Bilderberg Myths: “Fake News” from Infowars and Friends
By Will Banyan (Copyright © 29 June 2017)
The 65th Bilderberg Meeting, held earlier this month, from 1-4 June at Marriott Hotel in Chantilly, Virgina, was noteworthy on a number of counts, starting with the presence of four members of the Trump Administration at a gathering where it was widely assumed that both the policy direction and legitimacy of Trump’s presidency would have been hotly contested. This represented a deviation from the poor attendance by senior US officials at Bilderberg during Obama’s second term – during the previous four Bilderberg meetings the Obama Administration sent just one official in 2015. For a number of alternative news outlets, particularly Alex Jones’ Infowars, the presence of the four Trump Administration officials presented a unique ideological challenge given their previous incantations against Bilderberg as a hot-bed of intrigue by the elitist supporters of globalism, and their strong support of Trump, whom they had exalted as the globalist giant-slayer. The Infowars solution to this dilemma was to hold a poorly attended pro-Trump rally outside the Marriott.
While the overall turnout from the anti-Bilderberg protestors at Chantilly was, as Intellihub noted “substantially lower than in 2012 when the Bilderbergers last met at the very same hotel”, the alternative media and key activists were still well represented. In addition to the Infowars crew of David Knight and Owen Shroyer (incredibly, despite the convenience of the US location, Alex Jones failed to turn up with his bullhorn) there was Luke Rudkowski from We Are Change, Dan Dicks from Press For Truth, Jeff Berwick from The Dollar Vigilante, Mark Anderson of the American Free Press, Loose Change producer Jason Bermas (who got into an argument with Jack Posobiec over Trump’s relationship with Bilderberg), Leigh Stewy from Independent Citizen News, Conspiracy Cabbie TV, Lulz Machine, and Chris Dorsey the self-styled “commander” of the Virginia Militia.
Less amusing was the near complete absence of mainstream media to cover the event. Aside from Charlie Skelton from The Guardian, who filed four reports, only James Tennent from the International Business Times briefly flitted through to file one report that claimed Chantilly remained a “sleepy town”, despite the secretive meeting down the road. Even the local media seemed disinterested, with neither the Fairfax County Times nor the Chantilly Connection, bothering to report on the conclave:
Of course the Financial Times (UK), Wall Street Journal (US), Bloomberg (US), The Economist (UK), The Evening Standard (UK), Cook Political Report (US), La Stampa (Italy), Kathimerini Newspaper (Greece) and Dagens Næringsliv (Norway), were all represented at the meeting, but not outside, leaving it to the alternative media to cover the event and thus drive the narrative about Bilderberg. The results, though, were problematic not least because of the persistent repetition of various myths about Bilderberg, mainly by Infowars, that served to mislead rather than inform the public about media treatment of the annual gathering. There a couple of Bilderberg myths in particular that warrant correction.
Not the “Record” You Were Looking For
Among the claims made, perhaps the most astounding was Kit Daniels assertion in Infowars (Jun. 4, 2017), that news coverage of Bilderberg had “hit record highs as the establishment media is forced to admit the true nature of the globalist gathering.” The sub-heading of his article even implied a link to Trump’s ascendency: “Bilderberg more exposed than ever as Trump nationalism rises!” But Daniels claims were odd and contradictory. On the one hand, to support his bold claim, Daniels noted that various mainstream media outlets, specifically the BBC, Sky News and the Guardian were “openly discussing the meeting in Chantilly, Virginia…” Presumably to support his argument Daniels reproduced without comment a screenshot of a Google News search which showed 214,000 results for Bilderberg (Figure 1). But on the other hand, seeming to contradict this claim, Daniels acknowledged that in the US there had been a “mainstream media blackout” on the Bilderberg meeting.
Figure 1: Daniels’ Evidence of ‘Record’ Media Coverage of Bilderberg
One might well ask how media coverage of Bilderberg can both be hitting “record highs” at the same time as a “mainstream media blackout” seems to be in force in US. Daniels suggests this US media blackout is because “many American media owners are connected to the [Bilderberg] group.” This is an interesting and provocative claim but he makes no attempt to substantiate it. It also fails to explain why in 2015 the Austrian newspaper Der Standard published a number of articles on Bilderberg despite its editor and publisher Oscar Bronner being a long-time participant. Or why in the same year outgoing Steering Committee member and Chairman of Portuguese media conglomerate Impresa SGPS, Francisco Pinto Balsemão, would allow one of Impresa’s publications to run an article quoting approvingly the views of anti-Bilderberg activist Daniel Estulin.
