Penetrating the Cabinets

IntroductionIn a 2017 talk at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, sat alongside the journalist David Gergen and described a recent reception he had attended for the new Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. What pleased Schwab, he explained, was that more than half of Trudeau’s cabinet had been trained through his organization’s leadership programs. He used a striking word for the achievement. The Forum, he said, had “penetrated” the cabinets. He went on to mention Argentina and France in similar terms.Schwab said this in public, on video, in front of an academic audience, and he said it as a matter of pride. The remark passed largely unnoticed at the time. It deserves more attention than it received, because the candor of that single sentence opens a door onto an institution and a project that have done more to reshape the governance of the Western world over the past five decades than any other private organization, and that have done so largely without the awareness or consent of the populations affected.The World Economic Forum is best understood not as a conspiracy, not as a mere networking club, and not as the sinister cabal its loudest critics imagine. It is something more interesting and, from a capitalist and libertarian perspective, more worrying. It is an institution that has spent five decades cultivating, networking, and ideologically shaping the international class of people who staff the senior reaches of Western governments, multilateral institutions, and large corporations. It has used that influence to advance a coherent project built around stakeholder capitalism, technocratic global governance, and the steady transfer of decisions from local and national levels upward to international bodies. The economic and political consequences of this project are now visible in Europe’s stagnation, the broader loss of dynamism across the West, the strange spectacle of Davos liberalism finding common cause with the Chinese Communist Party on questions of global management, and the gradual capture of the United Nations and the World Health Organization by the same managerial logic.This essay argues that the WEF’s project is not merely objectionable on ideological grounds but materially counterproductive. It has produced, and is producing, worse outcomes for the populations it claims to serve. The argument proceeds in six parts: the nature of the project, its intellectual lineage in mid-twentieth-century European corporatism, its consequences for Europe, its consequences for the broader West, its peculiar resonance with the governance model of the People’s Republic of China, and its growing influence over the United Nations system and the World Health Organization.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Nature of the ProjectThe WEF is built on three interlocking assumptions. The first is that the major problems facing humanity, including climate change, pandemics, technological disruption, inequality, and financial instability, are global in nature and therefore require coordination above the level of nation-states. The second is that this coordination is best conducted not through formal democratic processes, which are slow, parochial, and captured by short electoral cycles, but through cultivated networks of leaders drawn from business, government, civil society, and academia. The third is that private companies should be understood as instruments of public purpose. They should be accountable not only to their shareholders but to a broader set of “stakeholders” whose interests are defined and weighted by the leadership class itself.Each of these assumptions is contestable. Together, they constitute a worldview that overturns the classical liberal architecture of the West. That architecture rested on three premises that the WEF’s project denies in practice. The first is that political authority derives from the consent of the governed and is exercised through accountable national institutions. The second is that decisions should be made at the lowest level of organization competent to make them. This is the principle of subsidiarity, common to Catholic social teaching, classical liberalism, and federalist political theory. The third is that economic enterprise is most productive when firms are accountable to clear principals such as shareholders and owners, operating under the rule of law and the discipline of competition, with externalities addressed through narrow and targeted policy rather than through comprehensive managerial direction.The WEF’s mechanism for advancing its alternative is the cultivation of leaders. The Young Global Leaders program, founded in 1992 as Global Leaders for Tomorrow and renamed in 2004, has produced an alumni network spanning Western politics, finance, technology, and media. Schwab’s 2017 admission about “penetrating the cabinets” referred to this program directly. It is not a conspiracy. It operates in the open, with published lists of participants. But it is, indisputably, a structured effort to identify ambitious young people, immerse them in an international milieu, form them in a particular worldview, and equip them with the networks to advance. By the time a graduate of this program reaches a senior position as a minister, central banker, regulator, or chief executive, she has spent years in rooms where a particular consensus is the unmarked default. That consensus holds that markets must be steered, that climate action requires comprehensive regulation, that stakeholder frameworks should govern corporate behavior, and that the relevant scale of action is global.This is the deeper meaning of the old aristocratic principle ofnoblesse obligeapplied to the WEF. The aristocratic disposition holds that the cultivated few have both the capacity and the duty to decide for the many. The WEF’s leaders rarely state the proposition this baldly, but it is the operating logic of the institution: a stewardship of human affairs by those qualified to exercise it. From a libertarian perspective, this is precisely the disposition that constitutional government was designed to constrain. From a capitalist perspective, it is the disposition that produces the politicization of economic decisions and the substitution of managerial judgment for market discipline.The Corporatist InheritanceThe WEF’s worldview did not emerge from nowhere. It descends from a specific stream of mid-twentieth-century European thought that has not been honestly examined, in part because the discussion has long been distorted by the temptation either to overshoot into accusations of fascism or to refuse the discussion entirely on the grounds that any such examination must be in bad faith. The honest examination is more interesting than either of these dead ends, and it is necessary if the contemporary project is to be understood properly.The relevant tradition is corporatism. Corporatism is a theory of how a modern industrial economy should be organized, and it offers a third path between liberal capitalism and socialism. It holds that the economy is best managed not by markets disciplined by clear property rights and the rule of law, and not by state ownership and central planning, but by continuous negotiated coordination among representatives of capital, labor, and the political authority. Private property is permitted under corporatism. Markets are permitted to operate within bounds. But the bounds are extensive, the coordination is continuous, and the political authority retains ultimate power to define collective purposes and override market outcomes when they conflict with those purposes.Corporatism has multiple roots. Catholic social teaching, particularly in Leo XIII’sRerum Novarumof 1891 and Pius XI’sQuadragesimo Annoof 1931, developed a corporatist framework as an alternative to both liberal capitalism, which the Church saw as atomizing, and socialism, which it saw as atheistic and totalitarian. The Catholic version envisioned society organized into vocational corporations or guilds that would mediate between the individual and the state, with subsidiarity as a guiding principle. This was a genuinely conservative and decentralist vision, rooted in pre-industrial social forms and protective of intermediate institutions.Fascist corporatism, particularly in Mussolini’s Italy and to varying degrees in Salazar’s Portugal, Dollfuss’s Austria, and Franco’s Spain, took the corporatist vocabulary and inverted its substance. Where Catholic corporatism envisioned vocational associations as buffers against state power, fascist corporatism organized them as instruments of state power. The Italian Carta del Lavoro of 1927 and the subsequent corporative state structure assigned representatives of capital, labor, and the state to corporative bodies that managed entire economic sectors in the name of the nation. Class conflict was supposedly resolved through forced harmonization under state direction. Production was coordinated for collective ends. Mussolini’s famous formulation was that everything was within the state, nothing outside it, nothing against it.Fascist corporatism collapsed politically with the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, but the underlying political-economic ideas did not entirely disappear. They migrated, were rebranded, and survived in altered forms within several European intellectual traditions. The Vichy regime in France, the technocratic strands of postwar Christian Democracy in Italy and Germany, the dirigiste tradition in French economic policy, and the broader European corporatist consensus that produced the German co-determination system and the Scandinavian tripartite labor models all drew, in varying degrees, from this lineage. Most of these postwar developments were genuinely democratic and produced reasonable outcomes. They are not fascist. But they share with fascist corporatism a structural premise that liberal Anglo-American capitalism does not share. That premise is that the proper organization of the economy involves continuous negotiated coordination among representatives of capital, labor, and the state, with the political authority retaining ultimate power to define collective purposes.The WEF descends from this tradition. The descent is structural rather than ideological, and the distinction matters. The WEF is not a fascist organization. It does not promote ultranationalism, racial mythology, militarism, the leader-cult, or violent suppression of political opposition. It is internationalist where fascism was nationalist. It is non-violent where fascism was definitionally violent. It is technocratic where fascism was mythic. Its idiom is management consulting where fascism’s was political theology. Anyone calling the WEF fascist is engaged in rhetorical inflation that obscures rather than illuminates what the WEF actually is.But the structural features of the WEF are recognizably corporatist, and corporatism has a history that includes its fascist phase among others. Several specific observations support this.First, the WEF’s “stakeholder capitalism” is structurally a corporatist doctrine. It holds that the corporation should be managed not for shareholders but for a defined set of “stakeholders” whose interests are weighed by management under guidance from regulatory frameworks established by political authorities. This is recognizably the corporatist conception of the firm: private in form, social in purpose, with the social purpose defined externally rather than emerging from market interaction. The vocabulary of “stakeholders” replaces the older corporatist vocabulary of “estates” or “social partners,” but the structural relationship is similar.Second, the WEF’s organizational form mirrors corporatist institutional design. It convenes representatives of capital, labor, the