The U.S. 2016 election season has been nothing short of a rollercoaster ride this year, despite it only being March. Shake-ups have been occurring on both sides of the political fence, with Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton seeing formidable resistance from long-time independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, while the Republican establishment has made little secret of the threat it perceives in businessman Donald Trump’s seemingly unstoppable momentum.
If anything, Trump has emerged as an enigma, having managed to attain an unprecedented level of support amidst America’s “Great Unwashed,” to borrow Thomas Wright’s phraseology for the working class in Victorian England. This, in turn, has resulted in a concerted effort amidst the establishment crowd to stop him, at all costs; and while notions of back-room-deals and cloak and dagger crookery may come to mind, very little about this conspiracy to overthrow The Donald is being kept quiet.
Fortune.com reported recently on a group of “nervous business moguls and politicians” who met secretly off the coast of Georgia recently, at a private island resort. “They weren’t visiting Sea Island to party,” the article read. “They were all guests at an annual closed-press event hosted by a conservative Washington think tank. And this year they banded together around one common goal: stopping Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump.”
The story the Fortune piece outlined is nothing new, especially for those adept with their conspiracy literature.
G. Edward Griffin’s book The Creature from Jekyll Island (American Media, 1994) is a classic revered by those interested in the secret workings that have engineered American (and global) economics for decades, which, as Griffin describes with gusto, began in modern times with the institution of the Federal Reserve Bank. More important (and relevant to the book’s title) is the fact that the secret meetings which led to the Fed’s formation were initiated off the Georgia coast on Jekyll Island, located within the same little spattering of islands where Sea Island is found.
Hence, perhaps it’s little surprise that when elites would decide to band together and engineer the future of government and economic prosperity in the free world, they would head off to a resort island like this off the Georgia Coast. And all this just a week after The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, proclaiming that he is prepared to play his part in handing the presidency to Hillary Clinton, in an effort to ensure that Trump never makes his way to the Oval Office.
Let’s stop for a moment to make clear the fact that Trump has frightened a lot of us. Whatever sense he might make of economic issues while in office, Trump’s unusually brazen attitudes have done little garner favor amidst the United States’ allies around the world, with some European countries advising that he might be “banned” if he were to show up there after being elected. Meanwhile, we’ve all heard former Mexican President Vincente Fox’s foul-mouthed responses to Trump’s unwavering assertion that he’ll build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and then be sure to make our Southern neighbors pick up the tab. Sure, many people will find Trump’s brand of apolitical plain-speak on the campaign trail refreshing; however, in the broader scheme of things, his irreverence may not bode well entirely for the United States, if he were indeed elected.
Which brings us back to our friendly neighborhood secret societies, and their not-so-secret meetings off the Georgia coast. Blogger John Rappoport, referring to the Sea Island elites and their little holiday as a group of “vampire technocrats”, noted the blood-wrenching irony (or maybe in this instance it’s blood sucking) of anyone within establishment politics branding Donald Trump a “threat”, summarizing the circumstances thusly:
“People expect the walking smiling dead to run for office. Big grins, empty words. That’s considered safe, despite the fact that these hideous creatures are perfectly ready and willing to send planes anywhere to drop bombs on populations for no goddamn good reason. But as long as the candidate has a wan shit-eating grin, and as long as says he’s caring, it’s all right. Then Trump comes along and he’s suddenly the Dangerous One. He’s suddenly a threat. You mean all those other ghouls weren’t? He’s Hitler, and they were messiahs? Are you kidding? All of a sudden we have a dangerous Presidential candidate where there were none before? REALLY? People are getting so worked up about the first dangerous candidate in recent memory? REALLY?”