Then there is the curious matter of the avidly pro-Trump media outlet Breitbart. None of its part-owners, the Mercer family, Susie Breitbart or Breitbart CEO Larry Solov, are Bilderberg participants. Last year Breitbart published at least four critical articles on Bilderberg’s Dresden meeting, but this year, despite the convenient US location there was nothing. Breitbart had joined the “mainstream media blackout.” Why?
More problematic is that, other than the Google News screenshot, Daniels provides absolutely no evidence that news coverage of Bilderberg has hit “record highs”. Moreover, the Google News screenshot tells us little as it is just an aggregate figure of all the times Bilderberg is mentioned. Daniels made no attempt to compare this year’s coverage with last year’s or even to show trends over a longer timeframe.
Performing such a search, however, suggests that media coverage for this year’s Bilderberg meeting was actually less than last year’s. A Google News search covering the period of the 2017 Bilderberg meeting brings up 1,130 results (Figure 2), compared to 1,510 results for the 2016 meeting (Figure 3).
Figure 2: Trending Down – Google News Results for 2017 Bilderberg Meeting
Figure 3: Smaller Peaks – Google News Results for the 2016 Bilderberg Meeting
If there ever was a “record high” for media reporting on the Bilderberg meeting, that moment has passed as it was surely achieved for the 2013 meeting in Watford, Hertfordshire in Britain with some 14,900 reports according to Google News (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Peak Reporting – Google News Results for 2013 Bilderberg Meeting
Indeed, a search on the Dow Jones Factiva database (Figure 5) suggests that after spiking in 2013 for the Watford meeting, overall media interest in the annual meeting has trailed off significantly.
Figure 5: Up, Then Down – Trends in Media Reporting on Bilderberg
This also seemed to coincide with a more widespread collapse in interest in the annual conclave, again after peaking as the subject of Google News searches in 2013. A search on Google Trends suggests that Watford again marked a key point with public interest peaking before falling off dramatically (Figure 6). The continuing decline in interest also appears to coincide with the falling numbers of anti-Bilderberg protestors, compare the 2000 protestors at Watford with the few dozen at best, protesting at Chantilly this year.
Figure 6: Declining Interest in Bilderberg? – Source: Google Trends
In short, without proper context, i.e. comparing media coverage of Bilderberg over time, Daniel’s claims about “record highs” are both inaccurate and misleading. Mainstream media coverage of Bilderberg may well be higher than it was 10 to 20 years ago, but the evidence shows that it peaked in 2013, and since then has fallen off steeply, coinciding with the significant drop in public interest. The “mainstream media blackout” that Daniels complained about, with few if any significant US media outlets even mentioning this year’s Bilderberg meeting, should have been an important indicator that his claim was wrong and that, at least in terms of media exposure, the tide has once again turned in Bilderberg’s favour.
‘There is no Bilderberg Group’
Another claim made by quite a few alt-media journalists and analysts during the Chantilly meeting, often with almost identical wording, is that the very existence of Bilderberg had been “denied” up until very recently by the mainstream media. Kit Daniels, for instance, declared in Infowars: “Remember, it was only a few years ago that the mainstream media denied Bilderberg even existed.” Infowars rather earnest correspondent, Owen Shroyer, dispatched to the wilds of Virginia, boldly asserted this as undisputed fact numerous times whilst questioning unsuspecting members of the public at the Herndon Festival:
“Until about five years ago they denied it. They said [Bilderberg] didn’t exist. Now they have to admit it because of the media coverage…Remember they used to deny it even existed. They used to say it didn’t exist.” (Locals Clueless, Then Terrified of Bilderberg, 1.15- 1.16)
“But that was during the first fifty meetings that [Bilderberg] ‘didn’t exist’ according to the New York Times.” (Trendy Scared Speechless Over Bilderberg, 1.36).
“They used to deny [Bilderberg] went on. Now they have to admit it.” (Awake Local Warns: Bilderberg Will End USA Forever, 1.24).