state, and a fourth element of credentialed experts, civil society leaders, and cultural figures. These are brought together in continuous deliberation aimed at producing coordinated outcomes across sectors. This is structurally similar to the tripartite or quadripartite bodies envisioned by corporatist theory, scaled to the global level. The WEF is, in effect, an unofficial global corporative chamber.Third, the WEF’s intellectual genealogy runs through institutions that had genuine continuities with mid-century European corporatist thought. Schwab’s own formation occurred in postwar German engineering and management traditions that absorbed pre-war corporatist ideas through Christian Democracy, Catholic social teaching, and the German tradition ofSozialpartnerschaft, or social partnership. The 1971 founding of the WEF was explicitly conceived as a project to bring American management techniques into dialogue with European management traditions, the latter of which carried corporatist assumptions that the American tradition did not. The European Coal and Steel Community, founded in 1951 as the precursor to the European Union, was itself an exercise in supranational corporatist coordination of a strategic industry, and its institutional logic shaped the European integration project the WEF has consistently supported.Fourth, the WEF’s preferred policy mechanisms reproduce corporatist patterns. Public-private partnerships, multistakeholder governance, sustainable-finance taxonomies, and ESG frameworks all involve the coordination of private firms toward publicly defined ends, with the definition of those ends produced through deliberative bodies that include but are not limited to elected officials. The result is a system in which large firms operate within bounds set by an extended regulatory and quasi-regulatory apparatus, with the firms themselves participating in the design of those bounds. This is corporatism updated for the era of globalized finance, decarbonization, and digital regulation.The strongest version of this analysis is structural rather than historical. There are essentially three coherent ways to organize a modern industrial economy: through markets disciplined by clear property rights and the rule of law, through state ownership and central planning, or through coordinated negotiation among representatives of capital, labor, and political authority. Fascism was one historical instance of the third model, distinguished by ultranationalism, militarism, and racial ideology. Soviet-bloc socialism was an instance of the second. The classical liberal model has been most fully developed in the Anglo-American tradition. The WEF is best understood as the most ambitious corporatist project of our time, scaled to the global level and stripped of the nationalist and militarist features that discredited the mid-century version. This is a different ideology than fascism, and it produces different pathologies. But it is not the classical liberal model, and the failure of contemporary commentary to recognize what it actually is has allowed it to advance further than it would have if its lineage had been honestly named.The genuine warning contained in the comparison is this. The structural template the WEF operates from has been tried before, in various forms, and it tends to produce the substitution of managerial direction for both market discipline and democratic accountability. When that substitution is combined with ultranationalism and militarism, it produces fascism. When it is combined with proletarian ideology and state ownership, it produces socialism. When it is combined with internationalism and stakeholder rhetoric, it produces what the WEF has produced. The form itself is the danger. The varieties are the historical instances. The classical liberal alternative, with its insistence on dispersed power, clear accountability, market discipline, and the rule of law, is the only model that has consistently avoided the pathologies of all three.Consequences for EuropeEurope is where the WEF’s project has been most fully implemented and where its consequences are most visible. This is not a coincidence. Europe is the home of the corporatist tradition the WEF descends from, and European institutions have been culturally and intellectually receptive to WEF-style governance in ways that Anglo-American institutions have generally not been. The European Commission has been institutionally close to the WEF since the WEF’s founding event in 1971, which was held under the Commission’s formal patronage. Two of the last four Commission Presidents, José Manuel Barroso and Jean-Claude Juncker, were alumni of the WEF’s leadership pipeline. The current President, Ursula von der Leyen, has used Davos every year as a primary venue for previewing major Commission policy directions, often before they are formally introduced to Europe’s elected institutions. Across the European Council, a substantial fraction of national heads of government have been Young Global Leader alumni or regular Davos participants. The European political class is, to a degree unmatched anywhere else in the world, formed inside the WEF ecosystem.The policy consequences of this alignment are concrete. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, the EU Taxonomy Regulation, the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, the Green Deal, the Fit for 55 package, the AI Act, the Digital Services Act, and the Digital Markets Act together constitute a regulatory architecture that turns stakeholder-capitalist premises into binding law. Every one of these regimes presupposes that the Commission, or a body of regulators it designates, can specify in detail what counts as responsible commerce, responsible investment, responsible technology, and responsible speech. Every one of them imposes substantial compliance costs that fall hardest on new entrants and small firms while creating moats for large incumbents capable of absorbing them.The economic consequences are now undeniable. European productivity growth has badly lagged American productivity growth for two decades, and the gap is widening. Mario Draghi’s 2024 competitiveness report, commissioned by the Commission itself, identified regulatory complexity, fragmentation, and risk-aversion as central causes of the stagnation. The report called for an additional 750 to 800 billion euros in annual investment to close the gap. This is a sum the European fiscal architecture cannot raise and that, in any case, would be misallocated by the same regulatory framework that produced the gap. Energy-intensive German industry has begun a quiet but significant migration to the United States, where energy costs are a fraction of European levels. Northvolt, the flagship European battery producer that was meant to demonstrate that the green transition could produce European industrial champions, collapsed in 2024 despite enormous public and private backing. The continent that invented modern industry is, at present, struggling to produce a single major artificial intelligence laboratory, a single major consumer internet platform, or a single major cloud computing provider.The capitalist diagnosis of this situation is straightforward. Capital flows to its highest risk-adjusted return. When regulatory regimes raise the cost and risk of productive investment, capital goes elsewhere. When the political class defines sustainability in ways that bear only loose relation to economic productivity or even to environmental outcomes, capital is misdirected on a continental scale. When firms are required to dedicate substantial resources to producing reports for regulators rather than products for customers, the result is wasted effort compounded annually. When new entrants face higher regulatory thresholds than incumbents, innovation is suppressed. None of this is mysterious. It is the predictable consequence of a managerial project that mistakes itself for stewardship, and it is the same set of pathologies that previous corporatist experiments have produced in their own contexts.The deeper democratic problem is that this project is substantially insulated from electoral correction. The European Commission is not directly elected. National governments that wish to deregulate find themselves bound by directives whose origins they cannot trace and whose authors they cannot remove. The Draghi report itself, despite its blunt diagnosis, has produced no comprehensive deregulation. The Commission’s response has been to add a competitiveness overlay to the existing architecture rather than to dismantle it. The instinct of the institutions is to manage more skillfully rather than to manage less. This is what it looks like when the aristocratic stewardship principle meets bureaucratic permanence. The recognition that a project is failing produces calls for more sophisticated management, not for restraint.Consequences for the Broader WestWhat has happened in Europe is the leading edge of a pattern visible across the Western world, though in milder form elsewhere. The same WEF-formed leadership class staffs senior positions throughout Western governments and multilateral institutions. The same stakeholder-capitalist framework has been promoted, with varying success, in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan. The same regulatory templates, including ESG reporting, taxonomies of approved investment, supply chain due diligence, and content moderation requirements, have spread through international diffusion. The European Union’s “Brussels Effect” has exported European regulatory approaches to firms operating globally.The political reaction has been substantial and has reshaped the politics of every major Western democracy. Brexit, the rise of national-conservative governments across Europe, the realignment of the Republican Party in the United States, the surprising electoral salience of “globalism” as a contested term, and the rising vote share of skeptical parties from Sweden to the Netherlands to Italy are all, in various ways, reactions to the same phenomenon. The publics of Western democracies have begun to perceive, accurately, even when their preferred remedies are wrong, that they are governed by a class whose formation, networks, and assumptions are substantially international and only loosely accountable to national electorates.From a libertarian perspective, this is a profound failure of the liberal political settlement. Liberalism was supposed to constrain power by tying it to the consent of the governed and dispersing it across competing institutions. The international managerial class cultivated by the WEF has, without ever formally amending any constitution, substantially escaped these constraints. It does not rule openly. It shapes the menu of options that elected officials face, the worldview of the technocrats who staff their administrations, and the regulatory frameworks within which private actors must operate. The result is a system in which formal democratic institutions remain in place while substantive policy direction is set elsewhere, by people whom no electorate chose and whom no electorate can remove. This is, again, a recognizable corporatist pattern. Corporatism has historically preserved the forms of representative government while hollowing out their substance, replacing the contested politics of democratic deliberation with the managed deliberation of organized interests.The capitalist consequence is the gradual replacement of market discipline with managerial direction across an ever-widening range of economic activity. Capital allocation is steered by taxonomies. Corporate behavior is shaped by ESG ratings whose methodology is opaque and whose authors are unaccountable. Technological development is preemptively constrained by regulators projecting hypothetical harms. Financial