining the globalists’ war on food.

©2024. Leo Hohmann. All rights reserved.

VIDEOS: ‘The Great Setup’ Parts 1 & 2 with Dr. David Martin

Each detail he mentions in the timeline, this site remembers well.

This is recommended by Conservative Tree House.

The Great Setup With Dr. David Martin Full Part 1

Part 2.

ABOUT DR. DAVID MARTIN

Dr. David Martin is the founder and owner of the company M-CAM International which has provided research and corporate advisory services to over 160 countries and he has personally served as an advisor to the World Bank and many governments. Dr Martin first came to the attention of the world when he featured in the August 2020 documentary by Mikki Willis called Planandemic Indoctornation.

EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog column with videos posted by Eeyore is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

The Climate Lobby Is Openly Plotting To Steal Our Freedom

During her May 15 speech to The Beyond Growth Conference held by the European Parliament, European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen, citing a 1970s de-growth plan published by the Club of Rome, made reference to the European Union’s “social market economy” five times in a span of less than 150 words.

A “social market economy,” of course, is a reference to the sort of central economic planning engaged in by authoritarian socialist governments throughout history. “And this is exactly why we put forward our European Green Deal,” Von Der Leyen told the conference. “Building a 21st century clean-energy circular economy is one of the most significant economic challenges of our times.”

The agenda of the Beyond Growth Conference focused on devising plans to manage the destruction of economic growth that is a centerpiece of the real agenda of the energy transition. Limitations on energy minerals and other resources required by wind, solar and electric vehicles, and on the ability to continue printing trillions of debt-funded dollars and Euros in a vain attempt to subsidize them to the scale required to displace fossil fuels inevitably means the forcing of common citizens in the Western world to scale down their standards of living and limit their mobility to meet the net-zero by 2050 goals being dictated at the global level. Thus, the need for the EU to move “beyond growth” and back to a more primitive mode of living.

Rising recognition and acceptance of these limitations, along with the success by Western governments in enforcing authoritarian edicts on their populations during the COVID-19 pandemic, is now leading to a rapid evolution in the overarching narrative and talking points related to the energy transition. The former energy transition narrative of “we will scale up renewables and EVs and you won’t even notice the difference in your daily lives” has been transformed to “we will scale everything down and you will just have to live with it” with stunning speed during 2023.

report titled “The Urban Mobility Scorecard Tool: Benchmarking the Transition to Sustainable Urban Mobility” issued by the World Economic Forum in May is another great example. Based largely upon a 2017 UC Davis report titled “3 Revolutions in Urban Transportation,” the WEF report advocates for authoritarian governments to force the reduction of the numbers of vehicles on the road from the current global estimate of 1.45 billion to just 500 million. The UC Davis report went largely unnoticed in 2017 because the climate alarmist lobby had not been sufficiently emboldened at that time to publicly discuss its real goals. But that mask is now coming off.

The authors of the WEF report claim citizens who can no longer own cars would still be allowed to move away from their planned cities of the future, but only via “shared transport,” i.e. electric buses and a new network of thousands of miles of high-speed rail. But California has clearly shown that thoughts of building a huge network of tens of thousands of miles of new high-speed rail in the western world in the next 27 years is a complete fantasy. California’s own high-speed rail boondoggle, originally proposed 27 years ago in 1996, has seen its budget blossom from $8 billion to over $130 billion, and still hasn’t managed to lay a single mile of rail.

The real world simply does not conform itself to fantasies like this plan, and everyone at the WEF is fully aware of that reality. Thus, what this plan really amounts to is a scheme to enable the speeding-up of implementation of socialist/authoritarian governments in the West to enforce the new restrictions on the lives of common citizens, an effort that began to accelerate during the COVID pandemic. Authoritarian governments always endeavor to restrict the free flow of information outside of approved propaganda, and restricting mobility is a key means of achieving that goal.

As we see the EU and the WEF now freely admitting, economic de-growth and forcing citizens of Western nations to live smaller, less prosperous lives are the real end goals of this energy transition. The narrative has officially shifted, and we would do well to take them at their word.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

DAVID BLACKMON

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


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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.

