I Will Not Eat Crickets: A Lone Satirist Declares War on the Globalist Elite
By Itxu Díaz
(Bombardier Books, 202 pages, $18)
Want to read a whole book about globalism? No? Think again. In I Will Not Eat Crickets: A Lone Satirist Declares War on the Globalist Elite, Itxu Díaz, a native Spaniard and regular American Spectator columnist, takes on the high priests of globalism with the most potent weapon of all: humor. Alas, he doesn’t succeed in vanquishing them — who could? — but by the end of the book, he’s hit all the important points and has done so with wit, charm, and (not infrequently) a fully appropriate dose of bile.
Then there are the valuable insights: For example, if globalism is a European rather than an American invention, it’s because while a well-off American, at least until a couple of decades ago, was “happy to be able to light the fireplace with kindling made from fistfuls of dollars, sleeping soundly without a hint of guilty conscience,” a financially successful European, at least in this age of social democracy, “lives under a strange sense of guilt if things go well for him…. The typical German businessman signs the biggest sales deal of his life, the one that will allow him and his whole family to retire, and before even calling his wife to tell her about it, he’s on the phone to Greenpeace saying: ‘Father, I have sinned against the Pachamama. I feel terrible about the polar bears drowning in Al Gore’s movies.’” (Confession: I had to look up “Pachamama.” She was the Earth Mother goddess of the Incas.)
Díaz recounts the backstory of the World Economic Forum — a.k.a. the Davos Forum, a.k.a. the would-be Fourth Reich — in a more painless manner than one might have imagined possible. In its early days the WEF was, quite innocently, “a space in which the rich could talk meaningless progressive nonsense they had no intentions of putting into practice and appear in the newspapers for a couple of days as the saviors of Humanity.” Then the United Nations and European Union got involved, and next thing you know, Klaus Schwab’s megalomaniacal little lifelong project actually had legs, pushing its devious policies on billions of people around the world. Today, thanks to the cooperation of the UN and EU with Dr. Evil’s diabolical schemes, the WEF is, in Díaz’s words, “the axis of all global attacks on individual freedom, on classical capitalism, on the sovereignty of nations, and also the main advocate for the effective elimination of all traces of Christian culture in Europe and America” — in other words, the fons et origo of “every new crazed woke policy proposal issued by our Western governments.”
And if the nations of the West are getting all these insidious ideas from the WEF, where, in turn, is the WEF getting them from? To an unsettling extent, China. Díaz professes to have made an interesting discovery: According to him, virtually all of the malignant ideas being promoted or ratified in legislatures around the world these days can be traced to “a discreet article published in the World Economic Forum online magazine” in July 2023. And what, pray tell, does that article consist of? It’s nothing more or less than a nauseating paean to Chinese Communism, eulogizing everything from China’s supposedly wonderful health-care system to its alleged carbon neutrality and asking, “How can we achieve a healthy China by 2030?” Really? Why on earth should this be our goal? Shouldn’t we be asking: How can we bring down the CCP by 2030? How can we free the Chinese people by 2030? No, that’s not the WEF’s thing. Most of the “news highlights” in that July 2023 article, Díaz informs us, “are about how well China is doing everything.” And we’re supposed to cheer. Why on God’s green earth should you or I or any free citizen anywhere wish China well? And how the hell did it happen that the most influential leaders in the Western world routinely turn for wisdom and guidance to a cockamamie “forum” that, heaven help us, looks to the world’s largest Communist state as a role model?
Díaz has other questions — about the UN, for example. How, he wonders, did the poohbahs of that vaunted body, which was “created to prevent wars,” decide that it was a good idea for them to hook up with the WEF and thereby turn the UN into a vehicle for “waging a war against freedom of thought”? How did an institution that began as a purported guarantor of human liberty morph into an enemy of liberty? How did an organization originally intended “to maintain international peace and security” end up pushing cockeyed environmental policies on the rest of us? Specifically, how dare the UN honchos think that they have either the legal or moral authority to try “to force us to eat insects because some vegan columnist in the Davos magazine says so”? How cruel the irony: In 1945, the fathers of the UN believed that they were cooking up something that would help spread American values to the rest of the world; today, the behemoth they created is controlled largely by barbaric Muslim theocracies and is a tool of the totalitarians in Beijing.
