CFR: Still the Power Behind the Throne
For a century, the globalist Council on Foreign Relations has been the “power behind the throne” in U.S. politics. This tradition has continued under the Biden administration.
By William F. Jasper
2021 is a big year for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an organization that often is heralded as the most influential think tank in America, if not the entire world. Prominent on the Council’s website (cfr.org) is its centennial page, “Celebrating A Century,” a self-congratulatory promo of the organization’s accomplishments over the past hundred years. The promotional features an impressive cavalcade of pictorials, videos, and articles showcasing the Council’s worldly influence and power, as demonstrated by the hundreds of presidents, prime ministers, princes, potentates, politicians, kings, diplomats, and dictators — including mass-murderers — who have graced the organization’s meetings, and/or have written for its famed journal Foreign Affairs.
The CFR does indeed wield unparalleled influence in political, financial, business, media, and academic circles, and is regularly showered with accolades by “the great and the good.” It is the public face, the brain trust, and the central nervous system of what critics refer to as the Deep State — the unelected “permanent government” that has hijacked our country.
In April 1945, just days before the end of World War II, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius journeyed to Pratt House, the CFR’s headquarters in New York City. He had come, he said, to “bear witness, as every Secretary of State during the past quarter of a century, to the great services and influence of this organization in spreading knowledge and understanding of the issues of United States foreign policy.” Every secretary of state since then has continued the tradition. As you will see in the accompanying table showing CFR influence in the State Department (pages 26-27), Secretary Stettinius and almost every one of his successors — until the Trump administration — has been a member of the Council. And now, with the enthronement of Joe Biden, that CFR control of the State Department has resumed, with CFR member Antony Blinken taking over as secretary, and a bevy of Council members filling out the top posts at State and in the rest of the Biden Cabinet.
Authors Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas referred to the Council’s leading lights as “The Wise Men,” a reverential term that has been generously applied to the CFR at large by the Council’s academic and media shills. Journalist and presidential speechwriter Joseph Kraft famously referred to the Council as a “School for Statesmen.” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist-historian David Halberstam called it “the Establishment’s unofficial club.” Historian and presidential advisor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. described the CFR as a “front organization” for “the heart of the American Establishment.” Like Secretary Stettinius, all of the individuals offering these respectful remarks were themselves prominent CFR members, though they were not identified as such when they made the comments.
However, a description by another Council member, author-journalist Richard Rovere, conveys a more ominous and telling image. “The directors of the Council on Foreign Relations,” he said, “make up a sort of Presidium for that part of the Establishment that guides our destiny as a nation.” Rovere’s choice of the word “Presidium” was apropos. He obviously was comparing it to the murderous, unelected, and unaccountable gang of criminals that ran the Soviet Union and still runs communist dictatorships such as China and North Korea. That such a body “guides our destiny as a nation” should be a truly chilling thought for every American. However, Rovere appears to have offered that evaluation as a compliment to his fellow CFR members, not as a condemnation, thus reinforcing the perception gained from decades of observing the CFR elite hobnobbing with the communist elite that the Pratt House princelings are far more comfortable with communist absolutism than with constitutionally limited government.
Those familiar with the true history of the Council on Foreign Relations know full well that its hundred-year history is a sordid record of treachery, treason, subversion, and betrayal. That is a serious charge, but it is not hyperbole, as we will show within the limits of this short survey. The history of the CFR is a chronicle of a century-long war against national sovereignty, and an unremitting effort to build an all-powerful world government, which CFR globalists have frequently referred to as their “New World Order.”
Yet, despite being composed of the high and mighty of American society, and despite its central role in global events and its extensive connections to world movers and shakers, the Council was largely unknown to most Americans for much of its existence. That is as the Council’s leaders desired, since they preferred to be the power behind the scenes. Modesty was not the reason they operated in the shadows; they knew that openly revealing their agenda would invite a severe public backlash from the American people. In the past two decades, the CFR has come out more into the open, and its president, Richard N. Haass, and various CFR spokesmen and “experts” now appear regularly as Wise Men in the major media, dispensing their wisdom to the masses on sundry topics. Their increased public visibility has not brought any genuine transparency, but for those with eyes to see and brains to reason, the past four years and the past few months have removed all doubt about the existence of the Deep State and its tyrannical designs for our future.
