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Seamus Bruner, the Director of Research at the Government Accountability Institute, joined the First Things podcast to discuss his new book ‘Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life’.

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.

Controligarchs are Depopulationists

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.

Related: Expert Claims Covid Vaccines Will Kill 700 million People Around the World

“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.

“Most of these [Controligarchs] in this book are sort of these Malthusian, overpopulation types who think that the Earth is overpopulated … That’s a myth, it’s never been proven conclusively that the world is overpopulated. 

“There’s a lot of evidence to the contrary, that [the world] can hold a lot more people than [today’s 8 or 9 billion].  Bill Gates says we need to cut that by 15%.  Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, is a little more extreme – he thinks that under 2 billion is the ideal population of the planet.  Other World Economic Forum agenda setters, Jane Goodall … says closer to 500 million.  They haven’t publicised what they think is the ideal total global population should be but it’s a lot less, billions less.”

Related: Author of ‘The Limits to Growth’ promotes the genocide of 86% of the world’s population

Controligarchs are Heavily Invested in Digital IDs

Bill Gates is heavily invested in digital identities (“IDs”) through various projects for digitising and creating central databases that hold every piece of information about us, Bruner said.

In 2016, the UN held its inaugural ID2020 Summit to discuss how to provide a unique digital identity to everyone on the planet by the year 2020.  In 2017, Accenture partnered with Microsoft and Avanade to provide blockchain and biometric technologies to support ID2020.  In 2019, Microsoft joined the ID2020 Alliance.

“All the Big Tech, all the Controligarchs, as I call them, poured their money into ID2020,” Bruner said.  “And the supranational organisations – the World Health Organisation and the United Nations – were all very on board with this … digital IDs would be a great way to keep track of people’s vaccination records – they said this before the pandemic,” Bruner said.

“This digital ID can essentially become like a Chinese-style social credit score where if you are in the wrong caste of society – you’re among the unvaccinated, let’s say –  you’re not going to be able to access goods and services … If you don’t comply with some government mandate … your digital ID will block entry for you.”

In November 2023, the 50-in-5 campaign was launched.  It aims to implement digital public infrastructure in 50 countries by 2028.  Digital public infrastructure is an underlying network of components such as digital payments, ID, and data exchange systems, which is a critical accelerator of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (“SDGs”). 50-in-5 is a “country-led” advocacy campaign in collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“We are just around the corner from this becoming not an optional thing,” Bruner said.

“These people have like a god complex but on steroids,” he added.

You can listen to First Things’ podcast titled ‘Control Freaks and Billionaires’ below.