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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EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Power of Woke: How Leftist Ideology is Undermining our Society and Economy

Neo-Marxism is a cultural cancer spreading through America and beyond.


“It’s an important part of society whether you like it or not,” lexicologist Tony Thorne, referring to “wokeness,” told The New Yorker’s David Remnick in January. That’s an understatement.

Wokeness is poisoning the Western workplace and constraining small and family businesses, midsized banks, and entrepreneurs while enriching powerful corporations and billionaires. It’s eating away at the capitalist ethos and killing the bottom-up modes of economic ordering and exchange that propelled the United States of America to prosperity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It’s infecting Gen Z and millennials, who, suffering high depression rates and prone to “quiet quitting,” are not as well off as their parents and grandparents, and who feel isolated and alone even as they enjoy a technological connectivity that’s unprecedented in human history.

What, exactly, is wokeness, and how does it impact business and the wider society?

Subversion

The term as it’s widely used today differs from earlier significations. “Woke”, which plays on African American vernacular, once meant “awake to” or “aware of” social and racial injustices. The term expanded to encompass a wider array of causes from climate change, gun control, and LGTBQ rights to domestic violence, sexual harassment, and abortion.

Now, wielded by its opponents, it’s chiefly a pejorative dismissing the person or party it modifies. It’s the successor to “political correctness,” a catchall idiom that ridicules a broad range of leftist hobbyhorses. Carl Rhodes submits, in Woke Capitalism, that “woke transmuted from being a political call for self-awareness through solidarity in the face of massive racial injustice, to being an identity marker for self-righteousness.”

John McWhorter’s Woke Racism argues that wokeness is religious in character, unintentionally and intrinsically racist, and deleterious to black people. McWhorter, a black linguist, asserts that “white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species.”

Books like Stephen R. Soukup’s The Dictatorship of Woke Capital and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Woke, Inc. highlight the nefarious side of the wokeism adopted by large companies, in particular in the field of asset management, investment, and financial services.

Hypocritical neo-Marxism

Wokeism, in both the affirming and derogatory sense, is predicated on a belief in systemic or structural forces that condition culture and behavior. The phrases “structural racism” or “systemic racism” suggest that rational agents are nevertheless embedded in a network of interacting and interconnected rules, norms, and values that perpetuate white supremacy or marginalise people of color and groups without privilege.

Breaking entirely free from these inherited constraints is not possible, according to the woke, because we cannot operate outside the discursive frames established by long use and entrenched power. Nevertheless, the argument runs, we can decentre the power relations bolstering this system and subvert the techniques employed, wittingly or unwittingly, to preserve extant hierarchies. That requires, however, new structures and power relations.

Corporate executives and boards of directors are unsuspectingly and inadvertently — though sometimes deliberately — caught up in these ideas. They’re immersed in an ideological paradigm arising principally from Western universities. It’s difficult to identify the causative origin of this complex, disparate movement to undo the self-extending power structures that supposedly enable hegemony. Yet businesses, which, of course, are made up of people, including disaffected Gen Zs and millennials, develop alongside this sustained effort to dismantle structures and introduce novel organising principles for society.

The problem is, rather than neutralising power, the “woke” pursue and claim power for their own ends. Criticising systems and structures, they erect systems and structures in which they occupy the center, seeking to dominate and subjugate the people or groups they allege to have subjugated or dominated throughout history. They replace one hegemony with another.

The old systems had problems, of course. They were imperfect. But they retained elements of classical liberalism that protected hard-won principles like private property, due process of law, rule of law, free speech, and equality under the law. Wokeism dispenses with these. It’s about strength and control. And it has produced a corporate-government nexus that rigidifies power in the hands of an elite few.

Consider the extravagant spectacle in Davos, the beautiful resort town that combined luxury and activism at the recent meeting of the World Economic Forum, perhaps the largest gathering of self-selected, influential lobbyists and “c suiters” across countries and cultures. This annual event occasions cartoonish portrayals of evil, conspiratorial overlords — the soi-disant saviours paternalistically preaching about planetary improvement, glorifying their chosen burden to shape global affairs. The World Economic Forum has become a symbol of sanctimony and lavish inauthenticity, silly in its ostentation.

