https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/26/klaus-schwab-the-last-davos-man/
On Easter Monday, World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab resigned as chair of its board of trustees. He stepped down amid swirling internal allegations that he misused funds and manipulated the WEF’s research to curry favour with governments. We don’t yet know if these charges are true, but manipulation certainly goes with the territory of the WEF. Indeed, manipulating the media and political culture to embrace the outlook of the global elites has always been one of its central aims.
To understand the significance of Schwab’s departure, we need to understand the role he played in the mythology of globalism. Arguably more than any other individual, Schwab personified the quasi-religion of globalism. If he was the pope of the church of globalism, his cardinals were members of the WEF’s board of trustees, including European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde, BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink and former US vice-president Al Gore. These are the Davos Men and Women – members of the super-rich Western oligarchy and their celebrity hangers-on who gather every year at the WEF conference in the Swiss mountain town of Davos.
One of the defining features of Davos Man is that he subscribes to a globalist fantasy, which assumes the nation state is a toothless anachronism. Rather, it is international institutions (like the WEF) that are supposedly best suited to running the world. He blithely assumes that there are no national solutions to the challenges facing the world, only global ones.
In recent years, however, Davos Man has lost his footing. Although the WEF’s public-relations machine continued to churn out high-profile propaganda, behind the scenes it was evident that globalism was gradually unravelling. The WEF never truly got over the global financial crisis of the late 2000s, and was further hit by the eruption of geopolitical conflict – namely, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Both events led towards more economic protectionism throughout the world.