At the same time, state ethics panel is investigating former Governor of Colorado Hickenlooper’s activities.

By Mark Anderson

Except for the year 1976, when the annual Bilderberg meeting was not held because Bilderberg co-founder Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands was embroiled in the infamous scandal concerning defense contractor Lockheed, the shadowy deep-state meetings have gone off without a hitch. However, the official Bilderberg Media Team, as it’s called, has confirmed that the 2020 Bilderberg gathering of political, financial, media, banking, technological, and military high rollers has been postponed.

This decision was reached “in line with worldwide travel constraints and prevention efforts” regarding the coronavirus, according to an April 22 email response to AMERICAN FREE PRESS. This writer had asked Bilderberg’s anonymous media team whether the coronavirus response might lead to the cancellation or rescheduling of the 2020 meeting. Meeting or no meeting, though, Bilderberg is making more headlines than usual, in a rare manner its organizers would undoubtedly prefer to avoid.

If AFP’s late Bilderberg hound Jim Tucker were still with us—April 26 was the seventh anniversary of his passing—he’d celebrate the fact that John Hickenlooper—who was Democratic governor of Colorado at the time he made at least two jaunts to globalist gatherings more than likely paid for by for-profit organizations—is being officially investigated regarding his attendance at the 2018 Bilderberg meeting in Turin, Italy. The concern is that Hickenlooper could have been representing the corporations who paid for his trips and thus acting as a de facto lobbyist while holding a U.S. public office.

Even mainstream news sources, which would normally classify Bilderberg coverage on a par with chasing Sasquatch, have picked up on the story.

“The Colorado Independent Ethics Commission has again postponed a hearing into the ethics complaint against former governor and [former] U.S. Senate Democratic candidate John Hickenlooper,” the website “Colorado Politics” noted, while clarifying that the next hearing date of April 28 has been pushed back into May, with the date still undetermined at press time.

Although the 31-page investigative report produced by the Ethics Commission and released amid minimal publicity in November 2019 stopped short of drawing conclusions or making recommendations as to further action, the report looks into four trips that Hickenlooper took in 2018, with considerable emphasis on his June trip to Turin for the Bilderberg meeting.

The remaining trips being probed include his August 2018 attendance at the Bilderberg-connected American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Jackson Hole Symposium. More often than not, AEI sends a representative to Bilderberg meetings.

But why would a Democrat such as Hickenlooper be interested in AEI? Soon after his attendance at Bilderberg, Hickenlooper announced his early candidacy for the presidency on the Democratic ticket. His lukewarm campaign was short-lived, but in order to continue his “audition” for moving up the globalist ladder, the former Denver mayor spoke to Chicago Council on Global Affairs (the former Chicago Council on Foreign Relations) about a year ago, on May 20, 2019. There, despite his party affiliation and generally liberal image, Hickenlooper delivered a speech, covered by AFP, that echoed several edgy neoconservative themes in tune with AEI-affiliated neocons who’ve attended Bilderberg several times, including Richard Perle (a former Bilderberg Steering Committee member) and Paul Wolfowitz, both of whom have long supported a foreign policy of aggressive U.S. military interventionism.

It’s noteworthy that Jackson Hole, Wyo. is a “global city,” of sorts, since it’s also the location of an annual summer meeting of central bankers and commercial bankers from the U.S. and other nations. The meeting is a virtual “Bilderberg” of bankers, although it’s nominally more open and admits a limited number of financial reporters, whereas Bilderberg has a more diverse attendance and its media attendees are direct participants who are sworn to secrecy.

The remainder of Hickenlooper’s trips being investigated were to Connecticut in March 2018 for the commissioning of the USS Colorado, private travel to New Jersey in January 2018, and to Texas to attend a wedding in April 2018. When he attended Bilderberg, hundreds of acres in Colorado were ablaze due to wildfires that scorched the area.

According to the original Colorado complaint, the breach-of-ethics allegations against Hickenlooper concern the above-noted 2018 trips “on private jets owned by for-profit corporations both domestically and internationally.” The complaint also alleges that Hickenlooper “illegally accepted luxury hotel accommodations and expensive travel expenses from corporations.”

Former Republican Speaker of the Colorado House Frank McNulty created the Public Trust Institute in October 2018—just two days before filing the first complaint and right before Hickenlooper left the governor’s office. McNulty was quoted as saying: “This investigation only underscores the fact that ‘Hick’ is guilty of a pattern of illegal activity under Colorado law. There was no justification made for his travel on private jets or for the gifts he received as part of the Bilderberg meetings. We look forward to the commission hearing on this. It’s an open-and-shut case.”