The unprecedented fury of the non-stop attacks on President Trump, his family, his administration, and his supporters — not only by the “liberal” media and “progressive” Democrats, but also by neoconservatives, “moderate” Republicans, and a host of high-level government officials (some retired and some still serving) — has awakened millions of Americans to the fact that there is a hostile power operating not only within the highest levels of our government but within the top levels of institutional power throughout our society. If you are among the newly awakened, it is crucial that you understand that this hostile power — this “power elite,” as leftist professor C. Wright Mills and conservative columnist Edith Kermit Roosevelt referred to it — is not a recent phenomenon. The CFR Deep State, as noted above, has been building and concentrating its power for a century, patiently penetrating and corrupting all of our foundational institutions.
The Council on Foreign Relations’ founders were the architects of, and prop-agandists for, the failed League of Nations following World War I, as well as engineers of the successful effort that launched the United Nations after World War II, and the multitude of UN agencies and international organizations that have burgeoned forth since then. They have been the primary moving force behind virtually every destructive policy that has been undermining America on all fronts, while simultaneously aiding our enemies. Through both Democrat and Republican administrations, the CFR’s members and minions have provided the leadership for the devastating programs and policies that are now dangerously close to extinguishing freedom as we know it and terminating our constitutional republic. They are, for example, the main promoters of, and cheerleaders for, open borders, unsustainable spending and taxing, foreign aid, LGBTQ “diversity,” racial polarization and discord, election thievery, gun confiscation, feminization and politicization of our military, fanatical environmentalism, global-warming hysteria, COVID panic and medical dictatorship, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Fake News, Big Tech censorship, oppressive regulation, trade policies that are outsourcing our industry and technology, communistic cancel culture, federal usurpation of state and local authority, indoctrination of our children and youth in immorality and Marxist ideology — and much, much more.
Deep State Comes Out
The CFR elite are celebrating 2021 not only because it is their organization’s centennial year, but because they have succeeded fabulously in creating chaos by undermining our nation in all the areas listed above. And they have succeeded in ousting President Donald Trump and installing their favored candidate, Joe Biden, in the White House. Biden is not a CFR member, but he has loaded his administration with Pratt House “Wise Men” (see page 17) and has reversed course on nearly every front where President Trump had moved against the CFR globalists’ New World Order agenda. During a videotaped appearance on January 23, 2018 at the Council’s headquarters, Biden uttered a revealing comment. When CFR President Richard N. Haass introduced himself and remarked that he worked for the Council, Biden, who was sitting next to Haass, quipped, “And I work for Richard.” Just a harmless joke, right? But, as the well-known adage goes, “Many a truth is spoken in jest.” The same applies to the comment by Hillary Clinton, who, while secretary of state, admitted at the CFR’s new Washington, D.C., office that she had been many times to the organization’s “mothership” in New York, but that the new office was much more conveniently located. “We get a lot of advice from the Council,” she claimed, “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.” (Emphasis added.)
Having surrounded himself with CFR globalists, Joe Biden will likewise rely on the Council to tell him what to do and how to think — except that in Biden’s case his mental deterioration before our very eyes makes it increasingly doubtful that he is capable of doing or thinking anything independent of his handlers. That being said, Biden’s allegiance to that subversive agenda has never been in doubt. While the CFR-dominated Fake News Media (see page 18) have continuously portrayed Biden as a moderate and a centrist, his votes, words, and actions during his 36 years in the U.S. Senate and his eight years as vice president under President Obama clearly showed that he was one of their agents. In addition to his official record as a career politician, Biden has telegraphed his true orientation repeatedly over the past nearly half-century. Take, for instance, his 1992 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal entitled “How I Learned to Love the New World Order,” which we have referenced many times in this magazine over the years. Besides the title, another big tell in Biden’s op-ed was his proposal to “breathe life into the U.N. Charter” by, among other things, providing it with permanent military forces.
