Communicable diseases have always shaped civilization. The consequences of an epidemic can last for centuries, and the outcomes of many wars have hinged on viral and bacterial infections. Smallpox, for instance, played a central role in the European conquest of the New World. During the American Civil War, nearly two-thirds of soldiers’ deaths were caused by diseases like dysentery and typhoid.

The spread of the bubonic plague through medieval Europe presents one of the clearest examples of how an infectious disease can alter the course of history. By some estimates, the Black Death killed 30 percent to half of Europe’s population. The plague severely shrank the peasant workforce, boosting its labor power. Attempts by the nobility to curtail this trend only fueled turmoil and peasant revolts. With reduced agricultural output, the merchant class gained influence at the nobles’ expense, setting the stage for the transition away from a land-based economy and the eventual disintegration of the feudal system.

From 2020 to 2022, we have witnessed an attempt to engineer a reversal of this historical development. Covid-19, a disease many orders of magnitude less deadly than the plague, has been deliberately exploited by ruling elites to bring about a neo-feudal order. This regression has so far been marked by diminished quality of life, sharply increased inequality, and the erosion of personal freedoms and civil liberties. Plans for digital IDs and central-bank digital currencies may further accelerate these developments, and the result will be total domination of a property-less underclass by ultra-wealthy elites and their expert class of technocratic clerics.

Much has been made of the World Economic Forum, its cartoonishly villainous chairman, Klaus Schwab, and the infiltration of various governments through its “Young Global Leaders” program. The focus on this particular group of actors is useful for illustrating how coalitions of financiers, corporations, and unaccountable nongovernmental organizations shape global policies. Schwab’s pet slogans—“the Great Reset,” “the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” “You will own nothing, and you will be happy”—are now a sort of shorthand for the effort to impoverish the world population and technologically expand elites’ control.

This agenda, however, doesn’t need to be tied to one particular organization or group of leaders. Elites’ desire to subjugate the rest of the world isn’t a “conspiracy theory,” but a pattern of class conflict evident from world history. The outcome of this conflict, now raging across a tangible battlefield as well as a digital one, will determine the shape of the world to come.

As mainstream outlets signal that it is acceptable and even funny to criticize Covid policies, the question arises: Why is there no public reckoning over the astounding failure and massive harms of these measures? The answer is that these policies had little to do with the virus in the first place. Now that the Covid narrative has become a liability for elites, the pandemic is “ending,” but the “reset” agenda underlying the pandemic response remains very much in play. Unless it is met with defiance, this agenda will be a decades-long process—one that began with lockdowns and vaccine passports and will continue with the proliferation of digital ID systems and central-bank digital currencies.

We have been encouraged to view the phenomena of the past two years as the natural outcomes of a pandemic, but most were actually part of a broader scheme to undermine the middle and working classes, normalize “papers, please” societies, and end the fiat currency system as we know it.

In 2019, central bankers were determined to “rethink” the global economy, as a Financial Times story summarized at the time. Covid was blamed for a global financial crisis in 2020, but this crisis was already in motion in 2019 when a meltdown in the market for short-term loans between banks prompted the Federal Reserve to inject hundreds of billions of dollars into the financial system to stave off a full-blown liquidity catastrophe. Lockdowns imposed in March 2020 conveniently bolstered financial assets and monopolistic giants at the expense of taxpayers and small businesses; Amazon’s profits soared, while nearly 40 percent of American small businesses went under by year’s end.

During this same period, investment firms like BlackRock have been buying entire neighborhoods of single-family homes, a move with the potential to price thousands of families out of entry-level real estate. This is significant, because home ownership, already trending downward, was once the engine of middle-class prosperity, allowing families to consolidate and pass on wealth.

In the developing world, meanwhile, literacy and poverty trends, once improving, shifted into reverse. The United Nations predicted that deaths from lockdown-induced starvation and malnutrition would exceed Covid deaths globally. To this day, 31 million students have still not returned to school in the developing world, which coincides with nearly 100 million people being pushed into poverty, and a dramatic rise in child labor and illiteracy. Through it all, the wealth of the world’s billionaires grew by $5 trillion.

It isn’t difficult to see how increasing desperation, ignorance, and instability can make the global population easier for elites to control. Along with these economic and social shifts came political transformations that subverted liberal-democratic norms. Although there is much concern about the potential development of a social-credit system in the West, many people don’t realize that a precursor to social credit has already been tested on us: the vaccine passport.

