In 2012 a Canadian journalist penned a penetrating piece on plutocracy for the New York Times entitled “The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent.” Taking a longer perspective, Chrystia Freeland outlined the rise and fall of the Republic of Venice and contrasted greedy “extractive states controlled by ruling elites” with “inclusive states” that share economic gains with the rest of society.
By devolving into an extractive state, Renaissance-era Venice declined as center of world influence - a historical warning for America, she insisted.
“And it is the danger America faces today, as the 1 percent pulls away from everyone else and pursues an economic, political and social agenda that will increase that gap even further — ultimately destroying the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place.”
Freeland shaped her argument into a 2013 TED talk, which most readers here would probably find little to argue with.
Cut to a decade later - and two years into the greatest transfer of wealth upward in world history - and Freeland is standing in front of news cameras as Deputy Prime Minister of Canada and minister of finance, delivering a police state-like diktat to peacefully protesting Canadians.
“As of today, a bank or other financial service provider will be able to immediately freeze or suspend an account without a court order,” the Deputy PM announced in February 2022. “In doing so, they will be protected against civil liability for actions taken in good faith . . . If your truck is being used in these illegal blockades, your corporate accounts will be frozen. The insurance on your vehicle will be suspended.”
Although it was eons ago in TikTok time, representative government was temporarily suspended in Canada last winter when Prime Minister Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, to reign in the supposed threat of truckers converging on Ottawa to peacefully protest vaccine mandates. The bouncy castles, impromptu hockey games and hot tubs on Parliament Hill would not stand on the Prime Minister’s watch - even if that watch had to be from afar, with Trudeau skipping town with a sudden and convenient case of COVID.
All of this was previously unthinkable in the liberal democracy of Canada. How do we reconcile the plutocrat-bashing Freeland of 2012 with the plutocrat-friendly Freeland of 2022, who endorsed the suspension of Canadian civil rights while temporarily extending the reach of banks into totalitarian territory?
How did the journalistic Jekyll transform into the parliamentary Hyde? Was she kidnapped, chloroformed and thrown the trunk of a car bound for a hilltop retreat overseen by some shadowy plutocratic cult, who forced her to drink the Kleptocracy Kool-Aid?
Actually no, she went there voluntarily on a jet plane. Likely first class.
A tiny bit of foreshadowing - essential to all good horror movies - was supplied in the 2012 NYT piece. “Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enrolled their daughters in an exclusive private school; I’ve done the same with mine,” Freeland wrote, before mentioning a visit earlier that year to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
In the preface to her 2022 book, The Bodies of Others, the journalist Naomi Wolf writes:
It would be an overstatement to say that Chrystia Freeland was ever a friend, but for a while we were in the same circle of hardworking, underpaid reporters and editors, all just trying to earn a living. I’d seen her around at social events in Manhattan, and one day when we were both adjusting our makeup — she after a television appearance, me in preparation for an interview — she mentioned, happily and with absolute confidence, that she was shortly to run for Parliament in Canada. At the time her humble title was as Reuters’ “Managing Director and Editor, Consumer News.” I remember looking at her with astonishment at this out-of-the-blue leapfrogging of many career levels. She must have powerful friends, I thought.
It turned out to be a good guess.
Ms. Freeland was part of a small cadre of “influentials” connected to the World Economic Forum; indeed, she is now on the WEF Board of Trustees. She and her peers, along with allied elites in other fields, eventually masterminded a crime against humanity unprecedented in our times — a crime that involves the theft of assets and the destruction of cultures, as well as untold deaths.
Even while expanding her NYT piece into the well-received 2014 book Plutocrats, the journalist and editor had been moving in the commanding heights of international privilege for some time. She had taken her first sips of Klaus Schwab’s Kool-Aid years earlier.
In 1993 the WEF initiated a program called Global Leaders for Tomorrow, which was rebranded in 2004 as Young Global Leaders. This program is all about identifying, selecting and promoting future global leaders in business, media and politics. WEF trustee Freeland is one of the graduates, as are Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg and New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern.
Even though the Deputy PM’s connection to the WEF is now well known on social media, it’s still a perversely fascinating and unlikely transformation to ponder, like a Monarch butterfly pupating into a caterpillar. It’s intriguing that her career arc - from public intellectual to WEF Young Global Leader to deputy Prime Minister of Canada - seems like a test case of WEF co-founder Klaus Schwab’s legendary boast that “ve penetrate ze cabinets.”
And things do appear to be going according to plan.*
Justin Trudeau has been a WEF keynote speaker, but he is not a confirmed Young Global Leader. Confirmed Young Global Leaders in his Cabinets since 2015 include Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland(selected in 2001; former managing director of Reuters and a member of the WEF Board of Trustees), Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Joly (2016), President of the Treasury Board Scott Brison (2005), Minister of Immigration Sean Fraser (2022), and Minister of families Karina Gould (2020).
Without the encouragement of a potion or full moon, the Jekyll who opposed the 1 percent became the Hyde who terrorized the truckers. Freeland is now an honourary member of, and mouthpiece for, the plutocratic class she discreetly confronted a decade earlier. (If I was suitably conspiratorial minded, I might suspect the NYT piece and TED talk by the long-time WEF member constituted a clever form of camoflauge, like a Viceroy imitating a Monarch butterfly - a way to audition politically as a woman of the people.)
“The irony of the political rise of the plutocrats is that, like Venice’s oligarchs, they threaten the system that created them,” Freeland wrote in 2012. It’s hard to interpret that now as either supreme irony or more horror movie foreshadowing.
*Not incidentally, the Government of Canada is listed as a pilot partner in the WEF-connected Known Traveller Digital Identity program, along with Air Canada and the Toronto Pearson International Airport.
When Did Chrystia Freeland drink the Kool-Aid?