>>172544
Let me explain how this all actually works, because the story is much simpler if you cover the beginning.
From 1840 to 1907 the British government, royal family, and East India company were making a gobsmacking fucking
fortune in the Opium trade. East India ships would pick up chests of opium in India and take it China to trade for tea. For reference a single chest of opium was worth several dozen chests of tea at the normal market rate. This money flowed into the pockets of the royal family, their closest allies from around Europe (mostly relatives, like French aristocracy who were related to them), and ultimately the British economy. When the opium trade "ended" in 1917 they didn't just stop. The opium kept flowing, but now it flowed "off the books" at the behest of a cabal of European royalty and East India execs. Now that it was a black market good its value increased 20-fold, and so even while Britain was embroiled in WWI the royal family were personally getting richer and richer. 1917 was the beginnings of the world's oldest, and largest, drug cartel.
Well when you're making a billion dollars a month in dirty money you need a way to launder it so you can spend it. Come to find that the only institutions large enough to launder
that much money are banks themselves. So several members of the royal family used this dark money and a lot of "look the other way just this once" bribes to start several new banks. When competing banks looked into this, it was easier to use this massive pile of money to simply
buy those banks, and thus expand their dirty money network and silence the criticism at the same time. It worked beautifully. When other banks came snooping who were too large to buy or otherwise refused, (Rothschild and Morgan, notably) the cartel simply offered them a slice of the pie. They were invited to join the cartel and profit in return for their silence and assistance. Now the world's biggest drug cartel was also the world's biggest banking cartel,
in addition to making up a plurality of European political leadership. The banks, the governments, and the drug trade all overlapped.
Enter World War II. Germany refused all inroads by the cartel into their economy, and the cartel flexed on them by economically and politically destroying Germany. The cartel stirred for war, but had to get the public involved. They decided the best way to do that was buy using their incredible amounts of money to buy up and sponsor newspapers and agitate the public with propaganda. It worked. The drug/banking cartel quickly became a media cartel too, and realized how powerful this was for their purposes in government. The acquisition of media outlets became a top priority, and they had way more than enough money to do it. They began buying influence in newspapers all over the world.
During WWII the British part of the cabal realized that their massive network of drug runners, cover agents, bankers and other unwitting "employees" as spies. This was because VERY few of the low level people knew who they really worked for, the same way a drug pusher on the street selling crack doesn't know which Colombian drug lord is his real supplier. This was phenomenally successful, and the intelligence gathered was handled by a new agency that was kept very private, and who answered only to the Royalty: MI6. From the day it was founded, MI6 was the total property of the cartel, headed by the monarch. After WW2 it was MI6 who helped organize the CIA and other intelligence agencies around the world, and always made sure to hire in enough of /theirguys/ from the cartel's illicit network that the cartel could keep tabs on things. Later when the CIA went around setting up South American intelligence services, every one of them was shot through with cartel agents from the day it was born.
All this takes us to about 1980. So here you have a cartel, part and parcel of several governments of Western civilization, headed by the British Royal Family and their allies who they gathered within a semi-secret society (the Order of the Garter) so they could hold meetings without interruption. They own all the big banks, they own all the big newspapers, they're running drug operations all over the world, and they have more money than god. What do they do with that kind of money? They invest it. They buy insurance companies, and stock brokerships, and finance entire industries. They go fully international via the World Bank and all that kind of stuff. They have a finger in every pie, and own part if not most of every single industry on the planet. Blackrock and Vanguard are just two of their mechanisms in just the trading market alone. They fund the thinktanks, they operate the charities, they long ago bought out Hollywood and their influence controls much of the Internet backbone. Every major intelligence agency on the planet knows about them (they're called "the magicians", because if an intel agency needs a favor then impossible things can happen like magic. They have a tongue-in-cheek nickname that they call themselves too, and its "the Olympians") but nobody can touch them. FDR was a member. Rockefeller is a member. GHW Bush was a member, as were Dubya Bush, Clinton (let them run drugs through Arkansas), and Obama. No government opposes them because they're seen as useful for maintaining global order, and because they can set entire countries to war almost at a whim.
Take that situation from the 1980s up there and fast forward another 40 years, where the original tyrants who started the whole thing are mostly dead, and their grandkids are running the show. And their grandkids are as ruthless as their forbears, much less competent, and
woke because they grew up in the Flower Child generation.
They came for gaming in 2014 after having ignored it as unimportant for decades, because they realized how much influence it would have if they made it another tool. So the bought out who they needed to buy, squeezed where they needed to squeeze, and when they found their "Rosa Parks" trigger to change gaming via Zoe Quinn they ran headlong into a wall of angry gamers.