Author adminPosted on Categories Parapolitics © Peter Edel, 2020
The Dutch King, the Prime Minister, and a Minister
associated themselves withan anti-democrat
who financed right-wing extremists.
At the beginning of June of this year, a tradition was missing: the Bilderberg conference. The annual gathering of the elite from politics, business, the media and science has been postponed for the time being. ‘The meeting 2020 is postponed’ read the short statement on the opening page of the official Bilderberg website. Probably has everything to do with the corona crisis; there are regular visitors who, given their age, certainly belong to the risk group. For example, the invariably present Henry Kissinger, who, at the age of 97, still carries around him his crimes during the Vietnam War.
If postponement leads to cancellation, it is the second time that a conference has been called off since Bilderberg started in 1954. The first time was in 1976, in the middle of the Lockheed bribe scandal in which then-chairman HRH Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands was deeply involved.
It looks like we will not hear about Bilderberg in the media this summer. Not a very big loss, because the reports about the infamous annual meeting generally amount to little, with one of the few exceptions in this century being an episode of Andere Tijden from 2003. Furthermore, the media limits itself to the observation that there are links between Bilderberg and the Dutch royal family, that the conference is veiled in secrecy, and that conspiracy theorists love it. The Dutch language area does not get to hear much more about it than that.
This is a taboo that also applies to politics. Parliamentary questions from 2008 by former Socialist Party Member of Parliament Harry Van Bommel about Bilderberg were recently labeled as a conspiracy theory, while what Van Bommel brought up referred to nothing conspiratorial. But whoever mentions Bilderberg is simply lumped together very quickly with conspiracy buffs. Then, what exactly is said, no longer matters.
This article ignores the taboo that rests on Bilderberg, without connecting in any way to the usual conspiracy theories in this area.
Cyber Industry
What is Bilderberg actually? The initiators wanted to give American and European representatives from politics, business, the media and academia the opportunity to exchange ideas as private citizens without having to fear that their opinions would be aired in public.
The premise implies secrecy, although something will be made public. Since 2000, Bilderberg has placed a list of invitees on its website and a list of the key topics to be discussed. Afterwards, however, nobody explains anything and you have to guess what was discussed.
What is striking on the list of participants is that nowadays the cyber industry has gained a firm foothold within Bilderberg. Last year in Montreux, this was also reflected in the discussion topics, such as The Weaponization of Social Media and Cyber Threats.
In 2019, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, CEO of Jigsaw, Google’s technology incubator, received an invitation. In addition, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft and Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of the artificial intelligence company Deepmind, were also invited. The same goes for LinkedIn and PayPal founder Reid Hoffman.
Another PayPal founder was also present last year: German-born American Peter Thiel. This article is mainly about this Bilderberger, billionaire, venture capitalist, libertarian and contrarian, because he is a prominent exponent of the cyber sector within Bilderberg, but also mainly because he stands head and shoulders above his cyber colleagues in terms of controversial antecedents.
Thiel is not just any Bilderberger either. He has been there for twelve years, an ‘honor’ that few have. You have to carry the name Oranje, Kissinger or Rockefeller for that (although that family has not been represented since the death of David Rockefeller in 2017). More tellingly, Thiel joined Bilderberg’s steering committee, which is an important position within the structure of the organization. In other words, Thiel belongs to the inner circle. As the name indicates, the steering committee determines the course of Bilderberg. It “assists” with tasks such as raising funds to make the conference possible, but especially also with the important selection of invitees.
Peter Thiel
After PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002, Peter Thiel invested in Facebook, where he also joined the board of directors. Around the same time he started Palantir. One of the branches of this company, Palantir Gotham, supplies software to security services with which large amounts of data and systems to which, for example, number plate and face recognition are linked. Palantir claims not only to be able to solve crimes, but even to predict them.
The downside is that, according to critics, Palantir’s collecting of personal data is on a shaky footing with the (human) right to privacy. In other words: when you drive under a traffic light in a city where Palantir provides services to the police, Thiel knows that.
In the US, Palantir also supplies software to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Thiel’s company thus commits itself to the raids by ICE on undocumented immigrants and to the human rights violations that accompany it, such cages as with locked-up children. This led to protests among some Palantir employees.