The near-ubiquitous celebration of lofty Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) strategies at the World Economic Forum reveals a seemingly uniform commitment among prominent leaders to harness government to pull companies — and, alas, everyone else — to the left.

ESG is, of course, an acronym for the non-financial standards and metrics that asset managers, bankers, and investors factor while allocating capital or assessing risk. A growing consortium of governments, central banks, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), asset management firms, finance ministries, financial institutions, and institutional investors advocates ESG as the top-down, long-term solution to purported social and climate risks. Even if these risks are real, is ESG the proper remedy?

Attendees of the World Economic Forum would not champion ESG if they did not benefit from doing so. That plain fact doesn’t alone discredit ESG, but it raises questions about ulterior motives: What’s really going on? How will these titans of finance and government benefit from ESG?

Follow the money

One obvious answer involves the institutional investors that prioritise activism over purely financial objectives or returns on investment (for legal reasons, activist investors would not characterise their priorities as such). It has only been a century since buying and selling shares in publicly traded companies became commonplace among workers and households. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), created in response to the Great Depression, isn’t even 100 years old.

Until recently, most investors divested if they owned stock in a company that behaved contrary to their beliefs. They rarely voted their shares or voted only on major issues like mergers and acquisitions. In 2023, however, institutional investors such as hedge funds and asset management firms engage boards of directors, exercise proxy voting, and issue shareholder reports with the primary goal of politicising companies. As intermediaries, they invest pension funds, mutual funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, 401(k)s and more on behalf of beneficiaries who may or may not know what political causes their invested assets support.

If a publicly traded company “goes woke,” consider which entities hold how much of its shares and whether unwanted shareholder pressure is to blame. Consider, too, the role of third-party proxy advisors in the company’s policies and practices.

Big companies go woke to eliminate competition. After all, they can afford the costs to comply with woke regulations whereas small companies cannot. Institutional investors warn of prospective risks of government regulation while lobbying for such regulation. In the United States, under the Biden Administration, woke federal regulations are, unsurprisingly, emerging. Perhaps publicly traded companies will privatise to avoid proposed SEC mandates regarding ESG disclosures, but regulation in other forms and through other agencies will come for private companies too.

The woke should question why they’re collaborating with their erstwhile corporate enemies. Have they abandoned concerns about poverty for the more lucrative industry of identity politics and environmentalism? Have they sold out, happily exploiting the uncouth masses, oppressing the already oppressed, and trading socioeconomic class struggle for the proliferating dogma of race, sexuality, and climate change? As wokeness becomes inextricably tied to ESG, we can no longer say, “Go woke, go broke.” Presently, wokeness is a vehicle to affluence, a status marker, the ticket to the center of the superstructure.

ESG helps the wealthiest to feel better about themselves while widening the gap between the rich and poor and disproportionately burdening economies in developing countries. It’s supplanting the classical liberal rules and institutions that leveled playing fields, engendered equality of opportunity, expanded the franchise, reduced undue discrimination, eliminated barriers to entry, facilitated entrepreneurship and innovation, and empowered individuals to realise their dreams and rise above their station at birth.

When politics is ubiquitous, wokeness breeds antiwokeness. The right caught on to institutional investing; counteroffensives are underway. The totalising politicisation of corporations is a zero-sum arms race in which the right captures some companies while the left captures others.

Soon there’ll be no escaping politics, no tranquil zones, and little space for emotional detachment, contemplative privacy, or principled neutrality; parallel economies will emerge for different political affiliations; noise, fighting, anger, distraction, and division will multiply; every quotidian act will signal a grand ideology. For the woke, “silence is violence”; there’s no middle ground; you must speak up; and increasingly for their opponents as well, you must choose sides.

Which will you choose in this corporatised dystopia? If the factions continue to concentrate and centralise power, classical liberals will have no good options. Coercion and compulsion will prevail over freedom and cooperation. And commerce and command will go hand in hand.

This article has been republished with permission from Mises Wire.

AUTHOR

Allen Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall is an associate dean at Faulkner University Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, executive director of the Blackstone & Burke Center for Law & Liberty, and Managing Editor of Southern… More by Allen Mendenhall

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EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

UN Deletes Article Titled ‘The Benefits of World Hunger.’ Was It Real or Satire?

