In his new book, Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life, author Seamus Bruner explores the long history of eugenicists, technocrats and social engineers – from the Rockefellers and the Club of Rome to Bill Gates, Jeffrey Epstein, Mark Zuckerberg, Klaus Schwab and World Economic Forum (WEF) members – who use their fortunes, often under the guise of philanthropy, to enrich themselves while promoting an undemocratic and dystopian future for the rest of us.

“Imagine a world in which you own nothing and rent everything,” Bruner warns in the book notes. “Most of the protein in your diet comes from bugs. You are not allowed to have more than one child, and your financial and medical data are instantly transferred to a centralised government database via a subdermal microchip.”

Bruner sat down with The Defender to discuss his book, the state of the world and his outlook for humanity.

Bruner, director of research at the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), said he honed his craft in investigative journalism by assisting GAI’s founder Peter Schweizer with his 2011 book, Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison.

That project led to a couple of 60 Minutes exposés and ultimately to the passage of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act – or Stock Act – passed in 2012, according to Bruner. “That experience also disabused me of any notion of going into politics,” he said.

“‘Follow the money’ is our motto here [at GAI],” said Bruner, whose subsequent investigations are documented in his books, Compromised: How Money and Politics Drive FBI Corruption (2018) and Fallout: Nuclear Bribes, Russian Spies, and the Washington Lies That Enriched the Clinton and Biden Dynasties (2020, with John Solomon).

Bruner, who is studying to become a certified anti-money laundering specialist, said, “We’re not against billionaires conceptually, just against ones who want to use their money and power and influence to exert control over your life.”

“The ten wealthiest men on the planet – including Gates, [Jeff] Bezos, Zuckerberg, and [Elon] Musk – doubled their combined personal net worth over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic,” Bruner wrote in Controligarchs, “while the dwindling middle class suffered, and more than 160 million people [worldwide] were pushed into poverty.”

Controligarchs documents the histories of some of the richest families on the planet, and how they have used their wealth and influence to establish plans like Agenda 2030, the Open Society, The Great Reset and the transhumanist movement – and organisations like the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and the Wellcome Trust – which are resulting in a virtual war on farmers and food, on informed consent and natural healing options, on energy and jobs and on freedom of speech and other unalienable rights.

Controligarchs begins with the recounting of a 2009 “secret meeting” at Rockefeller University in Manhattan convened by Gates, with a dozen other billionaire philanthropists in attendance, including David Rockefeller, George Soros, Ted Turner, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett and Oprah Winfrey, and the heads of financial titans Blackstone Group and Tiger Management, tech giant Cisco and other multinational companies.

Calling themselves the Good Club, their aim was to “set the agenda for the future of global health,” Bruner wrote. Building on the Club of Rome think tank founded in 1968 by Rockefeller-linked scientists and intellectuals, the Good Club members devised the “Giving Pledge,” an initiative designed to steer billions toward their priority of slowing population growth.

The Club of Rome had earlier published several reports framing The Predicament of Mankind – overpopulation and pollution as existential threats requiring global governance solutions. This was a “one world order”, according to Bruner.

The Limits to Growth was another work supported by the Club of Rome. Published in 1972, the authors used computer modelling to predict that overpopulation and resource depletion would soon destroy the world.

“This ‘predicament of mankind’ said we need a common enemy for mankind to unite against,” Bruner told The Defender, “and they settled on overpopulation – and that meant the problem of mankind is mankind itself.”

According to Bruner, this is the source of the anti-human ideology that runs through narratives like climate change, “where you are the problem.”

“You need fixing and they’ve got just the solutions for you,” he added. “Now, it just so happens that those solutions enrich these guys, so it seems a little too convenient.”

In his latest book, Bruner traces the Good Club’s meeting location to the Rockefeller family and its projects starting in the early 1900s, such as the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.

The Rockefellers, through their charitable foundations, pioneered a model of maintaining power and influence across generations by meeting consumer needs while also shaping societal beliefs and behaviours.

The Rockefellers built a monopoly in the oil industry and later expanded their reach by tackling public health issues and funding medical research. The Rockefeller Institute – later Rockefeller University – made key discoveries about diseases like meningitis, polio and yellow fever in the early 1900s, Bruner wrote.

In 1914, the Rockefellers established the Yellow Fever Commission to try to eradicate yellow fever by eliminating the aedes aegypti mosquito.

Fast-forward a century, and you have the Rockefellers’ protégé, Gates, involved in another mosquito-eradication project, funnelling “at least $93 million into controversial efforts to engineer and release roughly two billion genetically modified mosquitoes – first in Florida and California — and then, he hopes, everywhere,” Bruner wrote.

In 1941, the Rockefeller Foundation was approached by the US government to vaccinate “virtually all” Army recruits against yellow fever, but the vaccines, which were tainted with hepatitis B, caused widespread illness among the troops.

“The Rockefellers’ international yellow fever efforts gave them authority. And more importantly, the more diseases the Rockefellers tried to control, the more power and influence they gained in the international health community,” Bruner wrote.

They funded the development of contraceptives and backed population control advocates like eugenicist Margaret Sanger – founder of Planned Parenthood – to drive down global birth rates, especially among populations they considered less desirable.

The foundation also pioneered fields like psychology and sex research that helped destigmatise topics like abortion and promiscuity.

By the time the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the Good Club and its associates had already been working for decades on medical and technological innovations “they hoped would cure every human ill, from poverty to infectious diseases,” Bruner wrote. “Covid-19 presented an ‘opportunity’ to introduce these technocratic panaceas.”

In Controligarchs, Bruner extensively covers Gates, from his father’s (Bill Sr’s) involvement in Planned Parenthood to Bill’s troubles with Clinton’s US Department of Justice over Microsoft’s anticompetitive practices to his relationship with Epstein and his later pandemic-related nongovernmental organisation (NGOs), initiatives and Big Pharma companies.

“Microsoft had a strategy for monopolising the software industry called Embrace-Extend-Extinguish (or Exterminate),” Bruner wrote.

Bruner shared how Microsoft made enhancements to the Netscape browser to turn it into its own “Internet Explorer” browser, and placed it on every PC, then pushed “for standards and regulations that would make it impossible for their competitors.”

“We saw that same strategy during the pandemic with the generic medications like ivermectin they wanted to bury,” Bruner said, referring to the warp-speed vaccine development – funded by Gates.

“They even want mRNA products to replace existing vaccines and other drugs,” he said. “You see the same thing happening now with food,” Bruner said, pointing to the efforts of Gates, Schwab and others to curtail the use of meat, sanction the use of certain fertilisers and shut down farms, all while pushing for the development of fake meat and insect diets promoted by companies in which they are heavily invested.

Bruner wrote that Dutch multinational chemical giant Royal DSM – a partner of the Gates Foundation and the WEF – was just one example of a company that “seemed well positioned to profit from the [United Nations’ Agenda] 2030 goals.”

Royal DSM “had prepared for nitrogen reductions with new synthetic fertilisers, developed alternative proteins from canola, and even patented a solution to cow flatulence.”

The German company Bayer AG, another WEF partner, bought Monsanto in the hopes of harnessing its CRISPR gene editing crop technology, Bruner wrote. “Next, Bayer teamed up with a Gates-funded biotech company to genetically modify plants and turn them into self-fertilising crops.”

“This was the kind of patented breakthrough that could disrupt the livelihood of independent farmers everywhere,” he wrote, pointing out how Good Club members like Turner, Bezos and Gates were “quietly and systematically amassing millions of acres of prime ranch-land and farmland” in the US that could “rapidly integrate the new fertilisers and so-called sustainable agricultural technologies.”

• The Defender report