Control
What James B. Greenberg offers this morning is not particularly new information. But as invisible wheels turn that have impact on our futures, perhaps a review is timely.
Greenberg reviews efforts by moneyed interests inside the U.S. to retool government “of the people, by the people, for the people” to our oligarchs’ specifications. Two Heritage-connected projects continue apace as a kind of oligarchic Matrix:
Two projects are moving in tandem: Project 2025, a detailed plan for consolidating executive power now guiding actions in Trump’s second term, and an Article V Convention of States, a rarely invoked constitutional mechanism that allows state legislatures to propose sweeping amendments without going through Congress. Both are funded by the same network and both are being advanced—quietly but deliberately [1][2].
The machinery is a closed loop. The donors fund the agenda. They pay for the marketing campaigns that frame it as “restoring liberty” or “protecting states’ rights.” They bankroll the lobbying efforts that push legislatures to pass resolutions calling for a convention. They also underwrite the legal and policy staff who draft the model legislation that those legislators introduce [3].
What they have built functions as a parallel polity—an unelected, unaccountable apparatus embedded inside the official government. It uses the laws, budgets, and offices of the state, but its loyalties run to private funders rather than the public. Once such a system takes root, it can outlast elections, sidestep oversight, and operate with a speed and discipline that formal democratic processes rarely match.
Because government by the plebs is too messy for them. Sharing political power with people beneath them is, well, beneath them. Nancy MacLean traced the history of the development of this Matrix in “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.“ Greenberg describes the plan as it exists today as a form of resource extraction:
This is not representative democracy. It is governance outsourced to private actors who are not elected, not bound by obligations to the public, and not required to reveal their actual interests. From a political ecology perspective, it mirrors the logic of resource extraction: public institutions are treated as a commons to be stripped of their value, repurposed for private gain, and left weakened for everyone else. The same extractive mindset that clear-cuts forests or privatizes water is now applied to the machinery of governance itself. Their reach is national, but their operations are granular, targeting county commissions, school boards, and statehouses with the precision of political campaign targeting.
The Heritage Foundation’s public face is policy research. Its real power lies in a coordinated political infrastructure. The State Policy Network, for example, links more than 50 state-based think tanks that act as delivery systems for the national agenda [3]. Each one produces studies, testifies in hearings, and mobilizes activists to create the appearance of grassroots momentum. This is the cultural work of legitimacy: the performance of democratic process—hearings, petitions, and votes—crafted to disguise the fact that the outcomes are prearranged and the scripts are written elsewhere. As in other systems of dominance, legitimacy is constructed through symbols and ritual, not by consent freely given.
In essence, a Matrix that doesn’t require artificial intelligence, yet means to maintain the illusion of free will and agency for people it means to control.
Morpheus tells Neo, “You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain. But you feel it. You felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there. Like a splinter in your mind.”
Like MacLean, Greenberg warns this is exactly the case:
The media’s near-silence is part of the story. These groups thrive in the shadows. The quieter the path, the less public attention, the easier it becomes to present outcomes as inevitable, even consensual. By the time the public notices, resolutions have passed, delegates chosen, and the framework for change already in place.
It’s trite, perhaps, but like Neo, an anagram for One, you are the ones who can break this Matrix and awaken the sleepers to the danger and to their own servitude.
Marcy Wheeler revealed last week a similar attempt by Team Trump “to hide that what Trump has claimed for eight years was an effort by Hillary to frame Trump was — is, still — a wildly successful attempt by SVR [Russian Foreign Intelligence Service] to frame Hillary.” It’s another example of actions occurring outside public view that have national, international, and personal impacts.
“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now in this very room” Morpheus tells Neo.
Not yet, but powers are working on it.
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