The quick rise of “outsider” French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron has led to a little more research into his background, such as his 2014 attendance at the annual Bilderberg Conference. (Above are all the “M”-named people from the list released by Bilderberg).

Conspiracy theorists love the Bilderberg Conference because it really does bring together for a few days each year what could be called more or less the center-right Inner Party of the North Atlantic zone: Henry Kissinger and 100 or so of his friends, plus a few dozen people whom the Friends of Henry Kissinger want to meet.

It’s kind of Deep NATO.

For example, influential figures in Bilderberg included Tory foreign minister Lord Carrington and right-of-center Labour leader Dennis Healey, who died recently at 98. These are some of the guys who won the Cold War, so it’s hardly surprising they set up an institution to perpetuate their influence.

Bilderberg tries to invite up and comers such as Tony Blair in 1993. For example, here’s Bill Clinton talking about attending the 1991 Bilderberg conference with Vernon Jordan:

In action movies, the American Deep State is heavily black (e.g., James Earl Jones was head of CIA in the Tom Clancy / Jack Ryan movies). So, in case you are wondering, African-American attendees in 2016 included Jordan and George Lucas’s girlfriend, financier Mellody Hobson. Previous years’ attendees include Shirley Ann Jackson, the black lady physicist who headed Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the mayor of Atlanta.

Until about a half dozen years ago, Bilderberg was very hush-hush about who attends its conferences, but it has in recent years been publishing its list of participants, perhaps to compete with more publicity-mad newer conferences such as Davos.

Personally, I find Bilderberg rather reassuring in that there are some grown-ups involved. For example, Bilderberg sometimes invites Charles Murray rather than Malcolm Gladwell.

Macron was invited to the 2014 Bilderberg conference. Apparently, Macron did not attend in 2015 or 2016 when he was Minister of the Economy, Industry and Digital Affairs of France. Was he too busy to take up his invitation or was he not invited, either because he’d done poorly in 2014 or because he was doing so well? Conspiracy theorists want to know!