flows are channeled toward politically approved purposes. Each individual measure may sound reasonable. Their cumulative effect is the slow strangulation of the self-organizing market system that produced Western prosperity in the first place.The Strange Resonance with ChinaThe most striking feature of the contemporary WEF, and the one that should most trouble anyone with classical liberal commitments, is the convergence of its governance model with that of the People’s Republic of China. This is a sensitive observation that requires careful framing, because the WEF’s defenders have legitimate grievances about how the comparison is sometimes made by populist critics. The Chinese Communist Party is not a Western institution. The WEF is not a Communist organization. They differ in fundamental ways, and pretending otherwise serves no one.But the underlying governance philosophies share more than is comfortable, and the corporatist framing helps explain why. Both hold that complex modern societies are best directed by a cultivated elite operating through coordinated institutions. Both treat private enterprise as an instrument of public purpose, with the public purpose defined by the leadership class. Both prefer technocratic management to electoral contest. Both emphasize stability, coordination, and the management of populations as legitimate ends of governance. Both view national sovereignty and democratic accountability as obstacles to be managed when they obstruct urgent collective action. The Chinese term for the model is “whole-process people’s democracy.” The Davos term is “stakeholder capitalism” or “multi-stakeholder governance.” The vocabularies differ. The structural disposition is recognizably similar, and it is recognizably corporatist in both cases. The Chinese system is a corporatist arrangement under one-party Leninist control. The WEF system is a corporatist arrangement under transnational technocratic coordination. The classical liberal tradition is the alternative to both.This is why the WEF’s relationship with the Chinese leadership has been so cordial across decades, and why Chinese officials are reliable Davos attendees and speakers. Xi Jinping’s 2017 Davos address, in which he positioned China as a defender of globalization against rising Western populism, was warmly received and is still cited approvingly in WEF publications. The forum’s “Annual Meeting of the New Champions,” held annually in China, has been a fixture of the WEF calendar since 2007. This is not because the WEF is a Communist organization. It is because the WEF and the Chinese state share a deep premise about the legitimacy and desirability of expert-managerial governance, and because each finds in the other a useful partner.From a libertarian perspective, this convergence is the most damning feature of the contemporary WEF. The classical liberal West understood itself as offering a fundamentally different model of social organization than the authoritarian alternatives. That model was rooted in individual liberty, dispersed power, market exchange, and political accountability. The WEF’s project blurs that distinction. It produces a Western governance model that increasingly resembles, in structure if not in severity, the Chinese model. The features in common include extensive elite coordination, comprehensive regulatory direction of private firms, stakeholder framings that license managerial discretion, and the substitution of expert judgment for democratic deliberation. The differences remain real. Western publics still vote, Western courts still constrain, and Western press still criticizes. But the trajectory is toward convergence rather than away from it.The capitalist consequence of this convergence is that the West is losing precisely the competitive advantage that produced its historic prosperity. That advantage was a system in which dispersed actors with property rights, contractual freedom, and access to capital markets could pursue novel ideas without seeking permission from a central authority. To the extent that the WEF’s project succeeds, the West’s economic dynamism declines while China’s continues. The contest of the twenty-first century is not, on this analysis, between two competing models of political economy. It is between two variations on a single theme of corporatist coordination by cultivated elites, in which China has structural advantages of scale, coherence, and ruthlessness.The Capture of the United NationsIf Europe represents the WEF’s most thorough success at the level of regional governance, the United Nations represents its most consequential success at the level of global governance. On June 13, 2019, UN Secretary-General António Guterres and Klaus Schwab signed a Strategic Partnership Framework between their two institutions at UN headquarters in New York. The agreement formalized a relationship that had been growing informally for years and committed the two organizations to coordinated action across six areas: financing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, climate change, health, digital cooperation, gender equality, and education.The significance of this agreement is easy to miss because the language is bureaucratic and the press coverage was minimal. But what it accomplished was historic. It gave the WEF, a private organization funded by roughly one thousand of the world’s largest corporations, a formal institutional partnership with the world’s only universal intergovernmental body. The UN agreed to invite the WEF’s leadership into its policy processes, to coordinate its communications with the WEF’s, and to use the WEF’s annual gatherings as venues for advancing UN priorities. In return, the WEF gained something it had been working toward for decades: a place inside the formal architecture of global governance.The reaction from civil society was immediate and damning. More than four hundred organizations and forty international networks signed an open letter calling on Guterres to terminate the agreement. The letter, organized by the Transnational Institute and others, charged that the agreement represented a “corporate capture” of the UN that would move global governance toward what the WEF calls “multistakeholderism” and away from what the UN Charter calls “multilateralism.” The distinction is critical and worth pausing on. Multilateralism is the system, established after the Second World War, in which sovereign states negotiate as equals through formal intergovernmental processes. Multistakeholderism is the alternative system the WEF has long advocated, in which states are merely one category of actor alongside corporations, foundations, and selected civil society organizations, all participating as equal “stakeholders” in governance processes.The shift from one to the other is not a technical adjustment. It is a fundamental change in the nature of global governance, and it is, once again, the corporatist pattern transposed to the international level. Under multilateralism, decisions are made by representatives of sovereign peoples and are at least nominally accountable to those peoples through their national political systems. Under multistakeholderism, decisions are made by an assembly of self-selected interested parties whose representativeness is asserted rather than demonstrated and whose accountability runs to no one in particular. From a classical liberal perspective, multistakeholderism is the global-governance equivalent of stakeholder capitalism: it dissolves clear lines of authority and accountability in favor of managerial discretion exercised by those who happen to be in the room.The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which the WEF-UN partnership was specifically designed to implement, illustrates the practical consequences. The seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by the UN in 2015, are unobjectionable in the abstract. They commit the international community to ending poverty, ensuring quality education, achieving gender equality, taking climate action, and so on. But the implementation framework for these goals, especially after the WEF partnership was signed, has increasingly relied on public-private partnerships, sustainable-finance taxonomies, ESG reporting standards, and other instruments that align the work of the UN with the priorities of the WEF’s corporate membership. The goals themselves become vehicles for the same managerial regulatory architecture that has produced European stagnation, now scaled to the global level and applied through an institution whose authority extends to every country on earth.From a capitalist perspective, the UN-WEF partnership is troubling for several reasons. First, it formalizes the role of large incumbent corporations in shaping the rules under which they will operate, which is the textbook definition of regulatory capture. Second, it does so at a level of governance from which there is no exit, since the UN system is global by definition. Third, it routes corporate influence through an institution that retains the legitimacy of state-based multilateralism while operating, increasingly, on stakeholder principles. The result is a system in which the largest corporations enjoy preferential access to global rule-making while small firms, new entrants, and the ordinary citizens of member states have no comparable channel.The democratic problems are even sharper. The 2030 Agenda was negotiated by member states and is, in that sense, intergovernmental. But the implementation architecture that has grown up around it through the WEF partnership was negotiated between two unelected executives, Guterres and Schwab, without any vote of the General Assembly. The civil society organizations that protested the agreement were correct to point out that this circumvented the very intergovernmental processes that give the UN whatever democratic legitimacy it possesses. A private organization representing the world’s largest corporations was given a permanent seat at the table of global governance through a memorandum of understanding signed by two men, with no formal consultation of the world’s peoples or even of the world’s governments.The World Health Organization and the Pandemic ArchitectureIf the UN partnership represents the WEF’s strategic success, its relationship with the World Health Organization represents its operational success. The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath produced a remarkable demonstration of how WEF-style governance operates in practice and how rapidly it can advance when crisis lowers the usual political resistance.The WEF and the WHO have been close institutional partners for years. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has been a regular and prominent speaker at Davos throughout his tenure. His January 2024 appearance, in which he warned of “Disease X” as the next inevitable pandemic and called for the rapid adoption of a binding international Pandemic Agreement, was conducted in close coordination with WEF programming. The forum’s session that year included the heads of major pharmaceutical companies, the editor of Politico Europe, and senior health officials from multiple governments. The framing was unmistakable: a future pandemic is coming, the response must be coordinated globally, and the instrument for that coordination is a legally binding agreement administered by the WHO.The Pandemic Agreement was eventually adopted by the World Health Assembly in May 2025, after three and a half years of negotiation. From the WEF’s perspective, this was a genuine institutional achievement. From a classical liberal perspective, it was a textbook case of how WEF-derived logic transforms a genuinely international problem into an instrument for expanding managerial governance. Several features of the agreement and its surrounding architecture are worth examining.The first is the explicit subordination of national interests to international coordination. Tedros stated repeatedly, in WEF-hosted settings, that “narrow national interest” should not stand in the way of pandemic response. From a public-health perspective there is something to this; pathogens do not respect borders, and uncoordinated responses can fail. But “narrow national interest” is also the polite term for the constitutional and democratic processes by which sovereign peoples decide how their governments will respond to crises. To frame these processes as obstacles to be overcome is to reframe the basic architecture of legitimate governance. It is to assert that public-health technocrats, working through international agreements, have a better claim to decide on lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and information policy than the elected governments accountable to the populations affected.The second is the entanglement of public health with information control. The Pandemic Agreement and its associated instruments include provisions for combating “misinformation” and “disinformation” during health emergencies. The WHO and the WEF have both treated these as essential components of pandemic response, on the theory that bad information undermines compliance with public-health measures. From a libertarian perspective, the problem is straightforward. The line between misinformation and dissenting opinion is not technical but political, and the entity authorized to draw the line acquires enormous power. The COVID-19 experience demonstrated this clearly. Claims that were treated as misinformation during the pandemic, including the lab-leak hypothesis, the limited efficacy of masks for general populations, and the substantial costs of school closures, are now treated as legitimate questions or established findings. The institutional infrastructure for suppressing dissent, however, remains in place and would be available for the next emergency.The third is the financing structure. The Pandemic Agreement and the broader pandemic-preparedness architecture rely heavily on public-private partnerships, multilateral development bank financing, and contributions from private foundations such as the Gates Foundation. The result is a system in which the same pharmaceutical companies that profit from vaccines and therapeutics are partners in designing the regulatory framework that determines their adoption, the public-health framing that drives demand, and the international agreements that constrain national governments from deviating from coordinated responses. From a capitalist perspective, this is not a market. It is a managed system in which the favored firms enjoy structural advantages no genuine market competitor can match. From a corporatist standpoint, it is the textbook arrangement: organized capital and organized state power coordinating the management of an entire economic sector under the legitimating frame of a collective purpose defined by the coordinating bodies themselves.The fourth is the precedent the pandemic response set for emergency governance more broadly. The COVID-19 experience demonstrated that under conditions of declared emergency, vast areas of ordinary life, including travel, commerce, education, religious worship, and political assembly, could be regulated by executive action coordinated through international bodies, with limited judicial review and limited democratic input. The WEF’s response to this experience was not concern about precedent but enthusiasm about possibility. The forum’s programming has consistently treated the pandemic as a model for responding to other “existential” challenges, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and information integrity. The implication is that the emergency posture, with its expanded powers and reduced accountability, should become a more permanent feature of governance rather than an exceptional measure to be rapidly unwound.From a capitalist and libertarian perspective, the WHO’s transformation under WEF influence is perhaps the most worrying single development of the past decade. The WHO is not just another international organization. Its directives, when given binding force through agreements like the Pandemic Agreement, can override national laws on questions that touch the most intimate aspects of human life: what enters the body, where one may travel, with whom one may associate, what one may say in public. To place these powers in an institution that is increasingly aligned with the WEF, increasingly dependent on private financing, and increasingly oriented toward emergency governance is to create a global health bureaucracy whose authority over individuals dwarfs that of any nation-state, while its accountability to those individuals is, in practice, nonexistent.The American withdrawal from the WHO under the second Trump administration, whatever its other merits or demerits, was at minimum a recognition that this trajectory required interruption. Whether the broader West will follow, or whether the institutions will simply consolidate their position with American absence, is among the most consequential questions in international politics today.The Path ForwardA capitalist and libertarian response to the WEF and its project does not require conspiracy theories, and it does not require accusations of fascism. The louder forms of populist critique have done genuine damage by mixing accurate observation with paranoid embellishment, and by reaching for the fascism comparison without doing the conceptual work to clarify what they actually mean. Schwab is not a Bond villain. The WEF is not secretly governing the world. The “Great Reset” is not a literal plan to abolish private property. The WEF is not a fascist organization, and saying that it is gives its defenders an easy way to dismiss the entire critique by associating it with its weakest exponents.The serious critique is structural and historical. It is that the WEF descends from a corporatist tradition of European political economy whose historical instances have included fascism but are not limited to fascism. It is that the contemporary WEF version of corporatism, scaled to the global level and stripped of nationalist and militarist features, reproduces the basic structural pathologies of the corporatist template even as it presents itself in progressive, internationalist, and technocratic terms. It is that an institution composed of the world’s largest corporations and most powerful officials, operating without democratic accountability, cultivating the leadership class of multiple democracies, formalizing its partnership with the United Nations, and shaping the international response to global health emergencies, is dangerous regardless of the intentions of its participants. It is that the cumulative effect of the project has been to suppress economic dynamism in Europe, to corrode political legitimacy across the West, to push Western governance into structural convergence with authoritarian alternatives, to reorient the United Nations away from intergovernmental multilateralism and toward corporate-influenced multistakeholderism, and to expand the World Health Organization’s authority in ways that lack any meaningful democratic check.The remedy is not the destruction of international cooperation, which remains genuinely necessary for genuinely international problems. The remedy is the recovery of the principles that the WEF’s project has eroded. These include subsidiarity in the location of decisions, accountability in the exercise of power, clear principals and remedies in the governance of firms, narrow and targeted policy in the addressing of externalities, the rule of law as a constraint on managerial discretion at every level, and the preservation of intergovernmental multilateralism as the legitimate mode of global cooperation among sovereign peoples. None of this is exotic. It is the inherited wisdom of the classical liberal tradition, recovered against an institutional project that has spent fifty years quietly displacing it.The institutional reforms this would require are substantial. They would include the renegotiation or termination of the UN-WEF Strategic Partnership Framework on the grounds that it was concluded without proper intergovernmental consultation. They would include a reassessment of the WHO’s expanded authority under the Pandemic Agreement, with attention to the constitutional and democratic implications of binding international health regulations. They would include the systematic reduction of European regulatory complexity along the lines Draghi identified, even at the cost of disrupting the careers of the technocrats who built the existing edifice. They would include the recovery of national policy discretion in areas the EU and other supranational bodies have absorbed without genuine subsidiarity analysis. And they would include greater transparency about the cultivation of political leadership through programs like Young Global Leaders, with attention to the implications for democratic representation when a substantial fraction of a country’s senior officials have been formed in the same private foundation’s training pipeline.Whether the West can recover these principles, given the depth of the WEF’s penetration of its leadership institutions and the inertia of the regulatory edifice already built, is the central political question of the coming decade. Europe in particular is the test case. If the continent that pioneered both the original corporatist tradition and the contemporary managerial project can pull back from it through deregulation, through the restoration of subsidiarity, and through the return of policy discretion to accountable national institutions, then the broader Western recovery becomes possible. If it cannot, the trajectory of the twenty-first century will be the slow drift of Western governance toward something closely resembling the Chinese model, administered through international institutions that retain the language of liberal multilateralism while operating on stakeholder-managerial principles.Schwab said in 2017 that his organization had penetrated the cabinets of Western governments. He was telling the truth, and he was telling it with pride. The serious response is neither to dismiss the remark as an awkward turn of phrase nor to inflate it into a confession of conspiracy. It is to take it at face value as the description of a project that has succeeded, to understand the intellectual tradition that project descends from, and to recognize the structural pathologies that tradition has produced wherever it has been tried. The structural template the WEF operates from has been tried before. When it was combined with ultranationalism and militarism in the mid-twentieth century, it produced the worst political catastrophes in human history. When it was combined with proletarian ideology and state ownership, it produced the second-worst. When it is combined with internationalism and stakeholder rhetoric, it produces what we are watching unfold today: economic stagnation, democratic erosion, and convergence with authoritarian alternatives. The form itself is the danger. The classical liberal alternative, with its insistence on dispersed power, clear accountability, market discipline, and the rule of law, is not just one option among several. It is the only model that has consistently avoided the pathologies of the others, and the only model under which modern prosperity has actually been produced and sustained at scale. Its survival is the stake of the present moment.