“They used to act like [Bilderberg] didn’t exist.” (Proof Public Education is Globalist Propaganda – Bilderberg 2017, 0.59)
New York radio talk-back host and legal analyst Lionel Nation also proposed this view in a lengthy podcast at the start of this year’s meeting:
The first group was very secret. They didn’t want anybody to know this. It was a secret. The Bilderberg Group was a secret. They denied it. They denied it for years [emphasis added]
He made the same point on Russia Today, claiming that for decades the Bilderbergers would clear out resorts to host their annual meetings, bringing in their own security:
When they were asked, “What are you doing?” They would say, “We don’t know what you are talking about. You are a conspiracy nut. There is no Bilderberg Group.” Then one year they said, “There is”, and now they have Bilderbergmeetings.org online (2.31).
Bradley Brewer, a contributor to Borderland Alternative Media (Jun. 2, 2017) also declared: “Less than a decade ago, the media and the Bilderberg group itself denied it’s existence and concealed it’s meetings” [emphasis added].
This claim that Bilderberg has connived with the media plot to deny its existence has a very long pedigree, almost as old as Bilderberg itself. Sixty years ago syndicated US columnist Westbrook Pegler suggested something “very mysterious” was afoot if “67 self-qualified, polyglot designers and arbiters of the economic and political fate of the western world” could go into a “secret huddle” on St Simon’s Island, but “not a word gets into the popular press beyond a little routine Associated Press story which completely muffled the importance of the occasion.” Pegler also accused two Bilderberg participants, Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, and Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times of suppressing news of the meeting, (The Spokesman Review, Apr. 10, 1957).
Gary Allen and Larry Abraham, co-authors of the million-selling None Dare Call It Conspiracy (1971), a major anti-New World Order work of the 1970s, also took issue with media treatment of Bilderberg:
One would assume…that when the world’s leading parliamentarians and international tycoons meet to discuss the planning of their various nations’ foreign policies, that the news hawks from papers and televisionland would be screaming to high heaven that such an event held in secret makes a mockery of the democratic process…But, of course, the landscape painters merely brush the Bilderbergers right out of existence… (pp.95-96)[emphasis added].
The late Jim Tucker, the main Bilderberg correspondent for the Liberty Lobby’s Spotlight newspaper and its successor, American Free Press, once claimed that:
High officials of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Los Angeles Times and all three major networks have attended Bilderberg many times, on the promise of secrecy, to report nothing and to not use the world “Bilderberg.” Except for some minor, inconsequential accidents in which the word “Bilderberg” has suddenly appeared in print…the promise has been kept (Bilderberg Diary, p.7) [emphasis added].
Tucker cited just two instances where “Bilderberg” had appeared in the New York Times, and four times it had been inadvertently mentioned in the Washington Post (ibid, p.7).
These original claims of media suppression have evolved into the pervasive myth that mainstream media reporting about Bilderberg is both very recent and was in response to counter-pressure from the alternative media. For example, in 2013 the Guardian’s Charlie Skelton, noting the huge crowds gathered at the Watford meeting and having been shown reports in the Portuguese press declared: “Finally, after 59 years, Bilderberg has beeped its way onto the radar of the mainstream press.” More recently the John Birch Society’s The New American (Jun 14, 2015) claimed the surge in mainstream media reporting about Bilderberg was “following decades of complete silence.” Author Mark Dice, in his book The Bilderberg Group: Facts and Fiction (2015), writes that “for over half a century there wasn’t more than a peep about the meeting in the American mainstream media” (p.1) due to an “arrangement” with the Bilderberg “to keep them out of the news” (p.5). This arrangement was only overturned recently when the alternative media “finally forced some major mainstream media outlets to admit that Bilderberg is real…” (p.3).
This has emerged as the key Bilderberg myth, but none of these statements are true.
Contrary to Daniels’ blanket assertion that until very recently the media had “denied Bilderberg even existed” – an incendiary claim that he, Shroyer, Nation and Brewer fail to back up with any evidence – the mainstream press had actually covered its existence since its very first meeting. For example, we find on the first day of that very first meeting of a still unnamed group at the Bilderberg Hotel in Oostebeek, the Netherlands, the London Times (May 29, 1954) carried this one line report under the heading “Telegrams in Brief”:
On that same day the Guardian newspaper ran a four paragraph Reuters report which also provided some more detail on the first conference, citing a statement from the meeting’s first Chairman, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands:
At the conclusion of the first conference, the New York Times (Jun. 2, 1954) ran two short pieces, one giving a brief run down on who went and the nations represented, while the other reviewed the outcomes of the meeting and Prince Bernhard’s views on its success. The Guardian (Jun. 2, 1954) also ran a longer report from its unnamed “Political Correspondent” which referred to how the “mystery” of the Oostebeek meeting was lifted with the publication of a “ten-page statement” from the organizers (Figure 7).
