Oligarchs are typically extremely wealthy people with a close relationship with the government. Recently we’ve heard the term “Big Tech oligarchs” referring to the wealthiest in Silicon Valley, Bruner explained.
What makes Controligarchs different from oligarchs is that they really do want to control every aspect of our lives.
“These people have like a god complex but on steroids,” Bruner said.“Of the 3,100 or so billionaires in the world, there’s only about 30 in this book [Controligarchs] … People like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, George Soros … and his son Alex Soros – these guys use their wealth to do not-so-great things,” Bruner told host of First Things Mark Bauerlein.
He crunched the numbers and found that these billionaires in some cases have doubled their net worth since the beginning of 2020. “Mark Zuckerberg went from $60 billion or so to almost $120 billion today through the pandemic because everyone was locked down, stayed at home and was scrolling through Facebook … and Jeff Bezos close to doubled his net worth,” he said.
It’s not surprising that while small businesses were closed and schools were closed etc. online businesses would soar. But what is surprising is Bill Gates and his takeover of farmland.
“They used the pandemic, in the words of Klaus Schwab the World Economic Forum founder, as an opportunity. The pandemic was an opportunity to rejigger society and ‘build back better’ in a ‘greener’ way,” Bruner said.
“People didn’t really understand in July 2020 when Klaus Schwab announced ‘The Great Reset’ what a pandemic had to do with climate change. But we’re starting to see that ‘climate change’ is just the next crisis they want to leverage as an opportunity to not just get richer but to construct systems of tyrannical control.”
The systems of tyrannical control, Bruner explained, include food control, energy control, electric vehicles, cell or mobile phones, the Internet of Things, smart cities and financial control.
The inaugural meeting of the Good Club took place in 2009 at Rockefeller University in Manhattan, New York. The Good Club is the name given to the tiny global elite of billionaire “philanthropists.” Some of the members are familiar figures such as Bill Gates, George Soros, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, David Rockefeller and Ted Turner. But there are others, too, like business giants Eli and Edythe Broad, who are equally wealthy but less well known. All told, at the time its members were worth $125bn.
“Bill Gates, George Soros and David Rockefeller are kind of like the three co-hosts [of the first meeting of the Good Club],” Bruner said. “They invited half a dozen or a dozen of their billionaire buddies … They all got together in the spring of 2009.”
“The context is the tail end of the global financial crisis … they could sense that the ‘peasants’ were about to get unruly … The other part [of the context] is that Barack Obama has just been elected president [and] a lot of people at the Good Club meeting in New York had done a lot to get him there, George Soros especially, so they wanted to leverage the Obama opportunity to their advantage.”
At this meeting, Bill Gates suggested that they find an umbrella cause that they could unite their resources around to solve. They could have picked, for example, malaria, poverty, starvation or climate change as causes to unite their resources around. But “this meeting was all about solving the problem, in their minds, of overpopulation,” Bruner said. The Good Club is all about pouring money into projects that ensure there are fewer people in the world. “Their way of helping humanity is to make sure there is less of it,” Bruner said.
