My wife and
I have been considering buying a property on the Hawaiian
island of Kauai to escape the chill, rainy Vancouver winters.
One can imagine our distress when we learned that someone
I regard as among the most contemptible people on the planet,
Mark Zuckerberg, is building a 1,500-acre compound on this
most beautiful island in the Hawaiian archipelago.
Citing various
sources, Stephen Green at PJ Media reports that
“a 5,000-square-foot underground lair featuring its
own energy and food supplies is under construction.”
According to Housing.com, also cited by Green, Zuckerberg’s
$270 million Koolau Ranch project “is designed to
function as a self-sufficient space, ready to withstand
global catastrophes…It is packed with security measures,
encompassing keypad locks, soundproofing and concealed doors,
while an extensive camera network ensures surveillance.”
The Guardian
informs us that Zuckerberg’s lawyers “filed
suit against hundreds of local Hawaiians who may own an
interest in small pockets within his estates boundaries…
[which is] surrounded by a 6ft stone wall blocking easy
access to Pila’a Beach.” A local resident described
this legal action as “the face of neocolonialism.”
Zuckerberg eventually backed down, and the disputed parcels
of land were sold at auction. How that changed anything
is beyond me.
Apparently,
“a smaller-scale ‘bunker’ is being built
on nearby Maui by none other than Oprah Winfrey.”
Mr. Portfolio himself, Bill Gates, who owns at least seven
multi-million dollar homes, extensive farmland, hotel chains,
and a private island in Belize, is rumored to have bunkers
at all his properties.
Billionaire
bunkers are in, it seems, to protect the world’s oligarchs
from an impending apocalypse that they have conspired to
bring about. “A number of companies around the world
are meeting a growing demand for structures that protect
from any risk, whether it’s a global pandemic, an
asteroid, or World War III – while also delivering
luxurious amenities,” says CEO Robert Vicino of Vivos,
an underground shelter company.
The Vivos account
continues: “Most include food supplies for a year
or more, and many have hydroponic gardens to supplement
the rations. The developers also work to create well-rounded
communities with a range of skills necessary for long-term
survival, from doctors to teachers. The company also offers
Vivos Europa One, billed as a ‘modern day Noah’s
Ark.’” Or “if you prefer to spend the
end of days solo, or at least with hand-selected family
and friends, you may prefer to consider The Oppidum in the
Czech Republic, which is being billed as the largest billionaire
bunker in the world.”
These underground
people, whose vaunted charity is a lie, whose work on the
surface of the earth is a snare and a delusion, remind me
of H.G. Wells’ Morlocks in his timeless The Time
Machine — with evident adjustments, of course.
One recalls the story. Over the millennia, the human race
had split into two thinly related species, the feeble and
effeminate surface-dwelling Eloi and the semi-human, cannibalistic,
subterranean Morlocks who prey on their helpless siblings.
The Morlocks are clearly on their way to establishing their
rule on the earth.
As the narrator
says, “But gradually the truth dawned on me: that
Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated
into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of
the Upper-world were not the sole descendants of our generation,
but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which
had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages.”
The creatures of the underground are on the ascent and will
inherit the earth before they descend anew to bask in their
fortified and palatial redoubt.
One thinks in
this connection of the important work of Ellen Schreckter,
a conservative professor of American history, on the political
turmoil of the McCarthy era. In The Age of McCarthyism:
A Brief History with Documents, she analyzes the communist
peril of the time and the misunderstood courage of Sen.
Joe McCarthy in combatting the threat. It was a losing battle.
With the ideology of the Left metastasizing in the media,
the corridors of power, and the universities, infiltrating
every major institution in the country, the new enemy eventually
rose to prominence, as she writes, like “the Morlocks
[rising] from passive predator into cunning manipulator
preying on a weak population.”
The “new
enemy” we confront today is a composite phenomenon.
It reeks of communism, fascism, and “stakeholder capitalism”
— in other words, it has morphed into what we might
call a “Party-colored” totalitarian movement
fueled by the denizens of a down-gradient moral ecosystem.
Argentine president
Javier Milei uses cloacal imagery in his denunciation of
such people. Roger Simon calls them “the self-anointed
elites of no discernible distinction whatsoever”—the
Gateses, the Schwabs, the Soroses, the Bezoses, the Finks,
and, of course, the Zuckerbergs — living in the lap
of plutocratic luxury and controlling the levers of social,
political and economic power. Not all have commissioned
underground presidios, but they are all part of the underground,
a community of upscale Morlocks.
As noted, one
of these mandarins now commands a significant stretch of
Kauai’s northern coastline around Pila’a Beach.
Fortunately, Janice and I are concentrating on the southern
part of the island around Poipu Beach, banking on the intervening
distance to dilute the contagion. We are not interested
in Oppidums (fortified administrative center), which is
where the moral riffraff hangs out. We are not interested
in the proximity of superficially clever people with uneventful
minds, omnivorous appetites, and manorial compulsions.
The island
is a haven for movie companies and boasts a growing tourist
industry, developments which are understandable considering
what Kauai has to offer. This does not affect us. We are
private but not isolate. We enjoy our own company and take
a genuine interest in local customs and learning the language
of those we live among. But the underground people are the
bane of our existence.