Figure 7: Reporting on the first Bilderberg Meeting – New York Times (L) and The Guardian (R)
This was only the first meeting. What is also interesting, and again contrary to the claims of most of the aforementioned conspiracy researchers/activists, is that when Prince Bernhard’s meeting eventually obtained its Bilderberg name in 1957, this was reported in a number of outlets. These included the United Press (The Evening Times, (Pennsylvania) Feb. 12, 1957) and the New York Times (Feb. 16, 1957) ahead of the Bilderberg meeting on St. Simon’s Island, Georgia; and by the Times (Oct. 7, 1957) and the Sunday Times (Oct. 6, 1957), in their reports on the Bilderberg meeting in Fiuggi, Italy (Figure 8). This appears to be first time the term “Bilderberg group” appears in the press. It would not be the last.
Figure 8: ‘They said it didn’t exist’ – Media reports from 1957 on the Bilderberg Group – Clockwise from bottom left, The Times, The Evening Times (Pennsylvania), New York Times, & the Sunday Times.
To be sure, media coverage of Bilderberg did change, as Prince Bernhard and Bilderberg co-founder Joseph Retinger’s views on how the annual meeting should work moved away from directly inserting its ideas into public discussion through post-meeting communiques or statements, towards using its members to disseminate its ideas into the public sphere. But a review of the media over the 63 years since the first Bilderberg meeting fails to sustain the claims that there was an active campaign to suppress news of its existence.
The following table (Figure 9) tracks media reporting either directly citing the “Bilderberg Group” or covering its meetings before it acquired that name for the period from 1950 through to 2009 just before the Bilderberg Meetings website appeared in 2010. It also includes profiles or obituaries of its members that specifically mention their Bilderberg role. This graph samples only four publications: three British newspapers, the Times/Sunday Times, the Daily/Sunday Telegraph, and the Financial Times; and the leading US paper, the New York Times. A more comprehensive survey of the US and European media will no doubt yield more hits. But this small sample alone is arguably sufficient to refute the baseless claims of Daniels, Shroyer, Nation, Brewer and others that the mainstream media had “denied” for “years” or “decades” the very existence of Bilderberg.
Figure 9: Survey of Mainstream Media reports mentioning the Bilderberg Group (1950-2009)
Sources: New York Times Archive; Financial Times Historical Archive; The Times Historical Archive; The Sunday Times Historical Archive; and The Telegraph Historical Archive.
The record of mainstream media reporting on Bilderberg is not without its faults. There appears to be no media reporting in the English-speaking press at least, about the Bilderberg meetings in 1956, 1959, 1960 and 1961, and coverage dropped off in the 1980s and 1990s. The New York Times, for example, published just two articles in the 1980s mentioning Bilderberg. And of course there remains a problem of whether that reporting bothered to really delve into Bilderberg; much of it did not, but Bilderberg’s existence was not denied.
Proponents of “they used to deny [Bilderberg] went on”, also have to contend with the plethora of voluntary public statements and memoirs from members of the Bilderberg Steering Committee and other participants, acknowledging both Bilderberg’s existence and their own role in it. In 1959, for example, Bilderberg’s chairman, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, mentioned Bilderberg in his article “Minds Across the Atlantic” in Delta: A Review of Arts, Life and Thought in the Netherlands, a journal published by the Netherlands Institute for International Cultural Relations. Prince Bernhard wrote about how he had formed a “group of persons” with “outstanding qualities” for the purpose of promoting “mutual rapprochement” between America and Europe. He continued:
This group has come to be known as the Bilderberg Group, the name being derived from the Dutch hotel where they came together for the first time and where they have often met since. Some odd people detect a sinister conspiracy in all this, but the true facts would disappoint them (Delta, September 1959, p.24; emphasis added).
