Agenda21 2

see AGENDA 2030 = THREE 8 23

see main for earlier 9/13

recovered downstairs to ag21notes

see globalist elite

see davos gt reset BS

SEE MORANO CLIMATE LOCKDOWN BS

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1 25 MORANO

gmail

pull out of 66 orgs

Trump withdraws US from 66 organizations, including UN climate treaty | Fox News Video

1992 rio will req senate re-ratification; un pop fund, ipcc pol body masquerade as from ---take orders from pols; will save us $ bimbo rachel brn hair prolly shd pull out of un altogether; state limit number mi crush totalitarianism mass; mass state 15 member cncl; biden ev mandate trying to take away your freedom of movement; davos trying to get rid of cars, colo CA, limit gas station; carbon passport to monitor your travel; gubt will check your mi to see if you too much; life is hwy bimbo

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mma 12 23

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): It really has nothing to do with the environment when you hear "Green New Deal," does it?

MARC MORANO (GUEST): No, absolutely nothing. And as you mentioned, they freely admit that, whether it's AOC's architect or even the UN. They've actually said, they said, "You thought climate treaties had something to do with environmental policy? This is about redistribution of wealth. This is about empowering the bureaucrats." What they're trying to do, it's all about power. It's about making fewer and fewer decisions by fewer and fewer individuals -- more decisions by fewer individuals.

...

All of this is happening so that you can have a regulatory state that we've never experienced in America -- in our American history -- as they take over more and more swaths. This is the intentional collapse of energy, food, transportation, and as a bonus, our free speech, because remember, the UN last year announced, "We own the science on climate change, and that's why we partnered with Google to make sure only UN-approved results on climate science are returned."

This is a frightening world in which we're entering now. And, you know, we really need to push back hard because they are crushing the middle class, and they are literally doing everything they can with 15 minute cities to keep us locked in, the banning of gas-powered cars -- which, by the way, no one's ever voted to ban.

Fox News platforms climate denial and the Great Reset conspiracy theory during COP27

:{:{11/14/22}:

### Fox brings on climate denier to downplay landmark IPCC climate report

:{:{08/09/21}:

### Merchant Of Doubt Marc Morano Concerned Google Won't Promote His Website's Climate Change Denial

:{:{03/06/15}:

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https://www.mediamatters.org/spanish-language-media/spanish-speakers-are-being-targeted-conspiracy-theories-about-climate-change

spanish-language TikTok creators have been pushing fringe conspiracy theories that argue against the existence of man-made climate change, proposing that climate change is a myth created by supposed elites to bring about the so-called Great Reset – a conspiracy theory that claims climate lockdowns will be used to strip individuals of their rights and possessions.

This comes as record heat waves are affecting the entire planet.

Misinformation about climate change on TikTok occurs despite the platform’s moderation policies, which prohibit “climate change misinformation that undermines well-established scientific consensus, such as content denying the existence of climate change or the factors that contribute to it.” Once again, non-English language content that violates platform policy is flying under the radar, spreading damaging misinformation in what is becoming a disturbing trend.

Media Matters found several Spanish-language posts on TikTok denying climate change, insisting it is a hoax made to impose oppressive or even lethal initiatives led by NGOs, like the UN's Agenda 21 and its much newer Agenda 2030, which sets a series of sustainable development goals for 2030. Agenda 2030 conspiracy theories, which are popular in Spanish, are often conflated with the Great Reset, which is also used to deny the need for action on climate change. Other theories include references to a secret weather control program known as HAARP and even flat earth theory. [vid]

other TikToks take clips from news programs where a supposed expert or study is used to sow doubt about the established facts of climate change. One clip had a guest who claimed, “There is no clear evidence that us, human beings, are capable of changing the earth’s climate,” but that what she has clearly seen is “President Biden asleep at the inauguration of the COP26.”Further, several of these news clips were sourced from Russian propaganda outlet RTand despite TikTok’s policy of labeling state affiliated news sources, the videos remained unlabeled – a common discrepancy between English and Spanish content on other major platforms as well.

Other common criticisms of climate science and action come in the form of testimonials or complaints from individuals who deny the existence of climate change without presenting evidence. Additionally, attacks on climate activist Greta Thunberg garner thousands of views and draw false equivalencies between her qualifications and scientists who deny climate change.

Conspiracy theories are increasingly crossing from the fever swamps of Spanish-language media like Telegram onto mainstream social media platforms and news networks like :{Americano Media.For instance, on the July 11 edition of Battleground Americano, host Jesús Márquez claimed that a so-called “New World Order” and the elites seek to manipulate all countries worldwide through international institutions, that they aim to “enslave the majority of the population,” and that “climate change is an excuse to drive changes that favor the elite.”}:

This makes it all the more likely that the growing Latino electorate will become the target of this type of misinformation in the coming election cycle.

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ref usatoday

the claim: The United Nations will establish a 'new world order' under its Agenda 21/2030 Mission Goals

Is a "new world order" part of the UN's plan? There is evidence that the claim has circulated on social media for years, but a May repost by Facebook user Vernon Adkinson recently went viral.

Over 20 goals comprise the "new world order" the United Nations will focus on as part of its "Agenda 21/2030 Mission Goals," according to the claim. Items on the agenda include one world government; a single cashless currency; government-owned and controlled schools, colleges and universities and an end to single-family homes.

"THIS IS NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY," Adkinson insisted in the caption. "If you don’t believe it, a simple google search will take you to the U.N. website where you can access the document and read it for yourself. It is amazing (not) how well the Covid 19 plandemic ties in with Agenda 21/2030."

Adkinson did not respond to a request for comment from USA TODAY.

What are the U.N.'s Agenda 21 and its Agenda 2030 mission goals?

Agenda 21 was one of several agenda items for the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment & Development in Rio de Janeiro.

The agenda included 31 items addressing global social and economic dimensions; conservation and resource management; role strengthening for women, children and workers, as well as proposed methods of implementation.

Items listed in the "new world order" do not appear in Agenda 21. For instance, there is no mention of currency. Terms like "military" and "sovereignty" also do not appear, though both are referenced in the "new world order."

more:'No one is safe until everyone is safe': Vaccine nationalism threatens global coronavirus effort

However, there are brief mentions of some of the items from the claim. The term "central banking" is present in reference to capacity-building in developing countries; it is not described as a "world central bank." Property rights are also addressed, regarding protecting women's rights to property, but not an end to all privately owned property.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a resolution adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 2015 that is focused around achieving 17 goals within 15 years:

End all poverty in all forms everywhere
End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all
Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
Reduce inequality within and among countries
Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts (acknowledging the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change)
Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development

Terms like "one world," "currency," "military," "family unit," "5G," "private transportation," "air travel," and "synthetic drugs" are not mentioned in the 2030 Agenda, though they are listed in the "new world order."

There are references to equal rights and access to land and other forms of property for poor and vulnerable men and women, full and permanent sovereignty over natural and economic resources for individual states and universal health coverage to include affordable vaccines for all. The 2030 agenda does not mention global sovereignty over these items as the claim suggests.

Is the United Nations planning to institute a 'new world order' by 2030?

There is no evidence that the U.N. will establish "one world government" along with associated implications, such as a single military and currency.

Daniela Gross, a spokesperson for the U.N. Secretary-General, told USA TODAY in an email that the claim is entirely fabricated.

"No, this is false. This is not a genuine UN document," Gross wrote.

The author of a 2014 report on Agenda 21 conspiracy theories, Heidi Beirichm, told AFP Australia in June that the "new world order" claim is a far-right hoax.

"That post is filled with all the bogus claims the far right has made against (Agenda 21) for a long time now,” Beirich, a co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said.

Moreover, Agenda 21 and the 2030 Agenda are not legally binding. The latter is subject to each country's commitment. A frequently asked questions page states that "implementation and success will rely on countries’ own sustainable development policies, plans and programmes."

Similarly, Beirich described Agenda 21 as a "perfectly sensible planning paper, a nonbinding statement of intent aimed at dealing with sustainability on an increasingly crowded planet," in her 2014 conspiracy theory report for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Our rating: False

We rate this claim FALSE because it is not supported by our research. A claim suggesting the UN's Agenda 21 and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development will establish "one world government" has been debunked by experts. A representative from the UN said that the agenda is not a genuine agency document.

