Juno News - August 15, 2022


Globe and Mail runs defence for the WEF

Topics
own nothing and be happy misinformation
Mentioned
Andrew Adrian Monk Lifestyle COVID-19
Freeland laughs in the face of Canadian farmers What makes the Quebec Conservative Party different from other parties？

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

159.08

Word count

773

Sentence count

40

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we take a deep dive into the origins of the "You'll Own Nothing and Be Happy" conspiracy theory, and how the World Economic Forum responded to it in a Globe and Mail op-ed written by a conservative writer.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Let's turn from the internal party workings of the conservatives to the global workings
00:00:05.260 of the shadowy cabal of overlords that run the countries and the world and all of that.
00:00:10.780 Now, I don't know, it's not quite that bad, but we are going to talk about the World Economic
00:00:14.740 Forum here, which had an op-ed in the Globe and Mail debunking, as they believe, the
00:00:21.180 own nothing and be happy conspiracy theory.
00:00:25.040 And there are a few moving parts to this, but I'll say basically that by now I'm assuming
00:00:31.020 you've heard of own nothing and be happy, as though it's some common refrain of the World
00:00:35.420 Economic Forum.
00:00:36.360 Now, this line did really come from the WEF.
00:00:40.060 It was a blog post that was published on the WEF's website quite a while ago by a member
00:00:45.600 of parliament.
00:00:46.160 I think she was from Denmark.
00:00:47.820 And it was basically putting forward this futuristic scenario in 2030, so just eight years from
00:00:54.160 now, in which people don't own anything.
00:00:56.580 They don't have a car.
00:00:57.500 They don't have a house.
00:00:58.360 They don't have appliances.
00:00:59.920 What is the living room one day is used as an office for someone else the next day.
00:01:04.440 And public transportation is there and everything's a public good.
00:01:08.060 And the whole point here, and I want to go right down to the text of this.
00:01:12.760 In the world, before this fantasy 2030 world, we had all these terrible things happening.
00:01:18.760 Lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation. 1.00
00:01:23.280 Completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest, and unemployment.
00:01:29.160 We lost way too many people before we realized we could do things differently.
00:01:34.160 And doing things differently in this fantasy world is owning nothing and evidently being
00:01:39.500 happy.
00:01:40.000 So it wasn't like a central campaign platform item for the WEF, but it was a think piece that
00:01:46.000 the WEF put out that ultimately aligns with the World Economic Forum's broader vision of
00:01:52.000 rethinking property rights, of basically making it so that we all live with less because that's
00:01:57.320 the way to save the climate.
00:01:58.700 So let's talk about how this is being represented by the WEF now in a Globe and Mail op-ed.
00:02:05.420 Take it away.
00:02:05.960 So Andrew, there was an opinion article that was published in the Globe and Mail by Adrian
00:02:10.580 Monk, who's the managing director, excuse me, of the World Economic Forum.
00:02:15.300 And he takes direct aim at this statement, this you'll own nothing and be happy as previously
00:02:20.780 talked about.
00:02:21.860 And the title of the piece is how own nothing and be happy sparked a misinformation campaign
00:02:28.400 that targeted the World Economic Forum.
00:02:30.240 Misinformation and disinformation.
00:02:32.240 We've already seen that before, Andrew.
00:02:33.900 So again, this author, he begins by calling out where he believes the origin of the you'll
00:02:41.160 own nothing and be happy idea came from.
00:02:43.760 And of course, he does mention that it was published by the World Economic Forum.
00:02:47.000 It is a WEF slogan that they did kind of coin.
00:02:51.420 But then from that point on, from about the second or third paragraph, he completely abandons
00:02:56.340 that and then basically goes into saying that the comment defending the World Economic Forum,
00:03:03.500 the comment is Russian disinformation.
00:03:06.500 The comment came and became popular through 4chan, which he describes as an unmoderated messaging
00:03:13.420 board used by operators of a Russian propaganda campaign.
00:03:17.220 And then he writes in the article, the intent was apparently to spread disinformation in a
00:03:21.280 bid to stir far right outrage about COVID-19 and perpetuate domestic extremism.
00:03:26.720 The means was often via bots that would push far right conspiracy theories to communities
00:03:31.360 on board such as 4chan.
00:03:32.940 So what you're seeing here, I think, is a cleanup operation from the World Economic Forum to go
00:03:38.160 after the big slogans that have dominated their brand for the past couple of years and I think
00:03:42.560 pretty much ruined the brand of the World Economic Forum in the public eye.
00:03:46.460 They're trying to send out their best and brightest to combat what people are starting to learn about
00:03:51.580 this group and basically label any criticism, any direct quotation of the World Economic Forum
00:03:57.760 as this statement is, as Russian misinformation, as far right.
00:04:02.820 They even, you know, they even use the word anti-Semitic to describe using the terms, using the term
00:04:09.080 you'll own nothing and be happy.
00:04:10.220 So it's a big cleanup operation.
00:04:11.960 They're trying to sweep it all under the rug, Andrew, and they're using the Globe and Mail for it.
00:04:15.880 I mean, they couldn't have picked a better outlet to run a story like this, if you ask me.
00:04:21.580 Thank you.