OLD AND BUSTED: “Never Again.”
The New Hotness? Davos’s Iran invite is a new low.
Davos has always enraged a certain type of equally smug leftist – and now the MAGA crowd and their allies elsewhere – for whom the words ‘globalisation’ and ‘globalist’ respectively are rant catnip. I have always just found the whole thing more amusing than worrying or even important. Not this year, however: Davos 2026 is a shameful event, and those organising it deserve not just to be pilloried but to be covered in verbal red paint.
Red paint, that is, to represent the blood of the thousands of Iranians slaughtered by the regime in Tehran. In autumn, the WEF thought it appropriate to invite Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, to this year’s event. Aragachi is not just the regime’s main foreign spokesman. He is also a member of its Supreme National Security Council, which in recent days is understood to have ordered the use of live ammunition on protestors. The theme of this year’s Davos event is ‘A Spirit of Dialogue’; some dialogue, when one side is seeking basic freedoms and the other is using machine guns to slaughter them.
After it emerged that Araghchi was due to give his thoughts on the question of ‘How can we cooperate in a more contested world?’ in an event moderated by Financial Times editor Roula Khalaf, Davos has seen sense. In a hastily-written statement published on X this morning, the WEF said: ‘The Iranian foreign minister will not be attending Davos. Although he was invited last fall, the tragic loss of lives of civilians in Iran over the past few weeks means that it is not right for the Iranian government to be represented at Davos this year.’
Good. But the damage is done. We know exactly the mindset – indeed, the amorality – of those behind the WEF. That cannot be undone. As the great and the good hobnob in Davos, innocent Iranians are dying in the streets and hospitals as they fight for their freedom from a cruel Islamist regime.
Right around this time in 2024, Joel Kotkin wrote, “Goodbye to Davos — and good riddance:” “The interconnected world envisioned by the WEF is disintegrating. Indeed, it has fallen victim to the resurgence of history and the rise of powers determined to return us to the glories of the Middle Ages.” Or a much more primitive era, in the case of the mullahs.
QED: Iranian soldier sentenced to death for refusing to shoot protesters, human rights group says.
Related: “There’s a strange sense of desperation at losing the narrative here:”
Early Davos impressions. Will need to process, consolidate into an article.
– There’s kind of a distributed consciousness at play here. Almost nobody I talked to knows what the AI stuff is about, in concrete details. They just have vibes. And yet they dropped almost all of the…
— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) January 20, 2026