The Council on Foreign Relations tweeted out a promo video on Friday:


"The keystone of the entire Establishment arch is the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The leadership of the CFR is the equivalent to the brain of the octopus," writes Gary Allen. "The Council on Foreign Relations, headquartered in New York City, is composed of an elite of approximately 1600 of the nation's Establishment Insiders in the fields of high finance, academics, politics, commerce, the foundations, and the mass media..."

In 1976, when Allen wrote his critique in The Rockefeller File, the CFR strived to remain hidden and anonymous.

"During its first fifty years of existence, the CFR was almost never mentioned by any of the moguls of the mass media. And when you realize that the membership of the CFR includes top executives from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Knight newspaper chain, NBC, CBS, Time, Life, Fortune, Business Week, U.S. News & Wand Report, and many others, you can be sure that such anonymity is not accidental; it is deliberate."

However, with the rise of Donald Trump and, more significantly, the spread of anti-establishment and anti-globalist sentiment in the United States and Europe, the CFR has crawled out of the shadows to make its case.

In June, CFR member James Traub wrote "It's Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses." He portrayed Donald Trump and Brexit as symptoms of mindlessly dangerous insanity.

"It is necessary to say that people are deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-delude them," Traub wrote for Foreign Policy. "Is that 'elitist'? Maybe it is; maybe we have become so inclined to celebrate the authenticity of all personal conviction that it is now elitist to believe in reason, expertise, and the lessons of history. If so, the party of accepting reality must be prepared to take on the party of denying reality, and its enablers among those who know better. If that is the coming realignment, we should embrace it."


Comment: That brings to mind this exchange with a so-called 'reality creator':
In 2004, former Wall Street Journal reporter and author Ron Suskind wrote in New York Times Magazine:
"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend - but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

What exactly does Traub and the CFR demand the ignorant masses embrace?

Corporatist globalism and the destruction of national sovereignty.

"The objective of the influential majority of members of CFR has not changed since its founding in 1922," noted retired Admiral Chester Ward in the 1970s. He cited CFR member Kingman Brewster, Jr. "He did not back away from defining it: our national purpose should be to abolish our nationality. Indeed, he pulled out all the emotional stops in a hard-shell for global government."

"In the entire CFR lexicon, there is no term of revulsion carrying a meaning so deep as 'America First.'"