They will try to become a behind-the-scenes power player once again after Schwab’s rule has ended. It is our job to not let that happen.
The leader and founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, is leaving his executive role and transitioning to a “non-executive chairman role” in 2025.
The truth is that Børge Brende, president of the World Economic Forum, already leads the day-to-day operations. Mr. Brende is a smart, sophisticated Norwegian negotiator with a proven track record, and he is primed to take on an even bigger role in the organization. His involvement in the Bilderberg meetings, including service on their steering committee and various roles within the United Nations, including Chairman of the U.N. Commission of Sustainable Development (2003-04), attest to his ability to build power and influence. He is the natural successor to Klaus’s vaulted title of executive chairman.
Schwab is an excellent cut-out villain cartoon character with his Germanic, authoritarian, and overbearing demeanor. He comes across as a two-dimensional figure, driven by corporatism and power, which makes him an easy target to hate. But the truth is that he has been co-opting and coercing national leaders for decades.
The Malone Institute put together a list of all the WEF Young Leaders Graduates and a list of U.S. politicians who are graduates of the five-year long young leaders program, which can be found here.
Without Schwab at the helm, it will be harder to hold the WEF accountable for its corporatist agenda, that is, a corporate governance of world affairs driven by its globalist mindset.
I predict that under Brende, the WEF will try to garner more power and influence among the “middle powers” (smaller nation-states), as the ability for more regulatory capture within the superpowers is already maxed out. As the middle powers crave a bigger and more important role on the world stage, they are an easy target for the WEF transnational corporations.
Already, the WEF website is courting these players as the next wave of world leaders. The WEF website states: “middle powers and regional groupings are emerging as alternative axes in today’s multipolar world.” By aligning these middle powers with the WEF, the corporatists will increase their wealth and power.
Some of the recent WEF articles on “middle powers” include:
Furthermore, I believe that in the future, the WEF will work to downplay the Davos-man opulent parties, opting instead for more exclusive and private venues – where the press isn’t invited, as is the case with the Bilderberg meetings. The WEF leadership knows that they have a PR problem with the populist (center-right, libertarian, and conservative parties) throughout the world, and Brende will act quickly to try to fix this. It will require a public relations overhaul of Klaus Schwab’s flagship policy agenda, which the WEF calls stakeholder capitalism. This, of course, is just another word for corporatism, whereby there is a fusion of the unelected global leadership and transnational corporations in order for the largest corporations in the world access to enough power to rule the world. For our own good, of course!
The World Economic Forum is a tool for corporate globalists to rule the world through inverse totalitarianism. In effect, our nation, as well as many other nation-states, have been turned upside down while being captured by corporate interests that endorse authoritarian policies – hence “inverted totalitarianism.”
Here we are today. In many ways, the hidden head of this unelected corporatist government structure is now the leadership of the World Economic Forum. This is where the heads of corporations, politicians, and other wealthy elites meet to decide the governing decisions of the world. A trade union of the thousand largest corporations in the world.
Resistance has begun, which is what makes the WEF so scared and defensive. That is why the WEF will have a facelift as soon as Schwab’s rule has ended. The WEF will try to become a behind-the-scenes power player once again. The hand inside the glove. It is our job to not let that happen.
This is why government, corporate interests, and “mainstream” media find alternate social media platforms that they can’t control to be so threatening. They know social media, and the populist parties associated with it, are a threat to the corporatist globalist structure they have built over decades. They are worried that it is in danger of crumbling.
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US Vice President JD Vance criticized the European Union this week after rumors reportedly surfaced that Brussels may seek to punish X for refusing to remove certain online speech.
In a post on X, Vance wrote, “Rumors swirling that the EU commission will fine X hundreds of millions of dollars for not engaging in censorship. The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage.”
His remarks reflect growing tension between the United States and the EU over the future of online speech and the expanding role of governments in dictating what can be said on global digital platforms.
Vance was likely referring to rumors that Brussels intends to impose massive penalties under the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a censorship framework that requires major platforms to delete what regulators define as “illegal” or “harmful” speech, with violations punishable by fines up to six percent of global annual revenue.
For Vance, this development fits a pattern he’s been warning about since the spring.
In a May 2025 interview, he cautioned that “The kind of social media censorship that we’ve seen in Western Europe, it will and in some ways, it already has, made its way to the United States. That was the story of the Biden administration silencing people on social media.”
