Deep State Behind the Deep State: CFR, Trilaterals, Bilderberg
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

Everything is not as it seems in politics. And in recent months, the American people have come closer than ever to figuring that out, with the notion of a shadowy “Deep State” secretly pulling the strings in Washington capturing the public imagination. There is indeed a “Deep State,” or perhaps several, that includes elements of Wall Street, career bureaucrats with views deeply at odds with those of mainstream America, as well as the “intelligence community” that does the dirty work and appears to accept no limits on its power. But little has been said about the Deep State behind the Deep State — or the real Deep State. Until now.

Parts of this shadowy network — the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg, and more — are sometimes visible to the public, even if the establishment media rarely highlights the significance. Other powerful elements are practically invisible: Secret societies such as “Skull and Bones” and the Bohemian Grove, for example, which will be described in an upcoming article. But combined, it is clear that the Deep State behind the Deep State wields tremendous power over America and the world. The agenda is becoming clear, too. And if left unchecked, this powerful network of “Deep State” operatives fully intends to foist a draconian system on humanity that they often tout as the “New World Order.” But the American people have the power to stop it.

Much of what has been referred to as the “Deep State” is merely part of the government — the legions of entrenched Big Government bureaucrats and especially the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and other secretive agencies. Other analysts have pointed — quite properly — to elements of the Big Business community. Former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren, a top-secret security clearance holder and one of the early voices to develop the idea of a “Deep State” in America, refers to it as “a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country.” And he’s right. But it goes even deeper than he seems to realize.

Of course, Lofgren was hardly the first to notice that the elected officials who supposedly control the government are not really in charge. Even close friends and associates of the Deep State behind the Deep State have commented on the issue, as it relates to party politics and elections. The late Georgetown University Professor Carroll Quigley, a mentor to President Bill Clinton, was for many years close to the core of the Deep State, and, while he disagreed with the secrecy, he admitted to agreeing with most of its aims. He was even allowed to examine their records for a period of time. And then, spilling the proverbial beans, Quigley put some of his explosive findings in his massive 1966 book Tragedy and Hope. Referring to the Deep State as “international Anglophile network,” the professor said he had “no aversion to it or to most of its aims,” and added that he had been “close to it and many of its instruments” for much of his life.    

On political parties and using elections to change course in government, Quigley ridiculed the idea. “The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers,” Quigley wrote in his book, which reportedly made the Deep State quite upset. “Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.”

Quigley also offered insight into the agenda and machinations of the real Deep State. “The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole,” he explained. “This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.” Some of those meetings, such as the G20, are well known. Others, while even more important, are almost never mentioned, and remained virtually unknown to most Americans.

There exists a shadowy network of organizations controlled by the Deep State behind the Deep State that serves to coordinate the operations and tentacles of the machine. While secretive, many of the outfits are not secret societies in the true sense of the term. In fact, they have websites, put out reports, and in many cases make their membership lists public. That these organizations wield incredible power in government, media, academia, military, banking, intelligence, business, and more is beyond dispute. 

Council on Foreign Relations

What Professor Quigley revealed in Tragedy and Hope was huge. “There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act,” Quigley wrote in his book. “In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so.” The leading Round Table Groups he identifies include the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in the United States and its sister organization in Britain known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA,or the Chatham House).

In America, the CFR is among the most powerful organizations representing the public face of the Deep State behind the Deep State. To get some sense of how influential the outfit is, consider the words of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose husband and daughter are members, in a 2009 speech at the CFR’s new office in Washington. “I am delighted to be here in these new headquarters,” she said. “I have been often to, I guess, the mother ship in New York City, but it’s good to have an outpost of the Council right here down the street from the State Department. We get a lot of advice from the Council, so this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future.”

In other words, the unelected CFR establishment sets policy, and the visible government implements it. The same applies to the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which is also dominated by CFR operatives. Knowing how toxic the CFR label has become politically among conservatives, though, leading CFR “Republicans” actually boast of their dishonesty in concealing their membership from the public. George W. Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney, for example, was filmed on video bragging: “I’ve been a member [of the CFR] for a long time, and was actually a director for some period of time. I never mentioned that when I was campaigning for re-election back home in Wyoming.” He cackled, and the audience laughed. But he is hardly alone. 