Like Bilderberg, Palantir is also surrounded by secrecy. This is evident from the collaboration that the company started in 2012 with the New Orleans Police. The mayor of this American city knew about it, but the city government was kept out, which led to criticism. Under pressure New Orleans ended its partnership with Palantir six years later.
Palantir is not only represented within Bilderberg by Peter Thiel. The CEO of Palantir, Thiel’s college friend Alex Karp, will also be there. And not only that, because like Thiel, Karp also joined the steering committee of Bilderberg.
Startups
Peter Thiel, who may have taken refuge in New Zealand during the corona crisis, provided grants to numerous startups through his Founders Fund. They are usually in the cyber sector, but not always. Thiel, for example, donated seven million dollars to a project that was to lead to the development of a drug against herpes. He also came under fire because the project ignored the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) guidelines for experiments with newly developed drugs. Thiel responded in a typical way: he opened an attack on the FDA.
Actually, more money went from Thiel to startups with a questionable character. Such as to Tlon, the producer of the computer program Urbit. Tlon was founded by Curtis Yarvin, who is not only a software developer, but also became known as the founder of the philosophy behind the far-right movements neo-reactionism and dark enlightenment. Through his website Unqualified Reservations Yarvin thus gained influence in general on the more developed circles within the far right in the US and in particular on the Alt Techies within the underbelly of Silicon Valley.
Neoreactionism
Yarvin’s neo-reactionism is equivalent to reactionism covered with a bit of cyber sauce. He rejects the ideas of equality, human rights and democracy arising from enlightenment thinking. He preferred to see the world return to the pre-enlightenment situation. Including feudalism and monarchism, on the understanding that Yarvin would prefer to draw the new monarchs from the ranks of CEOs of tech giants. He would also prefer to place the administration of the US in the hands of a CEO, a principle that he attaches rather incoherently to the ancient form of government cameralism.
Yarvin’s neo-reactionism shows affinity with traditionalism, such as that of the Russian ultra-nationalist Alexander Dugin. The latter harks back to the Italian traditionalist and ‘super fascist’ Julius Evola, whose thoughts can be found back in Yarvin. In addition, neoreactionism is a form of palingenesis (rebirth), the harking back to the glory of a bygone era, which is considered an aspect of fascism by political theorist Roger Griffin.
Yarvin’s views are shocking. The Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik failed, according to Yarvin, because his attack was “insufficient to liberate Norway from European communism.” Apparently, the 77 murders on Breivik’s conscience did not go far enough for Yarvin.
The Education of a Libertarian
In Thiel’s defense, it could be argued that he only decided to subsidize Yarvin because Tlon / Urbit is innovative in internet technology. However, relations between Thiel and Yarvin go further than a business relationship. Plus, Yarvin isn’t the only cyber-fascist to receive funding from Thiels Founder Fund. The Machine Intelligence Research Institute received money from the same direction when the transhumanist and eugenicist Michael Anissimov was the media director there. The same goes for Patri Friedman (the grandson of economist Milton Friedman) of the Seasteading Institute. Anissimov and Friedman, like Curtis Yarvin, are known as neo-reactionaries.
It may go too far to call Thiel himself a neo-reactionary, but there is certainly an ideological affinity. For example, in The Education of a Libertarian, like Yarvin, he spoke out against democracy. “Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”, he wrote in 2009, the year after his first appearance at Bilderberg. He never rescinded it.
Like Yarvin, Thiel sees CEOs, especially CEOs of tech companies, as the new monarchs. He said said: “We just do not call them monarchies in public, anything that’s not democracy makes people feel uncomfortable.”
The Diversity Myth
Another unpleasant fact about Thiel is his co-authorship of the book The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, published in 2016, in which multicultural policy of universities was criticized and date rape en passant was dismissed as “belated regret”. It took twenty years, but unlike his aversion to democracy in The Education of a Libertarian, he did come back to this idea in 2016.
Thiel did so in a statement sent to Forbes. “Rape in all forms is a crime” he wrote. He also expressed regret about insensitive, crudely argued statements in the book. But as Forbes‘ Ryan Mac put it, Thiel was vague about exactly what he meant by that. Mac did not explicitly blame Thiel for rejecting the 1996 criticism of multicultural policies.