He added, “We’re going to be very protective of American interests when it comes to things like social media regulation. We want to promote free speech. We don’t want our European friends telling social media companies that they have to silence Christians or silence conservatives.”
Yet while the Vice President points to Europe as the source of the problem, a similar agenda is also advancing in Washington under the banner of “protecting children online.”
This week’s congressional hearing on that subject opened in the usual way: familiar talking points, bipartisan outrage, and the recurring claim that online censorship is necessary for safety.
The House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade convened to promote a bundle of bills collectively branded as the “Kids Online Safety Package.”
The session, titled “Legislative Solutions to Protect Children and Teens Online,” quickly turned into a competition over who could endorse broader surveillance and moderation powers with the most moral conviction.
Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) opened the hearing by pledging that the bills were “mindful of the Constitution’s protections for free speech,” before conceding that “laws with good intentions have been struck down for violating the First Amendment.”
Despite that admission, lawmakers from both parties pressed ahead with proposals requiring digital ID age verification systems, platform-level content filters, and expanded government authority to police online spaces; all similar to the EU’s DSA censorship law.
Vance has cautioned that these measures, however well-intentioned, mark a deeper ideological divide. “It’s not that we are not friends,” he said earlier this year, “but there’re gonna have some disagreements you didn’t see 10 years ago.”
That divide is now visible on both sides of the Atlantic: a shared willingness among policymakers to restrict speech for perceived social benefit, and a shrinking space for those who argue that freedom itself is the safeguard worth protecting.
Frances Widdowson, a former colleague professor at Mount Royal University, was arrested this past week on the University of Victoria campus. Her offence? Walking, conversing, and asking questions on a university campus. She was not carrying a megaphone, making threats, organizing a protest, or waving foreign flags. She was planning quietly to discuss, with whoever wished it, a widespread claim that has curiously evaded forensic scrutiny in Canada for five years: that the remains of 215 Indigenous children lie beneath the grounds of the former Kamloops Residential School.
UVic Campus security did not treat her as a scholar. Nor even as a citizen. They treated her as a contaminating source.
The director of security, a woman more reminiscent of a diversity consultant than a peace officer, almost shaking, presented Widdowson with papers and told her to vacate “the property.” When Widdowson questioned the order, citing her Charter rights and the university’s public nature, she was told to leave. She refused, and she was arrested. No force, no defiance, only a refusal to concede that inquiry is trespass.
Widdowson is no provocateur in the modern sense. She is not a shock-jock in a cardigan. She is a once-tenured academic with a long record of challenging orthodoxies in Indigenous policy, identity politics, and campus culture.
In 2008, she co-authored Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry, a book that deconstructed the bureaucratic machinery that profits from preserving Indigenous dependency. The book was methodical, sourced, and daring enough to be labelled heretical in some quarters, but simultaneously boringly Marxist materialistic.
Her arguments have made people uncomfortable for a long time. When I assigned her book to my political science students in the Department of Policy Studies, where Frances also taught, I was summoned by the department head’s office. Someone in my class complained about the book, though I ignored what was said, and the technocratic colleague, as chair of the department, had prepared a host of arguments to chastise me for assigning the book.
Widdowson was good enough to be hired as a colleague of that department, but they were all afraid of her ideas, and perhaps her manner. I have often wondered if the folks in the Mount Royal hiring committee had bothered to read her book. Hey, they had a female Marxist applying for a teaching job. Knowing how they operate makes me think they made giant assumptions about Frances.
My bureaucratic colleague relented. I got the impression that the department head was putting on a show, going through motions he didn’t want to engage in, but which he had to perform for administrative purposes. He had to act on the complaint, though the complaint had no substance. He tried to tell me that the ideas in the book might offend some students, and then went on with the typical dribble about being caring, but agreed that protecting feelings was not the objective of an education, nor the job of a professor.
I went to my campus office after the conversation with the department head, typed up a memo detailing our discussion, and emailed it to him to ensure there was a record of my viewpoint. The email got no response. He never mentioned it again, and to this day, 15 or 16 years later, we still haven’t spoken about it.