The author of the article in question told FEE it was not a parody.


UN Chronicle, the official magazine of the United Nations, recently deleted a 2008 article titled “The Benefits of World Hunger.”

The article, which now leads to an “error page,” was written by George Kent, a now retired University of Hawaii political science professor. In the article, Kent argued that hunger is “fundamental to the working of the world’s economy.”

“Much of the hunger literature talks about how it is important to assure that people are well fed so that they can be more productive,” Kent wrote. “That is nonsense. No one works harder than hungry people. Yes, people who are well nourished have greater capacity for productive physical activity, but well-nourished people are far less willing to do that work.”

UN Chronicle deleted the article after it began to cause a stir on social media. The magazine said Kent’s article should not be taken literally, contending that it was a work of parody.

“This article appeared in the UN Chronicle 14 years ago as an attempt at satire and was never meant to be taken literally. We have been made aware of its failures, even as satire, and have removed it from our site.”

At first glance, there seems to be little reason to doubt the United Nations. As some writers have noted, previous works written by Kent include Ending World Hunger, The Political Economy of Hunger: The Silent Holocaust, and Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food.

These titles hardly suggest that Kent sees global hunger as a good thing. In light of this, some contended that he was taking an approach not unlike Jonathan Swift, whose famous essay “A Modest Proposal” cheekily argued that Irish families should alleviate their mean condition by selling excess children to the wealthy for food.

After reading the UN’s tweet, Yahoo’s report, and several other pieces of commentary on the subject, I initially agreed that Kent’s article likely was written as satire. However, closer examination and a brief conversation with Kent revealed that is not the case.

First, it’s important to note that Kent himself denies the article was intended as a form of satire.

“I don’t think the UN would have published it if they thought it was satire or advocacy,” Kent told Climate Depot in a recent phone interview.

In the interview, Kent explains he was not advocating global hunger but was intending to be “provocative” by saying certain individuals and institutions benefit from global hunger.

“No, it is not satire,” Kent told Marc Morano, founder and editor of Climate Depot. “I don’t see anything funny about it. It is not about advocacy of hunger.”

I reached out to Kent and asked if the quotes were accurate, and he told me they were, adding that he intends to publish a paper this fall that will further detail his views.

“Marc understood me very well,” Kent told me in an email. “I hope my current paper on who benefits from hunger helps to make my position clear to everyone involved in this discussion.”

Additionally, the article’s concluding paragraph supports Kent’s claim that the work was not designed as either satire or advocacy. A careful reading of the text suggests Kent is being quite literal when he writes that some people benefit from global hunger.

“For those of us at the high end of the social ladder, ending hunger globally would be a disaster. If there were no hunger in the world, who would plow the fields?” Kent wrote. “Who would harvest our vegetables? Who would work in the rendering plants? Who would clean our toilets? We would have to produce our own food and clean our own toilets. No wonder people at the high end are not rushing to solve the hunger problem. For many of us, hunger is not a problem, but an asset.”

One senses in these words disapproval. The global poor exist because the wealthy require them to exist. Global hunger exists because humans are simply not doing the moral and necessary things to eradicate it.

But what are those things? A glimpse at Kent’s 2011 Ending Hunger Worldwide offers a clue. In the summary of the book, readers are told the keys to tackling global hunger are “building stronger communities” and challenging “dominant market-led solutions.”

In Kent’s view, one gathers, global hunger is not a complex problem that is being addressed by free market capitalism; it’s a moral one that requires empowering intellectuals like Kent to solve it.

It’s also worth noting that reviews of Kent on Rate My Professor—which gives him a rating of 1.9 out of 5—suggest he’s, well, perhaps a bit of an ideologue.

“Avoid this man with your life. Very opinionated and if your opinion differs, you will fail. He’s the worst professor i’ve had,” one reviewer wrote.

“Horrible professor if you are not politically aligned with his values you WILL FAIL,” another contended.

“Very opinionated and unhelpful,” opined another. “Very critical and extremely boring. Unsupportive and irritating.”

Whether Kent is a good professor or not, or whether his article was satire or literal, are questions that ultimately do not matter a whole lot in the larger scheme of things. What does matter are the policies that cause global hunger and the policies that alleviate global hunger.

