(Ken Silva, Headline USA) President Joe Biden’s apparent declining cognitive ability has voters asking: Who’s really in charge?
Former House Oversight Committee Chair Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, provided that answer in his recently released bestseller, The Puppeteers: The People Who Control the People Who Control America—and no, it’s not Barack Obama.
In the book, Chaffetz—now best known as a Fox News contributor since leaving elected office in 2017—described a dispersed network of power-brokers, ranging from billionaire investment tycoons and shady intelligence operators to mere self-interested bureaucrats.
“It’s not just the people with close proximity to Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and other top political leaders,” Chaffetz said Tuesday in an exclusive phone interview with Headline USA.
“It’s a whole group of people who—if you want to find out who they are and what they’re doing, you have to follow the money,” he added. “Money is power.”
One of the more prominent “follow the money” examples cited in The Puppeteers is that of investment firm BlackRock, which has at least a 5% stake in 97.5% of S&P 500 companies—including Fox News.
BlackRock uses this to push leftist policies such as “decarbonization” by, among other ways, influencing the companies’ boards of directors.
Chaffetz also wrote about what could be described as the enforcement arm of the American puppeteers: institutions such as the FBI, which are used to crush political dissent.
Currently, Chaffetz said, the FBI is being largely used to target conservative dissidents—such as parents protesting at school boards over lockdowns, mask mandates and child pornography in schools.
But The Puppeteers also cited the work of investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson, who found that nearly half of the post-9/11 terrorist cases involving Muslims were provoked by undercover FBI informant provocateurs.
“Race-based violence is nothing to be ignored,” Chaffetz wrote in the book. “But it’s not a right–left issue.”
Along with specific individuals and institutions, Chaffetz attacked some of the most sacred ideological cows being used by America’s power brokers—including even the legal theory of “disparate impact” that underpins how the Civil Rights Act is enforced.
Citing the work of Columbia University’s Richard Hanania, Chaffetz noted that disparate impact “criminalizes everything”—referring to the fact that the disparate-impact standard has been used by courts to outlaw things such as fitness tests for law enforcement jobs, on the grounds that such tests favor males.
While identifying the source of many of America’s problems, Chafetz told Headline USA that he admittedly struggles to find solutions.
When it comes to the current Congress, “they’re fighting all the wrong fights,” the former House Oversight Committee chairman lamented.
“That’s what bothers me: We get distracted by this shiny new object very week,” he said, noting that the recent debt-ceiling fight was really just a dispute over less than 10% of the federal budget.
“We haven’t attacked the structural challenges for our government to be responsible and good stewards of our money,” Chaffetz said
But he said he was pleased that the issues outlined in his book were being absorbed by a wider audience of voters. The Puppeteers made the New York Times bestseller list four times.
“I wanted to illuminate things that most people don’t hear or read about,” he said.
“And that’s why it’s satisfying to be selling so many books, because people are shocked,” he continued. “I try to offer solutions, but people have to first know what the problem is.”
Chaffetz also left the door open to attacking the problems identified in The Puppeteers one more time as a member of Congress—this time as a possible challenger to Mitt Romney’s Senate seat.
“I have no immediate plans to do that. But I’ll keep the door open and see what happens,” he told Headline USA.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
