…can be seen ithis year’s Rhode Island Senate race. As I’ve been arguing ever since I published the first mainstream media investigation of the Yale Secret society back in 1977 (“The Last Secrets of Skull and Bones” in Esquire, reprinted in my collection %%AMAZON=0060934468 The Secret Parts of Fortune%%), the true significance of Skull and Bones, lies not in its mondo-bizarro macabre initiation rituals (which a team of videotapers I assembled was the first to expose–and get broadcast on national tv–back in 2001) but as an instance of how power actually operates in America. Not through occult back room conspiracies, but through the kind of easily exposable networking that most resembles the Old Boy network of influence and power in the U.K., and which has sustained the reign of the East Coast blue-blood elite in private and public power for longer than it wants you to know.
And so just as we had two Bonesmen run for President in 2004, we now have two sons of Bonesmen running for the Senate seat in Rhode Island this year. The son of Charles Sheldon Whitehouse, Skull and Bones ’44, Sheldon Whitehouse, is running against Lincoln Chafee, the son of John Chafee Skull and Bones ’47.
And guess who came up to campaign for Lincoln Chafee during his primary fight, according to Katha Pollit in The Nation? None other than George W. Bush, Skull and Bones, ’68, even though politically he was closer to Chafee’s right wing opponent.
That’s the way “secret” power works in America. Out in the open, in your face if you know where to look for it.
Hat tip for this nugget of info to my Skull and Bones research colleague, ace investigator, Peggy Adler.
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