Against the Conspiracy Frame and the Hidden Hand

Recently, the journalist, James Delingpole, tweeted out ‘Dinosaurs are a hoax’. He had watched a video called ‘The Dinosaurs Never Existed’ by Eric Dubay. This video has over 88,000 views and its creator over 157,000 subscribers. This channel regularly posts Flat Earth content and it has a video called The History of the Federal Reserve featuring the Masonic Eye. A YouTube search for “Rothschild Power” throws up videos which have millions of views, including ‘The Most Powerful Families Who Secretly Run the World’ (5 million views), ‘This Family Secretly Rules the World’ (1.2 million views) and ‘The Richest and Most Families in the World’ (1.2 million views). The thumbnails feature the Masonic Eye, imagery reminiscent of Eyes Wide Shut and pictures of people from powerful families photoshopped to look like Emperor Palpatine. Whatever you make of these ideas, four things are very clear:

1.      They are not censored.

2.      They have recognisable imagery which everyone can parse quickly.

3.      They focus on the idea the world is controlled by a hidden hand tied to old money.

4.      They trade on the idea that the people in control today have always been in control.

I have found this frame increasingly irritating because it serves to obscure what we can see with our own eyes.

Let me provide a tangible example. I have frequently used the Dark Lord, Tony Blair, as one way in to understand the network of NGOs, Philanthropic Foundations, Corporations and International Financial Firms that make up the ruling class in the West and who appear to wield power above the level of national governments. Whenever I do this, someone in the comments will invariably crop up to say something like “of course, Blair is just a puppet, he’s not really in charge”. In fact, they will say this no matter who is named. To give another example, Bill Gates or Larry Fink. We can easily place these three individual actors in a wider network that is plainly visible: Blair’s network is openly funded by the billionaire Bill Gates, especially through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which receives funds from Microsoft, which, in turn, is part owned by The Vanguard Group, Inc (7.91%) and Blackrock (4.49%). Technically, both Vanguard Group and Blackrock are ‘owned by the funds managed by the company and is therefore owned by its customers’. In other words, the trillions of dollars in assets they manage are dispersed by across thousands of individual investors. As per the analysis of James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution (1941), Robert Michels’s Iron Law of Oligarchy applies to shareholders and the management in control of publicly listed companies: the shareholders are the disorganised mass while the managers are the organised minority. The thousands of investors who have their assets managed by Blackrock are passive, despite being the owners, and Larry Fink and his team have agency, because they are the people who directly control those assets. The managerial revolution is exactly this severance between ownership and control. Thus, who owns Blackrock is much less important than the fact that Larry Fink and his team manage their assets. So does this mean that Tony Blair is a puppet of Bill Gates who is a puppet of Larry Fink? This is to think about it in the wrong way. Blair’s exact role is to ensure that ground-level policies in the UK as well as Africa and elsewhere are implemented. He uses his vast network of connections from his time as Prime Minister of the UK to ensure that the Network’s agenda is seeded in the press and seeded to national governments at the policy level through think tanks and the apparatuses of the political parties. Bill Gates’s exact role is to keep the Network lubricated with resources funnelled from money he has made nominally by selling Windows software. He also personally benefits from this as the Network invariably push solutions in which he has personally invested. For example, Tony Blair managed the Covid vaccination roll-out for most of Africa – something he boasts about proudly on his website – and naturally the solutions are those Gates invested in. Slate.com did an interview with Tim Schwab last year which explained how Bill Gates became so powerful in the world of public health, not at all surprising to us students of elite theory:

Yeah, they came in and they were the first mover. They had the network. They had the people on staff. They had a plan, when a lot of government leaders didn’t have a plan. And everyone just looks to them for leadership because they seem to know what they’re doing.

In other words, the most organised minority hold power over the disorganised mass. In the Covid-19 pandemic, Gates and his Network (which includes Tony Blair) were the most organised group and the disorganised mass included every national government in the world.

Meanwhile, Larry Fink – who regularly meets with both Gates and Blair at the World Economic Forum – does not disagree with Gates or Blair on any substantial issue. He was for the same Covid response, he is for the same climate activism, and he is for the same technocratic and managerial solutions to almost every issue we face. Fink and Blair issued a joint statement on climate change just last year. Fink and Gates appeared together talking about climate change just a few months later. While he was still the Prime Minister of the UK, Blair set up a Climate Change NGO called Cool Earth in 2007, a project called ‘Breaking the Climate Deadlock’ in 2008 and a UK government project – financed by Bill Gates – called the African Governance Initiative just before Gordon Brown took over in 2008. The ISGP lists over 1,000 NGOs and provides power rankings of key players and how many NGOs they are a part of. Blair is ranked #3 in the UK and sits on the board of 35 NGOs – however, it is not up-to-date and does not include the Tony Blair Institute itself; Gates sits on 41 and ranks #32 in the USA; Fink sits on 21 and ranks #109. This does not mean that Gates is more powerful than Blair or that Blair is more powerful than Fink. It does mean that these three men are three extremely powerful notes in this lattice of networks that openly rules the West. Blair, interestingly, has his foot in another network. He is a special advisor to the ADL and, given his role in the Iraq War, is tied to the big Neocon and Foreign Policy network and frequents incredibly powerful institutions such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the McCain Institute and Yalta European Strategy as well as the Techno-Globalist world of Gates, Fink, the WEF and so on. Therefore, Blair – because he is a former Prime Minister – is in a position to affect foreign policy at a global level in a way that neither Gates nor Fink can do. Naturally, Fink can have much more influence in the area of finance especially as he has a direct line into the Fed with Bloomberg calling Blackrock the ‘Fourth Branch of Government’. Gates, meanwhile, as simply ‘a very rich man’, must rely on his direct funding of various schemes through the Network. However, the sheer extent of Gates’s wealth and the size of his Network means that his power is at least in the same ballpark as either Blair or Fink. These are simply three very powerful individuals – there are at least four hundred other global players at this level which are listed by the ISGP.

Let me get back to ‘capital C’ Conspiracy now. The analysis above is all based on open information and open actors who proudly tell you and the world exactly what they are doing. This is not a hidden hand: it is POWER ON DISPLAY. Power by its nature does not like to be hidden, it likes to show itself and let the world know it is in power. For what possible reason would it need to be hidden? When the ADL flexes on someone, it flexes on them, and expects the person to publicly genuflect and grovel for forgiveness. When that happens, President Greenblatt can show how merciful he is by patting her on the head like a benevolent Tudor king who has spared a subject the rod. Is Jonathan Greenblatt really powerful or is there a hidden hand behind him? Again, why would we need to invent a third party when the ADL makes no secret of its enormous power within the USA? Blair wants to be seen on the ADL website because it has power. Blair and Gates wanted credit for the vaccine rollout because it showed how benevolent and organised they are – they are the guys with a plan, and a plan has power as opposed to no plan. If you ever watch a Tony Blair speech, he’s always talking about the need for a plan. Fink wants to be seen leading the world on climate change alongside his two friends. I have looked at three real people engaged in a real living network who wield huge power and influence. The conspiracy theorist must invent another person – a third-party, the hidden hand – who may or may not exist. Why? To me, someone who wishes to CLEAR OUT these agents of evil, it is important to know who the enemy is, what their power bases are, and how we might best start the seemingly insurmountable task of countering them. When some smart alec pops up and tells me ‘you know they aren’t really in charge’ without providing an iota of evidence, I start to get very annoyed. It leads directly to things that are a complete waste of everyone’s time such as denying that dinosaurs existed.