Members include virtually the entire establishment. Among others: vast swaths of the Republican and Democrat establishment; countless current and former members of Congress and senior bureaucrats; “journalists,” columnists, editors, anchors, commentators, and media execs; CEOs, chairmen, and presidents of mega-banks; multiple cabinet secretaries in every administration going back generations; current Supreme Court justices; former presidents and vice-presidents; Federal Reserve bosses; celebrities; mega-church pastors; military brass; ambassadors, diplomats, and bureaucrats at international organizations; tax-exempt foundation chiefs and executives; leaders and professors at key universities across the country; and “intelligence community” bosses who do much of the dirty work. Even some pseudo-conservative “leaders,” mostly neocons, are involved.      

Corporate members include the world’s largest bailed-out mega-banks, Big Oil, Big Pharma, crony capitalists, the military-industrial complex, publishing houses, along with much of the establishment media. Among the mega-banks and financial giants: Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, American Express, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Soros Fund Management, Bank of New York Mellon Corporation, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Crédit Agricole, Rothschild North America, Inc., and more. Military-industrial complex: DynCorp, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., Raytheon Company, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and more. Big Oil: ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, Hess, and more. Media: News Corp (Fox News, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, National Geographic, and more), Time Warner (CNN, HBO), The Economist, Bloomberg, and more.

While not everyone involved supports the globalist Deep State agenda, most do, defectors have said. The late Admiral Chester Ward, a CFR member for almost 20 years before defecting and blowing the whistle, explained the danger of the CFR, its agenda, and the ideology of most of its members. “Once the ruling members of CFR have decided that the U.S. Government should adopt a particular policy, the very substantial research facilities of CFR are put to work to develop arguments, intellectual and emotional, to support the new policy, and to confound and discredit, intellectually and politically, any opposition,” he explained.

“The most articulate theoreticians and ideologists prepare related articles, aided by the research, to sell the new policy and to make it appear inevitable and irresistible. By following the evolution of this propaganda in the most prestigious scholarly journal in the world, [CFR mouthpiece] Foreign Affairs, anyone can determine years in advance what the future defense and foreign policies of the United States will be,” he added. “If a certain proposition is repeated often enough in that journal, then the U.S. Administration in power — be it Republican or Democratic — begins to act as if that proposition or assumption were an established fact.”

The ultimate goal of the CFR, Ward warned, is global government. “The main purpose of the Council on Foreign Relations is promoting the disarmament of U.S. sovereignty and national independence, and submergence into an all-powerful one-world government,” warned the admiral, who served as the   judge advocate of the U.S. Navy. “This lust to surrender the sovereignty and independence of the United States is pervasive throughout most of the membership.” Ward also revealed why the CFR’s members would be so violently hostile to Trump’s campaign promises. “In the entire CFR lexicon, there is no term of revulsion carrying a meaning so deep as ‘America First,’” he said. Trump, of course, campaigned on an America First platform to stop globalism.

The subversive agenda to betray the American people and subvert their independence, Constitution, and self-government has been made clear even in the CFR’s own propaganda organs such as the CFR magazine Foreign Affairs. In April 1974, for example, Richard Gardner, former deputy assistant secretary of state, explained how the agenda for world government would be pursued. “In short, the ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down,” he wrote. “An end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old fashioned assault.” Deception and a slow subversion process, then, are the tools of the CFR. The magazine also regularly promotes regional government, illegal war, and other extreme positions.

The Trilateral Commission

Another outfit like the CFR, only more “elite” and more international, is the Trilateral Commission, founded in 1973 by the late globalist and self-described conspirator for a one world order David Rockefeller. Aside from Rockefeller, who in his memoirs boasted of “conspiring” with a “secret cabal” against the best interests of America to form a “one world” order, the other key figure behind the Trilateral Commission was Zbigniew Brzezinski, advisor to Rockefeller and the National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter. His writings greatly impressed Rockefeller. Among other bizarre ideas, the late globalist, in his 1970 book Between Two Ages, argued that America was “obsolete.”

While he acknowledged some of the problems in the Soviet Union, Brzezinski also showered praise on Marxism. “Marxism represents a further vital and creative stage in the maturing of man’s universal vision,” he wrote. “Marxism is simultaneously a victory of the external, active man over the inner, passive man and a victory of reason over belief: it stresses man’s capacity to shape his material destiny — finite and defined as man’s only reality — and it postulates the absolute capacity of man to truly understand his reality as a point of departure for his active endeavors to shape it. To a greater extent than any previous mode of political thinking, Marxism puts a premium on the systematic and rigorous examination of material reality and on guides to action derived from that examination.”

Following his attack on obsolete America and his praise for Marxism, Brzezinski, a member of the CFR before his death, goes on to advocate the creation of “a council for global cooperation” bringing together “the United States, Japan, and Western Europe.” This body, he wrote, would “be concerned with political strategy” and “bringing together the political leaders of states sharing certain common aspirations and problems of modernity.” But in the end of the book, as pointed out by The New American‘s C. Mitchell Shaw in Brzezinski’s obituary, Brzezinski reveals the real purpose of his proposed council: Another step on the road to world government.    

