Tony Blinken and His Friends: How Washington’s Nepotism Game Subverts Democracy
The Unthreatening Threat
Antony Blinken, who arguably helped give Joe Biden the presidency by prompting the corralling of 51 former intelligence officials to falsely inform Americans that the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was Russian disinformation, doesn’t seem like a disturbing Democrat. He’s not a Democratic Socialist like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who compares herself to Eva Peron and thinks that the national government should censor opposition television. He’s not a hardline partisan with an obvious political agenda like Adam Schiff or Eric Swalwell. He’s not a presidential aspirant with grand and sometimes sinister ideas like Pete Buttigieg. He’s not even a career politician like Chuck Schumer, who will roll in whichever direction the party seems to point him.
Blinken seems bland, even conventional, by comparison. He’s a sixty-one-year-old Harvard and Columbia graduate whose father and grandfather were Democratic businessmen and diplomats known for their probity, their Zionism, and their old-line aesthetic. He’s the father of two whose wife serves in upper-level administrative positions in the Biden White House, and in his free time he’s a Jazz afficionado whose songs are listed on Spotify under Ablinken (pronounced Abe Lincoln). He’s seemingly politically “mainstream”: he favors a “tougher tone” with China even as he “disagree[s], very much, with the way [President Trump] went about it.” Republicans like him: he was confirmed by a 78-22 vote in the Senate, with the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, a supporter of President Trump, saying “this is the person for the job.” He’s not the type of official whose CV blares ‘threat to democracy.’
But recent evidence has shown that Blinken is possibly the worst kind of threat to democracy: the kind we don’t see coming because his actions are consistently behind-the-scenes and effectively neutralized by a conventional facade. Raised in what we once called the American establishment and owing his advancement entirely to its institutions, his loyalty isn’t to representative government by the people. It’s to the top-down administrative-corporate-academic system that’s grown up over the last sixty years of American Empire and increasingly tells Americans how to live. When push comes to shove, and even before that, he’ll lend his calm, expert, no-axe-to-grind exterior to supporting and legitimizing the system’s moves.
Worse, at a higher register, his background matches the background of top Biden “civil servants” like Attorney General Merrick Garland, Director of Domestic Policy Susan Rice, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, United States Special Envoy to Iran Robert Malley, US Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power, and Director of the National Economic Council Lael Brainard. These privileged and unelected players of an inside game rose to their positions through family, marriage, university, consulting and media connections and helped create a new kind of multiethnic-and-multiracial elite. They justify their rulership by their institutional expertise even as they’ve effectively revolted against the Americans they’re supposed to be serving: becoming handmaidens to the top-down government projects pushed by Democratic nonprofits and fronted by President Biden. The history of Blinken’s rise, and the CVs of the friends and colleagues who rose with him, show in microcosm how this elite came to be and how it works to subvert American democracy.
Blinken and His Family: Immigrants to Ambassadors, Old Democrats to New
Like most Democratic Washington players since the Clinton Administration, Blinken’s background is elite, only more so. The upward arc began with his grandfather, Maurice, who emigrated from Russia to America and graduated from New York University and Law School in 1921 and 1924, then founded a series of successful businesses. Like the late Colin Powell who grew up in some of the same neighborhoods that Blinken’s grandfather emigrated to, Maurice Blinken came up in an America of flourishing trade unions and civic organizations mobilized by a supportive Democratic Party. These as well as public schools sponsored by the states provided ballast for upwardly mobile minorities and their children.