It’s worth noting the timing of Biden’s WSJ article as well as its content. Recall that it was published in the same time frame in which then-President George H. W. Bush was repeatedly invoking the New World Order (NWO) in televised speeches and sending massive U.S. military forces to war in Iraq for the purpose, he said, of helping bring about “a United Nations that performs as envisioned by its founders.” (We’ll return to those “visionary” founders later on.) So, Joe Biden was one of the prominent globalist Democrats chosen to reinforce globalist Republican George Bush’s NWO message. In truth, both Biden and Bush, like thousands of other Democrats and Republicans, wear their party labels to disguise the fact that they are actually members of a CFR-directed duopoly, a globalist Uniparty.
Joe Biden: The CFR’s Man in the White House
Want another clue as to Joe Biden’s real loyalties? Consider that when Joe and Jill decided to get married in 1977, they chose the chapel of the Church Center for the United Nations (CCUN) at UN Plaza in New York City. The CCUN refers to itself as “A Door to the U.N.” and is a stalwart promoter of the UN drive for “World Order.” The CCUN building was dedicated in September 1963, with UN Secretary-General U-Thant, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson (CFR), and U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk (CFR) all speaking at the ceremony. The Church Center was originally administered by the National Council of Churches, a Rockefeller-financed operation to coopt Christianity to support a world religion and world government. Subsequently, the United Methodist Women, a radical feminist organization that supports the entire UN agenda, took charge of the Church Center and continues to run it today.
Does it not speak volumes that Joe Biden, a “devout Catholic,” chose the UN’s Church Center for his wedding when he had dozens of Catholic churches in Washington, D.C.; New York City; and his native Delaware from which to choose? It certainly fits with his pro-abortion and pro-LGBTQ “marriage” positions that clash with the teachings of the Catholic Church but are perfectly in sync with the UN agenda. During the administration’s first press conference, on January 21, 2021, when Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked about Biden’s pro-abortion stance conflicting with Catholic doctrine, she immediately replied with this canned response: “I will just take the opportunity to remind all of you that he is a devout Catholic and somebody who attends church regularly.” And that “devout Catholic” response has been endlessly echoed by the controlled media’s talking heads, not only with regard to Biden, but also with regard to Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo, and other “Catholic” politicos who push a leftist agenda at odds with the official teaching of their church. President Barack Obama was similarly described by his deputy press secretary, Bill Burton, as a “devout Christian.” The same description has been applied to Jimmy Carter, and, yes, even Bill and Hillary Clinton.
All of this proves the adage that “hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.” Globalist politicians who scorn Christian morality nonetheless realize that most Americans still consider themselves to be Christians. Thus, woke politicians (such as Biden) make sure to include campaign photo-ops at churches and to sprinkle their speeches with biblical quotes and references to God. But Biden’s speechwriters must have missed the “God thing” memo. How else to explain the bizarre neglect of God in his presidential “prayer” for the 70th anniversary of our National Day of Prayer. It was a first! “Devout Catholic” Joe Biden didn’t mention God, Jesus, or the Bible even a single time, although he did work in Marxist notions of “a reckoning on racial justice” and “the existential threat of climate change,” among other politically correct themes. This is in keeping with the Deep State’s ongoing campaign to de-Christianize America: First remove God and prayer from schools and the public square, then remove God and prayer from prayer!