Some academic arguments are meant to shake things up. That is the purpose of scholarship: to stir the sediment of consensus. To challenge conventional views. Marxist or no, scholars are supposed to push the envelope. Expand the boundaries of our understanding. But in today’s academic culture, discomfort is treated as injury and dissent as violence. So, Widdowson was treated as a threat merely by walking and speaking.
Was the university within its legal rights to remove her? Possibly. Universities can invoke property rights, ironically in Cowichan territory, and provincial legislation sometimes grants them a curious status: publicly funded yet selectively private. But the question is not merely legal. It is cultural and constitutional.
The University of Victoria is a publicly funded institution, governed under provincial authority and subsidized by taxpayers. Its grounds, though some claim they are on unceded Indigenous territory, are functionally administered by the Crown. The university is not a monastery. While it is not a temple to be kept free of doubt, it is not a temple to be torched either. It is a civic institution. An institution of higher learning. When it uses its resources to shield ideology and expel dissenters, it forfeits its academic character.
Consider the contrast. On this same campus, as on many others across the country, protests have called for the destruction of Israel and the extermination of Jews. Banners are waved, slogans chanted, and genocidal euphemisms like “from the river to the sea” are uttered without hesitation. These demonstrations, some of which praise Hamas or glorify martyrdom, proceed unimpeded. Security stands down. The administration issues boilerplate statements about inclusion and respect.
But when a female academic arrives to ask whether the number “215” refers to actual remains or mere radar anomalies, she is marched off by police. The imbalance is not accidental. It is a product of institutional capture.
Contemporary universities have adopted a new moral vocabulary. Terms like “safety,” “inclusion,” and “harm” are now treated as constitutional categories. But their terms are undefined, fluid, shaped by ideology rather than principle. “Safety” no longer refers to bodily security, but has become an emotional preference. “Inclusion” does not mean openness to different ideas and people, but a validation of specific identities. “Harm” is not an act, but a feeling.
Under this logic, Widdowson’s presence becomes a form of injury. Her questions are recast as wounds. And because feelings have been elevated to rights, her removal becomes a public good.
This ideology has structure. It is not random. It rests on a model of revolutionary politics in which dissent must not be part of the conversation. A differing opinion is an obstacle to be cleared. The new inclusivity has become a form of exclusion. It uses the language of welcome to police belief, and the rhetoric of tolerance to enforce conformity.
Charter rights were once the guardrails of public life. They are not supposed to vanish down the rabbit holes when one steps onto that university lawn. The right to free expression, to peaceful assembly, and to enter public space are not conditional on popularity. They are not subject to the feelings of a security director or the preferences of a DEI office.
Widdowson is testing this principle. She did not resist arrest, nor did she make a spectacle of herself. She acted as a citizen asserting a constitutional right. The courts may eventually rule on whether her rights were infringed. But the deeper issue is already visible.
If our public institutions can exile peaceful critics while accommodating radical political agitators who cheer for foreign terror movements, we are not in a neutral society. We are in an elite-managed consensus.
This consensus is enforced by policy. It does not need debate. The consensus managers already know what is true and treat challenges as threats. In this environment, universities are no longer places where young minds wrestle with the pangs of uncertainty. They are enforcing temples of doctrine. Their priests wear lanyards. Their rituals involve land acknowledgments. Their blasphemies include asking inconvenient questions about graves that no one has bothered to exhume.
Frances Widdowson may not be universally admired. No one is. Her conclusions are sharp. Her manner is uncompromising. But that is precisely why her treatment should alarm us. The test of a free society is not how it treats the agreeable, but how it tolerates the disagreeable, to paraphrase Bernard Crick.
When universities lose the confidence to host dissent, they cease to be universities in any meaningful sense. They become echo chambers with fancy libraries. They educate students in the same way a treadmill provides runners with travel: motion without movement.
We are at a moment of reckoning for universities and for Canadian liberal democracy. When citizens cannot openly raise questions without fear of removal, the Charter becomes ornamental. If the test of allowable speech is whether it affirms prevailing narrative and myths, then neither truth nor inquiry has a place among us.
Widdowson’s arrest is not an isolated event. It is a signal that tells us who is welcome in the public square and who is not. It tells us that the basic right to question popular opinions is now conditional. And it affirms for us what we already know: that the guardians of inclusion are, in practice, the agents of exclusion.
No democracy can afford such arbiters. Certainly not one that still calls itself liberal.