“To sum up: Though the objective of shaping a community of the developed nations is less ambitious than the goal of world government, it is more attainable,” he wrote. “It is more ambitious than the concept of an Atlantic community but historically more relevant to the new spatial revolution. Though cognizant of present divisions between communist and non-communist nations, it attempts to create a new framework for international affairs not by exploiting these divisions but rather by striving to preserve and create openings for eventual reconciliation. Finally, it recognizes that the world’s developed nations have a certain affinity, and that only by nurturing a greater sense of communality among them can an effective response to the increasing threat of global fragmentation — which itself intensifies the growing world-wide impatience with human inequality — be mounted.”

Much less has been written about the Trilateral Commission than, say, the CFR, but its influence is nevertheless enormous. And even well-respected conservatives have long recognized the threat this outfit poses to liberty and America. In his 1979 memoir With No Apologies, Senator Barry Goldwater exposed its agenda. “In my view the Trilateral Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power — political, monetary, intellectual, and ecclesiastical,” he wrote. “What the Trilaterals truly intend is the creation of a worldwide economic power superior to the political governments of the nation-states involved…. As managers and creators of the system they will rule the future.”

Around that time, a major expose of the Trilateral Commission was written by Stanford historian Antony Sutton and researcher Patrick Wood entitled  Trilaterals Over Washington. In a recent statement, Wood highlighted the significance. “The Trilateral Commission was international, founded to create a ‘New International Economic Order,'” Wood explained. “Their members have been the architects and drivers of all modern globalization, including that which comes through the United Nations as Sustainable Development and Green Economy. Although the Trilateral Commission is international in scope, in the U.S. they are more than just being part of the so-called Deep State, they ARE the Deep State!”

The Bilderberg Meetings

In addition to the CFR and the Trilateral Commission is yet another shadowy outfit with Rockefeller and other establishment globalists at its core: Bilderberg. Until recent years, the network, which hosts annual meetings, was virtually unknown to the American public, despite the regular attendance of many of the world’s most influential people and their useful idiots. Among the attendees is a collection of powerful figures from Big Government, Big Green, Big Media, Big Oil, Big Espionage, Big Banks, Big War, Big Internet, Big Foundations, Big Communism, Big Data, and most of the other important “Bigs.” Virtually all of the attendees share at least one common element though: a devotion to globalism and secrecy.

In public, at least Bilderberg summit organizers work to downplay the confab as a mere off-the-record discussion forum. A press release from Bilderberg released ahead of this year’s summit in Chantilly, Va., for example, claims the purpose is merely “to foster dialogue between Europe and North America.” “There is no desired outcome, no minutes are taken and no report is written. Furthermore, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken, and no policy statements are issued,” the statement claims. Numerous attendees, though, have suggested and even openly admitted in public statements over the years that much more than a mere “private talk” is in fact going on at the controversial summit.

In fact, attendees have admitted that policy is set behind closed doors. For example, in 2010, former NATO boss and two-time Bilderberg attendee Willy Claes said in a radio interview that reports of speeches given at the summit are compiled. “The participants are then obviously considered to use this report in setting their policies in the environments in which they affect,” Claes added, which analysts said was essentially an admission that Bilderberg attendees are secretly plotting your future behind closed doors.

The year before Claes’ admission, then-Bilderberg chairman Etienne Davignon — a former European Union commissar and current Belgian minister of state — told the online EUobserver that the summits “helped create” the controversial euro currency imposed on 17 formerly sovereign European nations. Much evidence also suggests that the summits played a major role in foisting the EU super-state on the peoples of Europe against their will — a process that continues despite the lack of public support. Speaking to the BBC in 2005, Davignon also admitted that at the summit, “automatically around the table you have internationalists.”

More recently, despite protestations to the contrary, a Bilderberg attendee and the leader of the Socialist International-aligned Dutch Labor Party admitted on camera this year that he was at the summit in his official capacity as parliamentary leader. Asked if he was there in an informal capacity, he responded: “Well, I’m formal, because being a politician, you’re 24/7, so there’s no way of exiting my role.” The Bilderberg website says, “Participants take part in the conference as individuals in their own right,” but the comments by the Dutch lawmaker and “sustainability” zealot Diederik Samsom suggest otherwise.  