Our fact-check sources:

United Nations Conference on Environment & Development Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 3 to 14 June 1992, "AGENDA 21"
United Nations General Assembly, "Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development"
AFP Australia, "Hoax circulates about United Nations' 'mission goals'"
Southern Poverty Law Center, "Agenda 21: The UN, Sustainability and Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory"
The United Nations, "The Sustainable Development Agenda"

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ref 2 GUK

no lnx

Agenda 21: a conspiracy theory puts sustainability in the crosshairs

Could right-wing attacks on a non-binding UN sustainability resolution put sustainable business at risk in some states?

Greg Harman

Wed 24Jun 2015

Green space, clean energy, increased urban density...and global dictatorship. It’s hard to see how all of these things could connect, but — according to a popular right wing conspiracy theory — a UN resolution aimed at sustainable development could pave the way.

Theorists argue that Agenda 21, a 23-year-old non-binding UN resolution that suggests ways for governments and NGOs to promote sustainable development, is the linchpin in a plot to subjugate humanity under an eco-totalitarian regime. One of its most outspoken critics, American Policy Center president Tom DeWeese, has described the resolution as “a new kind of tyranny that, if not stopped, will surely lead us to a new Dark Ages of pain and misery yet unknown to mankind”.

APC is on the political fringes, but anti-Agenda 21 sentiment is moving into the political mainstream. Criticism of the resolution extended to the Republican party’s 2012 platform, which stated: “We strongly reject the UN Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty.”

Legislators in several states have even created anti-Agenda 21 bills, many of which could pose serious threats to companies pursuing sustainability in those states.

In Arizona, for example, a proposed bill dictated that the state could not “adopt or implement the creed, doctrine, or principles or any tenet” of Agenda 21, and prohibited it from “implementing programs of, expending any sum of money for, being a member of, receiving funding from, contracting services from, or giving financial or other forms of aid to” a host of organizations with sustainability agendas, including the President’s Council on Sustainable Development.

Taken at face value, Arizona’s bill – which was defeated in 2012 – would have curtailed almost any sustainability efforts in the state, restricted the activities of tens of thousands of philanthropic organizations that promote sustainability, and potentially scared away hundreds of sustainability-minded companies. If it had passed, it could also have cost the state millions of dollars in lost revenue, as well as thousands of jobs.

If it hadn’t been defeated, Phoenix mayor Greg Stanton feared the bill “would send the message that Phoenix doesn’t believe in a sustainable economic future. It could negatively impact not only Phoenix and its residents, but the entire state”.

Agenda 21 addresses issues ranging from children’s health to public transportation to women’s empowerment, all of which could also have been severely curtailed under the sweeping wording of Arizona’s bill. The state’s chamber of commerce was among the bill’s staunchest opponents.

Battles in the statehouse

While Arizona’s bill was especially concerning, it’s only one of several anti-Agenda 21 bills that have come to the floor in state legislatures across the country. Almost all have failed, either dying in committee, getting defeated on the statehouse floor or – in the case of Missouri’s 2013 bill – getting vetoed by the governor.

The exception was Alabama, which unanimously adopted a law in 2012 to prevent any future effort to “deliberately or inadvertently infringe or restrict private property rights without due process, as may be required by policy recommendations originating in, or traceable to ‘Agenda 21’”.

As Alabama’s legislation demonstrates, one of the biggest dangers of anti-Agenda 21 bills lies in their often-vague wording, which can obscure many of their potential impacts. Arizona house minority leader Chad Campbell called his state’s bill the “most poorly crafted bill” in the statehouse at the time. “We wouldn’t be able to use CFL light bulbs in state buildings because that would be considered energy efficiency,” he said.

In Texas, a similarly sweeping anti-Agenda 21 bill submitted this year sought to prevent any governmental entity from accepting money from or granting money to any “nongovernmental or intergovernmental organization accredited by the United Nations to implement a policy that originated in the Agenda 21 plan”.

To get an understanding of the breadth of this language, it’s worth noting that, under its broadest interpretation, Texas’ bill could have curtailed the activities of the National Rifle Association. While the NRA is hardly a hotbed of sustainable activism, it supports several programs that dovetail with Agenda 21. Last year, for example, the group gave money to 4-H, the Boy Scouts of America, and the Texas Wildlife Association, all of which promote conservation and sponsor outdoor education - activities that could easily be linked to the sweeping priorities of Agenda 21.

The Texas bill could also have barred nonprofits that work with the UN from receiving any state or municipal funding. In an email to the Houston city attorney’s office, James Cargas, the city’s senior assistant attorney for energy, wrote that it would impact “approximately 31,000 nongovernmental organizations [that] provide funding for the benefit of the general public or volunteer services”, including senior citizen advocacy group AARP, the United Way and the privately-owned Ford Foundation. In other words, had it passed the bill, Texas might have cut itself off from hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable funding.

Bikers in Texas

Texas motorcycles, politics and guns: welcome to the biker world

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Mitchell Silver, former president of the American Planning Association, a nonprofit professional organization dedicated to urban planning, said that those making wild claims about the dangers of sustainable development are on the losing side of the argument.

“What I want to hear from opponents of sustainable development is where are you going to put 50m new housing units over the next few decades?” he told Reuters in 2012. “So far, I haven’t gotten an answer to that question.”

Citing his state’s failed anti-Agenda 21 bill, Arizona state senator Steve Farley says that there is a growing awareness among business-minded Arizona Republicans that their Tea Party-aligned colleagues are hurting the state’s business interests.

“Sometimes these conspiracies get a life of their own and those people you depend on to support your tax-cutting majority sabotage you [by] destabilizing the overall economic climate,” Farley said. “But you can’t just say that these folks are in the margins. These folks are in the center of power.”

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ayn randagenda 21 BS biggest damage?

tisch maine timeline:

2017 (June)

President Trump announces that the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate

Agreement

Stephen Bannon and the anti-globalist, climate denying contingent of White House advisors

trump the personal entreaties of Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, Pope Francis, Ivanka Trump, Rex

Tillerson, European Union heads of state and many others. Oblivious to the fact that the

emissions standards under the Agreement are voluntary, subject to revision, and entail no

penalties for noncompliance, the President calls the deal “draconian,” imposing unfair standards

on American companies and employees. “At what point does America get demeaned? At what

point do they start laughing at us as a country?” Trump says. “We don’t want other leaders and

other countries laughing at us anymore. And they won’t be.”

The New York Times observes that

“Mr. Trump’s decision to abandon the agreement for environmental action signed by 195 nations

is a remarkable rebuke to heads of state, climate activists, corporate executives and members of

the president’s own staff, who all failed to change his mind with an intense, last-minute lobbying

blitz. The Paris agreement was intended to bind the world community into battling rising

temperatures in concert, and the departure of the Earth’s second-largest polluter is a major

blow,”* and its editorial board calls the withdrawal “disgraceful.”** Wall Street Journal

headlines declare: “U.S. Climate Pivot Puts a Reluctant China in Driver’s Seat: Trump’s

withdrawal from Paris accord gives China a new opening to exert sway on a big global issue” ***

Some find a May 30 op/ed in the Wall Street Journal by presidential advisors H. R. McMaster

and Gary Cohn as illuminating on the withdrawal decision in: “The president embarked on his

first foreign trip with a cleareyed outlook that theworld is not a ‘global community’ but an arena

where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”

:{:{}:

Writes David Brooks in The New York Times: “That sentence is the epitome of the Trump project.

It asserts that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs.”**** Al Gore’s statement on the

withdrawal declares that “Removing the United States from the Paris Agreement is a reckless and

indefensible action. It undermines America’s standing in the world and threatens to damage

humanity’s ability to solve the climate crisis in time. But make no mistake: if President Trump

won’t lead, the American people will. Civic leaders, mayors, governors, CEOs, investors and the

majority of the business community will take up this challenge. We are in the middle of a clean

energy revolution that no single person or group can stop. President Trump’s decision is

profoundly in conflict with what the majority of Americans want from our president; but no

matter what he does, we will ensure that our inevitable transition to a clean energy economy

continues.”*****

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers states that “We may have our

first post-rational president,” and that “It is possible that last week will be remembered as a

hinge in history — a moment when the United States and the world started moving on a

path away from the peace, prosperity and stability that have defined the past 75

years.”****** The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication reports that US voters favor

staying in the Paris Agreement by a margin of 5 to 1, and that half of Trump voters support staying

in, with fewer than 3 in 10 saying we should not stay in.******* The formal process of

withdrawal will likely take four years, and not be final until after the 2020 presidential election.