There were whole chapters devoted to Bilderberg in Alden Hatch’s 1962 authorized biography of Prince Bernhard (H.R.H. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands) and in John Pomian’s 1972 biography of Bilderberg co-founder Retinger (Joseph Retinger: Memoirs of an Eminence Grise). In the first volume of his memoirs, The White House Years (1979), former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger mentions attending the 1971 Bilderberg meeting at Woodstock. George W. Ball, an Undersecretary of State in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations and Steering Committee member, addressed his Bilderberg experiences in his memoir, The Past Has Another Pattern (1983). British politician Denis Healey, a one-time Chancellor of the Exchequer, devoted a lengthy chapter to his Bilderberg history in his autobiography, The Time of My Life (1989). Former media mogul and convicted felon Conrad Black, a former Steering Committee member, briefly discusses his Bilderberg participation in both volumes of his memoirs – A Life in Progress (1993) and A Matter of Principle (2012).
And of course the late plutocrat, and one of the original Bilderberg members, David Rockefeller, wrote about glowingly about the virtues of Bilderberg in his Memoirs (2002):
…Bilderberg is an intensely interesting annual discussion group that debates issues of significance to both Europeans and North Americans—without reaching a consensus (p.411).
Rockefeller also intimated that Bilderberg, living up to its original transatlantic purpose, had helped to resolve the tensions between Europe and America by performing the shaping and influencing role envisaged by Retinger:
If these fissures had not been addressed, the consequences for the Atlantic Alliance might have been disastrous. While it is not Bilderberg’s role to resolve disputes among sovereign states, individual participants are free to report on what they have heard to those who do wield official power in their respective countries (p.412; emphasis added).
All of this is, of course, utterly inconsistent with the supposed plot hatched between Bilderberg and the media to suppress the very existence of the Bilderberg Group. The claim made by the alternative media, particularly Infowars, on the fringes of this year’s meeting that Bilderberg’s existence has been “denied” until very recently, should be seen as the utter falsehood that it is. Donald Trump would surely call it “Fake News”.
* * * *
The personal papers of participants that were bequeathed to various universities also dispels the myth that Bilderberg has traditionally been denied by its members along with their cohorts in the media. Bilderberg probably hate this aspect more than anything because it includes much that they would like to remain private. They have an official policy of secrecy – as far as their internal documents are concerned – for 50 years. Thomas Gijswijt is the source of this assertion if I remember correctly.
Respectfully, I agree that many of the reporters mentioned in your article have a strong tendency to exaggerate, but the fact still stands that media coverage of the Bilderberg Group has been minimalized. What is discussed at these meetings is never thoroughly reported by the media, journalists, historians, investigative reporters, etc. Unfortunately, most of what we have is the reports of the “conspiracy theorists.” I would rather have read an article from your attendance at one of these meetings and provide us all evidence what the nature of the “Bilderberg Group” truly is. That is what reporting used to be. It’s non-productive critiquing those who are at least trying to wake people up out of their digital comas; even if their tactics are flawed and not 100% accurate. Our human responsibility is to discern truth from error whether seen, read, or heard. (Which requires effort, but no one wants to exercise that these days). It would be inspiring to learn that the Bilderberg Group were meeting to repent and intercede in prayer for the sin of the nations. The media has a tendency to not report things that glorify Jesus either!
Kevin,
The point you make has been made by a few others in separate correspondence and it would be valid if, but only if the critique of the media coverage of Bilderberg had been along the specific lines you employed. But the fact is the targets of my criticism did not even attempt to make that distinction. Instead Owen Shroyer, Lionel Nation, Kit Daniels and Bradley Brewer all utilised unambiguous language that the mainstream media had actively suppressed or rather “denied” the existence of Bilderberg for decades. Shroyer even accused the New York Times of having ignored Bilderberg’s existence for its first fifty meetings. The utterances of Shroyer et al represent an evolution of the criticisms of the mainstream media promoted by their alt-media predecessors, Gary Allen, Jim Tucker etc, which exaggerated the mainstream’s media lack of coverage. But instead of arguing there has been “very little” media coverage, they now boldly claim until now there had been “none.” And that’s demonstrably wrong and in my view extremely misleading.
I can understand why they did it. It’s a sensational hook for people who are unaware of Bilderberg to be told the reason you probably haven’t heard about it is because the mainstream media has “denied” its existence for decades. But it’s not true.
