“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” Edward Bernays (1928) ^[1]

The plan of organisation provided for an inner circle, to be known as The Society of the Elect, and an outer circle, to be known as The Association of Helpers. Within the Society of the Elect, the real power was to be exercised by the leader and a Junta of Three. When the society was founded in 1891 after years of planning, Rhodes was to be the leader, and the Junta of Three were represented by William T. Stead, Britain’s most famous journalist; Lord Esher, confidant of Queen Victoria and later the most influential advisor of King Edward VII and King George V; and Alfred Milner, a colonial administrator who, although he was relatively unknown to the outside world, became the group’s leader after Rhodes’ death in 1902.¹] A fifth member of The Society of the Elect close to the top of the pyramid was Lord Nathaniel Rothschild, whose financial wealth had helped Rhodes to monopolise the South African mines of the Kimberley area and whose family’s financial and political power over Europe was likely without parallel in history up to that point.²

Following World War I, this synergy of Anglo-American wealth and power culminated in the establishment of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, commonly referred to as the Chatham House on the British island, and its sister organisation, the Council on Foreign Relations, in the US – the combination of which represented the reincarnation of the hidden Anglo-American establishment in the post-war era.³ The Council on Foreign Relations is of course not the sole occupant of the establishment’s outer circle. There are numerous other think tanks and secretive groups that advance the string-pullers’ agenda active around the globe. The Bilderberg Conference, for instance, has been bringing elitists from Europe and North America together every year in near total secret since it was founded in 1954 by, amongst others, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands with the help of Walter Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles, CFR members and directors of the CIA.⁴

The attendees – one by one top officials from European and North American royalty, politics, industry, banking, media and academia – are led to be believe that the meetings are organised on the principle of reaching consensus, but, in reality, the real power lies within the inner core, the Bilderberg Steering Committee, which selects the invitees and puts up the talking points.⁵ Past members of this inner ring include Baron Edmond de Rothschild, David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, while current members include such big names as Eric Schmidt, long-time executive chairman of Alphabet, YouTube and Google’s mother company; Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir; and the editors of both Bloomberg and the Economist, the latter in which the Rothschild family has held major shares for decades.

While the Bilderbergers aim to strengthen the ties between the US’s and Europe’s elites, the Trilateral Commission made the bridge to Asia. Since its foundation by CFR members David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1973 after the Bilderberg Steering Committee refused to invite Japanese representatives to the conference, it has been organising meetings to foster ties between the leaders of North America, Europe and Asia by, in David Rockefeller’s words, bringing “the best brains in the world to bear on the problems of the future.”⁶ Again, these “best brains” are carefully selected into the membership roster, from which only the brightest [and most agreeable] minds are selected into the Trilateral’s Executive Committee, comprising a membership of no more than 36.

The Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission in their turn are interwoven with a dense global network of financial institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, World Trade Organisation and the Bank for International Settlements; military and political institutions such as NATO, the European Union and the United Nations; think tanks such as the Atlantic Council, RAND Corporation, the Brookings Institute, the Project for a New American Century and the Fabian Society; secret societies and conference groups such as Le Cercle, the Club of Rome and Bohemian Grove; tax-exempt foundations such as the Rockefeller, Ford and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations; and a whole range of people in government, media, multinational corporations and other positions of power in society.

1. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden (New York: Books in Focus, 1981), preface, IX-X, available at http://carrollquigley.net/pdf/the_anglo-american_establishment.pdf ↩︎
2. Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden history: the secret origins of the First World War (Edinburgh/London: Mainstream Publishing, 2015) ↩︎
3. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and hope: a history of the world in our time (New York/London: MacMillan Company, 1966), 130-1, available at http://carrollquigley.net/pdf/Tragedy_and_Hope.pdf ↩︎
4. Valerie Aubourg, “Organizing Atlanticism: the Bilderberg group and the Atlantic institute, 1952-1963,” Intelligence and National Security 18, no. 2 (2003) ↩︎
5. Mike Peters, “The Bilderberg Group and the project of European unification,” http://bilderberg.org/bblob.rtf ↩︎
6. Rockefeller Archive Center, The Trilateral Commission (North America) records, 1972-2001, available at http://rockarch.org/collections/rockorgs/trilateral.pdf ↩︎