Perhaps Biden was channeling Karl Marx during his odd National Day of Prayer event. He certainly has been channeling World Economic Forum CEO Klaus Schwab and the WEF’s “Great Reset” scheme to “reset” the entire planet — politically, economically, socially, morally, and spiritually — in accord with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. According to the WEF’s website, “COVID-19 offers a chance to reset and reshape the world in a more sustainable way.” It calls on everyone to “imagine another world, one in which we can sustain ourselves as envisioned in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).” The UN’s SDGs, as regular readers of The New American recognize, are the centerpiece of Agenda 2030, the UN’s detailed plan for total control of everyone and everything on, in, and above planet Earth — all in the name of saving “the environment” and establishing “equity.” Hence, the world’s richest billionaires and their kept politicians flew into Davos, Switzerland, for the WEF’s annual champagne-and-caviar confab in 2020 to announce to the world’s proletariat (that’s the rest of us) that we must tighten our belts, give up driving cars and eating meat, and submit to draconian regimentation (including lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine passports) and a host of other new regulations. The World Economic Forum’s rollout of their Great Reset in 2020 was well timed to assist Joe Biden.
Team Biden launched into its first 100 days in the White House with a rush of activity to implement the joint WEF-UN “crisis” agendas related to COVID-19 and global warming. Biden announced the United States would again support the UN’s Paris Climate Agreement, which President Obama had illegally committed us to (without Senate ratification), but which President Trump had subsequently backed us out of. Mimicking the central planning of the Chinese Communist Party, Biden launched a whole-of-government assault on carbon-based fuels and brought out a $2 trillion climate deal that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) says is very similar to her socialist Green New Deal. He further announced that he was reversing President Trump’s orders that had stripped the UN’s scandalous World Health Organization (WHO) of U.S. staff and funding. Trump had scheduled a U.S. pullout of the WHO for July 2021, which Biden has also reversed.
Biden’s moves in these and other areas mirror the “global governance” plans of the wannabe world commissars of the WEF and UN. They also mirror the schemes of the CFR, which is not surprising, since CFR leaders played key roles in setting up and promoting both the WEF and the UN. Top CFR members also help govern the WEF and serve as major presenters at the WEF’s glittering soirees. Billionaire David M. Rubenstein, chairman of the CFR (and co-founder and co-executive chairman of the Carlyle Group) sits on the WEF board of trustees. Among the other CFR notables on the WEF board are Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, and Laurence D. Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock. Former U.S. Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry (a CFR member), who now serves as Biden’s “climate envoy,” has been a frequent attendee of Davos, and this past January he gave a double thumbs-up to the Great Reset, telling the privileged Davos crowd, “I think it will happen with greater speed and with greater intensity than a lot of people might imagine.” Kerry, who is also referred to as Biden’s “climate czar,” has been given a seat on the National Security Council, a signal by the Biden administration that it has adopted the CFR’s claim that climate change is a national-security issue, thereby justifying — even demanding — more government control over everything affecting climate change. According to the climate alarmists, this means virtually all human activity.
CFR Running the Executive Branch — Again
Kerry is not the only CFR member to be appointed to the Biden administration. In fact, Joe Biden’s Cabinet and higher echelon “public servants” choir are beginning to look like the CFR White House stables of old. As the tables on pages 24-27 show, the Council has, over the decades, gained a lock hold on the Executive Branch of our federal government. From FDR through Obama — through both Republican and Democrat administrations — the CFR has functioned as our “Invisible Government,” as constitutionalist author and former FBI agent Dan Smoot called it in his 1962 book of that title, one of the earliest critiques of the Council. From Secretary of State An-tony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, and Director of the CIA William J. Burns, to White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki (and many more — see page 17), Joe Biden — or whoever is overseeing him — has stuffed the upper management of our government with the usual CFR retreads. And there are yet many important vacancies to be filled, many of which undoubtedly also will go to Pratt House camp followers.
Why is it not a concern — or even a news story or topic of discussion — that a semi-secret club of uber-powerful individuals such as the Council on Foreign Relations has attained a virtual monopoly on the running of our nation? The CFR, with an exclusive membership numbering a little more than 5,000, serves as a revolving-door placement service that rotates its people from government “service” into top slots in the corporate, philanthropic, media, academic, and think-tank worlds, and then back into government stints as “public servants.”