A more detailed assessment of mainstream media coverage is in the works. Unfortunately it is limited to the English-speaking press, thus missing out on a lot of European coverage of Bilderberg when it was on the Continent. Nevertheless it sustains an argument I have made previously – most notably in my earlier review of Mark Dice’s book – that mainstream media coverage was for a time more than most anti-Bilderberg activists realise, particularly from the 1950s through to the 1970s, but then trailed off again until it began to increase in the 2000s. The real problem remains the actual depth of that coverage beyond merely recycling Bilderberg’s press releases which have, over time, got much shorter, and just writing amusing pieces about weird beliefs of the anti-Bilderberg conspiracists.
I would contend that (with the recent important exception of Charlie Skelton’s musings and attempts to penetrate the veil) some of the best and by that I mean the most inquisitive mainstream media reporting about the Bilderberg Group happened in the 1970s. The 1977 meeting in Torquay, UK, for example, the first meeting after the 1976 meeting was cancelled because of the Lockheed scandal that led to Prince Bernhard’s resignation generated a lot of media coverage. I have collected 33 media reports on that meeting including 16 in total from the following British newspapers: The Times/Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, The Observer and The Guardian. The reporting including some apparent scoops on what Kissinger was going to say at the meeting. But that was a high point. After there was a steep decline. That’s something we need to understand.
To properly assess media coverage of Bilderberg we don’t need misleading and plainly wrong blanket denunciations of the mainstream media for supposedly denying its existence for decades – that’s more like an Infowars commercial than a fact. We need to examine why the coverage went from serious to inconsequential to derisory.
Will Banyan
Will, thanks for responding. I agree with much of what you said. I still believe the Bilderberg Group is still disproportionately uncovered by the media or any other outlet. Even the fact that you stated the high point of coverage were cited articles from 40 years and more validates that statement.
The position I’m holding is Infowars is bringing attention to the Bilderberg Group. Even though this includes erroneous data. Which should be addressed.(You should send it to Kit Daniels as a teachable opportunity)
Mainstream media is not reporting it. The question is why.
Should we attack them for trying to bring light onto that which is hidden? It needs to be exposed so we can determine if it poses a threat or not. Another question to be asked is, what is Infowars agenda?
Are they “fake news?” Which is understood to indicate willful deception to implement a desired doctrine. They made a big mistake, but I don’t think they have evil motives toward their audience.
I served my country and I’m fed up with what is going on, especially that which is in secret; and decisions being made by unworthy men who were to coward to honor it with their own blood!
It’s unfortunate that these young reporters today do not really have a good example of what true journalism and investigative reporting is truly about – responsibility & accountability. I don’t want opinion, just tell me the facts and I’ll formulate my own. (The same problem with sportscasters – the Flyers lost, I don’t care about how that makes you feel).
Maybe you should apply as an editor for Alex Jones’ crew and improve the quality of what they report. Lol.
They sure could use it.
Remember there is only one Truth that we can rely on and that is Jesus Christ!
How will you prove the existence of the Illuminati or the ruling elite ? What all will you present as the evidence ? Where will you start and what are the list of documents and books you would like to show ?
Write a full article if possible on this.
The Illuminati! Terry Melanson has written extensively on this issue. This website is his and you can find plenty of material here or in his book.
I am not talking about the Order of the Illuminati that was founded in 1776.
I am talking about this hidden rulers often called international bankers. Like Rothschilds and Rockefellers.
I wrote a six part series on “Rockefeller Internationalism” for Nexus magazine about 14 years ago. I wrote an article on the Rothschild and the invasion of Iraq for Lobster magazine in 2012.
So do you think that would be enough to prove to average man, the existence of the ruling elite ? Nothing more is required. ?
In answer to your question Wordsworth, it depends on what is the “average man’s” threshold for believing. Some are more than satisfied with a half-hour rant from Alex Jones or nine hours with David Icke. Some will settle for a few issues of The New American, but others might have much higher standards in terms of what they will regard as strong evidence to back what are in essence extraordinary claims, or, at the very least, claims that are not considered credible by “serious” commentators. I write with those in latter category in mind, not as an elaborate act of bias confirmation, but rather as an intellectual exercise to see where the truth or something approaching it might reside.
I have been working on a lengthier treatment of the NWO, but progress is slow. Too slow. Perhaps in the new year…
Please List all the documents you will present as proof. I mean you cant sayto people go read this magazine or watch this video. People will argue back and say go watch alien videos etc. There must be arguments and documents to back your claim ?