And on this front, there has been stunning progress in recent decades. As Our World in Data shows, the percentage of undernourished people in developing countries has plummeted in recent years, falling from 35 percent in 1970 to 13 percent in 2015.

How this happened is not a mystery. As economist Bob Murphy noted in FEE.org, the proliferation of free market capitalism has “gone hand-in-hand with rapid and unprecedented increases in human welfare.”

“As the World Bank reports, the global rate of ‘extreme poverty’ (defined as people living on less than $1.90 per day) was cut in half from 1990 to 2010. Back in 1990, 1.85 billion people lived in extreme poverty, but by 2013, the figure had dropped to 767 million—meaning the number of those living on less than $1.90 per day had fallen by more than a billion people.’”

Ironically, no better example of this can be found in recent decades than China, which has achieved nothing short of an economic miracle in recent decades. China saw its percentage of underweight children fall from 19 percent in 1987 to 2.4 percent in 2013. As recently as 1990, 66 percent of Chinese people lived in extreme poverty. By 2015, that figure was less than one percent.

How did China achieve this economic miracle? By pivoting to privatization following the death of Party Chairman Mao Zedong (1893-1976), as I pointed out in 2019.

In 1979, China adopted its “household responsibility system,” giving many farmers ownership of their crop for the first time. This was followed by Communist Party leaders opening China to foreign investment, curbing price controls and protectionism, and implementing mass privatization of its economy.

The “market-led solutions” that Kent has disparaged have worked wonders for hunger alleviation. The same cannot be said for initiatives hatched by the central planners at the United Nations, the organization that published Kent’s controversial article on hunger.

Sri Lanka’s current food crisis stems directly from an effort to shift the country’s agriculture sector to organic farming, which saw the import of fertilizers banned and led the country to become an importer of rice instead of an exporter virtually overnight.

Many writers and thinkers are blaming Sri Lanka’s crisis on the global rise of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), which was started in 2004 under the auspices of—you guessed it—the United Nations to encourage “sustainable development.”

And people are right to blame ESG. Writing for the World Economic Forum in 2016, economist Joseph Stiglitz said “Sri Lanka may be able to move directly into… high-productivity organic farming…”

Sri Lanka did. By doing so, the nation earned an ESG score of 98/100—and caused a food crisis that resulted in one president’s resignation and food insecurity for millions of people.

This is a tragedy. And while George Kent is clearly wrong—there are no benefits to world hunger—one begins to understand why his 15-year-old article published by the United Nations is suddenly sparking so much interest

It’s not just Sri Lanka, after all. The NetherlandsCanada, and other countries are all making headlines with food schemes that are likely to goose their ESG score—but cause serious problems at a time when global hunger is on the rise for the first time in decades.

In light of current global policies, anti-population rhetoric, and the track record of twentieth century collectivist food schemes—HolodomorCambodia, and Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which saw tens of millions starve to death because of government policies—George Kent’s “The Benefits of World Hunger” article hit too close to home.

(Editor’s Note: We’ve posted George Kent’s 2008 entire article below since the United Nations removed the article from their site so readers can determine for themselves Kent’s purpose in writing the article.)

We sometimes talk about hunger in the world as if it were a scourge that all of us want to see abolished, viewing it as comparable with the plague or aids. But that naïve view prevents us from coming to grips with what causes and sustains hunger. Hunger has great positive value to many people. Indeed, it is fundamental to the working of the world’s economy. Hungry people are the most productive people, especially where there is a need for manual labour.

We in developed countries sometimes see poor people by the roadside holding up signs saying “Will Work for Food.” Actually, most people work for food. It is mainly because people need food to survive that they work so hard either in producing food for themselves in subsistence-level production, or by selling their services to others in exchange for money. How many of us would sell our services if it were not for the threat of hunger?

More importantly, how many of us would sell our services so cheaply if it were not for the threat of hunger? When we sell our services cheaply, we enrich others, those who own the factories, the machines and the lands, and ultimately own the people who work for them. For those who depend on the availability of cheap labour, hunger is the foundation of their wealth.

