1 The Good Club Some even believe we are part of a secret [club] working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as "internationalists" and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure-one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it. -David Rockefeller, Memoirs, 2002 On a cloudy spring day in 2009, Bill Gates arrived at one of the very last private, single-family, residential mansions on the crowded island of Manhattan in New York City. Gates was joined that May afternoon by a dozen other billionaire philanthropists-David Rockefeller, George Soros, Ted Turner, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, and Oprah Winfrey, as well as the heads of Cisco, Blackstone Group, and Tiger Management, to name a few-who had gathered for a secret meeting at the Rockefeller University, on Manhattan's posh Upper East Side. They were there to save the world-or, at least, to set the agenda for the future of global health. It was a fitting setting. After all, it was there in 1901 that John D. Rockefeller Sr. established the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, which was the nation's first biomedical and research laboratory. Rockefeller modeled his facility after the prestigious Pasteur and Koch institutes in France and Germany. In doing so, he elevated the prestige of America's scientific and medicinal research to Europe's level with the establishment of the nation's first biomedical and virology research center at the Rockefeller Institute. Now, Rockefeller University was the hub of the Rockefellers' biomedical empire. Gates and a few of his closest billionaire buddies met in the university's President's House, which is nestled in the northeast corner of the university's relatively lush sixteen-acre campus. This private, brutalist-style building also offered a tightly secured fortress of climate-controlled personal breathing space in the otherwise overcrowded island that is Manhattan. These tycoons called their group the Good Club. The May 2009 meeting of the Good Club was convened by three of the most consequential, wealthy, and powerful men in modern world history: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and David Rockefeller. These men had invested heavily in Barack Obama and Joe Biden's 2008 campaign, and the timing of the meeting-fifteen weeks into the new administration-came at the right time for the Good Club to capitalize on their victory. The global financial crisis had recently ravaged much of the American economy. As the middle and lower classes suffered more foreclosures and bankruptcies than at any point in recent memory, the billionaires no doubt knew that a peasant revolt may be on the horizon. The gathering was thus a planning meeting for a public-relations stunt called the Giving Pledge, which kicked off a massive movement of cash from the billionaire class to charitable causes. When billionaires pledge to give away half their wealth, this can mean that they will be transferring billions from their pockets to the coffers of their family foundations-through a byzantine network of tax-exempt NGOs. The meeting got little attention in the corporate press. The Times of London and a few other European outlets shared only a glimpse of the inside. The Good Club members spent fifteen minutes each outlining their proposals for an "umbrella" philanthropic cause they could collectively prioritize. The group had much in common, beyond its members' monumental wealth and shared interest in philanthropy. All the members were convinced globalists, who positioned themselves as being uniquely able to do good for humanity. CNN founder Ted Turner tried to dominate the meeting. Oprah Winfrey mostly listened. Gates's presentation impressed the other club members greatly, and taking their cues from him, they agreed to prioritize the goal that Gates now urged upon them: overpopulation. Gates had said at a conference in Long Beach, California, the previous year that he believed that the world's population should be capped at 8.3 billion. Ironically, the Good Club's top priority in serving humanity was to make sure that there was less of it. The timing was crucial because the Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. The next eight years could determine if the Controligarchs' agenda would succeed or fail. The Good Club members-particularly the Rockefellers-had already done much to influence a major decrease in global population. Global birth rates peaked in the 1960s and have been in steep decline ever since the Rockefellers started plowing massive sums into the development of every birth control measure from contraceptive devices to "the pill" to abortion-years before the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Crucially, the Good Club members had, over the course of decades, persuaded the general population that reducing birth rates was in the planet's best collective interest because fewer people equals less pollution. Oprah had used her powerful platform to champion birth control and abortion for decades. Soros, Buffett, Rockefeller, Bloomberg, and Gates had poured more than $1.5 billion into increasing women's access to contraceptives and abortions-enough to fund the termination of approximately three million unborn babies. At the time that Gates brought them all together, the Good Club members had been acquainted, at