Mark Anderson is AFP’s roving editor. Email him at [email protected].

Kissinger Urges Transition to Post-Covid World Order

By Patrick Buchanan

Among the works that first brought Henry Kissinger to academic acclaim was A World Restored, his 1950s book about how the greatest diplomats of Europe met at the Congress of Vienna to restore order to a continent shattered by the Napoleonic Wars. The balance-of-power peace these men achieved lasted—with the significant exception of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871—for the full century, from 1815 to 1914.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal earlier in April, Kissinger declared that it is now an imperative that the world’s leaders, even as they deal with the raging pandemic, begin to make the “transition to the post-coronavirus order.” “Failure to do so could set the world on fire.” Yet, the ingredients Kissinger considers essential for establishing that new world order appear, like ventilators, to be in short supply.

“Sustaining public trust,” asserts Kissinger, “is crucial . . . to international peace and stability.” But how do we trust again our adversary China, after its criminal cover-up of the menace and magnitude of the virus unleashed in Wuhan? How do we trust again this regime that was, until recently, blaming the coronavirus on U.S. Army troops visiting Wuhan? Observing governments thrashing about in the crisis, the phrase that comes to mind is not “public trust” as much as “every nation for itself.”

Earlier in April, The Wall Street Journal described Europe’s recent behavior: “EU countries unilaterally shut borders and hoarded vital medical gear, leaving people stranded far from home, grocery stores struggling to stock shelves and hospitals desperate to save critically ill patients. When Italy and Spain, reeling from some of the world’s most deadly outbreaks, urged their richer and healthier northern neighbors to help, Dutch politicians brushed off the appeals as new signs of southern mismanagement.”

Around that time, the European Union (EU) Court of Justice ruled that Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic broke EU law by refusing to relocate refugees during the migrant crisis in 2015. The three nations offered no apologies.

In March, Greece used force to stop Syrian refugees from entering its territory. According to Human Rights Watch, Greek troops and armed men at the Greece-Turkey land border sexually assaulted, robbed, and stripped asylum seekers and migrants, driving them back into Turkey. The EU has stayed largely silent.

When Donald Trump issued his Jan. 31 travel ban on those who had recently been in China, candidate Joe Biden denounced Trump for “hysterical xenophobia and fearmongering.” Biden now thinks Trump did the right thing.

Even lifetime liberals can put ideology on the shelf when the voice of the people is loud and clear enough. We must “struggle to heal the wounds to the world economy,” said Kissinger. Yet, the crisis has revealed that a prominent feature of this global economy is that China controls the production of medicines essential to keeping Americans alive. Do we want to continue that dependency? Says Kissinger: “The world’s democracies need to defend and sustain their Enlightenment values . . . [and] safeguard the principles of the liberal world order.” But did not March prove the superior wisdom of Alexander Hamilton: “Every nation ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply.”

Today, borders are everywhere being strengthened as nations compete ferociously for N95 masks and ventilators. Authoritarian rulers are seizing broader powers. The claims of family, faith, tribe, nation, and country seem ascendant over all. “The founding legend of modern government,” writes Kissinger, “is a walled city . . . strong enough to protect the people from an external enemy. . . . This pandemic has produced . . . a revival of the walled city in an age where prosperity depends on global trade and movement of people.”

Kissinger calls the concept of the walled city an “anachronism,” a “legend.” But is the idea of the nation-state, whose principal duty is the defense of the health, safety, and security of the unique people who created it, the “legend”? Or is the real legend the myth, the idea of some New World Order of countries traveling and trading happily with one another in a federation of the world?

In this coronavirus crisis, we can see clearly now, no longer as through a glass darkly. As in most wars, it is to the men of action not the men of words to whom the people turn—to governors, not legislators or members of Congress, who are taking action, as states outbid one another for critical medical equipment.

As for Trump, suddenly, the elites are berating him for being insufficiently dictatorial. Trump, they rail, did not move swiftly enough to invoke the Defense Production Act. He failed to use its authority to dictate to U.S. companies what they must produce. He did not shut down the country quickly enough. He failed to issue orders soon enough to governors who delayed shutting down their states.

People are dying, it is now said, because Trump did not immediately become the autocrat that progressives were denouncing him for being during the impeachment hearings two months ago.

Pat Buchanan is a writer, political commentator and presidential candidate. He is the author of Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever and previous titles including The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? and Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, all available from the AFP Online Store.