[see 2015 (December)]

*Michael Shear, “Trump Will Withdraw U.S. From Paris Climate Agreement,” New York Times, June 1, 2017,

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/climate/trump-paris-climate-agreement.html

**Editorial Board, “Our Disgraceful Exit From the Paris Accord,” New York Times, June 1, 2017,

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/opinion/trump-paris-climate-change-agreement.html

***Brian Spegele and Te-Ping Chen, “U.S. Climate Pivot Puts a Reluctant China in Driver’s Seat,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2017,

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-climate-pivot-puts-a-reluctant-china-in-drivers-seat-1496380249

****David Brooks, “Donald Trump Poisons the World,” New York Times, June 2, 2017,

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/opinion/donald-trump-poisons-the-world.html

*****The Climate Reality Project, “Statement by Former Vice President Al Gore on Today’s Decision by the Trump Administration

to Withdraw from the Paris Agreement,” June 1, 2017, https://www.climaterealityproject.org/press/statement-al-gore-us-commitmentparis-agreement

******Lawrence Summers, “After 75 years of progress, was last week a hinge in history?” Washington Post, June 4, 2017,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/after-75-years-of-progress-was-last-week-a-hinge-in-history/2017/06/04/2085b91e-47cf11e7-bcde-624ad94170ab_story.html?utm_term=.7ccf9ee984ec

*******Jennifer Marlon, Eric Fine, and Anthony Keiserowtiz, “Majorities of Americans in Every State Support Participation in the

Paris Agreement,” Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, May 8, 2017,

http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/paris_agreement_by_state/

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4 23 rww

a so-called “15-minute city” is a concept in urban planning that seeks to create urban areas in which the daily necessities of life—education, work, shopping, health care, leisure—are accessible via a 15-minute walk or bike ride from any point within the city. The 15-minute city concept is also a target for conspiracy theorists, so naturally former Rep. Michele Bachmann has gone all in on spreading baseless conspiracies about the idea.

On Wednesday night, Bachmann, who now serves as dean of the School of Government at Pat Robertson’s Regent University,appeared on a World Prayer Network livestream, where she baselessly claimed that 15-minute cities are really an “electronic leash” designed to prevent anyone from traveling more than 15 minutes away from their homes.

“The 15-minute city is a planned city, a planned community where people are allowed to travel by foot 15 minutes from their house,” Bachmann. “So, it’s really a leash, an electronic leash. You see where this QR code comes in on our phones; this contains people to an area that is no more than 15 minutes from home.”

“These are so-called smart cities where individuals will be tracked and traced and surveilled, and we can move about freely within 15 minutes from home,” she continued. “In the former Soviet Union, their people were allowed to go 50 miles from home—any further, they had to get permission of the government—so this is a move of totalitarianism, where there’s a limitation on freedom of movement. In the United States government under our Constitution, every American has the right to travel, so this is clearly an unconstitutional move." [vid]

the World Prayer Network is an outgrowth of a prayer movement that began in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, when religious-right activists began to gather together several times a week to pray for God to intervene and overturn the results. Founded by right-wing activists Jim Garlow and Mario Bramnick, the World Prayer Network livestreams have since become a conduit for the promotion of wild conspiracy theories, many of them spread by Bachmann, who is a regular participant.

Tags: Michele Bachmann World Prayer Network

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rww 6 22 random

andrew Torba celebrates how far the “dissident Christian right” has managed to move the Overton Window: “We have multiple members of Congress embracing Christian Nationalism. We have the most watched News show on TV talking about the Great Replacement.We have normalized the widespread use of the phrases ‘anti-White’ and ‘anti-Christian’ in normie right wing circles. We have eliminated the taboo of criticizing the Tribe.” FYI, by “the Tribe,” Torba means Jews.
Kandiss Taylor says she cried all day after receiving only 3.4 percent of the vote in Georgia’s GOP gubernatorial primary because it means the state has become “communist”: “This is the end to freedom as we know it.”
David Lane gripes that in today’s culture “vice parades proudly about in virtue’s raiment, wholly untroubled by the tens of millions of preborn babies killed in their mother’s womb, while injudiciously jubilant of the Supreme Court’s recent fictitious finding, in a 5-4 split, of the ‘right’ to same-sex intercourse and marriage in the Constitution.”
Todd Coconato is freaking out: “Most Americans are blind to what is happening and believe a media that is 90% owned by 6 corporations who spew talking points from the same woke corporations that are pushing that there are 68 gendersand who are telling us we are racists and full of hate because we love our country and stand for our flag. They say we ‘cling to our bibles and guns’ and they would love to disarm us! I wonder why? In order to answer that, all we have to do is study history. When will the people wake up and understand how wicked these people are? What will it take for Americas to demand changes in our economic polices and from our compromised leadership? Or will we sleep walk right into UN Agenda 2030 with no resistance at all?”
Finally, Kent Christmas proclaims that God is going to release a “death angel” on the Earth that will take out “evil” leaders who are in public office: “They ain’t gonna be voted out, they’re gonna be removed out.”

Tags: Andrew Torba David Lane Kandiss Taylor Kent Christmas Todd Coconato Leftovers

===

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wow putin is anti-commie?!

an 3 22

Conspiracy theorists in the United States and around the world appear to have a new obsession: the "New World Order."

Ever since Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, politicians and political pundits on cable have tossed about the phrase while predicting that Vladimir Putin's war, however it concludes, has reshaped the geopolitical landscape. In their shorthand, that equates to the dawning of a "new world order."

As Vice News points out, President Joe Biden name-checked the “new world order” conspiracy in a mid-March to the Business Roundtable. “Now is a time when things are shifting,” Biden said when asked about the United States’ response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “There’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it.”

The “New World Order” is solidly ensconced in American conspiracy theory culture. To those who believe, those three words represent a multitude of dystopian horrors, such as forced depopulation programs, a secretive ruling class of reptiles and “elite globalists” on a satanic mission to bring about the “end times.”

References to the “New World Order” have been frequent on some of the large Telegram channels dedicated to the“freedom convoy” movement that started in Canada in January. “Ukraine falls, and it will, it is the end of the New World Order,” wrote someone on that Telegram channel. “Believe it or not,Putin is a white hat and working to take downSatanists, corruption, bioweapons sites, and the New World Order,” wrote another. “Mainstream media is not your friend.” “Vladimir Putin is a traitor to the NWO!” someone else wrote in another convoy channel. “That's why we like him.”

At least one far-right U.S. politician appears to buy into the theory. Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, who was censured by her colleagues for participating in a white nationalist conference, recently listed the names of people she believes are part of “one big happy New World Order club.” Her list, shared to Telegram on Tuesday, included top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, billionaire philanthropist and Holocaust survivor George Soros, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Mark Zuckerberg, the Clintons, and the Bush family. She also called the European Union “New World Order tyranny.”

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beckbunch of novels eye of moloch, but 2 on ag 21 with RN

https://www.amazon.com/Agenda-21-Shadows-Glenn-Beck/dp/1476746842/

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refs EU but UN by extension? blue hull navy? ~ arms exports?

gee never connected UN to satan:

[brexit] What they got was discussion ranging from the allegation that the seat 666 is kept empty in the European Parliament chamber in both Brussels and Strasbourg (it isn’t), to whether the EU is a political tool of Antichrist in advance of the second coming of Christ.

My friends were astonished at this. I wasn’t. During the previous month I had contributed a guest blog for a Christian news platform, challenging these same accusations. During that month (it went live on May 25, 2016) it had become, from my calculations, one of the most visited blogs on this website.

It can still be read online but, unfortunately, the huge string of comments and conversations under it can no longer be accessed. That is a pity because they would have provided interesting source material for future students of theology and the sociology of religion. Like the meeting I organized later, in June of that year, the online discussion got lively. In fact, it got very lively indeed! Some might say “heated.”

Eschatological turbulence on both sides of “the pond”My experience in the UK was not the only turbulent event of 2016 that had end-times features to it. In November, something even more extraordinary occurred in the USA: the election of Donald Trump.

Somewhere in the region of 33 million white evangelicals voted for Trump and huge numbers of these see contemporary events through the same eschatological lens that had informed the outlook of those with whom I had debated in the UK about the European Union. In the US, this support has had significant effects on foreign policy.