Blinken’s father, Donald, whom Blinken has called his “hero,” and his uncle Alan were successful businessmen in the mold of their father. But the Democratic Party they eventually joined had less in common with their father’s Party and more in common with the Party we see today, thanks to the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations staffing it with Harvard academics and Harvard-educated corporatists: “best and the brightest” high on theories and ideals but low on real-world experience. Blinken, who grew up with his mother and her second husband in Paris, knew this world well. Not only was his father part of it—a Harvard graduate, a reliable member of presidential panels—but his stepfather was a close adviser to John F. Kennedy. Blinken’s milieu growing up resembled the cosmopolitan, idealistic Democratic Party Kennedy and his successors were helping create. For example, though his grandfather had been a committed Zionist, Blinken’s close friend in Paris was Robert Malley: the son of a journalistic promoter of Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro who later made his own career specializing in a more welcoming approach to rogue players like the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Hezbollah, and the Iranian regime.
After Harvard, where he served on the staff of the traditional political-and-journalistic incubator The Harvard Crimson, Blinken wrote for mainstream Democratic magazines in Washington, D.C as the Democratic Party (and its journalistic organs) kept transitioning: becoming ever less influenced by on-the-ground associations and ever more by an academic and corporate elite. In 1988, he helped his father fundraise for Massachusetts governor and former Harvard professor Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign. In 1993, he secured a job on the National Security Council of the first Democratic President in twelve years, Bill Clinton. His sister Leah became NSC Director of Communications, his father Donald served as Ambassador to Hungary and his uncle Alan served as Ambassador to Belgium.
Blinken’s father’s and uncle’s projects prefigured many of the Democratic and centrist Republican entanglements that Republicans are revolting against today. Alan Blinken was ambassador to Belgium as the European Union, headquartered in Brussels, expanded: pushing back free trade barriers, enlarging administrative mandates, and marginalizing private sector labor. Donald Blinken was instrumental in expanding NATO, writing that “the principal argument opposing NATO enlargement (Don’t upset Russia) now seems greatly exaggerated.” He also helped push for America’s interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, which marked the first time that military-industrial players like the armed services contractor Halliburton played a major role in American military operations abroad.
Blinken and His Friends: The Rising Inner Circle, Clinton to Obama
Antony Blinken was also connected to other allies from similar backgrounds pushing the same general project in the same post-Kennedy milieu. For example, serving with him on the NSC was Susan Rice, a Stanford and Oxford graduate whose family pedigree almost matched his own. Rice’s mother was a Brookings Institution scholar who had created Pell Grants during the Johnson Administration’s expansion of national control over education. Her father had served in the Johnson Treasury Department with a special focus on international aid as the Administration created the 1970s inflationary crisis off its spending at home and abroad. Later, he was the first Black American to serve on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. Her stepfather was General Counsel to the Congressional Budget Office. Rice’s career also tracked the arc of the new Democratic inside player. Before serving in the White House and advocating with new international nonprofits for aid to Africa, she served on Dukakis’s 1988 Democratic presidential campaign and worked at McKinsey.
So did the arcs of others in Blinken’s orbit. Merrick Garland, a Harvard graduate now working at the Justice Department, owed his advancement to Harvard classmate Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick: the official de facto in charge of Clinton’s Justice Department as it funded top-down national law enforcement policies whose effects the Trump Administration began correcting. Later he was appointed to the Federal Appellate Bench by President Clinton. Lael Brainard, the daughter of a U.S. foreign service officer in Germany who got her PhD from Harvard and worked at McKinsey and MIT, helped liberalize trade relations with China for the Clinton White House. Michelle Flournoy, a Harvard and Oxford graduate and Harvard Kennedy School Fellow, was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense.
Finally, Blinken’s old friend Robert Malley was a chief negotiator in the 2000 Clinton-brokered peace talks between Arafat and Israel: part of the top-down administrative peace push on the issue that has defined every Democratic Administration since. Malley then went on to work for George Soros at the Open Societies Foundation, which had spent the decade ardently pushing for international administrative agreements and nonprofits to de facto replace the decisions of representative governments. Soros, who also used the Foundation to push the same open-border policies which had made him rich, was close allies with the likeminded Clinton White House, itself busy promoting the policies—NATO expansion, increasing international aid, and outsourcing labor—that Soros supported. Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, a Yale and Oxford graduate whose friendship with President Clinton dated to those days, went so far as to tell The New Yorker that the White House “synchronize[d]” its policy with Soros.