Trump
Peter Thiel is good friends with US President Donald Trump. He donated $1.25 million to his election fund and was later also part of Trump’s Transition Team. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, Trump is “the fulfillment of Thiel’s desire to build a successful political movement for less democracy.”
Especially given Trump’s weakness with regard to the corona crisis, his re-election is no longer as self-evident as previously assumed. However, Thiel has deployed a new weapon to support his friend in the White House: HHS Protect Now, software developed by Palantir that could efficiently map the spread of the coronavirus.
It is unclear exactly how it works, so the mystery surrounding Palantir also remains here. Partly because of this, it is necessary to wait and see whether conditions regarding privacy will be respected. There is certainly concern about this in the American media.
Confrontations
Last year at the Bilderberg conference there were also guests of a completely different order from Peter Thiel. Such as the American historian Timothy D. Snyder, who specializes not only in the Nazi Holocaust, but also in Eastern Europe. The fact that he was invited must have had everything to do with the discussion theme Russia, although he is also known for his heavy criticism of Donald Trump.
By inviting Snyder, the steering committee planted the seeds for a fierce confrontation with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who was there last year in Montreux, but especially with Thiel. We will probably never know whether that confrontation really happened due to the proverbial secrecy surrounding Bilderberg, but the author of this article would have liked to have been there …
Also because another confrontation was lurking in 2019. Thiel is nowadays not welcome at Google, which fielded last year, as previously described, a number of representatives to Bilderberg. A month after the conference, Thiel accused Google of being infiltrated by Chinese military.
“How many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated Manhattan Project for AI?” he said. By Manhattan Project for AI, he referred to the artificial intelligence-focused company Deepmind, which was founded by the aforementioned Mustafa Süleyman and was acquired by Google in 2014 – although Thiel himself also invested in it.
China was also one of the key topics at Bilderberg last year. Also keep in mind the trade war that Thiel’s friend Trump unleashed against China.
Facebook / Cambridge Analytica
Back to Timothy Snyder. In one of his videos on YouTube, he calls the image of Donald Trump as a successful businessman a myth. The fact that this image could nevertheless arise, according to Snyder, is mainly due to a lot of Russian money and efforts on social media, such as via Facebook.
Facebook was at the center of the 2018 scandal surrounding Cambridge Analytica (CA), the British / American data mining company that used data on many millions of Facebook users to influence both the British Brexit referendum in 2016 and the US Presidential election of the same year.
The outrage over CA’s manipulations was enormous. And that did not decrease after Netflix released the documentary The Great Hack about it. Andrew Adonis a member of the British House of Lords on behalf of Labor, who was also present at Bilderberg last year, made no bones about it: “Cambridge Analytica was hired to wage a giant, illegal ‘psy-ops’ campaign for the 2016 (Brexit) referendum & it’s amazing there haven’t yet been more prosecutions.”
Wylie
Peter Thiel knows CA’s primary financier, Trump and Brexit supporter Robert Mercer. In any case, reports appeared that he wanted to start a conservative news channel with Mercer. However, it is mainly Palantir that linked Thiel to CA.
This is how it emerges in the book Mindf*ck by former CA employee and later whistleblower Christopher Wylie. According to Wylie, the contacts between CA and Palantir came about at the initiative of an intern who worked at Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), the company from which CA originated. This Sophie Schmidt is the daughter of the former CEO of Google and last year Bilderberger, Eric Schmidt.
Wylie learned from his boss at CA, Alexander Nix, that Palantir had access to data on millions of US citizens. Equally interesting is that Palantir employee Alfredas Chmieliauskas joined CA to work on the development of the This Is Your Digital Life app, a personality test aimed solely at harvesting data about Facebook users. Thiels Palantir initially denied any connection, but later admitted that Chmieliauskas worked for CA.
Russia
There are also the Russian connections that can be made from CA. Steve Bannon is the former strategist of Donald Trump, editor of the far-right website Breitbart, alleged contact of Thiel-subsidized Curtis Yarvin, and co-founder of CA. Bannon showed his respect for the aforementioned Alexander Dugin, the Russian ultra-nationalist who has a lot of influence within the Kremlin and on the Russian armed forces.
