If I put do a post on burn any rewards will go mainly to the insider circle jerk cabal's posts so I would be helping to fund associates of the very accounts that downvote me.

No.
Curators are paid, and only your author rewards are burned.
Decline gets no rewards, burn takes both curator and author rewards from the pool, that otherwise would have gone mostly to trending, and burns the author's share.

You have been misinformed, do you remember who told you that?

To my amazement, they do actually seem to manually monitor what I post and downvote strategically when they get a chance.

They've succeeded in lessening their workload over the years, but every post gets read, no doubt about it.

I'm pretty sure that decline still gets hit in reputation if flagged.