The conventional thinking is that hunger is caused by low-paying jobs. For example, an article reports on “Brazil’s ethanol slaves: 200,000 migrant sugar cutters who prop up renewable energy boom”. While it is true that hunger is caused by low-paying jobs, we need to understand that hunger at the same time causes low-paying jobs to be created. Who would have established massive biofuel production operations in Brazil if they did not know there were thousands of hungry people desperate enough to take the awful jobs they would offer? Who would build any sort of factory if they did not know that many people would be available to take the jobs at low-pay rates?

Much of the hunger literature talks about how it is important to assure that people are well fed so that they can be more productive. That is nonsense. No one works harder than hungry people. Yes, people who are well nourished have greater capacity for productive physical activity, but well-nourished people are far less willing to do that work.

The non-governmental organization Free the Slaves defines slaves as people who are not allowed to walk away from their jobs. It estimates that there are about 27 million slaves in the world, including those who are literally locked into workrooms and held as bonded labourers in South Asia. However, they do not include people who might be described as slaves to hunger, that is, those who are free to walk away from their jobs but have nothing better to go to. Maybe most people who work are slaves to hunger?

For those of us at the high end of the social ladder, ending hunger globally would be a disaster. If there were no hunger in the world, who would plow the fields? Who would harvest our vegetables? Who would work in the rendering plants? Who would clean our toilets? We would have to produce our own food and clean our own toilets. No wonder people at the high end are not rushing to solve the hunger problem. For many of us, hunger is not a problem, but an asset.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘Could this be the year Europe dies’ as economic conditions drive a billion Africans North?

Klaus Schwab the founder of the World Economic Forum convening in Davos, Switzerland this week has a very scary prediction for the future of Europe.

Learn more here at American Resistance 2016!

See our complete ‘Invasion of Europe’ archive by clicking here.

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Obama Threatens to Veto the Nuclear Weapons Free Iran Act

Like many Americans and Israelis I watched expectantly President Obama’s State of the Union Address (SOTUS)  before a joint session of Congress crammed into the House Chamber. I was looking for a reaction from the Congressional audience on the issue of the P5+1 agreement implemented on January 20th. Iran’s President Rouhani had basically told  the P5+1  in a CNN  interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that the Islamic regime was not going to dismantle their nuclear program. Instead they were going to plough ahead with research and development on advanced centrifuges and would not swap the Arak heavy water plant that would produce plutonium for a bomb.

In  light of these jarring comments made in Davos, Switzerland  by President Rouhani  at the World Economic  Forum, you would have prudently thought that the President would have changed his mind about  vetoing  the Nuclear Weapons Free Iran Act (NWFIA), S. 1881. Obama made it clear that he was proceeding with the P5+1 deal as a diplomatic way of  avoiding  military action to disable the Islamic Regime’s  nuclear weapons capability.  A capability that according to Israeli PM Netanyahu  speaking at the Annual Conference of the Institute for National Security studies at Tel Aviv University  (INSS) was  “six weeks away from achievement when the P5+1 deal was signed” on November 24, 2013 in Geneva.

President Obama fired a bow shot directed at NWFIA sponsors Sens. Kirk and Menendez, and 57 other co-sponsors of S. 1881, as well as the Resolution introduced in by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor  (R-VA)  and Minority Leader Steny  Hoyer (D-Md.) supporting its passage.

Obama said:

Let me be clear if this Congress sends me a new sanctions bill now that threatens to derail these talks, I will veto it.

For the sake of our national security, we must give diplomacy a chance to succeed.

If Iran’s leaders do not seize this opportunity, then I will be the first to call for more sanctions, and stand ready to exercise all options to make sure Iran does not build a nuclear weapon.  But if Iran’s leaders do seize the chance, then Iran could take an important step to rejoin the community of nations, and we will have resolved one of the leading security challenges of our time without the risks of war.

It is American diplomacy, backed by pressure, that has halted the progress of Iran’s nuclear program – and rolled parts of that program back – for the very first time in a decade. As we gather here tonight, Iran has begun to eliminate its stockpile of higher levels of enriched uranium. It is not installing advanced centrifuges. Unprecedented inspections help the world verify, every day, that Iran is not building a bomb.