By the time Blinken left the White House to serve on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Senator Joe Biden in 2001, he was an active proponent of this collective worldview. He joined many Democrats and Republicans when he endorsed the invasion of Iraq in 2003. This was a project of White House-connected neoconservative academics which was supposed to remake the Middle East and ended up a boondoggle for both military-industrial players like Halliburton and Iranian-backed militias. Then, after 2009, serving as National Security Adviser to Vice President Biden and as Deputy Secretary of State, Blinken endorsed President Obama’s Middle East “pivot” to Iran. This was another sweeping plan to remake the Middle East, now through international peace agreements authorized without congressional ratification. It was pushed by a president more tied to academia as well as its corporate and Silicon Valley allies than any executive in American history.
Blinken’s friends, allies and ideological fellow travelers were also along on the trip. Robert Malley was Obama’s point person in the mission to bring Iran to the table and reduce Israel’s and Saudi Arabia’s influence in the region. His former colleague Susan Rice was Obama’s Ambassador to the U.N. and then National Security Adviser. Lael Brainard, having spent the Bush years at the Brookings Institution where Strobe Talbott was now president, was Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs before being appointed to the board of the Federal Reserve. Michele Flournoy was Deputy Secretary of Defense. And Merrick Garland was Obama’s third nominee for the Supreme Court. They were joined by John Kerry, the former Senator who had made his bones at Yale and then entered politics off of two propitious marriages. In the Obama Administration, Kerry became Secretary of State, pushing the Middle East “pivot” away from Israel and toward Iran and its Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian allies.
Also joining them was Samantha Power. Power was a Yale College and Harvard Law graduate who had made her name in the 1990s in the same Washington, D.C. Democratic journals as Antony Blinken advocating for the same intervention abroad that Blinken’s father was pushing from his position in Hungary. Her book on the subject, linking interventionist policies to preventing genocide and promoting human rights, had won her a Pulitzer Prize and a position at Harvard Kennedy School. It was also admired by centrist Democrats and Republicans who spoke about Saddam Hussein’s human rights abuses as a major reason for invading Iraq. Having met her husband, Harvard Law professor and Obama adviser Cass Sunstein, on the Obama Campaign, she now served Obama in the White House: first on the National Security Council and then as UN ambassador, succeeding Susan Rice.
Most of these players were considered more obviously partisan than Blinken. But none of them managed to do what Blinken did in 2020: help secure President Obama the third term he missed in 2016.
Blinken into the Breach: The 2020 Election
Blinken’s moment of truth was four years in the making, and very much a product of his milieu. After the shock of the Trump victory, Blinken decamped to the private sector. He joined Michele Flournoy and retired General Lloyd Austin at a political advising firm that created connections between Silicon Valley, law enforcement, and the Defense Department: three of the main power centers of the Clinton-Bush-Obama White Houses. He also commented on CNN along with other Obama and Bush White House veterans like former CIA deputy director and director John Brennan. Others of his allies took similar paths. John Kerry formed a climate advocacy group with allies in Hollywood, and Robert Malley went back to working for George Soros. Susan Rice flirted with running for a United States Senate seat in Maine but eschewed electoral politics and instead remained on the board of Netflix, helping guide the company as its programming shifted to wokeness. It wasn’t until 2020, when President Biden mounted his reelection bid, that these players reemerged. Susan Rice was reported over the summer to be in contention for the Vice Presidential nomination and in September was announced as part of the Biden Transition Team. Blinken was foreign policy adviser for Biden’s presidential campaign. Power, Garland, Kerry, Malley, and Flournoy were all considered likely presidential appointments.
But first came the hurdle of Hunter Biden: one which in retrospect might have sunk President Biden’s campaign a few weeks before election day. In October, The New York Post reported that
Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by The Post…The blockbuster correspondence — which flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claim that he’s “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” — is contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.
