by Edward Ring
There is a reason that nearly every powerful special interest in the United States is doing everything in its power to defeat Donald Trump, and it has nothing to do with the media’s fraudulent portrayal of him as a racist. Nor does it have anything to do with his allegedly abrasive personality.
If the president were willing to put the United States citizens under a total lockdown, allow millions of economic refugees to swarm across the borders, ship more jobs to Asia, and then impoverish whatever was left of middle America under the pretext of fighting “climate change,” he would be cruising to reelection.
Put another way, if Trump were a globalist, instead of a nationalist, there would not be well-funded militants destroying our cities while benefiting from a news blackout. There would not be NPC drones like ABC’s David Muir spewing anti-Trump pablum night after night, and money from Big Tech and Wall Street billionaires would be pouring into his campaign, instead of supporting his opponent.
In January 2018, in a speech of striking clarity, Trump described his vision of American nationalism. Addressing the assembled heads of state and business elite at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Switzerland, Trump’s speech amounted to a declaration of war on the globalists. For example, he said:
The United States will no longer turn a blind eye to unfair economic practices, including massive intellectual property theft, industrial subsidies, and pervasive state-led economic planning. These and other predatory behaviors are distorting the global markets and harming businesses and workers, not just in the U.S., but around the globe. Just like we expect the leaders of other countries to protect their interests, as president of the United States, I will always protect the interests of our country, our companies, and our workers.
These words constituted a threat to globalist ideology not because Trump’s version of nationalism is particularly toxic, but because he exposed the globalist vision itself as flawed and dangerous. What globalists want will not deliver peace or prosperity to the world, much less America. What globalist billionaires and globalist corporations want, however, will make them wealthier and more powerful than ever.
In 2016 the World Economic Forum released a brief video called “8 predictions for the world in 2030” which remains an accurate summary of the globalist vision for the future. Here are the key points:
1) You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy. Everything you’ll want, you’ll rent, and it will be delivered by drone.
2) The United States won’t be the world’s leading superpower. Instead, a handful of countries will dominate.
3) You won’t die waiting for an organ donor. We won’t transplant organs. We’ll print new ones instead.
4) You’ll eat much less meat. An occasional treat, not a staple. For the good of the environment and our health.
5) A billion people will be displaced by climate change. We’ll have to do a better job at welcoming and integrating refugees.
6) Polluters will have to pay to emit carbon dioxide. There will be a global price on carbon. This will help make fossil fuels history.
7) You could be preparing to go to Mars. Scientists will have worked out how to keep you healthy in space.
8) Western values will have been tested to the breaking point. Checks and balances that underpin our democracies must not be forgotten.
The essence of this list, or agenda, can be distilled into the following: Private property will be abolished, the United States will lose its sovereignty, food will be rationed, state-supported refugees will arrive by the millions and be dispersed into every American city and town, energy will be rationed, and America’s traditional values and institutions will be obliterated.
This is a deeply flawed vision of the future. It fails on every practical level, but is marketed relentlessly by all the same institutions that attack President Trump. And on the surface, it has a powerful moral appeal. Consider these lyrics from John Lennon’s globalist anthem: “Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too.” This sounds great, until you face the reality of other powerful nations who aren’t about to cede their sovereignty to Western corporations, or deliberately undermine their cultures or their economies.
This means that “climate refugees” will not be pouring into China, or Japan, or Russia, or any other powerful and independent nations. It means those nations will continue to consume cheap and abundant fossil fuel, allowing them to allocate a higher percentage of their GDPs to more productive investments including research, industrial development, infrastructure upgrades, and military spending.
Deliberately hobbling the American economy, unilaterally, in the name of fighting “climate change” will elevate the price of everything imaginable—energy, water, food, housing, transportation, and every product and service that requires those basics for its own production. At the same time, adding tens of millions of “climate refugees” to America’s population without any regard to whether or not they come with productive skills will place additional burdens on an already handicapped economy.
Even worse, this agenda embraces a new dominant ideology, already well established, that attacks the core values that made America great. It justifies American submission to rationing and mass immigration through the underlying claim that American imperialist capitalism is responsible both for the “climate crisis” and the economic misery in other nations. It goes on to reject the most fundamental premise of capitalism, which is individual ownership of property. “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.”
But just as abandoning the fate of the world to rising nations such as China—an implacable police state bent on enslaving the world—is obviously flawed, abandoning capitalist values to a society where “you’ll own nothing” is also a recipe for misery. Taking away the ability for individuals to own property takes away the incentive for people to work hard and strive to improve conditions for themselves and their families. Behind the obvious historical fact that communism and socialism have never worked and have led to nothing but murderous tyranny and economic devastation in every place they have ever been tried, is one simple truth of human nature: people need to have an incentive to achieve, or they won’t bother.
Thus far, America’s influential elites, from Big Tech and Big Media to at least some significant percentage of academia and the corporate community, have been unable to embrace the alternative vision President Trump represents. This is a failure of imagination as much as evidence of corruption. Because there is an alternative future that doesn’t involve American decline.
In this alternative to the agenda of the Davos set, instead of despoiling the landscape with millions of wind turbines, we would have clean fossil fuel, hydroelectric power, and nuclear power that is deregulated and allowed to create cheap abundant energy in America and around the world. This would cause a rapid rise in the standard of living and quality of life in developing nations, which would lead to rising literacy and lower birth rates. In Africa, India, and elsewhere, economic development also fosters voluntary population migration into revitalized and inviting urban centers, taking pressure off ecosystems and wildlife.
This scenario, where sovereign nations are encouraged to develop conventional energy and make big infrastructure investments, has been completely derailed by the Western obsession with fighting climate change. The result is environmental destruction caused by burgeoning populations pouring into protected wildernesses in search of firewood and game meat. And that is a cold, devastating fact. Anthropogenic climate change as an existential threat to humanity, on the other hand, is a theory; a mighty convenient one at that.
President Trump’s policies have encouraged industrial development, especially in the United States, but also around the world. The globalists’ agenda calls for tightly controlled development, massive migration, and socialist redistribution, all under the supposedly benevolent management of multinational corporations and international banks. But even if their intentions were entirely innocent, their plans, should they ever come to fruition, would spell catastrophe.
The irony of globalist ideology is that its ostensible goal, peace and prosperity for all mankind, is better served by Trump’s version of nationalism. What Trump envisions—peaceful competition between nations, all looking out for their own national interests—offers humanity a path into the future that can be realized without trauma, especially if America remains united and prosperous, and able to exercise leadership. What globalists offer is tyranny, masquerading as enlightenment.
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Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness and co-founder in 2013 of the California Policy Center.
