One of the things that the plague chronicle aims to do, is draw back the curtain on the institutional or cultural roots of particular malignancies, which seem at first to be contingent on specific bad actors. While I understand that some of you find this irritating, it’s not my purpose to let anybody off the hook. It’s rather to point out that the very real villains we’re all concerned about are mere expressions of much deeper forces, and that fixing things will involve a lot more than rounding up all the Anthony Faucis of the world and trying them for crimes against humanity.
One vein of Corona analysis sees the entire pandemic as the plot of globalist conspirators who are interested in reducing the world population. There are many variations on this theory, but the most basic would hold that lockdowns and the rest were a means of driving us to accept harmful vaccination, which will cause a massive die-off among the vaccinated in the coming years and prepare the way for whatever netzero sustainable future Klaus Schwab has planned for the survivors.
My readers often send me links to podcasts, videos and other media providing proofs of this Global Depopulation Agenda. Clip compilations like this one constitute an important genre in this area. They generally feature globalist goons – in this case, Bill Gates – saying ominous things about the overabundance of humans at different interviews and panel discussions.
I have a look at almost everything you send me, and by now I’ve seen enough to note that the internet case against Gates rests heavily on the same dozen or so video statements. Some of these items, for example the third one in that link (where Gates is talking about reducing childhood mortality), are deliberately deceptive, and it’s an important question, why this area is so awash in clearly manipulated media. The rest of the clips are more or less accurate representations of Gates’s arguments, the only problem being that they’re presented too narrowly.
The fourth at that link, for example, is from a TED talk, where Gates opines that
The world today … is headed up to about nine billion [people]. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, healthcare, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps ten or fifteen percent.
The fifth is very similar. Here, Gates pleads:
The problem is that the population is growing the fastest where the people are the least able to deal with it, so it’s in the very poorest places that you’re going to have a tripling in population by 2050. And so their ability to feed, educate, provide jobs, stability, protect the environment, in those locations means they’re facing an almost impossible problem.
If you read these statements carefully, you’ll see they don’t actually support the idea that Gates wants to reduce the world population by vaccinating people to death. First, he could hardly be expected to air such plots in a public forum; and second, Gates almost always pairs his remarks about population with other concerns about healthcare, food and education. These are strange scruples for a homicidal maniac bent on killing billions.
These statements only begin to make sense, when you realise that they’re rooted in the sociological theory of demographic transition. This theory observes that, as societies advance technologically and economically, they shift from an order of high birth rates and high death rates, to an order of low birth rates and low death rates. Gates, who like all globalist elites is worried about environmental impacts from there being too many humans, believes that he can reduce the total peak population in places like Africa by introducing medical interventions to lower mortality and thereby guide populations to a low-birthrate, post-transition demographic pattern. Whether this theory is right, or whether this makes Gates’s interventions morally defensible, are separate questions. What is beyond dispute, is that this is what Gates is arguing and what everybody in his audience understands him to be arguing.
The banal truth is that Gates is an unoriginal flabby Western liberal. He’s worried about the environment, about population and about disadvantaged brown people, and he thinks he can solve all these problems by improving healthcare. This isn’t a defence of him. I happen to think he’s a malign influence and that if we can’t reign in the Gates’s of the world we’re finished, but that’s not because he’s bent on using mRNA vaccines to decimate humanity.
Those concerned about the Global Depopulation Agenda will not be appeased by these clarifications, of course. They’ll point to anti-natalist messaging and policy in Western nations, and also to organisations like the Club of Rome and establishment intellectuals like Paul Ehrlich, who have openly railed against the spectre of overpopulation. They’ll argue – rightly – that our entire political culture is in thrall to a green movement which opposes any technology that might further human flourishing via reliable energy, regardless of its carbon impact. They’ll say I myself have frequently complained that countries like Germany are doing permanent damage to their economies by pursuing an energy transition which will make no difference in the longer term, because future carbon emissions are almost entirely a function of increasing prosperity and population growth in the developing South and East.
If there isn’t a Global Depopulation Agenda, what’s going on, and how are all these ominous developments to be explained?
The answer is very important, and it lies in the peculiarities of postwar political ideology and the moral instincts which this ideology expresses.