The Statement
A social media post claims that a “major military industrial corporation” projected Western populations would be cut in half by 2025 “inexplicably”, with the post linking the dire prediction to “future biological warfare” following the COVID-19 pandemic.
The text claims the projections were “discovered in 2014”, pointing to the post’s comments for “photo evidence”. In the comments, screenshots from the Deagel.com website show forecasts that the populations of the United States and Australia will drop to 65 million and 8.9 million respectively by 2025.
The Facebook post, by a page administered from Australia, had generated more than 550 interactions at the time of writing.
The Analysis
The source of the post’s projected population figures is not a “major military industrial corporation” as claimed but an obscure website, which itself admits made the predictions based on pure speculation.
Deagel.com has described itself as a “non-profit, built on spare time” that is “not linked to any government”. Nevertheless, it has previously been falsely identified as a secret US intelligence agency and a United Nations-linked group in posts and articles sharing misinformation based on the site’s groundless projections.
As noted previously by AAP FactCheck, the website’s grim forecasts have proved inaccurate. For example, in February 2012, it predicted the US population would fall to 248 million by 2020 – when in fact it reached around 330 million.
The 2025 projections are no longer displayed on the Deagel site, but an archived version from the beginning of the year shows predictions for large population declines in Western countries – but increases in countries like India, Brazil and Indonesia.
Contrary to the post’s claim that the depopulation prediction was unexplained, a disclaimer at the bottom of the page gives the reason for the massive decline as “the collapse of the Western financial system”.
“As COVID has proven Western societies embracing multiculturalism and extreme liberalism are unable to deal with any real hardship,” the disclaimer says.
It describes the population decline as the “Great Reset”, which it says is “another attempt to slow down dramatically the consumption of natural resources and therefore extend the lifetime of the current system”.
An archived version of a similar table from 2017 also ascribed cataclysmic population decline to the collapse of the Western financial system but made no mention of the Great Reset.
The term originated in June 2020 with an initiative launched by Prince Charles and World Economic Forum chief Klaus Schwab to recast the COVID-19 pandemic as a chance to reframe the global economy around sustainable industries. Since then, it has become attached to various conspiracy theories – some of which are tied to baseless claims that pre-date the pandemic about a plot for global depopulation.
The photo used in the Facebook post dates back to 2009 and a blog post diarising a trip to see the so-called “Georgia coffins” in Madison, Georgia.
Fact checkers and local news reports have identified that the “cheap plastic coffins” were in fact burial vaults, an outer container placed in the ground before a coffin to protect it and maintain level ground.
The owner of the vaults told the Morgan County Citizen the items had been stored on the site since the late 1990s to provide for future burial needs. Nevertheless, the same photo has since been attached to unfounded conspiracy theories that the Ebola outbreak of 2014-2016 was planned.
The Verdict
The post’s reference to the populations of Western countries halving by 2025 is not a prediction from a major military industrial corporation, as claimed, but is taken from an obscure website with a history of making unfounded and inaccurate forecasts based on the future collapse of the financial system.
False – Content that has no basis in fact.
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