The CFR: None Dare...pp. 51-58

 Last week we discussed the Illuminati because this book mentions it in passing and it is too well known of a subject for me to not cover. The next three pages after this talk about the same thing only with a different name: The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). I've mentioned this group before but I'll recap it for you: it's just a different name for the Illuminati by people who are disposed to think that such a group exists. It simply doesn't matter what the name of the group is anymore: Illuminati, CFR, Tri-Lateral Commission, Freemasons, the international Zionists, international bankers, the Deep State, or whatever it is that the Q-anon people are claiming. The devil has many names, and just like the devil this is all made up. 

"In addition to Paul Warburg, founders of the C.F.R. included international financial Insiders Jacob Schiff, Averell Harriman, Frank Vanderlip, Nelson Aldrich, Bernard Baruch, J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. These men did not create the C.F.R. because they had nothing better to do with their time and money. They created it as a tool to further their ambitions."

I call this move the "bewilder gambit," an academic paper calls something similar to it "the illusion of explanatory depth." In either case the general tactic is just to carpet bomb the audience with technical jargon, facts, and nouns so that they begin to think that there exists some kind of truth to what is being said. After all, the reader thinks, all of those names must come from somewhere. Who are any of these people? It literally doesn't matter. All that matters is that there are a few names you recognize and the rest of them must be evil shadow puppeteers. 

For example, Jacob Schiff--an international financier. He's come up before when we discussed bank loans funding the cold war...or something, his Kuhn, Loeb, and Co. lent money to the Japanese government during the Russo-Japanese war. This loan was made, essentially, at his behest. The average conspiracy theorist has no idea who that is, why it was important, and--I'll hazard a guess--any idea that there existed a Russo-Japanese war. What matters is that he's a banker, his name is vaguely Jewish (Schiff was a hugely influential Jewish leader), and that he can be placed on a list with Morgan and Rockefeller. Now, does it matter that Schiff dies in 1920 and that the CFR wasn't created until 1921? Maybe it does not as he could have helped lay the groundwork before his death. 

Nevertheless, the CFR is different from the Illuminati in that it not only did exist but still does at their original headquarters located at 58 East 68th Street New York City. Like the Tri-Lateral commission, it has always held a special place in the hearts of conspiracy theorists. The appeal of the CFR is probably that you can literally point to it. What it actually is: a think tank with a specific focus on U.S. foreign relations which should be obvious because of the name. 

What do Allen and his ilk think it is: the evilest thing ever devised by the hand of man.* According to the book, "The C.F.R. has come to be known as "The Establishment," "the invisible government" and "the Rockefeller foreign office."

The book leaves out who it has come to be known as by because this is the Trump gambit of making a claim prefaced with "a lot of people are saying..." Which, no, they are not. No one calls the CFR this, simply because a majority of people are not even aware that this group exists. Like most think-tanks, the average person isn't going to be aware of them because they have no reason to be. Prior to 2019--if you asked a person in the street what virus shedding was, they'd very likely have no idea. You are aware of the CFR if you follow international relations, just as if you are a biologist you follow what gets published in Nature. 

Though Allen's claim is odd because after discussing how the group has these nicknames he then spends a page discussing how hidden it is. No one knows about it but it has come to be known as "the invisible government?" No thanks, your argument from ignorance won't fly here. Look this group is so veiled that "we discovered after poring over volumes of the Readers' Guide To Periodical Literature covering several decades that only one magazine article on the C.F.R. has ever appeared in a major national journal-and that in Harper's, hardly a mass-circulation periodical." Allen goes on to comment that only a handful of newspapers have written articles on the CFR. 

A couple of things: the first is the weird shade thrown at Harper's Magazine. It's an intelligently written magazine containing long-form articles. It's not it has ubiquitous as TIME but it's been around for a century by Allen's book's publication. Secondly, the CFR probably didn't appear in a lot of magazines or newspapers except Foreign Affairs, the magazine the CFR actually publishes. Do you want to know what the CFR thinks on U.S.-Russian relations? You can buy the magazine they publish about the subject. Finally, the reason no one covers the CFR is the same reason the media never covered Hillary Clinton's child sex trafficking ring: because it wasn't real. The CFR isn't doing the things that Allen thinks they are so there is no reason to write articles about them. Again, if we want to know what they are up to we can read their publication.

The undue influence of the CFR though must be something. After all, according to the Christian Science Monitor, "Because of the Council's single-minded dedication to studying and deliberating American foreign policy, there is a constant flow of its members from private to public service. Almost half of the Council members have been invited to assume official government positions or to act as consultants at one time or another."

Let's be clear: Allen thinks this is a bad thing. Members of the CFR who spend their professional careers studying foreign politics are sometimes given positions in government to do the same thing. What this means is that the CFR is evil for fostering the creation of experts in foreign politics who then go on to use that expertise to advise the leaders of the U.S. in foreign politics. This is further evidence that Allen's real problem is that professional intelligentsia has shut him out. He's derided academics and now think tanks because his views aren't being accepted. The result is that anyone that has received formal education is now the tool of the conspiracy simply because his down-home simplistic writing isn't accepted by the professionals covering the same subject. 

This problem is going to extend to the rest of the chapter as well. Allen is going to list a bunch of people who are or were members of the CFR and then show that they've worked for both parties in government as well as international corporations such as IBM, NBC, Pan-American, the Brooking Institute, the Rand Corporation, etc. The problem is that this isn't how any of this works. It makes perfect sense that IBM would employ people with expertise in foreign affairs because they do business in foreign countries. This is only a conspiracy if you set the cart in front of the horse and claim that the CFR is implanting people in these organizations. The problem though: is that if you've read this far, you probably are already going to believe it. 

*Also possibly the devil.