If John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan could negotiate with the Soviet Union then surely a strong and confident America can negotiate with less powerful adversaries today.

Watch this C-SPAN video clip of the nuclear Iran segment of his SOTUS:

The immediate reaction was clearly stony silence from the Republican members of both chambers in the audience.

According to a  Jerusalem Postarticle on the President’s veto threat, NWFIA co-sponsor Sen. Kirk said:

“The American people – Democrats and Republicans alike – overwhelmingly want Iran held accountable during any negotiations. While the president promises to veto any new Iran sanctions legislation, the Iranians have already vetoed any dismantlement of their nuclear infrastructure,” Kirk added, calling his bill an “insurance policy” for Congress.

The Hill  Global Affairs blog reported the dissembling  the morning after  the President’s SOTUS remarks on a nuclear Iran by some Democratic co-sponsors of NWFIA in the wake of the President’s public veto threat.  Note these Senators’ comments:

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said on MSNBC Tuesday night that he didn’t endorse the bill so that it could be voted on during negotiations with Iran. “Give peace a chance,” he said.

“I did not sign it with the intention that it would ever be voted upon or used upon while we were negotiating,” Manchin said. “I signed it because I wanted to make sure the president had a hammer, if he needed it and showed them how determined we were to do it and use it, if we had to.”

[…]

“Now is not the time for a vote on the Iran sanctions bill,” Coons said Wednesday at a Politico event, according to The Huffington Post.

The senator clarified that he still supports the bill but warned advancing it now could damage ongoing negotiations toward a final agreement with Iran.

[…]

“I’m not frustrated,” Menendez told The Huffington Post on Tuesday after Obama’s address. “The president has every right to do what he wants.”

The Hill Global Affairs blog noted the Senate reaction  to NWFIA :

Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the second-highest ranking Democrat, Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the fourth-highest ranking Democrat, and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have said they are against the bill.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has also suggested he’s leaning toward not allowing a vote on it.

On Wednesday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said the Senate should move the sanctions bill forward to the floor, predicting it would have a veto-proof majority.

Meanwhile, Reuters reported on Monday that lawmakers in both the House and Senate are considering a nonbinding resolution that expresses concern about Iran’s nuclear program.

Backing what Sen. Kirk said in his response to the President was further evidence from former  UN nuclear weapons inspector David Albright at the Washington, DC Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS).  Both he and the sanctions analysis team from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies held a well attended briefing for Capitol Hill Staffers on Monday, January 27th.  Albright was quoted in the Los Angeles Times citing an ISIS  report on the technical aspects of the accord implemented on January 20th that allows Iran to continue research over the next six months on several types of advanced centrifuges already at Natanz:

[The accord]  is not expected to seriously affect Iran’s centrifuge research and development program. Albright said he hopes to persuade the six powers to push for much stricter limits on centrifuge research and development when they negotiate the final agreement. The issue has to be addressed much more aggressively.

Cliff May of FDD, co-sponsor of the Capitol Hill event with Albright  of  ISIS,  observed in an NRO Corner article:

If Iran’s rulers faithfully comply with every commitment they have so far made, at the end of this six-month period, they will be about three months — instead of two months — away from breakout capacity.

Yesterday, at the annual conference of the  Institute for National Security studies (INSS)  at Tel Aviv University, there was a dialog between former CIA Director Gen. David Petreaus and Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin,  former  IDF military intelligence chief.  The contrast between their positions on the Iran nuclear threat was most telling:

General (ret.) David Petraeus: The United States is war weary and suffers from a “Vietnam syndrome.” However, it still has major strategic capabilities, and President Obama will not hesitate to use force against Iran, if necessary.

Major General (ret.) Amos Yadlin: What keeps me awake at night is the Iranian issue. The Iranian nuclear program aspires to attain a nuclear capability. The only viable leverage – sanctions and a credible military threat – are weakening, and this is most worrisome. Also troubling: the status quo on the Palestinian issue is not favorable, and the relations with the United States are not on the same level as before – these must be restored.

If you are a gambler, which of the two former military leaders, would you bet on to make a decision in the sovereign national interests of Israel regarding a nuclear Iran?  I know who I would.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The New English Review.