Elite Wall Street banker/lawyer John J. McCloy, who served as chairman of the CFR from 1953 to 1970, was an advisor to nine U.S. presidents and was known as “the chairman of the Establishment.” In an interview with the New York Times, he recounted how he filled the top government posts with CFR members. “Whenever we needed a man we thumbed through the roll of the Council members and put through a call to New York,” McCloy said. His successor as chairman, David Rockefeller, continued the process, as have Rockefel-ler’s successors. The Council’s 2020 Annual Report says that 374 of its members hold posts in government. Imagine the media outcry if the National Rifle Association, with 5.5 million members, had that many members in such important posts! Or Christian, conservative groups such as National Right to Life with seven million members, the Knights of Columbus with two million members, or any number of other organizations. But we won’t have any national conversation about that because, as you will see on pages 18-20, the CFR has managed to place its members into controlling positions in the major corporate media. In plain words, the fix is in. The three-letter “news” organizations — ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, NYT, WSJ, FOX, NPR, etc. — are merely echo chamber adjuncts of the CFR. They simply tell us, “Nothing to see here, move along.”
Just “Conspiracy Theory”?
However, the power and influence exercised by the Council goes far beyond the sowing of their members throughout our government, the media, and other American institutional power bases. The Council has its counterpart in England, a sister organization known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), also known as Chatham House, which, like the CFR, traces its origins back to the aftermath of World War I. In more recent years, the CFR has launched the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and the Council of Councils (CoC), which brings together CFR affiliate organizations from 24 countries, including Russia and Communist China. In addition, the CFR is joined at the hip with the David Rockefeller-founded Trilateral Commission and the super-elite, super-secret Bilderberg Group. Moreover, its members move in and out of top posts at the World Bank, the IMF, and the UN. To top it off, it has a corporate membership that includes global giants of Big Business, Big Banking, Big Tech, Big Data, Big Media, and Big Pharma. In short, the CFR has unparalleled reach and clout.
Whenever anyone brings up concerns about the outsized influence wielded by the Council, its collaborators/defenders are ready with the all-purpose “conspiracy theory” label, which is supposed to render critics immediately non-credible. George Gavrilis (CFR), the author of the CFR’s recent centenary book, The Council on Foreign Relations: A Short History, attempts to dismiss legitimate public concerns with the usual resort to ridicule. He recounts in the book “a particularly colorful theory that linked the Council to an intergalactic conspiracy.” “Back in 1954,” Gavrilis writes, “Eisenhower met secretly with aliens in Morocco, and they appointed the first extraterrestrial ambassador to the United States. With the help of the Council, the government was keeping the alien invasion a secret from the American people.” Ah, yes, ha ha, those crazy people with their tinfoil hats and aliens in flying saucers.
This type of attempt to silence critics by gas lighting and derision still works with those who are weak of mind and/or weak of backbone, but it is having less and less effect on millions of Americans who can see with their own eyes that we are headed in a very bad direction, and also can see who is leading us there.
On February 17, 1950, Wall Street banker James P. Warburg, an advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt, told a U.S. Senate Committee, “We shall have world government whether or not we like it … by consent or by conquest.” He was in favor of it and did all within his power to advance it. He was also a member of the CFR, as was his father, Paul Warburg, known as the “father” of the Federal Reserve System. Various prominent Council members have made similar statements and have used their positions of power to advance the CFR objective of world government. With the COVID and climate-change “crises,” the Council and its globalist allies are pushing the Great Reset to wipe out the middle classes all over the world to concentrate all power — political and economic — in their hands.
Over the past century, many brave Americans have exposed this conspiracy reality — it’s no longer “conspiracy theory” — and have absorbed the slings and arrows of mockery and ridicule. The John Birch Society has been the tip of the spear in these efforts and has provided not only rock-solid information exposing this criminal effort to steal our country and our freedom, but proven, reliable leadership and an action program to stop and defeat this scheme. For books and videos covering these issues in-depth, see the advertisement on the inside back cover. The Deep State’s infernal grip on our nation — and the entire world — will not be broken unless more Americans awaken, expose the CFR’s growing control, and oppose its diabolical New World Order agenda.
Published with Permission of thenewamerican.com