More than 15 years ago, meanwhile, far-left Bilderberg attendee Will Hutton — a former British newspaper editor, rabid pro-EU extremist, and vehement opponent of American conservatism — also hinted at the influence of the gathering. “[Bilderberg] is one of the key meetings of the year,” he wrote in 1998. “The consensus established is the backdrop against which policy is made worldwide.” The admission could not get much clearer than that.

Aside from guiding policy, a great deal of anecdotal evidence suggests Bilderberg plays a major role in selecting the policymakers who will foist the schemes on an unsuspecting public. In 1991, for example, a virtually unknown governor from Arkansas attended. Shortly after that, he became President Clinton. Obama, too, went to Bilderberg before becoming president. It is not just American politicians whose careers seem to get a major boost from attending the summits, either. Tony Blair, for example, attended Bilderberg as an opposition member of Parliament. He then became prime minister shortly afterwards. Numerous other British prime ministers have also attended. Other countries in Europe have faced similar occurrences, such as Bilderberg bigwig and Goldman Sachs operative Mario Monti being installed as the unelected prime minister of Italy in 2011.

At the European level — where voters and the peoples of Europe have virtually no say — the same phenomenon has been observed. In 2005, the state-funded BBC noted, “All the recent presidents of the European Commission attended Bilderberg meetings before they were appointed.” EU overlords, of course, are not elected. In 2009, meanwhile, former Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy — a virtual nobody unknown throughout the bloc — was mysteriously installed as EU “president” days after attending the confab. He promptly announced that “global governance” was advancing.

Indeed, what unites the seemingly disparate globalists appears to be mainly their fanatical devotion to globalism — the transfer of political power away from nations and people to unaccountable supranational regimes. Based on their public statements, it appears that virtually every attendee at Bilderberg is and has been a proponent of global and regional governance rather than national independence. In 2001, former British chancellor of the exchequer and Bilderberg bigwig Denis Healey even told the U.K. Guardian that it was a little “exaggerated, but not wholly unfair” to say that the outfit’s overall goal was to impose a global government on humanity. “Those of us in Bilderberg felt we couldn’t go on forever fighting one another for nothing and killing people and rendering millions homeless,” he claimed. “So we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a good thing.” By “community,” globalists really mean government — after all, the European Union was a “community” before the full-blown super-state was openly announced.

Beyond the Bilderberg, CFR, the Trilaterals, and such establishment organs are secret societies including Skull and Bones, Bohemian Grove, and others. There are also key leaders of the Deep State behind the Deep State: Families such as the Rockefeller, Soros, and Rothschild, among them. Aside from their organizations and meetings, along with government, they operate through tax-exempt foundations. All of those topics will be explored in upcoming articles in The New American as part of this series on the Deep State. And beyond all those that are known are, undoubtedly, others that are not even known publicly. And for Christians and God-fearing people, there is certainly a spiritual component to it all. But Americans do not need to be helpless victims of these shadowy forces.   

Unfortunately, Trump has many operatives for the real Deep State serving at the highest levels of his administration. More than a few of his cabinet secretaries, for example, are members of the CFR and/or attendees of Bilderberg. But, it is also becoming obvious that the Deep State behind the Deep State does not trust Trump — at best — and actively despises him at worst. That is a good sign, though it is no guarantee that anything will change.

Not just exposure but organization and concerted action are needed to effect positive change, according to Art Thompson, the chief executive officer of The John Birch Society, which has maintained since its founding that there is design behind America’s long slide from constitutional government. “The John Birch Society has been the most consistent organization exposing the so-called Deep State for over 50 years and doing so in a responsible manner,” Thompson told The New American, which is an affiliate of the JBS. “There have been times when the exposure has hurt them greatly and usually exposure is all that needs to be done. But there may come a time when exposure will not be enough or perhaps impossible if enough people do not get involved to do something responsible about it now. The solution is to do what Jefferson said — bind the politicians down with the chains of the Constitution — force them to adhere to the Constitution. That is our job at hand and individual action is not enough. Organizational, concerted action is what is needed.”

Americans who wish to see a return to self-government under the Constitution must get involved. There is an incredible opportunity, now, to set the Deep State’s globalist agenda back by decades or even generations. The American people, acting through Congress, will be the key. But to seize the opportunity, Americans must get educated, activated, and organized.

Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook.

Related articles:

Deep State “Intelligence” Threatens Trump, Self-Government

“Deep State” Bureaucracy vs. Trump, America, Constitution

Deep State and Fake News

Globalist Zbigniew Brzezinski Dead at 89

Bilderberg: Where Big Business and Big Government Plot Globalism

The EU: Regionalization Trumps Sovereignty

Council On Foreign Relations Exposed