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareBibliographyA Working Bibliography for Penetrating the CabinetsThe sources below are organized by the section of the essay they primarily support. Within each section they are arranged by document type — primary documents and official records first, then institutional and journalistic sources, then scholarly and theoretical works. The bibliography is selective rather than exhaustive. It identifies the materials a reader would need to verify the essay’s central factual claims and to pursue any of its analytical threads further.* * *Primary Documents and Direct StatementsThese are the original sources for the essay’s most important factual claims, including statements made by the principals themselves.Schwab, Klaus. Remarks at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, with David Gergen, in conversation about “Strengthening Collaboration in a Fractured World, Featuring Special Guest Yo-Yo Ma.” September 20, 2017. Video archived at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics; widely circulated excerpts available at the Internet Archive (archive.org/details/klaus-schwab-penetrate-cabinets). The “we penetrate the cabinets” remark and the discussion of Trudeau, Macron, Merkel, Putin, and the Argentine government as Young Global Leader alumni occur in this conversation.Schwab, Klaus, and Vanham, Peter.Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy that Works for Progress, People and Planet.Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2021. Schwab’s most extended statement of the doctrine the essay treats as central to the WEF’s project.Schwab, Klaus.The Fourth Industrial Revolution.Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2016. Schwab’s framing of the technological transformation that the WEF positions itself to manage.Schwab, Klaus, and Malleret, Thierry.COVID-19: The Great Reset.Geneva: Forum Publishing, 2020. The volume that gave the “Great Reset” framing its name and that became the focal point of much populist criticism.World Economic Forum.The Davos Manifesto 2020: The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2019. The updated formal articulation of stakeholder capitalism, building on the original 1971 Davos Manifesto.United Nations and World Economic Forum.Strategic Partnership Framework for the 2030 Agenda.Memorandum of Understanding signed by UN Secretary-General António Guterres and Klaus Schwab, June 13, 2019. Available through the WEF press archive (weforum.org/press/2019/06/world-economic-forum-and-un-sign-strategic-partnership-framework/) and on the UN photo archive.World Health Organization.WHO Pandemic Agreement.Adopted by the World Health Assembly, May 2025. The text and related documentation are available through the WHO Intergovernmental Negotiating Body archive.European Commission.The Future of European Competitiveness.Report by Mario Draghi. Brussels: European Commission, September 9, 2024. Available at commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-report_en. The 400-page report and its recommendations are the central documentary basis for the essay’s claims about European stagnation.European Commission.A Competitiveness Compass for the EU.Communication from the Commission. Brussels, January 29, 2025. The Commission’s formal response to the Draghi diagnosis.Letta, Enrico.Much More Than a Market: Speed, Security, Solidarity.Report on the future of the European single market commissioned by the European Council. Brussels, April 2024. The companion report to Draghi’s, often read alongside it.Civil Society Open Letter.End the United Nations–World Economic Forum Partnership Agreement.September 2019. Signed by more than 400 organizations and 40 international networks. Coordinated by the Transnational Institute. Available at tni.org/en/article/end-the-united-nations-world-economic-forum-partnership-agreement.Pius XI.Quadragesimo Anno(encyclical on the reconstruction of the social order). Vatican City: Holy See, May 15, 1931. The locus classicus for the modern formulation of subsidiarity in Catholic social teaching.Leo XIII.Rerum Novarum(encyclical on capital and labor). Vatican City: Holy See, May 15, 1891. The foundational document of modern Catholic social teaching and the corporatist alternative to liberal capitalism and socialism.Carta del Lavoro. Italian Fascist Grand Council, 1927. The foundational document of fascist corporatism, defining the corporative state and its principles of class harmonization under state direction.* * *On the World Economic Forum, Its Programs, and Its Influence OperationsWikipedia contributors. “World Economic Forum.”Wikipedia.Last revised May 2026. A useful starting point for the institutional history, including the 1971 founding under European Commission patronage.Wikipedia contributors. “Young Global Leaders.”Wikipedia.Last revised April 2026. Includes the program’s history, structure, and notable alumni.InfluenceWatch. “Young Global Leaders.” Capital Research Center. Available at influencewatch.org/organization/young-global-leaders/. A skeptical institutional profile, with documentation of the Schwab “penetration” remarks and the program’s funding sources.Swiss Policy Research. “The WEF Young Global Leaders.” Available at swprs.org/wef-young-global-leaders/. A detailed listing of alumni in European, North American, and Asian governments. Useful for confirming specific cabinet placements; should be cross-checked against the WEF’s own published lists.World Economic Forum.Young Global Leaders Annual Class Announcements,2005–2026. The WEF’s official lists of program participants, available year by year through weforum.org and through the Young Global Leaders Foundation site (younggloballeaders.org).Nussbaum, Bruce. “Young Global Leaders: The Most Exclusive Private Social Network in the World.”BusinessWeek,March 17, 2008. The contemporary journalistic profile that gave the program much of its current characterization.McKinsey & Company. “Young Global Leaders on Davos 2026.” McKinsey featured insights, December 2025. Available at mckinsey.com/featured-insights/world-economic-forum/young-global-leaders-on-davos. An example of how the YGL network operates in elite media coordination around Davos itself.* * *On the European Commission and the WEF RelationshipVon der Leyen, Ursula. Special addresses to the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, 2020 through 2026. Transcripts archived at weforum.org and at ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner. The 2024 address on disinformation, the 2025 address rolling out the Competitiveness Compass, and the 2026 address on European independence are the most relevant for the essay’s claims about the Commission’s use of Davos as a policy venue.Bebchuk, Lucian Arye, and Tallarita, Roberto. “The Illusory Promise of Stakeholder Governance.”Cornell Law Review106 (2020): 91–178. The most rigorous academic critique of stakeholder capitalism’s accountability problems.Ramaswamy, Vivek.Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.New York: Center Street, 2021. A critique of stakeholder capitalism from a capitalist and libertarian perspective. The book’s analytical claims about managerial discretion track closely with this essay’s treatment of the same subject.Friedman, Milton. “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.”The New York Times Magazine,September 13, 1970. The classical defense of shareholder primacy that stakeholder capitalism positions itself against.Bradford, Anu.The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. The authoritative academic treatment of the EU’s regulatory diffusion, which the essay invokes in discussing the WEF-aligned regulatory architecture’s spread beyond Europe.McCann, Philip, and Ortega-Argilés, Raquel. “The Draghi Report on the Future of European Competitiveness: Challenges of Participation, Engagement and Economic Geography.”Regional Studies,2026. A scholarly engagement with the Draghi report’s findings and limitations.European Policy Innovation Council.Draghi Observatory & Implementation Index.Brussels: EPIC, September 2025. The first systematic audit of how much of the Draghi agenda the EU has implemented; finds only 11.2% of recommendations fully adopted in the first year.Wolf, Martin. “Draghi Is Trying to Save Europe from Itself.”Financial Times,September 17, 2024. Wolf’s reading of the Draghi report as documenting an existential challenge to the European model.* * *On the WEF and the Chinese Communist Party ConvergenceXi, Jinping. “Jointly Shoulder Responsibility of Our Times, Promote Global Growth.” Keynote address at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, Davos. January 17, 2017. Available at weforum.org. The address in which Xi positioned China as a defender of globalization, warmly received by the Davos audience.World Economic Forum.Annual Meeting of the New Champions(sometimes called “Summer Davos”). Documentation of the WEF’s annual gathering held in China since 2007. weforum.org/events/annual-meeting-of-the-new-champions.Pieke, Frank N.Knowing China: A Twenty-First Century Guide.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. A balanced academic treatment of contemporary Chinese governance that helps situate the structural comparison the essay draws.McGregor, Richard.The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers.New York: Harper, 2010. An authoritative treatment of the structure of CCP rule, useful for understanding what the essay’s structural comparison does and does not claim.State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China.China: Democracy That Works.White Paper. Beijing: State Council, December 2021. The official articulation of “whole-process people’s democracy,” for direct comparison with WEF stakeholder rhetoric.* * *On the United Nations Capture ArgumentGleckman, Harris.Multistakeholder Governance and Democracy: A Global Challenge.London: Routledge, 2018. The most developed scholarly treatment of multistakeholder governance and its democratic implications. Gleckman, a former senior UN official, has been the principal academic critic of the WEF-UN partnership.Gleckman, Harris. “How the United Nations Is Quietly Being Turned into a Public-Private Partnership.” Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, July 2, 2019. The contemporaneous critique of the Strategic Partnership Framework by the academic best positioned to evaluate it.Transnational Institute.End the UN-WEF Partnership Agreement.Position paper and signature campaign documentation. Amsterdam: TNI, 2019–2020. The organizing documents for the civil society response, including the full text of the open letter.FIAN International. “WEF Takeover of UN Strongly Condemned.” Press release and analytical brief. Heidelberg: FIAN, January 2020. Available at fian.org. Documentation of civil society opposition from a different angle, with attention to food sovereignty and human rights implications.United Nations General Assembly.Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.Resolution A/RES/70/1, adopted September 25, 2015. The framework whose implementation the WEF-UN partnership was designed to coordinate.* * *On the World Health Organization and the Pandemic ArchitectureTedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Remarks at the World Economic Forum “Disease X” panel. Davos, January 17, 2024. Transcripts and coverage at pharmaceutical-technology.com and weforum.org. The “narrow national interest” formulation appears here.Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Opening remarks at Health@Davos at the World Economic Forum. Davos, January 21, 2026. Available at who.int/news-room/speeches. The Director-General’s framing of the Pandemic Agreement as a “generational achievement.”World Health Organization Intergovernmental Negotiating Body.Pandemic Agreement Negotiation Documentation,2022–2025. Available through the WHO website. Includes successive draft texts and the final adopted version.Bhattacharya, Jay, Kulldorff, Martin, and Gupta, Sunetra.The Great Barrington Declaration.American Institute for Economic Research, October 4, 2020. The dissenting public health document that became one of the principal cases of WHO-aligned information suppression during the pandemic.Hanage, William, et al. “Lab Leak Hypothesis.”NatureandSciencecommentary, 2020–2024. The trajectory by which the lab-leak hypothesis moved from “misinformation” to legitimate scientific question, illustrating the essay’s point about the political character of misinformation designations.Mazzucato, Mariana.The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths.London: Anthem Press, 2013. A defense of public-private coordination in technology and pharmaceutical development from a left-of-center perspective; useful as a counterweight to the essay’s libertarian framing.* * *On Corporatism, Subsidiarity, and the Intellectual LineageSchmitter, Philippe C. “Still the Century of Corporatism?”The Review of Politics36, no. 1 (1974): 85–131. The classic political-science treatment of corporatism as a system of interest representation distinct from pluralism, indispensable for the essay’s structural argument.Williamson, Peter J.Varieties of Corporatism: A Conceptual Discussion.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. A taxonomy of corporatist systems that helps distinguish fascist from non-fascist instances of the same structural template.Wiarda, Howard J.Corporatism and Comparative Politics: The Other Great “Ism.”Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996. Wiarda’s treatment of corporatism as a political-economic tradition with deep roots and continuing relevance, including its survival in postwar European institutions.Sternhell, Zeev.The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. The standard intellectual history of the development of fascist thought from earlier European traditions.Maier, Charles S.Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade After World War I.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. The classic history of how European corporatist arrangements emerged in the interwar period and the political-economic context from which fascism arose.Streeck, Wolfgang, and Kenworthy, Lane. “Theories of Institutional Change: Corporatism in the Twenty-First Century.” Cologne: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, 2005. A more recent academic treatment of how corporatist arrangements have evolved.Hayek, F. A.The Road to Serfdom.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944. The classical-liberal warning against managerial direction of the economy, against which the WEF’s project should be read.Hayek, F. A.The Constitution of Liberty.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. The mature statement of the classical-liberal alternative the essay invokes.Buchanan, James M., and Tullock, Gordon.The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy.Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962. The foundational text of public-choice theory, indispensable for understanding the regulatory-capture argument the essay applies to the UN-WEF partnership.Tocqueville, Alexis de.Democracy in America.Translated by Henry Reeve. 1835/1840. The locus classicus for the federalist and subsidiarist understanding of how dispersed authority sustains liberty and prevents the soft despotism of administrative centralization.Huntington, Samuel P. “Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite.”The National Interest75 (Spring 2004): 5–18. The essay introducing “Davos Man” as a sociological category and identifying the disconnection between transnational elites and national publics.Robinson, William I.A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. The fullest development of the “transnational capitalist class” framework from the academic left, which converges with parts of the essay’s analysis from a different starting point.Klein, Naomi.The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. A left critique of how crises are used to advance neoliberal restructuring; relevant background for the essay’s discussion of how the COVID-19 emergency was used to expand managerial governance.George, Susan.Shadow Sovereigns: How Global Corporations Are Seizing Power.Cambridge: Polity, 2015. A left analysis of corporate influence on global governance institutions that anticipates much of the WEF-UN partnership critique.Sklair, Leslie.The Transnational Capitalist Class.Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. The sociological framework for analyzing the elite class the WEF cultivates.Scruton, Roger.The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat.Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2002. The conservative philosophical critique of cosmopolitan elite governance, offering a different philosophical foundation than the libertarian one that animates this essay but reaching compatible conclusions.Deneen, Patrick J.Why Liberalism Failed.New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. A traditionalist critique of contemporary liberal-managerial governance that converges with parts of the essay’s argument from a non-libertarian direction.* * *A Note on SourcesThe essay’s argument rests on a combination of documentary primary sources (Schwab’s own statements, the texts of agreements, the Draghi report) and analytical work drawn from across the political spectrum. Where the essay makes specific factual claims — Schwab’s “penetration” remark, the dates and parties of the UN-WEF agreement, the contents of the Pandemic Agreement, the productivity-growth gap between Europe and the United States, the cabinet placements of YGL alumni — these can be verified through the primary documents listed above. Where it makes interpretive claims, the bibliography includes substantial work from libertarian, classical-liberal, conservative, and left perspectives, because the structural critique the essay develops draws on observations that have been made independently from each of these starting points. The convergence of left and right critiques on the structural problems with WEF-style governance, despite their disagreement on much else, is itself part of the essay’s argument and is reflected in the diversity of sources cited here.

Summary: How a Private Club in the Swiss Alps Came to Shape the Governments of the West


Sunday Strip: Rat Catchers Needed:

TRUE STORY:We need to take the people who can catch venomous snakes with their bare hands and turn them loose to catch infectious rodents.The alternate headline for this clip is that this is Bobby practicing the skills necessary to survive DC culture as Secretary of Health.Deja Vu!Every day that Kennedy remains Secretary of HHS is another Groundhog Day for Big Pharma!If Kamala or Newsom becomes president in 2028, this is how future outbreaks will be handled:The above meme is, of course, false.We all know that Senator Blumenthal served in the war in Ukraine.Be sure to thank Senator Blumenthal for his service!Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareJGM

Summary: Brain-eating viruses on the rise.


Champions of Change Baton Rouge: How Policy Really Gets Made

Jill and I have just returned from Baton Rouge, where I had the honor of speaking to the members of the New Louisiana Foundation and Health Freedom, Louisiana.  For those who were there, and any wishing to know what was said, I am providing the text of last night’s address below, following the introduction provided for themeeting announcement.Champions of Change Baton RougeHow Policy Really Gets MadeFeaturing Dr. Robert Malone & Noah WallFrom scientific authority to statehouse policy—discover how ideas move, who shapes them, and why it matters.Most people believe laws are written by elected officials. In reality, policy often begins long before a bill is filed—developed through networks of institutions, experts, and organizations that shape the ideas, language, and frameworks lawmakers rely on.At this special Baton Rouge event, you’ll hear from two speakers who illuminate this process from different—but deeply connected—angles.Dr. Robert Malone brings a scientist’s perspective on how expertise, authority, and public health decisions are translated into policy—raising critical questions about informed consent, medical ethics, and the balance between institutional power and individual rights.Noah Wall examines how policy is developed, packaged, and distributed across all 50 states—often moving in coordinated ways through trusted associations and professional networks.Together, they offer a rare look at how influence flows through modern governance and what that means for transparency, accountability, and ultimately, individual liberty. If you’ve ever wondered why the same ideas seem to appear in multiple states at once, or how complex policies move so quickly through the system, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.REMARKSFear, the Apparatus, and the Coalition That Said NoRobert W. Malone, MD, MSDecember 2021. Louisiana House Health and Welfare Committee. Some of you were there.Governor Edwards wanted to put the Pfizer shot on the K-12 mandatory list. Jeff Landry was the Attorney General then. He didn’t like it. He invited me and Bobby Kennedy down to testify against it.We did. That committee voted thirteen to two.That vote mattered. It happened here. And the Attorney General who set it up is now your Governor. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.Around that same time, Landry was filing Missouri v. Biden. The case about the federal government leaning on social media to silence people. People saying what Bobby and I were saying. Louisiana didn’t just push back politically. Louisiana sued. And won at the district court. The Supreme Court eventually narrowed it. But the record from that case is now part of the public history of what was actually happening between Washington and the social media companies during the pandemic.I haven’t forgotten any of that. I doubt you have either.That’s why I said it’s good to be back.One thing I want to do before I get into it. My wife Jill Glasspool-Malone is here tonight. Jill is my partner in everything I do, professionally and otherwise, and she is the co-author of both books that the talk tonight comes out of. Most of what you’ll hear from me tonight, Jill helped me think through. So when I say I, I usually mean we. - Jill, would you wave so people can see you.So. The organizers want me to talk about my own history. The mRNA work. How I ended up on the side of this I’m on now. I get why. Given what you sat through in 2021, that history is part of what I’m doing here. But if you’ll let me, I’d rather use the time on something else.MAHA. The “Make America Healthy Again” movement. Where it came from. Where it’s going. What it is, and what it isn’t.And I want to do it by way of a story that’s been in the news this week. Hantavirus. Because what’s going on right now with Hantavirus is the same thing that happened to us during COVID. Smaller scale. Same playbook.Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.One more thing. You’ll notice I’m reading from a laptop. Here’s why. I like to talk. If I don’t have something in front of me, we’re here all night. The people who put this together were very clear we needed to be done at a reasonable hour. So, the laptop is for you. Not me.Three parts tonight. Where MAHA came from. Where it’s headed. And the Hantavirus story, and what it tells you about the system MAHA was built against. A system that didn’t change just because the administration changed.The first two parts come out of work Jill and I have been doing for the book we just finished. It’s called “The Chronic Rebellion”. It comes out before the midterms. The third part comes out of work we did two years ago, in our last book, “PsyWar”.So you’re getting the connection between the two books tonight. Which is something I haven’t had a chance to lay out in this form before.PART ONE — Where MAHA Came FromLet me tell you what MAHA isn’t.It isn’t something Bobby Kennedy invented when he endorsed Trump. It isn’t the Means siblings, Casey and Calley, who you’ve seen on every podcast in the country. It isn’t the Health and Human Services Secretary, even though that’s the face on it now. And it isn’t a Washington operation.MAHA has been building for twenty years. Underneath everything else. You probably didn’t see it until it surfaced. But it was there.Who built it? Not who took it over. Who built it?Mothers. American mothers. Some grandmothers too.Their kids got sick in ways the pediatric establishment couldn’t explain and didn’t want to be asked about.Autism. Severe food allergies. Type 1 diabetes at four years old. Eczema head to toe on a baby. ADHD at seven, on stimulants through high school. Autoimmune conditions in kids who shouldn’t have autoimmune conditions. Chronic gut problems. Anxiety in middle school. Depression at nine.The chronic disease curve for American children used to be flat. It started going vertical in the nineties. It hasn’t come back down.Talk to any pediatrician who’s been practicing for thirty years. They’ll tell you the same thing. The patient mix in their office today does not look like the patient mix in their office in the early nineties. The volume of chronic conditions, the volume of allergies, the volume of behavioral and developmental issues — all of it is up. Not a little. A lot. And no one in the federal health establishment has a satisfying explanation for why. Or if they have one, they aren’t saying it out loud.What they say instead, when you push them, is that diagnostic criteria have changed. That we’re catching more of what was always there. That parents are more aware now. Maybe some of that is true. Some of it. But anyone who has actually been in pediatric practice across these decades knows that what they are seeing is not just a change in how they count. Something has changed in what they are counting.You see it. You see it in your own families. You see it at church. You see it in your grandkids’ classrooms.These mothers organized. Some around vaccines. Some around the food supply. Some around environmental toxins — and if you’ve driven that stretch of river between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, you know what I mean by environmental toxins. Some around pharmaceutical advertising aimed at their kids. Some around all of it.They had one thing in common. Their kids were getting sick. The institutions were telling them everything was fine. And they didn’t believe it.They weren’t credentialed. They weren’t rich. They weren’t Republican operatives. They weren’t Democratic operatives. They were just paying attention. To their own kids.For twenty years, the press treated this whole crowd as an embarrassment. Crunchy moms. Anti-vaxxers. Conspiracy theorists. If you knew anyone inside that world before 2020, you knew most of them were serious. A few weren’t. The press treated them all the same. Which was contempt.Then came COVID.And COVID gave the rest of America a four-year crash course in what those mothers had been saying for twenty years.Three feet. Six feet. Ten feet. Cloth masks. N95s. Back to cloth masks. The vaccine prevents transmission. Then it doesn’t. Then there’s a booster. Then another. Then a fourth one nobody wanted. The lab leak is a conspiracy theory. Then it’s the leading hypothesis. Kids are fine in school. Then schools have to close. Then we’re catastrophizing the learning loss the closures caused.The problem wasn’t that the science changed. Science changes. We learn things.The problem was the certainty. Every step of the way, somebody on television was certain. Every step of the way, the people asking questions were called dangerous. And when the certainty turned out to be wrong, nobody who had been certain had to answer for it.You were told something was true. Your eyes told you something else. You were told to trust the science. The science was changing every week. You were told that asking made you a bad person.You watched your kid fall behind. Your business close. Your mother die alone in a nursing home with nobody allowed to visit.You were told it was for your own good. And you were told that wondering whether it was for your own good was itself a public health emergency.Louisiana lived all of that. The closures. The mandates that didn’t apply equally. Schools shut for months while the big-box stores stayed open. Hospitals turning away ivermectin scripts. Pharmacists in this state losing their licenses for filling them.MAHA is what happened when the people who’d been getting that treatment for twenty years met the people who just got it for four. And they figured out they were the same people.That’s where it came from. That’s who built it.Now. The part I told you I’d be honest about.The base of this movement is mothers. The top of every MAHA organization built since 2023 is almost entirely men.The founding chief operating officer of the main MAHA political organization was a woman. She left last year to start her own firm. Mary Holland runs Children’s Health Defense. Mary will tell you herself, and she’s told me, that CHD is not MAHA. CHD is the older medical-freedom outfit that MAHA bolted onto. Not the other way around.So we’ve got a movement the mothers built, and a top leadership that’s mostly men.That happens. There’s a name for it. Founder displacement. It’s what happens to populist movements as they get organized. The people who built the thing at the kitchen table get replaced by the people who can navigate the paperwork.The men running these organizations are good men. I’ll defend them. But here’s the truth. If MAHA forgets who built it, MAHA is done. The base isn’t going to keep showing up for something that’s become something else. Watch it. If you don’t see it being addressed, say so. To the people in this room who work in those organizations. To the donors. To Bobby. To me.I’m sharing this because if I only talk about the good parts, you shouldn’t believe me about the rest.PART TWO — Where This Is HeadedWhere is this going. Quick version. Because I could go on, and you know what happens then.American populist movements have a track record. Most of them don’t last as the original group. The ones that succeed leave something behind.Moral Majority. 1979. Gone as an organization decades ago. But Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom — those are still running. Forty-five years later. Still shaping the country. That’s success.Tea Party. 2009. Gone by 2016. But FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, Heritage Action, the House Freedom Caucus — still running. That’s a partial success.Ross Perot. 1992. Nineteen percent of the vote. Built nothing that lasted. Reform Party dead within a few years. That’s failure.The difference? The successful ones built institutions that outlived the founder. The ones that failed didn’t.So which one is MAHA going to be?Here’s what I see. At eighteen months, MAHA has built more than the Tea Party had at the same point. Less than Moral Majority had. The organizations exist. The policy work exists. State-level operations are real, and growing.The cultural footprint is real. Ninety percent of Americans say they’re worried about ultra-processed food in their kids’ diets. That isn’t partisan. That’s a country that woke up. That isn’t going back.So the food side of this — the dyes, SNAP reform, school lunch, whole milk back in schools — that’s locked in. Whatever happens in 2026 or 2028, the food fight is already won at the cultural level. It will outlast any one administration.The vaccine and pharmaceutical side is harder. It’s earlier. It’s more contested. It will live or die based on whether the institutions Bobby and the team are building now survive the next transition out of power. They probably will survive. With losses.Here’s what I want this audience to hear in particular.This coalition came together because people from across the political map were getting the same treatment from the same institutions.Christian conservatives in rural Louisiana watching their grandkids deal with food allergies that didn’t exist a generation ago. Libertarians watching the FDA dance with pharma. Organic-food people in California who voted for Bernie Sanders. Hasidic communities in upstate New York. Black mothers in South Los Angeles whose sons developed asthma. Hispanic mothers in Texas whose kids had conditions their grandmothers had never seen.That coalition holds if it stays a movement. It falls apart the day it becomes the health wing of any one party.Because the people who built it didn’t get into this to pick a team. Their kids were sick. The institutions weren’t listening. That’s it.One more thing on this part, because it touches Louisiana directly.The big case right now is American Academy of Pediatrics versus Kennedy. The case challenging Bobby’s decision to cut the pediatric vaccine schedule from seventeen vaccines to eleven. That case is in Massachusetts. The appeal is in the First Circuit, in Boston. So Louisiana is not the courtroom.But Louisiana has Senator Bill Cassidy. Who chairs the committee that oversees HHS. Whose vote was the deciding vote on Bobby’s confirmation. Cassidy attached conditions to that vote. There’s a real fight playing out right now over whether those conditions are being honored.And Cassidy is up in 2026. And he is being challenged in the primaries right here.Cassidy did vote to confirm Bobby. He spent the months before the confirmation extracting commitments. Commitments about which vaccines would be reviewed, how the review would happen, what the public would be told. Then he cast the deciding vote. Then he watched what came next, while working closely with the newly created mRNA vaccine lobby. Cassidy has relationships with the vaccine manufacturers while also influencing vaccine policy. Some of the commitments he extracted have been kept. Some haven’t. There is a fight inside the Senate Republican caucus right now about whether Cassidy was right to take the deal he took, and whether what came out of HHS afterward honored the deal.That fight is not theoretical. It will play out in your primary.Draw your own conclusions about what that means. But Louisiana has more leverage on this whole thing than most states. Watch your primary.PART THREE — The Hantavirus MomentNow the part I really wanted to get to. Hantavirus.If you’ve watched the news the last two weeks, you’ve seen it. Cable. Wires. New York Times. Washington Post. Coverage of Hantavirus cases. If you watched it without context, you’d think half the country was about to die in a cloud of mouse droppings from the HVAC at Tractor Supply.That isn’t what’s happening.Hantavirus is real. It can be serious. There are cases. Rodent control around homes and barns matters. Parts of the Gulf Coast, including parts of this state, see cases. Nobody serious is arguing otherwise.But Hantavirus in this country is rare. Specific regions. Specific exposure situations. The CDC has thirty years of data on it. Known disease. Known footprint.So why is it suddenly everywhere?Watch the words. Every headline uses the word “could.” Could spread. Could mutate. Could get worse. Technically true. Almost anything in biology could happen. But that’s not how the public hears it. The public hears “could” as “will.”That gap — between what’s technically possible and what the language makes you feel — that gap is the entire trick.Jill and I published a piece on this just today in our Substack, Malone.News. We called it by the name it has in the academic literature.Psychological bioterrorism.I know that’s a strong phrase. So let me tell you where it comes from. Because if I’m going to use it, you deserve to know it’s not something I made up.Alexander Kouzminov. Former Soviet intelligence officer. Worked in biological espionage and biosecurity. In 2017, in published academic work, he laid out how fear of disease gets used as a weapon. Not just by foreign adversaries. Sometimes by institutional actors inside a country. Using fear of disease to move public behavior, shape government decisions, and make money or expand authority along the way.He named it. He documented it. He warned that Western governments had stopped recognizing when it was being used on their own people.This is not a conspiracy theory. Jill and I wrote about it at length in PsyWar two years ago.Psychological bioterrorism. Using fear of disease to manipulate people, populations, markets, and governments. Sometimes the goal is political. Sometimes financial. Sometimes bureaucratic — keeping agencies funded, keeping budgets up, keeping the power consolidated. Often all three at once.Now here’s what I need you to understand. I am not telling you every public health official is a bad person. I am not telling you every reporter covering this story is a propagandist. That’s not how it works.It works because the system is set up to reward fear and punish proportionality. Once those incentives are in place, the output comes out the same whether the people inside are good or bad. Most of them are decent people. They don’t have to be malicious. They just have to be doing their jobs inside a machine that rewards them for amplifying fear.Here’s the pattern. Watch for it. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.One. A pathogen shows up somewhere. Maybe it’s real. Maybe it’s old news repackaged as new. Maybe it’s a case count that would have made the local paper and nothing more in a non-election year.Two. The coverage goes apocalyptic. Experts on TV predicting catastrophe. Computer models projecting millions dead under specific worst-case assumptions. The hedging language gets buried in paragraph three.Three. Politicians declare emergencies. Pharma companies announce new products. Federal agencies expand their authority and their budgets.Four. Social media catches fire. “We must act now” appears in every editorial within forty-eight hours.Five. And this is the step most people miss. The pathogen drops out of the news within weeks. The expanded authorities don’t.Six. The cycle resets with a different disease, a different season. And we do it again.And here’s the thing about that pattern. Every step is profitable for somebody. Cable news ratings spike. Pharma stocks move. Federal agency budgets grow. Politicians get to be seen taking action. Editorial pages get easy material. Everybody who runs the cycle wins. The only people who lose are the ones being told to be afraid. Which is to say, the rest of us.We lived this at full scale during COVID. We’re still living with the consequences.Think about the receipts.Two weeks to flatten the curve. Remember that? March 2020. Two weeks. By summer 2020 it was a year. By the second summer it was two years. Nobody who said two weeks ever apologized for what those two weeks turned into.The vaccine prevents transmission. Nobody who said that ever apologized when it didn’t prevent transmission.The lab leak is racist disinformation. Nobody who said that ever apologized when our own intelligence agencies said the lab leak was the most likely origin.Schools have to close. Nobody who said that ever apologized when the data showed it cost a generation of American children months and years of learning they’re still trying to make up.That’s not a parade of mistakes. That’s a system. A system that doesn’t self-correct. A system that absorbs new information without ever reckoning with the old. A system that punishes the people who were right early and protects the people who were wrong loudly.And that same system is still running. That’s the part you have to understand.You see it in the agencies. The people who ran the COVID response are still mostly the same people. Different titles in some cases. Same people. You see it in the journals. The peer review networks that suppressed dissenting research during the pandemic are still running peer review. You see it in the press. The reporters who treated the lab leak as racist disinformation in 2020 are now the reporters covering Bobby’s tenure at HHS. And they are using the same playbook on him that they used on the rest of us.The system has muscle memory. The system has incentives. The system has institutional habits that were built over decades and that do not change overnight just because the boss changed. And now the system has artificial intelligence and Wikipedia.Hantavirus right now is a smaller version of the same script. So was avian flu. So was Mpox. So was the measles cluster in West Texas earlier this year — two pediatric deaths, lots of coverage, very little proportionality.None of these run at COVID scale. That’s not the point. The point is what the cycles do over time. Each one trains you. Each one expands the apparatus. Each one makes the population a little more anxious. A little more dependent. A little less able to tell real risk from manufactured panic.Fear scales faster than facts.Here is where this comes back to MAHA.MAHA is the people who stopped accepting that cycle as legitimate. Not because they’re anti-science. Not because they’re anti-vaccine. Not because they’re against public health. Because they watched the system run that cycle for twenty years, or four years, and produce harms the system could not admit to and could not fix.Their kids’ autism rates kept climbing. The system said it wasn’t connected to anything. Their kids’ food allergies kept climbing. The system said it wasn’t connected to anything. Two weeks turned into two years. The supposedly transmission-blocking vaccines didn’t block transmission. And every time anyone pointed at any of it, the system said they were a public health threat.That’s what built MAHA. The system didn’t produce MAHA by doing its job well. The system produced MAHA by failing in ways it couldn’t acknowledge. And by treating the people who noticed as enemies.Now here’s the hard part.That same system is the one running the Hantavirus fear cycle right now. With a MAHA Secretary in office. With Jay Battacharia, acting CDC director doing what he can to apply the brakes. The system didn’t change just because Bobby is in charge of the building. The career staff is the same. The journals are the same. The pharma money flows the same. The press infrastructure is the same.Bobby cannot fix all of it in four years. Nobody could. And anyone who tells you he can is selling you something.So, if MAHA’s measure of success is whether Bobby fixes the system in his term, MAHA loses. That can’t be the measure.The measure has to be whether the people who built this stay harder to manipulate after the political moment passes. Whether the next time a Hantavirus story shows up, or the next pathogen lands in the news cycle, the audience of Americans who automatically reach for the panic button has gotten smaller. Whether enough people in enough places have learned to read the signals and ask the questions. So that the next time the system tries to run the play, it doesn’t work as well.That’s a long fight. It’s not a four-year fight. And it doesn’t depend on Bobby. It depends on you. On me. On the parents and grandparents and pediatricians and pharmacists and small-town doctors who keep paying attention.CLOSINGLet me close with this.Louisiana has a long history with being told by Washington what’s good for you. Levees that weren’t enough. Water that wasn’t safe. Chemical plants in your parishes that nobody in a federal office building wanted to look at too closely. You’ve been told a lot of things by people in suits from D.C. The last fifty years have not been kind to the people in suits.That experience is the same experience that built MAHA. Different topic. Same pattern. The institutions tell you something. Your eyes tell you something else. Too often, your eyes were right.The lesson is the same. Don’t be fearless. Fearless is foolish. Some things are real.Be harder to manipulate.Next time the headline lands, ask four things. Who benefits from me being scared right now? What’s the actual evidence? What part is known and what part is speculation? Am I being asked to respond to a real risk, or to the way the risk has been packaged?That last question is the one most people don’t ask. Because most people don’t separate the underlying risk from the way it’s been wrapped for them. The risk and the packaging show up together, in the same headline, in the same news segment, in the same conversation. Most people just take the package. The discipline is to pull them apart. The risk is one thing. The packaging is another. The packaging usually tells you something about who’s doing the packaging. Pay attention to that. It will tell you most of what you need to know.Those questions aren’t radical. They aren’t partisan. They are what free people ask. They are what the apparatus would prefer you didn’t ask. And if enough Americans ask them, consistently, for the next decade, that is the difference between a MAHA that fades and a MAHA that lasts.The mothers who built this coalition asked those questions for twenty years before the rest of us caught up. Some of them were in Louisiana. Some of them are in this room tonight.The least we can do is keep asking them ourselves.One last word. Everything I said tonight reflects work Jill and I have done together over the last several years. I am the one at this microphone tonight, but the analysis behind what I just told you is as much hers as mine. I want you to know that. And I want her to know I know it.Thank you. I’m glad to take your questions.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.Share

Summary: Text of address to The New Louisiana Foundation and Health Freedom Louisiana


Friday Funnies: They're here!

Yep - it is real…Breaking News: Trump has finally made good on his promise to release at least some of the UFO files.  With more releases yet to come!Today, the Department of War announced the initial release of new, never-before-seen files on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). This interagency effort includes The White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Department of Energy (DOE), the DOW’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and additional components of U.S. intelligence agencies. The collection will be housed onWAR.GOV/UFOand additional files will be released by the Department of War on a rolling basis…WAR.GOV/UFOis a dedicated Department of War webpage to stay up to date with the latest UAP file releases.For those on X, there is more information about the releaseshere.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareYour odds of being struck by lightning are more than seven times greater than your odds of contracting Hantavirus in the USA.About 250 people get struck by lightning each year.There are about 35 cases of Hantavirus per year in the USA, with an average of 12 deaths per year.Honestly, why don’t we have a vaccine against lightning strikes yet?You thought falsies were a girls thing?Not anymore!Yep- you know it is real, when it is sold on Amazon!If you can’t afford man falsies, there is always the DIY project!Time to end the ACA, and the insurance scam that has raised costs through the roof - and get back to the basics of health care.Time for independent physicians and medical practitioners to become mainstream again.Enough of this failed social experiment.More drone warfare:On May 8, ten years ago, Scott Adams published the comic below.The man was pure genius!Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Well, I am about to go peruse a certain set of government webpages -Have a great day folks!JGM

Summary: WAR.GOV/UFO