President Trump’s decisions to move the US embassy to Jerusalem (announced in 2018) and to support Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights (announced in 2019) were designed to appeal to American evangelical Christians. Polling in the US in 2017 revealed that 80% of evangelicals believe that the creation of Israel in 1948 was a fulfilment of biblical prophecy that will bring about Christ’s second coming.

In addition, Trump’s decision to leave the Paris climate agreement in 2017 (the decision was implemented in 2020) sat easily with a group which contains many who deny the reality of climate change caused by human action, or do not consider it a threat which can be averted by human agency.

Whatever one feels about these geopolitical and environmental issues, it is undeniable that huge numbers of voters in the USA see these decisions through an end-times lens....

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/end-times/

The continued impact of end-times beliefs today

Since 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to claims that it has eschatological significance. It should be noted that the same thing was said about the fourteenth-century Black Death. Anti-vaxxers and those unhappy with mask-wearing have included some who loudly identify these as aspects of an emerging international order associated with the Antichrist. This has resonated with – and been amplified by – conspiracy-theory-culture and the effects of social-media algorithms.

Some of the most extreme supporters of gun rights in the USA see them as weapons to be used in resisting the forces of the Antichrist in the last days.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/dozen-times-right-wing-media-said-something-ridiculous-about-climate-change-2021

no lnx mant vids

A dozen times right-wing media said something ridiculous about climate change in 2021

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY TED MACDONALD

PUBLISHED 12/23/21

1. The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro doesn’t think that 4 degrees Celsius of warming is an emergency

On the April 14 edition of The Daily Wire’s The Ben Shapiro Show, host Ben Shapiro stated that “I do not consider it a quote-unquote ‘emergency’ if the climate were to warm 4 degrees Celsius over the course of the next century. … It’s just a way for them to create a certain level of alarmism that is unjustifiable by the facts on the ground."

It’s a good thing that Shapiro, whose publication is backed by fracking billionaires, has no authority or credibility within the climate science community: 4 C of warming would be literally catastrophic for large swaths of the globe. As The Guardian reported in 2019, at 4 C of climate change, we’d have sea levels that would be around 2 meters higher than today (which would render many coastal areas obsolete), destruction of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, oceanic dead zones, temperatures in the equatorial belt so high that would make for impossible living conditions for most of the year, and the beginning of a potential mass extinction for many species. This is not the first time that Shapiro has said something ignorant about the climate crisis; he once theorized that people affected by rising sea levels could just sell their inundated homes and move.

2. Fox’s Dagen McDowell thinks that cold temperatures in certain parts of the U.S. entirely disprove global warming

Fox News personalities regularly conflate climate with weather, and they generally do it to dismiss global warming. On the April 21 edition of The Five, co-host Dagen McDowell mockingly suggested that “they stopped calling it global warming” because of abnormally cold U.S. temperatures.

Video file

CitationFrom the April 21, 2021, edition of Fox News' The Five

In reality, our warming climate has not eradicated cold weather, and in some cases, it has even made cold weather more severe and unpredictable. Nor have abnormally cold temperatures caused a dent in the Earth’s alarming warming trend, in which the past decade was the warmest on record.

3. Ex-coal lobbyist Steve Milloy lies about warming temperatures on One America News: “The June 2021 temperature was actually below the 40-year average”

On the August 2 edition of OAN’s The Tipping Point, former coal lobbyist and Fox News contributor Steve Milloy stated: “The June 2021 temperature was actually below the 40-year average. … There’s just so much bad information going on around, and you know, you’ve just got to be careful with climate alarmists.”

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CitationFrom the August 2, 2021, edition ofOAN's The Tipping Point

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In reality, the U.S. suffered through its hottest June on record, while it was the fifth-warmest June on record globally (followed by the hottest July ever recorded in earth’s history). Milloy is a longstanding figure in the climate denial community, and viewers have really “got to be careful” with his objectively false information.

4. Fox's Laura Ingraham suggests that climate change is really “about controlling the people” and fearmongers that climate action will lead to pandemic-style lockdowns

On both the May 18 and 19 editions of Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham theorized that Democrats will use climate change to control Americans’ lives through pandemic-style lockdowns.

Video file

CitationFrom the May 19, 2021, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle

This is a dangerous conspiracy theory being pushed by prominent climate deniers that has taken hold among far-right media figures. To be clear, the way to fight climate change is not via lockdowns (COVID-19 lockdowns “only marginally reduced greenhouse gas emissions”), but by bringing about systemic change in our energy system and reimagining our economy and the way we live.

5. Newsmax’s Chris Salcedo doesn’t believe in “proof” that CO2 emissions are contributing to climate change

There were multiple times this year when Newsmax host Chris Salcedo went on a perplexing rant claiming there’s somehow no proof that rising CO2 emissions affect temperatures in any meaningful way. On the August 18 edition of The Chris Salcedo Show, Salcedo called global warming a “religion” that “has not been proven through science” before going on to say, “There's no mathematical proof out there that states that X amount of man-made CO2 yields Y amount of temperature change.”

Then on the December 14 edition of his show, Salcedo stated: “From experts I have read and interviewed over the years, I can say that there is no proof that man's C02 emissions are destroying the planet.” Salcedo must be interviewing some pretty fringe climate deniers as “experts,” as there is effectively unanimous scientific consensus that “humans are changing Earth's climate, primarily through greenhouse gas emissions.”

6. Fox’s Tucker Carlson rants that climate change is somehow a conspiracy to shrink your children

While Tucker Carlson is no stranger to promoting weird conspiracy theories about climate change, one of his segments from June went completely overboard. On the June 22 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the Fox prime-time host accused climate scientists of wanting to use “human engineering” to “make human children smaller than they are now” and thereby reduce their lifetime greenhouse gas emissions: “All we need to do is experiment on human children and we can solve climate change.”

Tucker Human Engineering

Carlson’s claim was based on a speech given by a bioethicist nearly five years ago. As Gizmodo reported, “The ideas are bad, but they’re utterly fringe. Activists are clamoring for transforming society, not individual humans. You’d never know that from watching the segment, though.” But taking a fringe remark out of context and repurposing it to claim that the government will take over our lives seems pretty on-brand for Fox News.

7. Dennis Prager thinks the simple solution to a warming climate is to just use more air conditioning

Conservative commentator Dennis Prager, who leads a nonprofit online “university” that promotes climate denial, among other conservative talking points, offered his own absurd “solution” to climate change during a talk on September 22: “Did you know that there is a solution to a warm climate? It's called air conditioning. It's very effective.”

Prager’s comments follow a concerning new form of climate denial in right-wing media: acknowledging the climate is changing but claiming there’s nothing we can do to prevent it -- we must learn to live with it instead. In Prager’s case, he suggests that well-off people can just adapt to the warming climate by using air conditioning when it gets hot (which would only increase emissions even further), while those without access to air conditioning will suffer.

8. On Fox News’ The Five, Greg Gutfeld claims that the data to prove climate change is “never there”

On the September 2 edition of Fox News’ The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld criticized those who connect climate change to extreme weather events -- specifically to the destructive Hurricane Ida. He stated that the data is “never there,” and that “the severity” of such storms “has been on the decline.”

LOMBORGIAN?

Video file

CitationFrom the September 2, 2021, edition of Fox News' The Five

For one, science has shown that climate change is affecting hurricanes in a number of ways as storms are dumping more rain, moving slower, and rapidly intensifying -- all hallmarks of Hurricane Ida. Secondly, the data is indeed “there,” as climate models have been correct over the past 50 years. Additionally, Gutfeld talks about “severity” only in terms of decreasing deaths from natural disasters. However, focusing on this statistic obscures the many other reasons that climate change is a serious and deadly threat. As one scientist puts it, “climate change kills, from poor nutrition status and poor health linked to episodes of drought and harvest failures, the spread of infectious diseases, … increasing violent conflict, … and of course the impact of extreme events like tropical cyclones and flash floods.”

9. On Newsmax, Republican commentator Ford O’Connell claims that “climate change is the ultimate Trojan horse for socialism” before stating that the Earth “may or not be warming”

Newsmax had a wild year of promoting climate denial, and right-wing pundit Ford O’Connell’s claim that the Earth “may or may not be warming” on the October 25 edition of American Agenda is just another sad example.

