McCain Institute Hosts Summit for Various Spokes of Swamp Power

Remember when they all pretended they weren’t on the same team? The solidifying of the Uniparty ruling establishment continues in earnest May 5-6 as the McCain Institute hosts its 2023 Sedona Forum. Establishment Republicans, Democrats, big-box media, defense contractors and progressive donors all find a home at the organization founded by the late arch-neoconservative Swamp titan, John McCain. Nowhere is the blurring of lines more evident than at the Institute’s flagship affair.

The tenth annual Sedona gathering features “lawmakers, journalists, military leaders, business executives, and more,” the Institute’s website boasts. “This year’s theme, ‘Indispensable Power,’ will examine the diplomatic, military, and economic means employed to protect democracy, human rights, and the global competitive edge.”

One Big Happy Club

Official 2023 Forum supporters include Amazon Web Services and defense contractor goliath Northrop Grumman. CBS News and Politico, the news site recently seen allowing French President Emmanuel Macron to edit its interview with him for content, are prominently listed as “media partners.”

Speakers at the affair show how seamlessly ruling establishment networked power works together. Leading dominant media figures include CBS News anchor Margaret Brennan, CBS Chief Washington Correspondent Major Garrett, Fox News Chief National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin, NPR National Security Correspondent Greg Myre, Politico White House Correspondent Eugene Daniels, and Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin.

Among the politicians flying in from Washington are Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA).

David Simas, the founding CEO of the Obama Foundation, will speak. As will Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, co-founder and Managing Partner of Inclusive Capital Partners, an organization that watchdog website Influence Watch states is “a business and political policy movement based on aligning capitalism with left-progressive priorities.”

Lady de Rothschild, a member of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations, is perhaps best known for her longtime ardent financial support of Bill and Hillary Clinton. She is not out of place at all at Sedona. In fact, de Rothschild sits on the Board of Trustees at the McCain Institute.

Joining her on that Board is Elisa Massimino, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, a leftist establishment political organization founded by former Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign manager John Podesta. Massimino runs the Human Rights Institute at uber-leftist establishment Georgetown University Law Center and is also a CFR member.

McCain People: Soros, Gates, Ford, Rockefeller, and ADL

A look at the McCain Institute’s donors shows even more seemingly strange ties. In the “$100,000 and Above” category one name immediately jumps out – notorious progressive globalist philanthropist George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Fellow powerhouse hard-left philanthropies the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation are also to be found in this highest-dollar category, as is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

This is who John McCain really was.

The 2021 Sedona Forum hosted a discussion on “How to Win the War Against Misinformation” that featured Open Society Foundations Managing Director, US Programs, Lelah Ispahani. The 2022 Forum included a panel on “Protecting American Democracy: Working Together to Counter Hate & Extremism” co-hosted by the thoroughly discredited Anti-Defamation League, which hasn’t come across a conservative group yet that it can’t label racist, anti-Semitic and/or extremist. Widely ridiculed ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt was among the speakers.

Here’s a quick snapshot of what he considers hate and extremism: “It’s about time,” Greenblatt tweeted on April 24 of Tucker Carlson’s exit from Fox News. “For far too long, Tucker Carlson has used his primetime show to spew antisemitic, racist, xenophobic & anti-LGBTQ hate to millions.”

A quote from another partner of the McCain Institute best captures the spirit of this ruling establishment coterie. In January 2022, the Institute teamed up with Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications to create “a task force... to fight disinformation in the media landscape.”

An assistant professor at the journalism school who is part of the endeavor bluntly stated that the task force is meant to combat the questioning of credentialed authority by regular Americans. “A growing portion of civil society began to be skeptical about whether information infrastructure is a pillar of our society; that skepticism is a real danger,” Hazel Kwon said. “It’s a real danger to the nation, and the United States as a country. So to me, tackling disinformation is really about regaining trust in our information systems.”

What’s not to trust about George Soros and Bill Gates money going to allow Mitt Romney, NPR, defense contractors and intimate Hillary Clinton allies to get together and talk about saving democracy?