Bannon and Dugin disagree when it comes to capitalism, for example, but the differences between them virtually disappear in light of the shared tendency to traditionalism; the traditionalism that Curtis Yarvin is also familiar with. According to The Nation, Bannon and Dugin had a secret meeting in 2018.
The information collected by CA about Facebook users also went to Russia, according to Christopher Wylie. CA employee Alexander Kogan, who, like Palantir employee Alfredas Chmieliauskas, was involved in the app that harvested data from Facebook users, was also working on a Russian-funded study into ‘Stress, health and psychological wellbeing in social networks.’ At the time, Kogan was affiliated with the University of Cambridge, but also with the University of Saint Petersburg.
CA also hired US political consultant Sam Patten. At the time, Patten was working with the Russian Konstantin Kilimnik, a former agent of the Russian intelligence service GRU. According to Wylie, Patten insisted that he had not transferred information from CA to Kilimnik. But Kilimnik got information about election polls in the US anyway, even if it came from Donald Trump’s former campaign chief Paul Manafort. Sam Patten and Konstantin Kilimnik worked in Ukraine for Manafort, which, as is known in the US, was sentenced to imprisonment, among other things for illegal services to the pro-Russian Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych.
Facebook / Milner
Also, in the CA manipulations so essential to Facebook, one can note a Russian connection. In 2009, Russian / Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner invested many millions in Facebook, where Peter Thiel was already on the supervisory board at that time.
After the Paradise Papers were unveiled, it turned out that this investment had traveled a complicated route, but initially came from Gazprom, the Russian energy company in which the Russian state has a majority stake. In 2009 relations between the US and Russia were still different than they are today, but it was inevitable that Gazprom’s investment in Facebook through Milner received attention after the Russian manipulations in the US of 2016 came to light.
Yuri Milner also invested in Cadre, a company co-founded by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law who, as we saw earlier, was also present at Bilderberg last year. Other investors in Cadre besides Milner include Goldman Sachs, George Soros (odd given his aversion to Trump) and Peter Thiel.
The connection with Russian interests that Peter Thiel acquired through the contacts between Palantir, CA and Facebook is a bit contrary to Bilderberg’s traditional Transatlantic orientation.
Personal capacity
In short, during last year’s Bilderberg conference, HRH Willem Alexander, Prime Minister Rutte and Minister Kaag, associated themselves with someone whose company was guilty of human rights violations, financed right-wing extremists, considered freedom incompatible with democracy, criticized multicultural policies and who also had a whiff of vodka.
The King, Prime Minister and Minister were at Bilderberg in their personal capacity but how much difference does that really make? Is there no problem when they become personally associated with an anti-democratic element?
If such a thing had happened at another meeting, the Netherlands would probably have been too small, but when it takes place at Bilderberg, no journalist makes a point of it – although the question is how many Dutch journalists fully understand the connections outlined above . . .
Nor did the political world get excited about it. Perhaps for the same reason, although according to an anonymous source well known in political The Hague, it is possible that a presence at Bilderberg here is regarded as the icing on the cake of a political career. In other words, according to this source, there are MPs who are reluctant to criticize Bilderberg because they secretly hope to be invited themselves. The fact that Member of Parliament on behalf of Groen Links Kathalijne Buitenweg was one of the participants of Bilderberg last year is one of the indications that this does not only apply to right-wing politicians.
So probably there will not be a Bilderberg in 2020. And its absence creates space to think carefully about this tradition of conferences.
This article has been brought to the attention of the Bilderberg media team before publication, with an offer to include a possible response. However, they waived that.
Source
This article was originally published in Dutch by Peter Edel on the Belgian on-line site De Wereld Morgen (The World Tomorrow) titled “Bilderberg: voorbij het taboe!” on 15 June 2020. Google was so kind to translate it into English with final edits by Govert Schuller. All done with the permission of the author.
Peter Edel is a Dutch analyst and investigative journalist from Amsterdam. He is the author of De Schaduw van de Ster (The Shadow of the Star, 2002); Banvloek (Anathema, 2003); and De diepte van de Bosporus, een politieke biografie van Turkije (The Depth of the Bosporus: A political biography of Turkey, 2011).