Video file

CitationFrom the October 25, 2021, edition of Newsmax's American Agenda

The context behind this segment is noteworthy -- Newsmax was attacking its much larger rival Fox News for “going woke” and “making a permanent hard-left turn” by suggesting that the newly launched Fox Weather streaming service is taking climate change too seriously. In actuality, Fox Weather is just ignoring the issue altogether, but it’s funny to see Newsmax melt down over the fact that Fox is apparently not right-wing enough.

10. On Fox Business, Patricia Lee Onwuka of the Independent Women’s Forum claims that climate change is a “fallacy”

Discussing President Biden’s response to Hurricane Ida on the September 3 edition of Fox Business' Mornings With Maria, right-wing commentator Patricia Lee Onwuka suggested that climate change is a “fallacy” that Biden is using to advance his agenda; she also said that “the facts dispute” the idea that extreme weather events like hurricanes are connected to climate change.

Video file

CitationFrom the September 3, 2021, edition of Fox Business' Mornings With Maria

As noted above, we already know the ways in which climate change is affecting hurricanes and worsening their impacts on our warming world. Those facts don’t seem to matter to Onwuka or the Independent Women’s Forum, which has received both Koch and tobacco industry money and has a history of climate denial.

11. On OAN, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) says that “we have the cleanest environment anywhere in the world” because of the fossil fuel industry

A lot of stupid things were said by right-wing media regarding this year’s United Nations climate conference, known as COP26. One of the more head-scratching comments came from Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), who was featured on a November edition of OAN’s In Focus With Stephanie Hamill to downplay the seriousness of climate change. He went on to hype up the U.S. fossil fuel industry by stating that “we have the cleanest environment anywhere in the world” because of “clean energy practices” like fracking.

While Cawthorn was alluding to the fact that natural gas obtained by fracking is cleaner than coal (it emits much less CO2 than coal when burned), it’s important to remember that fracking also releases methane, which is about 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. And like coal, there are numerous water and air pollution problems associated with its use. In any case, the side effects of fossil fuel operations involve literally polluting our air and waterways, so in no way are they responsible for making our environment clean and safe. Additionally, despite Cawthorn’s boast that “I’ll put our air [quality] up against anyone’s,” the U.S. is nowhere near the top of global environmental rankings by any metric.

12. Fossil fuel lobbyist Daniel Turner thinks concern about climate change is “so overblown that it is hyperbolic and silly”

On the November 1 edition of Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, Daniel Turner of the fossil fuel shill group Power the Future tried to throw cold water on COP26 by claiming that “climate change panic is so overblown that it is hyperbolic and silly” and suggesting that the U.N. tries to scare people by publishing “nonsense reports.”

Video file

CitationFrom the November 1, 2021, edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom

We’re not sure what’s so “silly” about being concerned with a planet that’s on track for over 2.5 C of warming, which will have devastating consequences for billions of people around the world. Turner, who has spent almost his entire career working for Koch-backed groups, has made similar ludicrous statements in the past, including claiming that climate activists are somehow thrilled with the COVID-19 pandemic because it’s supposedly accomplishing their goals of implementing a Green New Deal.

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They swore he’d never build, just tear down. He was, after all, the ultimate loner president with a grim history of bankruptcies. It was obvious that, among other things, he’d destroy the country’s alliances. And admittedly, these last two years his strength hasn’t always been in building. Take that “big, fat, beautiful wall” of his. You know, the one the Mexicans were going to pay for until it turned out that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi were the Mexicans he had in mind. Not only hasn’t he gotten it built, but he’s now threatening to shut down part of the government if the Democrats won’t agree to fund it. In something like a hissy fit, in fact, he recently swore that he’d be “proud” to do so, wouldn’t for a second blame it on the Democrats, and might even order the Pentagon to spend a few billion of the bucks he’s been shoveling its way to build that wall for him -- all of which may represent a first when it comes to presidential public relations.

Still, in other areas, how wrong they were! It couldn’t be clearer now that Donald Trump is capable of building bigly. Just look at the recent climate-change meeting in Poland if you want some striking evidence of his success! It took a year or so, but now he’s no longer alone in trying to deep-six the Paris climate accord and turn this planet into a fossil-fueled hothouse from hell. Thanks to his kind words and supportive gestures and those of figures close to him, Trump and his men actually managed to put together an informal but potentially powerful alliance of fossil-fuel producing countries at that recent Polish conference -- Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia, Australia, and Kuwait -- to take the world down with him. And on a planet on which fossil fuel emissions remain on the rise and American bank investments in coal and oil from tar sands (but not in renewable energy) are also on the upswing, here's a strong sign of what such an alliance could ultimately accomplish: glaciers in a part of East Antarctica long considered stable are now melting, a flood threat, sooner or later, to coastal areas globally. In other words, the outlook is bright indeed, if you happen to be a Big Energy tycoon or CEO.

Now, let TomDispatch* regular John Feffer, author of the new climate-change thriller *Frostlands, the second in his Splinterlands series of dystopian novels, fill you in on the real New World Order whose creation Donald Trump and his alliance are intent on aiding and abetting. Tom

Are You Ready for an Epoch Fail?

Globalists Really Are Ruining Your Life

By John Feffer

You know the story: the globalists want your guns. They want your democracy. They’re hovering just beyond the horizon in those black helicopters. They control the media and Wall Street. They’ve burrowed into a deep state that stretches like a vast tectonic plate beneath America’s fragile government institutions. They want to replace the United States with the United Nations, erase national borders, and create one huge, malevolent international order.

The only thing that stands in their way is -- take your pick -- the Second Amendment, Twitter, or Donald Trump.

Conspiracy theorists have, in fact, been warning about just such a New World Order for decades, going all the way back to theisolationist critics of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and to fears about the United Nations in the post-World War II moment. During the Cold War, the John Birch Society and fringe elements of the Republican Party nurtured just such anti-globalist sentiments, but they never made much headway in the mainstream world. As the Cold War ended, however, theanti-globalist virus began to spread again, this time more rapidly, and it’s threatening to become a pandemic.

The Agenda 21 Dystopia

On September 11, 1990, just after Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of Kuwait and just before the reunification of Germany, George H.W. Bush spoke of a “new world order” that would unite all countries in defense of the rule of law and thwart the Iraqi autocrat’s regional ambitions. The phrase was meant as a rallying cry, not an actual plan, but that didn’t stop the president’s America First critics from reading all manner of mayhem into his speech.

The elder Bush, who had long toiled in the shadow of Ronald Reagan, was in some ways a curious target for those who feared the end of U.S. sovereignty. As recent posthumous assessments revealed, he was an early champion of states’ rights (against civil rights), supported prayer in school and the NRA, made a U-turn as a presidential candidate to oppose abortion, launched wars in Panama and the Persian Gulf, and presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union. Anti-globalists, however, focused on a different part of Bush’s résumé: he’d gone to Yale, later belonged to a wealthy elite of Texas oil barons, served as ambassador to the United Nations, and was a card-carrying member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and that most elite of global agenda-setting outfits, the Trilateral Commission.

Such characteristics made him particularly vulnerable to attacks from the far right. Preacher Pat Robertson, for instance, disliked Bush’s staid Episcopalianism and resented losing to the future president in the 1988 Republican primaries. In his 1991 bestseller, The New World Order, Robertson refocused all his ire on the president’s presumed global ambitions. “Is George Bush merely an idealist or are there now plans underway to merge the interests of the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the United Nations?” he asked rhetorically and then, of course, provided the answer:

“A single thread runs from the White House to the State Department to the Council on Foreign Relations to the Trilateral Commission to secret societies to extreme New Agers. There must be a new world order...There must be world government, a world police force, world courts, world banking and currency, and a world elite in charge of it all.”

Though that 1991 book is largely forgotten, the televangelist’s attacks on Bush’s “globalism” resurfaced again and again in different forms. Beginning in 1994, for instance, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ Left Behind series spun Robertson’s dire predictions of a one-world government into 16 novels and several dreadful movies. Just to ensure that readers wouldn’t miss their point, they even installed the anti-Christ as the head of the United Nations. More recently, Donald Trump’s attacks on Hillary Clinton’s elitism echoed some of the very themes Robertson had sounded almost three decades earlier.

Oddly, though, Bush and Robertson agreed on one thing, on which they even found common ground with former Vice President Al Gore: the importance of addressing climate change.

