Every year, the international ruling class—the most influential world leaders, CEOs of big corporations, top academics, and even celebrities—come together at Davos. They discuss topics that interest them and prescribe their preferred policies.

What’s your take on the Davos crowd and what they are doing?

Doug Casey: The Davos crowd has become the most visible element of the ruling class. Although, they overlap with lots of other groups who are pushing the same agenda—Bilderberg, CFR, and Bohemian Grove among them.

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article after I attended the Concordia, which is very similar, with exactly the same people. I don’t plan on going back. It was disturbing and depressing listening to soulless bigshots natter about the best way to rule the plebs.

These people are all part of what you might call the “World Deep State.” They all know each other. They go to the same conferences, and more often than not, they’ve attended the same universities, belong to the same social clubs, and have kids in the same schools.

But most importantly, they share the same worldview. They live in their own little silo, where the rest of 7.9 billion people in the world are outsiders. So it’s only natural that people in such a relatively close-knit—albeit informal—group conspire.

Adam Smith famously observed that whenever two men from the same occupation get together, they always conspire against the interests of the public. It’s a perfectly normal and natural thing.

But these people aren’t just merchants contriving to make a few extra shekels. These people are the top dogs in all of the world’s governments, NGOs, corporations, universities, and media organizations. They have contempt for the little people, whom they treat as either useful idiots or useless mouths. They’re interested in power more than anything else.

As they’ve recently shown in this COVID exercise, they pretty much control the world. They’re very dangerous; I despise them.

International Man: In 2019, well before the first case of COVID was reported, the World Economic Forum (WEF), which hosts the annual Davos conferences, held an event to discuss the possibility of a worldwide pandemic.

In fact, they ran a simulation exercise for how the scenario could play out and how governments, large corporations, and the media should handle the situation.

What do you make of this? Was it a coincidence?

Doug Casey: These people are quite bold. They believe—correctly—that 90% of the public will basically eat whatever they’re fed and accept whatever they’re told.

I have no doubt that these people have an informal understanding with each other as to how the world ought to reset to their benefit. It’s not a formal conspiracy, per se, just a natural consequence of what inevitably happens when people of the same class, worldview, and philosophy are in a position of power.

The problem is that worldwide conflagrations over the last century have gotten much more serious each time around. World War 1 was unbelievably nasty. World War 2 was even nastier. We dodged the bullet of a global thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union. But that doesn’t mean that World War 3 isn’t going to occur. It’ll just be different than it would have been 40 or 50 years ago.

So, based on the trend in motion, if World War 1 killed 20 million people and World War 2 killed 60 or 80 million people, anything could happen in whatever turns out to be World War 3. Maybe 500 million or a billion. Think big, like the people who put together the Deagel report.

As I’ve said before, this war will have little to do with obsolescent junk like Abrams tanks, F-35s, and Ford-class carriers. Those toys serve little purpose beyond bankrupting the US while enriching the Deep State. This will be primarily a cyber and biological war.

I’m just surprised that more people aren’t watching and referring to the movie V for Vendetta, which also revolves around a virus called the St. Mary’s virus. The world desperately needs a real V.

There are really a lot of parallels today. I wonder if the “little people” know that the elite have been planning or playing with the idea of a virus for years. Probably not—it’s hard to imagine anyone could be as evil as the Nazis, Soviets, or Chicoms because that was ancient history and human nature has obviously changed. A great virus to smite humanity has been the subject of lots of sci-fi novels and movies over the years. And now, as usual, life is imitating art.

Let’s fantasize for a moment. Perhaps the elite, who mostly masquerade as philanthropists, will rationalize their plan as a way to cleanse the gene pool, reducing the population by 80 or 90%. I have no doubt these people could justify a viral plague as a way to save Gaia from a human plague. Perhaps the vaccine will actually be the real vector, killing some after a time and sterilizing the rest. Perhaps it will serve as a catalyst for the vaccinated, the obedient 80%, to put the independent unvaccinated 20% in camps. Perhaps the current virus is just the first gambit, and after the Delta and Mu strains a genuinely serious Zeta variant will present itself.

Anything is possible. We’re living in a science-fiction world at this point.

Even if things just go along more or less as they are, there are lots of advantages to the COVID-19 virus from their point of view. The collapse of the economy, the Greater Depression, won’t be blamed on central banking, inflation, and the State. They’ll be sold as heroes in the fight against the virus. The depression will be blamed on COVID—a Deus ex machina device—as opposed to the real causes. It’s really quite perverse.

International Man: Earlier this year, the WEF started making a lot of noise about cyberattacks disrupting global supply chains.

Klaus Schwab, the WEF founder, has been calling for the internet to be vaccinated preemptively—presumably meaning more controls, regulations, and less freedom and privacy.

Are they foreshadowing the next real or manufactured crisis? How could it play out?

Doug Casey: There’s no question in my mind at this point that the US, and in fact many countries, are turning into genuine police states. It’s happening right before our eyes with Australia—the entire country is locked down. People, masked at all times, of course, can’t go more than a couple of miles from their homes without suffering draconian penalties. No one can enter Australia, and—this is really shocking—no one can leave. And it’s not even questioned. If it can happen in Australia, New Zealand, and in parts of Canada, it can happen anywhere.