least socially, for years or even decades, and their philanthropic interests often overlapped. Gates and Buffett had been close friends since Gates's mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, introduced them in 1991. Also, before Gates and Patricia Stonesifer combined several of Gates's smaller charitable endeavors into a single foundation in 1999, Gates had already begun partnering with the Rockefellers, particularly on "population and health research," including the joint funding of vaccine-related initiatives. In the months and years following the Good Club meeting, Controligarchs such as Gates and the Rockefellers developed a global response to a hypothetical pandemic. They could not have known that barely a decade later the world would face the first global pandemic in nearly a century, and everyone would beg them for solutions. (Their answers involve seismic transfers of wealth from the lower classes to the billionaire class.) But that is exactly the kind of power they dreamed of. As it happened, by the time COVID-19 made worldwide headlines in early 2020, the Good Club and its partners had already been working for decades on medical and technological breakthroughs they hoped could cure every human ill, from poverty to infectious diseases. COVID-19 presented an "opportunity" to introduce these technocratic panaceas. And Gates and the Rockefellers had key partners to urge their solutions upon heads of state the world over. Dr. Anthony Fauci, for example, had long been acquainted with Good Club members. The Rockefeller Foundation, which had worked intimately with Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for decades, dramatically elevated his profile when it featured him in a December 2019 video about the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Notably, this video was released as COVID-19 cases began to emerge in Wuhan, China. Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, Rockefeller and Gates had sponsored multiple training exercises for just such a coronavirus pandemic. The Rockefellers had nearly a century's head start on Gates in pandemic planning experience, having been the leading viral research entity beginning in 1901-well before the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. A 2010 Rockefeller training exercise titled "Lock Step" and Gates's more innocuously titled "Event 201" in October 2019-just two months before China recorded its first official case of COVID-19-were especially prescient. The training exercises produced a long list of recommendations that were eerily prophetic. Possible solutions included mandatory quarantines, face masks, temperature checks, and biometric identification for all citizens. Moreover, the exercises addressed lockdowns, enforced cooperation, and virus surveillance programs such as contact tracing. By 2017, Rockefeller and Gates had begun their digital identification ("digital ID") push with an initiative called ID2020. At the time, this initiative did not get much publicity in major outlets. But when COVID struck the United States in early 2020, the Rockefeller Foundation sprang into action and immediately began implementing a Lock Step-type game plan. The foundation rolled out an international contact-tracing surveillance operation to officially usher in a global digital ID regime. A digital ID-like a QR code in your phone's digital wallet scanned by a restaurant hostess-provides a point of entry for this unprecedented level of access to personal information. In August 2021, with funding from the Gates and Rockefeller foundations, the World Health Organization (WHO) published its vaccine passport guidelines, which were filled with requirements and mandates. The Rockefeller Foundation had previously committed $1 billion, not just toward ending the pandemic but also to use the pandemic as leverage to address climate change, social justice, and other "inequities made worse by this virus." Moreover, the foundation sought to "catalyze a more inclusive, green recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic." In the words of Rockefeller Foundation president Rajiv Shah in October 2020: There's no going back to the past, to before-Covid. We need to reimagine the future we want. To meet this moment, we must leverage all our resources and relationships to build an equitable, sustainable future, where everyone has the opportunity to realize their full potential and climate disaster is avoided. The time to act is right now to make sure vulnerable children and families are included in the pandemic response and recovery. Gates may have convened the 2009 meeting, but the Rockefellers had been working to curb overpopulation since before Gates was born in 1955, which made them the obvious hosting choice. The Rockefellers did not just pioneer the Controligarch model; they perfected it. While other dynastic billionaire families-such as the Fords, Vanderbilts, and Carnegies-amassed fortunes, none have been able to maintain their power and prominence across generations as have the Rockefellers, who are still one of the world's most powerful families in their seventh generation. The Rockefellers found that meeting the needs of consumers is not enough to perpetuate multigenerational wealth. For more than a century, they kept the money flowing, and, through their charitable foundations, shaped the