As president, Bush pushed a number of environmental initiatives related to air quality, ozone depletion, and climate change more generally. In 1992, his administration even endorsed a tepid “action plan,”Agenda 21,that came out of that year’s global environmental meeting in Rio de Janeiro. In reality, it was just another of an endless stream of documents produced by such environmental conferences. For some Americans, however, those two words came to evoke the most terrifying aspect of the Bush era, proof positive that he was covertly constructing the very New World Order that he had invoked.

Perhaps the leading proponent of Agenda 21 conspiracy theories has been TV and radio personality Glenn Beck.In 2012, he even published a dystopian novel called (you won’t be surprised to learn) Agenda 21. In it, he and co-author Harriet Parke fingered environmentalists as the true agents of the coming apocalypse and issued dire warnings about climate change becoming the lever a future global authority would use to eradicate national sovereignty and enslave Americans to a collective vision. “Just a generation ago, this place was called America,” Beck and Parke wrote. “Now, after the worldwide implementation of a UN-led program called Agenda 21, it’s simply known as ‘the Republic.’ There is no president. No Congress. No Supreme Court. No freedom.”

Once you start looking for Agenda 21, it pops up in all sorts of strange places. Newt Gingrich ran for president in 2012 with a pledge to rescind the “plan.” Ted Cruz linked it to -- you guessed it -- George Soros and warned that its implementation would deprive Americans of their right to play golf (no joke). Most recently, YouTube and Twitter have lit up with contrived reports that Agenda 21, not climate change, was somehow responsible for the latest California wildfires.

And here’s the truly bizarre part: while Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz, and the rest of them were nattering on about an obscure, non-binding U.N. document, they were missing the real story. A nightmarish New World Order was indeed being constructed around them. It’s global, malevolent, aimed at destroying ever more American lives, and -- according to a recent Trump administration report -- getting worse by the minute.

The Real New World Order

A significant number of Americans believe that they’re still relatively safe behind the walls of Donald Trump’s Fortress America. Homeland Security protects them from international terrorists. Border patrol agents block caravans of refugees and asylum-seekers. By refusing to ratify membership in institutions like the International Criminal Court, Congress keeps the U.S. safe from foreign influences. President Trump has only reinforced such feelings by pulling the United States out of international pacts like the Paris climate accord and global bodies like the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Because the world keeps knocking on America’s door, the present wave of nationalist politicians has added a few more locks for safety’s sake. All such precautions, however, have done nothing to prevent the establishment of an actual New World Order on American soil. Yes, it’s happened, even if the conspiracy mongers haven’t cared to notice.

There is indeed a new global order. It’s called climate change and, unlike the scenarios imagined by the anti-globalists, it’s wreaking havoc not in some dystopian future but right in the here and now: the prairie fires that struck Oklahoma, Kansas, and the Texas panhandle in the spring of 2017, killing seven people and destroying an area equivalent to three Rhode Islands; Hurricane Maria that devastated large areas of Puerto Rico that fall, leaving nearly 3,000 people dead; Hurricane Michael that swept through Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia with unprecedented winds and flooding this October, killing 45 and causing $30 billion in damage; and the wildfires that raged across California in November, killing more than 80 people and destroying nearly 14,000 homes. And that’s just to begin a list of weather catastrophes in this country.

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https://www.splcenter.org/20140331/agenda-21-un-sustainability-and-right-wing-conspiracy-theory

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Agenda 21: The UN, Sustainability and Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory

March 31, 2014

In this article

Introduction

The Problem: Agenda 21 and the Right

The Players: Anti-Agenda 21 Activists

And the Nazis Join In…

Virtually none of the outlandish claims about Agenda 21 are true. Yet, as with all such baseless propaganda, the hysteria over it has had the effect of poisoning any kind of rational discussion of the very real challenges we face — challenges that are essential to tackle head-on in an increasingly complex and stressed world.

Introduction

At the conclusion of the June 3-14, 1992, United Nations Conference on Environment & Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, President George H.W. Bush and the leaders of 177 other nations signed a document known as Agenda 21. At the time, it was seen as a perfectly sensible planning paper, a nonbinding statement of intent aimed at dealing with sustainability on an increasingly crowded planet.

But in the 22 years since that day, at the hands of groups like the John Birch Society, Agenda 21 has been transformed in much of the American public mind into a secret plot to impose a totalitarian world government, a nefarious effort to crush freedom in the name of environmentalism. And it isn’t only extremists pushing this conspiracy theory — in January 2012, the Republican National Committee bought into the propaganda, denouncing Agenda 21 in a resolution as a “destructive and insidious scheme” that is meant to impose a “socialist/communist redistribution of wealth.”

The demonization of Agenda 21 began among extremist groups like the John Birch Society, the same outfit that was effectively ejected from the conservative movement after accusing President Dwight D. Eisenhower of being a communist agent. The Birch Society and an array of other radical-right groups see Agenda 21 and virtually all other global efforts as part of a nefarious plan on the part of global elites to form a socialistic one-world government, or “New World Order.”

To listen to such groups, Agenda 21 will lead to a “new Dark Ages of pain and misery yet unknown to mankind.” It is “a comprehensive plan of utopian environmentalism, social engineering, and global political control,” the “most dangerous threat to America’s sovereignty” yet. It will “make our nation a vassal” of the UN, result in “the destruction of our lives,” force rural areas’ “population [to be] decimated,” and lead to having “90% of the population murdered.” The end, these critics all agree, will be the imposition of “a collectivist world government.”

Agenda 21 is not a treaty. It has no force of law, no enforcement mechanisms, no penalties, and no significant funding. It is not even a top-down recommendation, seeking instead to encourage communities around the world to come up with their own solutions to overpopulation, pollution, poverty and resource depletion. It is a feel-good guide that cannot force anyone, anywhere, to do anything at all.

Yet Alabamahas passed a law meant to outlaw any effects of the plan. The legislatures of Kansas, New Hampshire and Tennessee all passed state resolutions condemning it.Similar needless laws have been approved by one chamber of the legislatures in Arizona, Missouri and Oklahoma. And political fights over it have broken out in at least half a dozen other states and countless local communities.

The fears generated in such places are ridiculous to the point of utter absurdity, but they have had an important real-world impact. In communities like Carroll County, Md., politicians have been voted out of office for supporting local plans. In Baldwin County, Ala., all nine members of the Planning and Zoning Commission quit in disgust after the County Commission killed their plan “on a pretext so devoid of relevance and merit as, in our opinion, to elicit only ridicule,” as they wrote. Prominent politicians like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) have contributed to such outcomes as they denounce the plan that Cruz has claimed would “abolish” golf courses and paved roads.

It’s time to finally call out the conspiracy theorists. The politicians who spread falsehoods about Agenda 21 and its effects need to be shamed by other politicians, by editorial boards and other commentators, and by the citizenry at large. The business community and organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, which know better, should speak out publicly about the real purposes and usefulness of planning and sustainability. The media needs to stop reporting on Agenda 21 as if it were a bona fide controversy and plainly state the facts about the plan. And communities around the country, some of which have abandoned work on sustainability plans because of the heat, need to be encouraged to return to or start to develop such plans in tandem with responsible groups like the American Planning Association.

This report was principally researched and written by Heidi Beirich, with contributions by Mark Potok, Janet Smith and Don Terry, who wrote about the plan in Baldwin County, Ala. It was edited by Potok. Russell Estes and Sunny Paulk designed the report.

The Problem: Agenda 21 and the Right

In Carroll County, Md., all five county commissioners were swept from office for supporting the plan. In Missoula, Mont., police had to be called in to quell an uproar over paying dues to an organization to help implement it. And in Albemarle County, Va., the harried board of supervisors quit paying those dues and even backed out of a related national agreement.

From one end of the country to the other, a 22-year-old, entirely voluntary United Nations planning document known as Agenda 21 has increasingly come under bitter attack from a wide array of far-right fearmongers. Led by nearly a dozen extremist groups and their propagandists, the plan — a document meant to help local communities deal with overpopulation, pollution, poverty and resource depletion — is being pilloried as a secret conspiracy to impose global governance. The end point, these ideologues insist, is the destruction of freedom and the onset of tyranny.

Already, the results have been shocking.

At least three states — Arizona, Missouri and Oklahoma— have considered laws, each of which passed one chamber of their legislatures, to halt the purportedly noxious effects of Agenda 21; Alabama went all the way, passing a 2012 law that was signed by Gov. Robert Bentley. Major political battles have broken out over it in Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Montana, Ohio and Texas. Even the Republican National Committee, in January 2012, denounced Agenda 21 as a “destructive and insidious scheme” to impose a “socialist/communist redistribution of wealth.”