It does all begin to seem rather strange, after a bit of careful reflection. As despicable as Trump may seem at any given time, is it really fair to say he’s much worse than many of the alternatives? In reality, maybe the biggest differences between Trump’s loud-mouth approach to politics, peppered with questionable positions on race and ethnicity, advocation of potential war crimes (especially with brilliant ideas that include targeting the families of terrorist groups), and other horrid visions of America batting for “Team Trump” is simply this: he actually says what he plans to do, whereas in the “real world” of American politics, these kinds of things are done all the same, but then they are never mentioned.
Which brings us back to this not-so-secret meeting on Sea Island, Georgia. Some might think it humorous that “technocrats” like Apple’s Tim Cook and Tesla’s Elon Musk, as well as politcal heavy-hitters like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and political advisor Karl “Turdblossom” Rove, would all band together as an anti-Trump alliance. It might also seem noble, of course. Still, there’s the troubling implication of what it means when a candidate like Trump comes out of left (or right) field, and seemingly stomps every hope and dream of the political establishment… which, in turn, results in those of the latter group banding together to stop him. The question is, how will it be done?
The most popular theory at the moment involves a brokered Republican convention, in which Trump would be ousted in favor of a more “stable” establishment type, someone probably the likes of Ohio governor John Kasich, who would be more willing to tow the party line than Trump has been. However, one may wonder how the public, which has turned out en-masse to show support for Trump and his irreverent approaches during this primary season, might react to such an overthrow. Would the establishment ever be deemed trustworthy for ousting Trump, “the people’s man”, in favor of the guy THEY would prefer representing the Republican party? Either way, the message it sends is that no matter what the American public thinks (and no matter how potentially misguided support for someone like Trump may also be), the establishment will prevail in the end, and will resort to political trickery and backroom engineering to do so.
To end on a final anecdote, historian Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University wrote extensively in his book Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (MacMillan, 1966) of what he called the “Round Table Groups”, also sometimes referred to as the Milner Groups or other similar names. These groups, defined roughly, were international organizations whose operations were aimed at the proliferation of the way of life in the Western World to all parts of the globe, and whose operations were aimed at keeping them the architects of the economic and political structure of Western society. Some have criticized Quigley’s notions of a “secret society” or group whose control stretches to all corners of the globe, despite Quigley’s assertion that they published their own magazine which kept members abreast of its operations (and even more interesting is the fact that the publication is still in print today).
Quigley did not perceive the group’s actions as being particularly concerning or nefarious, although he did assert that the operations of this “Round Table Group” in its various forms and manifestations over the years had become essential to the way of life we have come to know in the world today; however, his extensive mention of the group and its operations and influence, for those willing to study Quigley’s written works, hardly would be considered a “conspiracy theory”, so much as the observations of an eminent historian whose perspectives on world history offer an alternative, albeit a clear-minded one, to the establishment view.
It may well be that these “Round Table Groups” are very much still a part of Western Society, and the aims and objectives of its prospective architects are represented by a group in which Donald J. Trump has, with near certainty, no part. Hence, while some would dispute the reality of secret groups and their goals and agendas in the modern world, the real “engineers” of Western Society, while meeting secretly, are right before our eyes; their names are well known, and there appears to be historical precedent for their enjoyment of vacations to resort islands off the Georgia coast.
Whether or not you call them “secret societies,” the members of these engineering groups are hardly anything secret. If anything, they are the constituents of a political reality that, while seldom acknowledged by the mainstream, remains a far more complete picture of the modern world than many would have us believe. Which reminds us of the time-tested saying which goes, “the best place to hide something is in plain sight.”
Addendum: At the close of writing this article, I did a quick search on Google for the name “Donald Trump”, for which the first result was the following New York Times headline: “Republican Leaders Map a Strategy to Derail Donald Trump,” detailing a strategy that would, “rely on an array of desperation measures, the political equivalent of guerrilla fighting.”
If I were Donald J. Trump, I would have to express amusement at the tail feathers that are being continually ruffled by his political presence today; however, Trump might also do well to familiarize himself with the political history of innocuous little islands off the Georgia coast, and the kinds of meetings that have been held there in decades past.