Whoever designed the cover of Jason Chaffetz's newest book The Puppeteers did a terrific marketing job, putting focus not on the five silly puppets now trying to distract us (The A Team), but on "The people who control the people who control America" (The B Team).  This is the central theme of Chaffetz's book.

In the first four chapters, Chaffetz contrasts what the federal, state, and local elected officials should be doing to secure our freedom and strengthen our economy with what the globalist B Team of unelected bureaucrats have been doing to weaken America.

Thus, in Chapter 1 ("America's New Social Credit System"), Chaffetz shows how the B Team "appears to be importing elements of China's top-down perversion of democracy to America."  In the United States, this involves rating companies in the financial sector by using an Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) score.  In other words, companies are rated "according to their compliance with political dogma."

Then, in Chapter 2 ("Farewell Free Markets, Hello Stakeholder Capitalism"), Chaffetz reveals how the B Team's ESG scheme works.  Readers should pay careful attention to the details because "stakeholder capitalism" involves a completely new way of using other people's money without their consent.

The point is, most of Americans don't buy individual stocks directly.  Instead, they buy index funds that are invested by fund managers in hundreds of different companies.  Individual investors couldn't possibly manage such a vast array of different stocks, so they must rely on fund managers to do the job.  In fact, Chaffez warns, "[t]hree of the largest fund managers in America — Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street — manage a combined total of $15 trillion in assets, an amount that is more than three-quarters of the size of the whole United States economy. ... Each of these fund managers can make or break any company that does not support leftist policy goals."

"So who," Chaffetz asks in Chapter 5 ("Most Power, Least Famous"), was Biden's Svengali on the economy?"  His answer is Brian Deese, the former "global head of sustainable investing at Blackrock."  Blackrock hired Deese while Trump was in office.  This was also the time when only a few wealthy American voters knew that Blackrock was building a giant global investment company whose ultimate goal was to create an "economy without borders" through the World Economic Forum (WEF).

Before Deese went to work for Blackrock, he was "a senior advisor to President Obama during the last two years of his presidency."  There, he "played a key role in forging the Paris climate agreement."  Thus, Deese was "least famous" in the public eye but still had the "most power" at the highest levels of our federal government.

In Chapter 7, "Inventing Discrimination to Redirect Capital," and in Chapter 11, "Criminalizing Dissent," Chaffetz reveals two of the Biden administration's highest priorities: combating domestic terrorism and "putting equity at the center of the agenda[.]"  To head up an obscure federal agency called the Domestic Policy Council, Biden has appointed as its director former U.N. ambassador Susan Rice.  So again, Chaffetz has highlighted a key theme in his book — those "least famous" have the "most power" in the Biden administration.

Here's how, in her own words, Susan Rice sees her role as director of the Domestic Policy Council: "Every agency ... will place equity at the core of their public engagement, their policy design and program delivery to ensure that government resources are reaching Americans of color and all marginalized communities — rural, urban, disabled, LGBTQ, religious minorities and so many others."  Wow!  That's a lot of power in the hands of someone with Susan Rice's defiantly duplicitous reputation.

One of the most interesting strategies Chaffetz talks about in his final chapter, Chapter 13, is Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin's approach to liberal values in education such as diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE), which figures prominently in Susan Rice's plans for equity enforcement in domestic affairs.  Instead of completely rejecting his predecessor's rigid DIE policy for public schools, Youngkin "embraced it."

He simply changed one word by replacing equity with opportunity.  He then appointed the Heritage Foundation's Angela Sailor — "a Black woman with an impressive history of opposition to politicized school curriculum such as Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the 1619 Project.  When government sets out to secure equality of opportunity," Chaffetz affirms, "we preserve the very American pursuit of excellence by incentivizing and rewarding merit."

On the next-to-last page of his book, Chaffetz makes an observation that may seem depressing to some readers: "What I learned along the way in writing this book is that simply electing people to Congress will not change things fast enough. ... We shouldn't assume that Congress will fix all things.  They never have.  The answers to our most complex problems are found outside of Washington, D.C.  They are found in our homes, in our communities, and with our friends and neighbors."

Image: Broadside Books.