Apparently, it’s starting to happen here in the US with Biden having laid down not-so-subtly veiled threats against people that don’t get vaccinated. It was ominous to hear the senile old scumbag say that he, and the righteous vaccinated, were starting to “lose patience” with Americans who think they control their own bodies.

I have no plans to get vaccinated. At best, the vaccine is unproven—and possibly, we won’t know how risky it is for several years. Which is why in the past, radical new therapies have always had to be tested for years. But that hasn’t happened in this case.

But the vaccine psychosis is just one aspect of this war. As much as the elite want to sell the January 6th event in Washington, DC as the equivalent of the Reichstag fire, I don’t think the average American buys it. Therefore, perhaps something real or imagined will transpire to allow them to designate a whole class of American citizens as domestic terrorists.

We now have genuinely crazy people in control of the apparatus of the state. They’re exactly the same psychological and philosophical profile as the Bolsheviks or the Jacobins. They’re not going to let go of power voluntarily. Anything is possible at this point; we’re still in the early days.

As we enter the trailing edge of the Greater Depression, there’s actually something much more serious to consider in looking at the world situation. Things are similar to 1914 or 1939. Who knows exactly what happens next?

International Man: The COVID hysteria worked out exceptionally well for power-hungry politicians around the world. The public has now accepted an unprecedented level of government control over their everyday lives.

If there is a so-called “cyber pandemic” as the elites are hinting at, what would the consequences be for personal freedom?

Doug Casey: As I said earlier, World War 3 won’t be about nuclear weapons or conventional armies, but biology and computers. The cyber war aspect will be huge because the entire world now runs on computers. In fact, the world is starting to run on artificial intelligence. I don’t doubt that robotics will come into its own soon.

As far as a cyber pandemic and closing down the Internet is concerned, I’d say that’s a near certainty. They definitely want to do that, because the fact of the matter is that you’re only as alive as you can communicate with others.

If you can’t get your thoughts or news of what’s going on out to other people, you might as well be sealed in a tomb. It makes sense that people who want to control other people want to cut down on popular means of communication. They’ll find excuses to keep what they consider to be unsound views off the internet. It’s already happened in regard to the so-called pandemic. Contrary views, no matter how well-reasoned and factual, even from renowned sources, are quashed. Dissent, or even discussion, isn’t tolerated. You’ll find that spread to all other areas of intellectual and political discourse.

We already can’t travel easily; domestic flights are inconvenient, and international flights are down about 85%. Vaccine passports are on the way. In many places, we can’t gather, even in small groups. And of course, the next big thing—the big thing—is a heavily controlled internet.

At that point, all you’ll have is what you’re told officially and what you can see in your own little local area. These people are all about quashing communication. It’s a great formula, critical, really, for control. They don’t want people organizing to challenge them.

In Biden’s recent speech, he several times made out the unvaxxed as a potential enemy—a domestic danger.

It’s no coincidence that the people who don’t want to take the jab correlate strongly with people with conventional right-wing views, Trump voters, and cultural conservatives. The battle lines are drawn. It’s really turned into a class and ideological war.

They’re playing the health card with this COVID nonsense. They’re playing the race card and domestic terror card. They’re succeeding in delegitimizing American values and history, as well as masculinity in general and white males in particular. Next will be a reemphasis on the Global Warming scam. You plebs won’t be allowed to do anything, and most will go along with it because they’ve been indoctrinated over several generations to believe it’s right. The elite are doing everything in their power to ramp up fear. Fear for your health, fear of domestic terror, fear of the non-compliant, and fear of the climate destroying the planet.

As I discussed previously, fear is the most powerful tool that governments have to control the people. That’s what governments are all about. They thrive on fear. Fear is the health of the State.

International Man: What can the average person do to protect themselves from these disturbing trends?

Doug Casey: In Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, he talks about how, when they’re all together in the Gulag under the worst possible conditions, they said, “If we had only known, when they came to round us up as individuals… if we’d only grabbed a frying pan, or a pipe, or a rock and attacked these criminals…” But they were afraid. And they didn’t think that things could possibly be as bad as they turned out to be.

It’s understandable that they were hesitant to attack the state apparatchiks when going off to the Gulag, just as the Jews rarely attacked the Gestapo when they were rounding them up to take them off to camps.

You naturally might think, “These people can’t be that serious. These people can’t be that bad….” And you’d be wrong.

It takes a lot of physical courage to even think about these things.

Why didn’t any of the nomenklatura around Stalin simply kill him? They all knew the odds were good he was going to kill them eventually. You’d think that any of the rats around him would have cut his throat.

But everybody’s afraid to take physical action because we tend to be optimists. We tend to hope for the best, as we do right now. We hope that this will blow over, and maybe it will. But it boils down to what will you do, maybe five minutes from now, when you’re confronted one-on-one with an apparatchik from the State who gives you an order.

What will you do?

It’s too dangerous to take physical action against the guy because it may bring down the whole weight of the State organization on you.

So how do you resist? Well, unless you want to be a hero, the only thing I can think of is to have enough assets to insulate yourself from the bad guys or to move yourself physically to a different location.

We’re headed into a very rough patch in US history, especially for the next three or four years.

Editor’s Note: In the months and years ahead the financial, economic, and social conditions will be scary and unpleasant. And it will be very tough to navigate for most people.