Transcript - America This Week, Apr 25, 2025: "Globalism Tells The Truth About the Future, For Once"

A Canadian advisory committee predicts mayhem, the end of the nuclear family, and subsistence hunting and farming in the near future, echoing WEF language. Also, "The Funeral," by Kate Wilhelm

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how’s it going?

Walter Kirn: I’m looking out the window at the 1,700th snowfall of winter here in Montana. They don’t seem to have gotten a memo here that we’re supposed to have flowers and tulips by now. Even the bears are still in hibernation.

Matt Taibbi: Really?

Walter Kirn: Yeah. There’s no real animal activity. And I basically live inside an open air zoo out here. I can see many species that people travel the world to find. It’s like I live on the Serengeti. And nothing’s happening. Everybody’s got-

Matt Taibbi: Wow.

Walter Kirn: Everybody’s in a hole. Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: Wow. Well, that doesn’t sound very pleasant.

Walter Kirn: It’s good for writing. It’s good for writing.

Matt Taibbi: That’s good. Yeah. Keeps you inside, right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. That’s why the Russians were such good novelists, right?

Walter Kirn: Exactly.

Matt Taibbi: They couldn’t go outside.

Walter Kirn: Right. Each Russian novel is exactly as long as a Russian winter, if you have ever noticed.

Matt Taibbi: Right. And War and Peace was just ... It was one hangover too long, right? So, oh, you missed a whole summer in between. So Walter, you found an amazing story this week. And we’re going to do a deep dive into something a little bit unusual, but it ties into a number of real news stories that happened this week. And to begin with, that involved the resignation, the sudden and unexpected resignation of Klaus Schwab, the Chairman of the World Economic Forum. And yes, here’s the AP story that came out on Monday. World Economic Forum founder, Klaus Schwab, retires as Chairman. Gave a very terse announcement, really was like a two-sentence thing, not fully explaining what was going on.

A few days after that, The Wall Street Journal came out with a story. And this is kind of par for the course in modern life, which is when somebody retires unexpectedly, you can almost set your watch by the headline the next day that the person is under investigation for some weird thing. So The Wall Street Journal came out with the story. And the implication of it, I don’t know. The key paragraph reads, “It included allegations that ...” Somebody sent a letter to the WEF board that, “Included allegations that Klaus Schwab asked junior employees to withdraw thousands of dollars from ATMs on his behalf and used Forum funds to pay for private in-room massages at hotels. It also alleged that his wife, Hilde, a former Forum employee, scheduled “token” Forum-funded meetings in order to justify luxury holiday travel at the organization’s expense.” Okay. So theoretically, this was going to come out, so they got to get rid of the guy, but he was 88. He’s been there forever. Something tells me that this isn’t the whole story, but whatever. It’s a-

Walter Kirn: You will have nothing. I will have everything.

Matt Taibbi: Well, right? Yes.

Walter Kirn: But persecuting someone who heads an organization whose annual meeting is an oligarchical orgy on the ski slopes of Davos, Switzerland, and saying that they live too high on the hog is a little much, as far as I’m concerned.

Matt Taibbi: Private in-room massages. Come on. They practically have to have a courtesan screening system to get into Davos during that period of the year.

Walter Kirn: I’ve had private in-room massages at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas. Anybody who gets the deluxe package, the romance package can have that.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. The girlfriend experience. Klaus Schwab’s girlfriend experience.

Walter Kirn: Klaus Schwab girlfriend experience. It’s the masseuses. See, sometimes I’ve thought about organizing a private intelligence agency that could maybe do what the CIA does, but for $10 million. And I’d just get about 12 masseuses and I’d follow the film festival and sports championship calendar.

Matt Taibbi: And Davos.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. And Davos, Sun Valley. And I’d always have a guy in the middle seat of the first class section of the LA to New York City Delta flight or whatever. And-

Matt Taibbi: Right. Get them loaded.

Walter Kirn: Yeah. And we’d just have iPhones. And I think by the end of the day, we’d have a better read on whether we’re going to war or what’s going to happen to the economy than these people do. But not that I feel sorry for Klaus. I do, however, feel that he was helpful because he was so repulsive as the face of the WEF. I hate to see him go. I think the entire world developed an aversion to him, which was extremely-

Matt Taibbi: Useful.