Agenda 21 is not a treaty. It is not a legally binding document. Even its recommendations do not come from the top down, but are meant to encourage local communities to come up with their own solutions. It does not have the slightest power to force anyone, American or otherwise, to do anything at all.

President George H. W. Bush signs a United Nations accord on climate

change in 1992.

And it was signed, in 1992, by President George H.W. Bush and the leaders of 177 other countries — nations representing 98% of the world’s population.

But the fears Agenda 21 has provoked plug directly into more than a century of far-right worries about any international body imposing any kind of control on the United States. It is the latest iteration of the decades-long property rights movement, a movement that has included militant upsurges like the “Wise Use” movement of the 1980s and the militia movement of the 1990s. Taking the place of the communist bogeyman, the United Nations has become the fearmongers’ chief demon.

Tom DeWeese

“Any time you get some sort of UN program that suggests any kind of change in the way people live, even if it seems outwardly benign and even voluntary, it’s going to be taken up by people with a conspiracist bent,” explained Michael Barkun, a Syracuse University political scientist and scholar of conspiracy theories.

The hysteria is palpable.

Glenn Beck

To Tom DeWeese, perhaps the leading critic of the plan, Agenda 21 will lead to a “new Dark Ages of pain and misery yet unknown to mankind.” To TV and radio conspiracist Glenn Beck, it is the leading edge of a push for “government control on a global level.” It is an “anti-human document,” a “False Religion,” a mandate to “round up” Americans, a conspiracy to cut the population by 85%, the first step toward a “police state,” a “seditious new plan” for “totalitarianism.”

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who led the 2013 government shutdown, even claimed it would “abolish …. golf courses, grazing pastures and paved roads.”

Ted Cruz

“The anti-Agenda 21 movement has had a demonstrable impact on land use policy in Virginia,” said James A. Bacon, a newsletter publisher and conservative activist who focuses on land use issues there. “The fixation on Agenda 21 creates a bizarre distraction from the very real challenge of articulating principled conservative positions on how to manage growth, development and the environment — issues that won’t go away just because we choose to ignore them. Sadly, just uttering the words ‘Agenda 21’ is sufficient in some quarters to shut down the discussion.”

Back to the Beginning

To be sure, when Agenda 21 was adopted at the so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, it was heralded as a key agreement, the first global effort to take on what was increasingly seen as a looming environmental crisis.

In a semi-official 1993 book explaining the plan, Daniel Sitarz described it enthusiastically as “a document of hope,” a “comprehensive blueprint for humanity to use to forge its way into the next century by proceeding more gently upon the Earth. As its sweeping programs are implemented world-wide, it will eventually impact on every human activity on our planet. Deep and dramatic changes in human society are proposed by this monumental historic agreement.”

Sitarz was being optimistic, to say the least.

Perhaps because the document was, in fact, so sweeping — even though it contained no requirements, enforcement mechanisms or even significant funding — it quickly came under attack from conservatives in the United States. In the years that followed, a surprising number of conservatives and right-wingers took on the basic premise of the plan, disputing the world’s scientists on such issues as global warming, the ozone layer, rising oceans and a host of related problems.

Many of those opponents saw Agenda 21 as inimical to business and industry — it did, after all, focus on carbon emissions and related issues — and also believed that it represented an attack on property rights because it proposed to not allow owners completely unfettered use of their lands and businesses.

But to denizens of the radical right, particularly those involved in the growing antigovernment “Patriot” movement, it was worse than that. Agenda 21, they insisted, was merely the latest step in a dismal march toward a totalitarian, socialistic “one-world government,” or New World Order. This kind of conspiratorial thinking was particularly evident among certain Patriot groups that warned in the 1990s that the UN intended to turn most of America into a human-free “biosphere,” or gigantic wildlife preserve, necessitating the murder of most of the U.S. population.

After all, the far right had been sounding the alarm about all international agreements and controls going back to the League of Nations in the early 20th century and even before. Indeed, one Patriot website, Sovereignty.net, produced a “Timeline to Global Governance” that started in 1891 and included financial pacts, treaties, regional and international associations, plus, naturally, Agenda 21.

The Activists

Tom DeWeese, who heads an organization called the American Policy Center, was probably the first to focus on Agenda 21, launching attacks on it almost before the ink on the document was dry. To DeWeese, the plan is the “ruling principle of the revolution,” a sea change that will end with the imposition of “a new kind of tyranny,” something akin to both socialism and fascism. He believes that Agenda 21 is ultimately responsible for what he sees as destructive forces in American society, including multiculturalism, same-sex marriage and other cultural changes.

DeWeese produces materials including an anti-Agenda 21 kit, complete with workbooks, DVDs, and the book Shattered Dreams: One Hundred Stories of Government Abuse. Another one of the books he distributes includes a section on the “Delphi Technique,” said to be a form of mind control to aid propagandizing.

Political provocateur Glenn Beck may have done more than anyone to spread false

conspiracy theories about Agenda 21, which he describes as part of a globalist plot to

“suck all the blood” out of American communities.

For many years, DeWeese soldiered on almost alone, but as time passed he began to gain adherents, or at least his ideas did. DeWeese and the others saw the plan as a direct attack on the American way of life, a scheme to force Americans out of large suburban homes into urbanized, “pack’ em and stack ’em” apartment complexes, and to insist on mass transportation rather than individual vehicles — a way, in a phrase, to impose a collectivist ethos on a freedom-loving people.

Ultimately, many of those who followed DeWeese thought, the UN intended to create a kind of radical-left utopia, where guns will be banned, the UN will raise a global army to enforce its directives, and freedom will die as globalist planners impose their vision of social order, equality, sustainability and “smart growth.”

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The John Birch Society— the ultra-paranoid organization best known for accusing President Dwight D. Eisenhower of being a communist agent and claiming that fluoridation of water was a nefarious attempt to poison Americans — also got into the act early, sending a correspondent to cover the original Earth Summit in 1992. Although it didn’t concentrate heavily on Agenda 21 at first, in recent years it has conducted hundreds of one-day briefings around the country on the topic.

In those sessions, many of which involve local and regional politicians, the JBS has shrilly warned about the perils of environmentalism. In 2008, for instance, it handed out cards mocking “The New False Religion, Worshipping the Earth.”

“Advocates of a UN world government have drafted an Earth Charter, which they compare to the Ten Commandments and keep in an ‘Ark of Hope,’ the group said in a comment about Agenda 21 with no apparent reference to reality. “Will you let the United Nations or any other group undermine the faith of your family?”

DeWeese and others are part of a network of radicals peddling essentially similar ideas about Agenda 21 (see profiles, p. 13). Michael Coffman, for example, is the executive director of Environmental Perspectives Inc. At a 2008 “Freedom 21” conference in Texas, Coffman described the plan as “[a]n anti-human document, which takes aim at Western culture, and the Judeo-Christian and Islamicreligions.” He said it would ultimately lead to a communist redistribution of property.

Michael Chapman of Ed Watch, a group against public education, sounded similar at the conference. To Chapman, the plan is to restrict economic development, not so as to protect the environment but just to give more power to the government. “The new world theology is pantheism,” he added. “Nature is God.”

Another fairly well-known right-wing activist, John Bush of Texans for Accountable Government, cited Agenda 21’s alleged final goal when he tried to get his hometown of Austin, Texas, to drop a resolution meant to make the city more energy efficient. “Before carbon was thought of as the most evil thing in the world,” he said, “there were … internationalists hashing out a plan to further their scheme for world government through the means of excessive environmentalism.”

Fox News, Glenn Beck and the RNC

Conservative commentators have enthusiastically joined the attacks, too.

Dick Morris, the Bill Clinton adviser-turned-Fox News conspiracy theorist, excoriates Agenda 21 backers in his 2012 book, Here Come the Black Helicopters: UN Global Government and the Loss of Freedom. He accuses them of “cancelling out both free will for the individual and democratic determination of policies for the nation. Only their fetish has priority.” Fox News’ Eric Bolling sounds similar, saying in 2012 that a proposed White House Rural Council sounded “eerily similar to a UN plan called Agenda 21, where a centralized planning agency would be responsible for oversight into all areas of our lives. A one-world order.”