beliefs, morals, and behavior of society. It gave them control. The story of how the Rockefellers became the greatest influencers in global health policy, and the central planners of pandemic responses, is complex and spans over a century. It is sometimes a triumphant tale of victory over viruses such as smallpox and polio and, at other times, a sordid story marred by the Rockefellers' funding of racist selective breeding and eugenics programs, Nazi experiments, and forced sterilizations. To say that the Rockefeller family helped build the modern world would be an understatement. From energy to finance to education to public health to computing, the Rockefellers had a hand in developing every major field and industry. By examining these Controligarch prototypes in close detail, we can understand how their modern descendants-such as the Big Tech titans-push authoritarianism from every angle. The Controligarch Prototype: "A National Menace" John D. Rockefeller Sr., or "Senior" as he was known, may well go down in history as the greatest businessman the world has ever seen, and rightly so. Nearly all his heirs-more than 250 of them and counting-look up to him with pride and gratitude, as they should. Senior is famous for creating one of the largest monopolies in American history: Standard Oil Company, or "The Standard." In less than two decades, The Standard achieved control of more than 95 percent of the US petroleum industry-from the first step in the production process, drilling for crude oil; to the next step, refining the crude; to the transportation of the finished product, refined oil. This was possible because Rockefeller owned everything: the oil wells, the refineries, and the complex oil tank system that traveled by railroad car. The Rockefeller patriarch believed that his ability to get rich was his divine purpose. "I believe the power to make money is a gift from God," Senior said, and "having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow-man according to the dictates of my conscience." Within thirty years of The Standard's founding, it had become the most powerful conglomerate in the country and was exerting influence abroad in ways that made even the US government jealous. For example, the Rockefellers were influencing China a full century before President Richard Nixon's famous visit in the early 1970s. To achieve The Standard's monopoly, Senior's soldiers spied on and sabotaged his enemies, The Standard leveraged its massive buying power to squeeze out smaller operators, and Rockefeller attorneys used secret contracts and lawfare to effectively steal from The Standard's competitors. Senior's tactics paid off, and the value of The Standard grew exponentially. By 1910, as one reporter put it, "when a glass of beer cost a penny and a loaf of bread less than a nickel, when a three-room apartment went for five dollars a month and a good pair of shoes for a dollar, Rockefeller had assets of over $800 million" (which is nearly $25 billion today). But there was a problem-a problem that is rarely studied or acknowledged. The reputational costs of such success-and the ruthlessness of the methods that Rockefeller used to achieve it-were mounting. The Rockefellers had attained oligarch status, and as their wealth surged, the public's opinion of the family turned to skepticism and eventually to ire. More importantly, the US Congress took notice of The Standard's monopolistic practices. By the early 1900s, the press routinely ran hit pieces on The Standard's shady business practices and raked Senior over the coals. More concerning, federal investigations began targeting The Standard for anticompetitive tactics, and the dreaded word antitrust was percolating up through the Justice Department. Senior needed a trustworthy lieutenant to manage both the fabulous wealth and the negative press that came with it. And he knew exactly the right man for the job. Senior met Baptist minister Frederick T. Gates (no direct relation to Bill) nearly twenty years prior at the University of Chicago. Gates had experience leading flour magnate George Pillsbury's philanthropic endeavors, which impressed Senior. Soon, the reverend was fielding all Rockefeller donation solicitations and handling many other aspects of the Rockefeller business. But managing such a staggering amount of wealth was no small task. Gates famously told Senior that his fortune was "rolling up like an avalanche!" The eldest Rockefeller needed to dole out funds faster than he was accumulating them. "If you do not, it will crush you, and your children, and your children's children," Gates warned. Gates knew that wealthy families had historically passed down their enormous fortunes with "scandalous results to their descendants and powerful tendencies to social demoralization." Gates worried that his benefactor's good family name might be in jeopardy. "I trembled as I witnessed the unreasoning popular resentment at Mr. Rockefeller's riches," he wrote. To the public at the time, Rockefeller was a "national menace," and protestors would gather by the thousands to rally against the company and vandals sabotaged The Standard's oil tankers. Excerpted from Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, Their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life by Seamus Bruner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