Since the Covid vaccines didn’t stop transmission (as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky conceded in August 2021), a vaccine card only served as a token to demonstrate that the bearer held the right opinions or, at least, believed the right experts. It was never a plausible mitigation measure, and its real purpose was to punish the unvaccinated for political impurity. Although binary and unsophisticated, this is similar in practice to a social-credit score that can blackball citizens. In Canada, for example, unvaccinated people weren’t permitted to travel on trains or planes—precisely one of the punishments that can befall individuals who find themselves on the Chinese Supreme Court’s list of “discredited” people.

Western ruling classes also mounted a rudimentary exercise in the seizure of financial assets. When Canadian banks froze accounts connected to the truckers’ Freedom Convoy protest, it was evidence of the financial industry’s willingness to quash dissent. This was done not only in the interest of the state, but also that of the banks, which are deeply entwined with vaccine passports, digital currencies, and digital IDs.

The International Monetary Fund is now promoting central-bank digital currencies in developed and developing nations. The Fed is currently considering issuing a digital dollar, and Apple is planning to roll out a digital driver’s license. China has launched a digital currency, and Jamaica, Zambia, Kenya, and India are likely to follow suit. The UK government has signed a contract with multinational accounting and consulting firm Deloitte to develop a new digital-ID system, and Canada is planning to roll out digital IDs at the urging of the Canadian Bankers Association. Meanwhile, Wall Street firms are strategically expanding their foothold in blockchain investments.

The move toward digital IDs and central-bank digital currencies is part of a broader economic shift. Corporations are already subject to ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) ratings, so their behavior can be shaped to suit the priorities of financial institutions in the name of “diversity,” “sustainability,” and other abstract values. Not only can ESG scores be used to dissuade investors from decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, credit agencies have also started using ESG scores to alter credit ratings for corporations. The ruling class is thus using ESG to promote a specific agenda that can manufacture sweeping societal changes. This is effectively what “stakeholder capitalism” means: Businesses aren’t being reoriented to serve the interests of communities, customers, or workers, but to serve the ideology of elite stakeholders on whom companies are dependent to maintain their stock value.

Stakeholder capitalism is supposedly being advanced with combating climate change as a main motivation. Yet the plans of entities like the WEF involve ever-growing reliance on digital services and data storage. The data centers necessary for such plans already have carbon footprints equivalent to that of the aviation industry, and their energy usage is only expected to expand. This makes climate change more of an excuse to assert control, rather than a plausible motivation behind ESG ratings. The reason executives like BlackRock CEO Larry Fink push stakeholder capitalism is because it allows the financial industry to supersede shareholders’ immediate interests in favor of an ulterior long-term plan.

So what is this long-term plan? If a digital ID and central-bank digital currencies are used in tandem with ESG principles, banks and governments will have the ability to fully blacklist noncompliant citizens. Profitability is no longer the only goal—the goal is also to change the way economic transactions occur in the first place, so that they become closer to a form of bondage than to monetary exchange. Instead of sums of money, a bank account would come to represent tokens that could be turned on and off based on good or bad behavior. The vaccine passport and the crackdown against Covid dissent served as a test run for this model. But the inability of unvaccinated people to access a gym or a bar will pale in comparison to the types of punishments that can be meted out through such a system, not just for members of a political opposition, but for their families or anyone who dares to help them.

Data-based arguments about the efficacy of lockdowns, masks, and vaccines have in many ways served as a distraction from the larger political significance of what has transpired. A scientific or medical understanding of Covid can only go so far, because so little of the pandemic response has had any scientific validity. For much of this fiasco, we have been encouraged to disbelieve our own eyes and to discount observable evidence in favor of patently absurd propaganda. Now that this spell has been broken, many have been left wondering what will come next.

Covid policies served as temporary tools to swell the power of the ruling class, but the same ends can equally be achieved through war, climate initiatives, or other state-declared crises. As the idea of a “Great Reset” continues to be dismissed as a conspiracy theory, governments, central banks, and NGOs are becoming ever-more explicit about their plans. Any new supposed emergency can be manipulated by financial institutions to initiate systems of total control. Once fully realized, these systems may be impossible to combat. Yet as the Canadian truckers’ convoy illustrated, this move is a massive gamble for elites. The public still has the will and the ability to organize resistance through protests, labor actions, and civil disobedience. Such resistance is essential for anyone who doesn’t wish to live in a dehumanizing and nightmarish dystopia.