What are those arguments and documents ? One argument I have is Bilderberg group, how elite gathers each year, next argument is media ownership by 5 corporations. For documents I have texts like PNAC papers and Proffessor Carrol Quigley tragedy and hope book. I hope you understood my question now. What will you list as documents of proof and argue as evidence of the existence of the elite. Add to the above.
Let me answer it this way: if you are dealing with people with a conspiratorial mindset their standards for evidence in favor of their preferred theory will actually be very low, moreover their beliefs will be unfalsifiable, i.e. they won’t accept any evidence that disproves their theory, there will always be a careful excuse as to why their belief remains “true.”
In answer to your specific questions, to prove the existence of the Bilderberg Group one need only look at the media reports and websites, to go deeper into what it actually does, there are a number of recent academic studies drawing Bilderberg records and those of past participants. And, as per my methodology, we can began to determine how Bilderberg shapes in and influences public debates by studying the participants at each meeting, who the speakers were and whether their message was reflected in the statements of some of the participants.
Media ownership is harder. You would have to start with the financial press and then keep digging back through the various owners to see if indeed there are just five corporations behind them all.
As for the existence of the elite, there are a numerous sources one can start out with, such as the Fortune/Forbes/Bloomberg lists of the world’s richest. Then branch out into looking at who is funding, leading and advising the various think-tanks and foundations the plutocrats use to influence policy debates. Also there are in most of the democracies government agencies that list political donors. Basically a big part of tracking this is being disciplined enough to keep following the threads to find the larger tapestry that the MSM is often reluctant to point out. Such things are hidden in plain sight.
Ok, thanks for sharing your ideas.
also recommend some good sites and blogs.
The Bilderbergers are just a smokescreen for the real villains: the Jews. It is the Jews who control world finance, the mainstream media, and American foreign policy.
I’m sure there’s other places where you can float that anti-Semitic theory.
Some will settle for a few issues of The New American, but others might have much higher standards in terms of what they will regard as strong evidence to back what are in essence extraordinary claims, or, at the very least, claims that are not considered credible by “serious” commentators. The personal papers of participants that were bequeathed to various universities also dispels the myth that Bilderberg has traditionally been denied by its members along with their cohorts in the media. Bilderberg probably hate this aspect more than anything because it includes much that they would like to remain private.
Will Banyan, again, sports graphs and internet stats (quantitative stuff) but avoids substance. He misses the point that early Bilderberg news coverage (which Liberty Lobby fully acknowledged in the 1950s) sounded simply like a repeat of Bilderberg press releases. Then as time went on, and mainstream coverage of Bilderberg waxed and waned, the coverage became largely hit pieces against people protesting Bilderberg’s makeup and secrecy — secrecy being the operative word. Banyan spins a subtle yarn here. He makes some salient points. The key omission, though, is that he downplays the fact the Bilderberg has had journalists/editors/publishers as Steering Committee members and/or as regular or semi-regular attendees who are IN THE BILDERBERG FOLD!!!! Whatever superficial reports might have been made over the decades by mainstream press, the general public STILL DOES NOT KNOW ABOUT BILDERBERG AS ANYTHING REMOTELY APPROACHING A HOUSEHOLD NAME. It remains as a secretive world-planning and networking gahtering where WE ARE NOT ALLOWED TO KNOW what takes place (and cannot be sure the “official” meeting agenda released to the public and press is real or complete)—despite tax-supported officials who attend and yet claim they can and should separate their official capacity from what goes on at the Bilderberg Meetings. Like my colleague Jim Tucker used to say, if this was a clandestine gathering of sports figures or entertainers, the press would pump it much more beyond the staid and stale “reports” that Banyan cites. Care for a debate, Mr. Banyan? Mark Anderson, American Free Press (Correction please. AFP was not founded by Liberty Lobby; the Lobby and the Spotlight newspaper were dissolved before AFP was formed).
Anyone familiar with Bilderberg has read/watched being repeated over and over again that the msm simply did not even acknowledge the Bilderberg’s existence, let alone report on it. Years ago I found a user name and password for access to all the old newspapers and decided to check out the claim myself. The alt info blanket statements simply did not hold up. While the reporting was nowhere near even adequate, exaggerating that they didn’t even report on it nor mention their existence at all serves no purpose except to willingly propagating disinfo.
