The Selection System

Every American president except one traces documented genealogical lineage to King John of England, who died in 1216. That one exception - Martin Van Buren - was of Dutch descent. Not English. The rest, regardless of party, era, or stated ideology, connect to the same medieval bloodline.

This document is not about conspiracy. It is about a system - one that has operated continuously for five centuries, selecting leadership through interlocking institutions, educational pipelines, and networks that compound across generations. No single actor controls it. No meeting decides it. It runs the way a river runs: not because someone orders the water, but because the terrain has been shaped over centuries to direct the flow.

Part I: The Origin - The Cecil Family (1520-1900)

The traceable modern network begins with William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (1520-1598), chief advisor to Queen Elizabeth I for forty years. Cecil did not sit on the throne. He ran it. He managed English foreign policy, intelligence operations, and succession planning across four decades of Tudor rule. When Elizabeth I died, it was his son Robert who engineered the handoff to James I without civil war.

The Cecil family established a template that would persist for five centuries: the power behind the throne, not the throne itself. Advisors, not monarchs. The people who outlast the figureheads.

Part II: The Evolution - Cecil Rhodes and the Round Table (1890-1921)

Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) took the Cecil family's model of institutional power and formalized it into something unprecedented: a designed, documented, funded network intended to operate in perpetuity. Rhodes made his fortune in South African diamonds (De Beers), colonized a territory named after himself (Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe), and when he died left his estate to fund a secret society for the extension of British imperial values worldwide.

His will was explicit. He called for "the establishment, promotion, and development of a secret society, the true aim and object whereof shall be the extension of British rule throughout the world." He was not speaking metaphorically. He created the Rhodes Scholarship specifically to select and train future world leaders in his vision.

Alfred Milner, Rhodes' successor, recruited what became known as "Milner's Kindergarten" - young Oxford graduates groomed for positions across the British Empire and its American relationships. From this group emerged two institutions that continue operating today:

These institutions still operate. Chatham House publishes foreign policy analysis consumed by every Western government. The CFR has included virtually every US Secretary of State, CIA Director, and National Security Advisor for a century. Membership is not publicized but is documented in their own membership lists.

Part III: The Pipeline - How Leaders Are Made

The network selects leaders through a recognizable process. The pattern appears consistently enough across candidates of different parties, eras, and stated ideologies that it constitutes a system rather than coincidence.

The Five-Stage Selection Pattern

Documented Cases

Part IV: The Yale Law Anomaly

Yale Law School produces approximately 200 graduates per year. The United States has 335 million people. Yet Yale Law alumni disproportionately appear at the highest levels of American governance across party lines and across decades.

Yale Law is not merely a school. It is a sorting mechanism. The selection begins with admission. The network is formed during attendance. The connections activate upon graduation. Amy Chua's role is particularly instructive: as a professor she personally mentored JD Vance, then personally introduced him to Peter Thiel. The institution delivers candidates; senior figures deliver them to patrons.

Part V: The King John Question

A 2012 genealogical analysis traced 43 of 44 US presidents to King John of England (died 1216). The one exception: Martin Van Buren, who was of Dutch - not English - descent. The question this raises is not whether the connection is real. The math says it is. The question is what it means.

The Statistical Reality

King John died 810 years ago. Yale geneticist Joseph Chang calculated that the most recent common ancestor of ALL living Europeans existed around 600 AD - after King John's time, which means King John is the mathematical ancestor of essentially every person of European descent alive today. The lineage connection is not remarkable on its own.

What is remarkable is this:

*Obama: paternal line Kenyan, maternal line Anglo-American. Raised entirely within Anglo-American institutional framework. Rhodes/Harvard pipeline.

The United States stopped being a majority English-descent nation before the Civil War. Yet the presidency has remained an effectively Anglo-lineage institution for its entire history. The King John connection is not the anomaly. The anomaly is that the selection pool has remained English/British when the general population diverged from it 150 years ago.

Part VI: The Emergent System

This is not a conspiracy in the conventional sense. No secret committee meets annually to select the next president. No document exists naming the chosen one. The system operates through something more durable and more difficult to dismantle: institutional inertia compounding across centuries.

The mechanism works like this:

No single actor needed to design this. Each generation simply preserved what benefited them. Each institution selected people who would maintain the institution. The bloodline connection is a byproduct - the emergent signature of a system that has been running the same filter for a thousand years.

Sources and Verification