This was the tip of the iceberg that is Hunter Biden: a caricature of nepotism whose indiscretions, unlike the quieter institutional plays of Blinken and Friends, were outlandish enough that they risked capturing the public’s attention. And, more than Anthony Weiner’s stumbles in October of 2016 which threatened the Clinton campaign, the Biden story had ramifications for American national security. President Trump had already aired his concerns about Hunter Biden’s and his father’s Ukraine connections in unwisely broad strokes, but this didn’t even address the younger Biden’s other arena of activity as far back as 2014: helping Chinese Communist Party-backed companies become some of the largest landholders in the United States.
In the face of the obvious threat that the 2016 election would repeat itself, Blinken, who had served Biden since 2001 and had had multiple contacts with Hunter Biden during Hunter’s loose cannon years, called, subtly but unmistakably, on political and academic connections. The result was a very public letter released to mainstream media and then widely circulated, dated two weeks and one day before the presidential election. It was signed by 51 former intelligence officials including six former directors or deputy directors of the CIA and NSA in the Obama and George W. Bush Administrations. One of these six had been Chief of Staff in the Clinton White House, and five were employed by security consultancies, establishment media, academia, or Facebook. One was Blinken’s fellow CNN commentator and former CIA Director John Brennan. Another was a former acting and deputy CIA director who, like Blinken, had ties to Facebook. Their letter stated that the Hunter Biden story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation…if we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election.”
They weren’t right, a fact of which the FBI, in possession of the laptop during this time, was aware, even as it pressured Twitter and Facebook to censor posts about the Post’s article. CIA veterans like the ex-Moscow station Chief had refused to sign, calling the evidence nonexistent and the argument “convoluted.” But by the time these facts, as well as the lengths and depths of Hunter Biden’s foreign entanglements, revealed themselves, President Biden was installed in the White House and Antony Blinken was installed in the State Department.
Blinken and His Friends at the Apex: The Biden Administration and its Policies
Antony Blinken wasn’t the only beneficiary of his quick thinking in October of 2020. Across the Administration, his allies assumed prominent posts. They helmed causes pushed by Democratic interest groups, the established media, the academy, and corporations whose effect was to massively expand government power.
Merrick Garland resigned his appellate judgeship and was installed in the Department of Justice on what he made clear was a specific mission to expand law enforcement to combat racism. In the face of this appointment, his daughter postponed her clerkship with Supreme Court Justice and former Obama Solicitor General Elena Kagan until Garland left office. (It was never explained why clerking while her father was Attorney General was more of a conflict of interest than clerking while her father was a Judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, the second-most important federal court in the country which sent many of its cases to the Supreme Court.) Meantime, Garland’s son-in-law didn’t abstain from running an education company which serviced 13 million students in 23,000 schools with materials focused on "social and emotional climate," including materials on "equity and inclusion.” This was racial curriculum then being opposed, along with mask mandates, by parents in school board meetings, leading Attorney General Garland to direct the FBI to investigate threats against school board members. Eventually, opposition like this led Garland’s original patron Jamie Gorelick to quietly cancel a Department of Homeland Security project to police American citizens for “disinformation.”
Susan Rice, the head of President Biden’s Domestic Policy Council, headed his push for a “whole of government equity agenda,” the favoring of certain groups above others to achieve equality. One area where President Biden and Director Rice made their focus obvious was transgender rights: pushing the Human Rights Campaign’s main legislative goal, the Equality Act, as well as executive orders shutting biological conceptions of sex out of the equation and probably making them illegal. Another was race: mandating quotas of people of color hired by the national government and prioritizing relief money to minority-owned small businesses.