Walter Kirn: ... wholesome and healthy. And now they’ve got a new guy that-

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. So I was just about to say-

Walter Kirn: ... we have to learn to hate every fiber of in a whole new way.

Matt Taibbi: But it’s not going to be difficult. So the new Vice ... He’s being succeeded by the-

Walter Kirn: Woah.

Matt Taibbi: ... former CEO of Nestle and the Vice Chair of the WEF, and this is Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, if I’m pronouncing that right. I’m probably not. I would ... Let’s look at the close-up of that picture on the left, if we could, for a second. Yeah.

Walter Kirn: Now, I’ve been told that it’s a form of propaganda to feature this picture because he had conjunctivitis, and an unfortunate photo was taken. And he should not be known for the fact that it looks like he is wearing a mask that Chain Saw Massacre guy stole off-

Matt Taibbi: Right. Yeah.

Walter Kirn: ... someone else.

Matt Taibbi: Leatherface. Exactly. This is oligarch Leatherface. Let’s go to the other picture then.

Walter Kirn: There he is.

Matt Taibbi: There he is. Okay. There’s a word in German for this. Backpfeifengesicht, which is a very punchable face. And he’s got backpfeifengesicht in spades. But in the same way that Klaus Schwab has lots of infamous quotes that quickly became famous, so does this guy. The only thing is his are mostly in German. So let’s listen to this little address that he gave about the question of what we’re going to do about water as a commodity going forward into the future.

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe: [foreign language 00:08:04].

Matt Taibbi: Okay. Let’s pause for a sec. Just for people who are listening, he’s saying that there are two different views on what we do about water. One of them is the extreme version, which is represented by the NGOs. And then he’s talking about they bang on about something.

Walter Kirn: Okay.

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe: [foreign language 00:08:47].

Matt Taibbi: Okay. Stop.

Walter Kirn: Don’t you agree?

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. They bang on about declaring water to be a human right, which is basically saying that people have a right to water. And that is the extreme solution.

Walter Kirn: Okay. Now let’s look to Nestle’s idea.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah.

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe: [foreign language 00:09:28].

Walter Kirn: Foodstuff.

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe: [foreign language 00:09:34].

Matt Taibbi: Okay. So basically, the other, the non-extreme version is that water is just a-

Walter Kirn: A foodstuff.

Matt Taibbi: A foodstuff, a nahrungsmittel. That like anything else, and it’s a commodity that has value that should be measured and bought and sold and all those other things.

Walter Kirn: Well, no one disputes that it has value. One might assert that it has ultimate value, much like air.

Matt Taibbi: Right.

Walter Kirn: Without which your metabolism will grind to a halt rather quickly, your lips will parch, your eyeballs will shrivel to raisins, and you won’t be able to go on as a human being. Now, right, necessity, those are legalisms. I suppose what he wants is to turn it all into a delicious flavored drink. Then it would be a foodstuff, and then maybe you could own it. If you mixed it with chocolate, for example, it would then become a Nestle product.

Matt Taibbi: It’s very Milo Minderbinder, the whole thing.

Walter Kirn: What it is is nearly an element. The alchemists would say it was, along with fire. Maybe they should turn fire into a product too, a privatized product.

Matt Taibbi: If you light a cigarette, but without a license or if you didn’t pay for it-

Walter Kirn: Well, Lockheed could own it. They could have a monopoly on fire. But-

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Prometheus Limited, right? Would be the sub-corporation.

Walter Kirn: Now, Nestle, I think just below maybe Monsanto, and I’m not sure what else is probably the most despised-

Matt Taibbi: Unilever.

Walter Kirn: ... corporation on planet Earth.

Matt Taibbi: Right.

Walter Kirn: Its position on water is long known. Its insistence on baby formulas that starve children of all that is necessary to the actual maturation of the human being while keeping it alive is one of its great profit centers. You’re right. Klaus Schwab was a lovable Huggy Bear compared to this guy. He also looks like he’s from Zeta Reticuli and has gone to a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon to humanize him in a jiffy. He just heard he would-