Thread by @TheDailyMao

Or as I like to call it, the West's Central Committee

https://twitter.com/Russ_Warrior/status/1347210459032772609

Fun fact: in college I RA'd for a guy who was a former member of the Bilderberg Steering Committee. One job I had was copying his paper rolodex into Outlook. When I got to George HW Bush he told me to put in Bush's golf caddy's cell phone instead of the landline.

Most of the time, people who are in that circle perform a sort of bridging function. Here, you can see attendees Kravis, Paulson, Thornton, both Greenbergs, etc mediating a discussion between Wang Qishan and US business execs trying to press China for more market opening

Of course people will assign the conference (and other similar meetings ie Trilateral) some sort of nefarious intent but it's honestly more a consensus-building mechanism (which doesn't always result in consensus) than anything else.

The interests attendees represent are actually not that hard to figure out, which means who is chosen to attend each year sends as much a message as the agenda itself around what topics the "Western collective" considers salient.

For example, you can trace how China went from a topic of quasi-engagement (2014 saw Liu He and Huang Yiping invited to talk about Chinese economic reform) to strategic containment (2019 saw no Chinese attendees; Matt Pottinger was invited to talk simply about "China")

But returning to @Russ_Warrior's point, of course, this is not democratic. But since the West is an oligarchy (dependent on capital appreciation) hiding under the skin of liberalism, this "Western collective" is pretty much the best you can get, absent real revolution.