By way of illustrating how far the UN has fallen, Díaz contrasts the 1946 inaugural address of its first secretary-general, Norway’s Trygve Lie, with a 2023 speech by the current holder of that office, the deplorable António Guterres, thereby illustrating that the UN, over the course of 77 years, degenerated from Lie’s sincere, selfless statement that “it is with great emotion that I leave the service of my homeland and my King to devote myself entirely to serving the international community” to the oily Guterres’ insolent declaration that “[g]overnments and companies must be pressed to take stronger and faster action against biodiversity loss and the climate crisis.” Note the difference: “Lie talks about ‘serving,’ while Guterres talks about ‘pressuring.’” I’ve long been an ardent detractor of the UN, but in Díaz’s view — and he’s probably right — it didn’t really hit rock bottom until Guterres took charge: Beforehand, the UN “had done a lot of foolish things,” but under this Portuguese asshat it “definitively crossed the line of disrespect for the individual decisions and freedoms of its member nations, and joined the great utopian world government project—progressive, pacifist, feminist, environmentalist, and communist.”
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The WEF and the UN are far from Díaz’s only targets. There’s France, for one: “The French Revolution. The Enlightenment. The student revolt of May ’68. Multiculturalism. The guillotine. Marcel Duchamp. Bras. Almost all the bad, annoying, or unpleasant things in the West originated in France.” (The savvy British historian David Starkey makes the same claim on a regular basis.) Díaz also denounces the truly vile Oprah Winfrey, “who never misses an opportunity to promote the most dangerous progressivism” — one of the most recent examples of which is the “sex change” operation undergone by actress Ellen Page, now known as Elliot Page, a person whose palpable (and pitiable) psychiatric problems, as breathlessly promoted by the execrable Ms. Winfrey, have likely caused innumerable other confused souls to follow her tragic lead. Díaz also takes a nice swipe at Harvard, which he describes, not at all unfairly, as “an endless factory of idiots with pretensions of dignity.” (How I wish his next book would be a full-fledged takedown of the Ivy League!) And he decries that internet pioneer and would-be global tyrant Bill Gates, who has called for air travel “to be cut by more than half in the next few years” on account of air pollution. Díaz notes, deliciously, that “[a] Seattle high school student named Shendure compiled private jet flight data to find the owner of the largest carbon footprint.” Guess who won? Gates, of course, who in 2022 “made 393 flights in three planes, spending 657.55 hours of flight time, traveling 328,573 miles, consuming 313,714 gallons, and releasing 3,058.71 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”
What is it with these hypocrites that they think they have a right to reshape our lives? Díaz has a succinct answer: “[T]hey think we are idiots.” And they think they’re geniuses, “because they have achieved fame, political power in their fields, or wealth in a globalized world.” Needless to say, Díaz is right. The good news is that in the last few years, thanks to the internet, the preposterous, once-covert shenanigans of the Davos crowd have become increasingly common knowledge even as the curtain has been pulled back, for more and more of us, on the shabby reality that America’s Deep State uniparty (as well as its counterparts around the world) is made up of self-dealing, Davos-directed rogues. We’ve learned that grasping elites like Hillary Clinton consider ordinary Americans “deplorables” and that government agencies and international organizations that we regarded, not too long ago, as trustworthy defenders of our freedom are, in fact, its sworn enemies. In I Will Not Eat Crickets (translated from the Spanish, incidentally, by Joel Dalmau — mostly with great skill, although he should’ve referred to Hemingway’s debut novel not as Fiesta, the British title, but as The Sun Also Rises), Itxu Díaz provides us with an informative account of, and suitably cynical and sardonic reaction to, the whole ugly hustle that goes by the name of globalism. I can’t imagine that there’s a more engaging way to learn about it than by reading this smart, funny little book.
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