I find Banyan overview of the early msm “coverage” valuable. Precision of details matters if you’re going to discuss the org realistically.
You’re joking, right? Liberty Lobby would write letters to newspaper editors who either would barely budge (occasionally, they’d publish a deadpan blurb) or they would decline to cover it, or profess they had never heard of Bilderberg. “Nowhere near adequate” is exactly right. If you go to a Bilderberg Meeting, the mainstream press IS NOT EVER THERE, UNLESS THEY”RE INSIDE THE MEETING TO PARTICIPATE BUT NOT REPORT. (A shortlived exception was Spain 2010) What is not to understand here? This Banyan comes across as a containment-op to trivialize and discredit alt-media who do sometimes overstate things, but that’s easy to do in a virtual info. vacuum. The occasional mainstream reports, as I said and I know because I’ve worked the beat, are too tame and timid to convey the real substance of the Bilderberg Meetings in the first place. So occasional milquetoast scribblings (increasingly about bashing protestors and alt-media anyway) in the MSM don’t mean DICK. Who are you trying to kid here? The makeup of the Bilderberg roster is the who’s who of usurious banking, big pharma, big-box tech companies that are controlling the narrative and censoring people and getting into military tech matters. (Google’s Schmidt, Alex Karp, etc etc). I know all the techniques (projection, conflation etc) so I will be observing your dismissive nonsense closely. I know how the Rockefeller and Morgan and related interests have operated over the years and Bilderberg is but one network of several that has sought to nuture the creation of blocs of countries and subdue them economically and politically.
The main thrust of this article is criticism and correction of the exaggerations by infowars and a few others. I can read.
I know who you are, and who your are affiliated with. I wasn’t born yesterday. I’ve been researching and writing about conspiracies for close to 20 years. Having had to pick through the sludge of Bavarian Illuminati myths to get at the core facts was a lesson well learned. And I appreciate those who similarly seek after precision and clear evidence.
Mr Anderson, I thoroughly enjoy how you seem to misunderstand and thus misrepresent the argument of my article. The focus is on a specific claim voiced by a number of alt-right commentators that there was no coverage of Bilderberg not some, not a little, not an article here and there, but none until recently.
I merely demonstrated by reviewing the actual record that this specific claim wasn’t true. I was not engaging in a detailed analysis of the quality of mainstream media reporting on Bilderberg, but merely making the point that claims MSM reporting on the Bilderberg Group was non-existent until recently were not only wrong but were an unnecessary exaggeration given that it could so easily be disproved. If the individuals listed in my article had merely argued that mainstream reporting was not very good, that would have warranted an in-depth analysis of Bilderberg media reports to provide more historical context on that matter and also the opportunity to comment more directly on the complex relationship between the MSM and Bilderberg. A relationship you seem to misunderstand.
Nevertheless, ahead of this year’s meeting, I shall analyse the media angle in anticipation of your no doubt serious and well-considered critique.
You’re right, the Illuminati stuff, by definition, is quite ambiguous and can lead down various rabbit holes, that’s undeniable and that’s why I stick with various key think tanks and the related world planners and “conceptualizers” (e.g., Bilderberg) who leave a paper trail of agendas, 990 forms, studies, white papers, etc. where you can get a clear handle on the fundamental agenda. I don’t mean to huff and puff but Tucker and I, and Willis Carto, really studied this stuff hard. When media blackouts are referred to, there are exaggerations to be sure, at times, but even when the occasional watered down or mis-focused MSM piece comes out, it’s inconsequential. For one thing, Bilderberg doesn’t ever make the evening national news on TV (the reports you’ve cited were all print pieces). Absent television coverage of some magnitude, there is still basically a near-blackout of Bilderberg, not total, but close. (RT started out doing a little decent coverage, but then it seemed to cave, and in 2014 when I went to Denmark, RT, oddly, ran segments that ridiculed and lampooned those who take Bilderberg sufficiently seriously).
Mr Anderson your criticisms of my articles about Bilderberg would seem less obviously ill-informed if you had actually bothered to peruse this site in more detail and read all that I had written on the topic. It might avoid unnecessary backtracking about whether or not a “media blackout” is an exaggeration or not. You might even find some of it to your liking.