Lael Brainard, now director of the National Economic Council, is pushing for a digital currency in the name of consumer efficiency that would potentially put Americans’ bank transactions under the control of the national government. John Kerry, the President’s Climate Ambassador, is attending Davos and comparing the Climate threat to World War II. Robert Malley, the president’s chief envoy to Iran, is reaching out to the regime as the Biden Administration continues the Obama Administration’s documented policy of undermining Saudi Arabia and Israel. Samantha Power is heading the United States Agency for International Development and stonewalling questions about whether it funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan. The only person left off the list is Michele Flournoy, impaled by progressives on the spear of her work for multiple defense contractors. She had been expected to be appointed Defense Secretary but her business partner, Lloyd Austin, was appointed instead.
And what about Antony Blinken, who moved into the breach to help rescue his patron fifteen days before the election? He’s funding protestors against Israel’s conservative government, further weakening Israel in the eyes of its adversaries. He’s supporting Robert Malley’s outreach to Iran as it moves against Israel and closer to China, leading America’s longtime ally Saudi Arabia to move towards China as Iranian warships enter the western hemisphere, ignoring American warnings. He’s also committing to “allied management” in the name of funding Ukrainian aid for, as his President said, “as long as it takes.” This is the latest in our post-Cold War interventions, but one that already looks less like Kosovo and more like Iraq. It also expands our public debt and gives major debt holders like China increasing room to move against us in unexpected ways.
The Revolt of the New Elite
Racial equity, transgender ideology, climate idealism, digital currency, the Ukrainian boondoggle—all of this might seem like a long way away from the world of the 1990s, when Antony Blinken, his family, and his friends first came to positions of power in Washington, D.C. But it isn’t. In retrospect, that was the beginning of the world we inhabit now. Cold War spending to fund government administration, research universities and corporations had created the space for idealists to take command from on-the-ground associations which had held national politics in check for the past two centuries. Every president since Kennedy, with the exceptions of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, has furthered that trend, and Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden ratcheted it up. For thirty years, the establishment’s causes have kept changing—war on crime, war on genocide, war on terror, war on racism, war on climate change, war on Russia—but the game of using a cause to expand institutional power remains the same.
What all of this is a long way from is the way power worked when Maurice Blinken came to America a century ago. Then, labor unions, city parties, religious associations, state governments, even organized crime syndicates allowed marginalized people of all backgrounds to rise, imperfectly, in an imperfect system. In the years after 1960, the national government expanded its reach and successively took these opportunities away through policies that came to fruition in Antony Blinken’s era: military-industrial expansion, nationalized law enforcement, labor outsourcing, overregulation, anti-state and anti-religious judicial rulings, and inflationary public spending.
The result is that what Maurice Blinken achieved, and Colin Powell achieved—political influence by people who started from the ground and share the experiences of most Americans—has not been achievable for fifty years, at least for Democrats and centrist Republicans. The people coming up in the establishment, instead, are people a lot like Garland and Blinken, Rice and Power, Kerry and Flournoy. They’re mostly upper-middle class, mostly left-leaning, often family connected, almost all Ivy League educated. And, like the Kennedy appointees who began this push, they’re committed to sweeping, idealistic academic crusades that mean directing Americans’ lives.
They’re also unchecked, at least on the Democratic side, by the on-the-ground organizations their policies helped destroy. Undeniably, elites have existed throughout American history, but never has their power been this expanded and unconstrained. They may call themselves pioneers of racial, gender, and ethnic equality, but really they’re a new aristocracy which relies on insider connections to advance and govern, leaving most Americans of all races, genders, and ethnicities behind.
Antony Blinken didn’t create this reality; he only operates inside it, and so do his friends. But that doesn’t make them innocent, because the power structures they came up in and seek to expand have de facto stripped Americans of their right to self-determination. Blinken is one of the most active promoters of these structures, willing to manipulate the information Americans hear in order to sustain them. Genial appearances, mainstream political language, and jazz renditions might help insulate him from blowback. But they don’t change the reality. He, and his friends and fellow travelers, are threats to American democracy.