Remarkably, there is also some opposition to Agenda 21 from the left, notably in the form of Democrats Against UN Agenda 21. The group, which hosted a major conference on the plan in 2011, is led by self-described lesbian feminist Rosa Koire, who came to the issue through battles over zoning in Santa Rosa, Calif., where she owns property. Koire, who wrote the popular book Behind the Green Mask: U.N. Agenda 21, claims the plan will ultimately bring on the economic collapse of the U.S. She reservesspecial animus for those who lobby for bicycle lanes,describing them as “testosterone-laden zealots” who are the “‘shock troops’ for this plan.”

Perhaps the most effective purveyor of the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory has been Glenn Beck, especially before he left Fox News in mid-2011. “Those pushing … government control on a global level have mastered the art of hiding it in plain sight and then just dismissing it as a joke,” he said around that time as he waved a copy of the 294-page document. “Once they put their fangs into our communities and suck all the blood out of it [sic], we will not be able to survive.”

In 2012, Beck went further, publishing a dystopic novel with co-author Harriet Parke called Agenda 21. It purports to tell a post-Agenda 21 tale of America, a place where the beleaguered heroine is confined to a depressing apartment in a planned community, spending her days treading on a special pad to produce energy. In this world, children are taken from parents and raised in group homes, mating partners are assigned, and people recite pledges in honor of squirrels.

“[I]f the United Nations, in partnership with radical environmental activists and naïve local governments, get their way, then the themes explored in this novel may start to look very familiar, very quickly,” Beck writes in an afterword.

The most dispiriting aspect of the entire book may be Beck’s comment that “since those who speak about Agenda 21 are constantly marginalized as radicals or conspiracy theorists, I wanted to include a link to the official 2012 GOP platform.” Although that platform, by the time it was adopted in August 2012, dropped some of the RNC’s wilder language about communism from earlier that year, it still had this: “We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty.”

On the Ground

In this era of extreme political polarization, politicians with relatively large followings have jumped on the Agenda 21 bandwagon, simultaneously demonizing environmentalism, the United Nations and any kind of global planning.

During his short-lived presidential campaign, Newt Gingrich said that he would “explicitly repudiate” the plan signed by the first President Bush, who led Gingrich’s Republican Party until just two years before Gingrich became House Speaker in 1995. He described it as “interference from the United Nations.”

That was comparatively calm talk.

Introducing anti-Agenda 21 legislation that ultimately failed, Oklahoma state Sen. Sally Kern (R), already infamous for her wild-eyed anti-gay commentaries, said that the plan would destroy American property rights and result in a ban on cars powered by fossil fuel. Arizona state Sen. Judy Burges (R), an anti-Obama “birther” who also introduced an anti-Agenda 21 law that failed, said that the “sinister and dark” plan would require that certain “people should be rounded up.” Burges said it would force Americans from the land they own, ruin Arizona businesses, mandate a “redistribution of wealth,” and, in the end, “control every aspect of our lives.”

In Georgia, Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers organized a four-hour, closed-door anti-Agenda 21 briefing in October 2012 for fellow Republicans that was delivered by “birther” Field Searcy. Attendees were told President Obama was using “mind control” techniques to push land use planning, and that the UN planned to force Americans from suburbs into cities and also was implementing mandatory contraception to curb population growth. Around the same time, after a debate about raising sales taxes to pay for transportation improvements, state Sen. Bill Heath (R) said Agenda 21 advocates wanted to “essentially conquer the world through limiting everything we do.” And a former state gubernatorial candidate, running for the Cobb County Commission, condemned plans for a jogging and biking trail along a certain highway, saying that it was the work of auto-hating backers of Agenda 21.

In Missouri, legislators cut funding for the Department of Motor Vehicles after it came to light that it had turned over a list of 163,000 residents with conceal-carry permits to federal investigators. The move followed testimony to lawmakers from Melissa Wilson, wife of state Rep. Kenneth Wilson (R), in which she said, “With this information going to the federal government, I feel that I will be a target. With Agenda 21, I will be someone who will be put on a watch list.”

Although other states have passed resolutions and considered

laws condemning Agenda 21, only Alabama actually enacted

legislation meant to outlaw any possible effects of the UN plan.

The law was proposed by state Sen. Gerald Dial (R-Lineville) and

signed by Gov. Robert Bentley.

In Carroll County, Md., all five county commissioners were voted out of office over their support of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), which supports Agenda 21 and helps local communities plan sustainable development. (The Huffington Post reported in October 2012 that 29 members of ICLEI had quit as a result of anti-Agenda 21 activism.) Local activist Richard Rothschild, who led opposition to the commissioners, said that Agenda 21 was “a direct assault on private property rights and American sovereignty” and “arguably an amalgamation of socialism and extreme environmentalism.”

In Missoula, Mont., police had to be called to calm a December 2012 government meeting where some $1,200 in dues to ICLEI was under discussion. In Albemarle County, Va., the board of supervisors halted dues payments in 2012 to ICLEI and also withdrew support for a national agreement on climate change. In the Springboro (Ohio) Community City School District in 2013, the ACLU threatened action when officials proposed a “controversial issues policy” requiring that students of sustainable development also read about Agenda 21 conspiracy theories.

And in Naperville, Ill., two female opponents of “smart meters” — devices that measure electricity use in businesses and homes in order to rationalize energy production — were arrested in January 2013 as they tried to prevent installation. Opponents of the smart meters claimed without evidence that they were linked to illness and cyberwarfare, and endanger property rights and liberty in general.

There are almost too many of these kinds of encounters to count. But the most dramatic action — outdoing states like Kansas, New Hampshire and Tennessee, which all passed resolutions condemning Agenda 21 — came in Alabama. There, on May 16, 2012, after just a few minutes of debate, legislators voted unanimously for Republican state Sen. Gerald Dial’s S.B. 477, which says “the state of Alabama and all political subdivisions may not adopt or implement policy recommendations that deliberately or inadvertently infringe or restrict property rights without due process.” Of course, existing laws plainly already prevented such property seizures.

Whither Agenda 21?

Is Agenda 21 on the ropes?

For all the agitation, it’s not clear. A June 2012 poll by the American Planning Association, which has been shocked by the attacks on what seems like a perfectly sensible approach to planning, found that 85% of respondents didn’t know enough to make a judgment about Agenda 21. Just 6% said they opposed the UN plan, while half again as many — 9% of survey respondents — said they supported it.

What does seem clear is that the world is growing more complex and facing more challenges that really do require serious advance planning. Despite the barrage of anti-science propaganda, there is virtually no doubt among climate scientists and others that we face huge challenges related to climate change, rising oceans, and resulting disastrous weather events — challenges that it seems certain can only be effectively met by multinational action. In addition, there are major challenges related to population growth and shifts in concentrations of people. By 2050, the Census Bureau expects the population to grow by 40% to 440 million people, and huge numbers of baby boomers are expected to very shortly begin moving to smaller homes and, in many cases, different parts of the country, as they retire.

There has been something of a backlash to the anti-Agenda 21 movement. In 2012, for instance, an anti-sustainable development bill was killed in Arizona after the state Chamber of Commerce lobbied against it, saying it could drive away firms with sustainable development plans, according to the Huffington Post.

“I think the Tea Party people who turn up shouting at planning meetings are heading for a McCarthy moment,” said Chattanooga, Tenn., Mayor Ron Littlefield, in a reference to Communist witch hunter and Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, according to the Post. “Many people are sick of their scare tactics.”

That may well be. But an enormous number of politicians, commentators, activists, conspiracy theorists and others have swallowed the story of the anti-Agenda 21 zealots, making any kind of rational discussion of the environment and related issues extremely difficult. And that is the basic problem. Dealing with the serious problems that confront our nation and our planet becomes incredibly difficult when the public discussion is poisoned with groundless conspiracy theories.

The Players: Anti-Agenda 21 Activists

Agenda 21, the 1992 United Nations plan for sustainable development that was signed by the leaders of 178 of the world’s 196 countries, is not binding and has no power to force any action at all. Nevertheless, in the hands of a dedicated cadre of far-right conspiracy theorists, it has been depicted as a key step in a secret plan to destroy property rights, redistribute wealth and, ultimately, force the United States and other countries in a tyrannical, one-world government in which bicycle paths and wildlife refuges will be vastly more important than human beings. What follows are brief portraits of 11 of the leading anti-Agenda 21 groups and their leaders.

The American Policy Center, which focuses on “environmental policy and its effect on private property rights” and “the United Nations and its effect on American national sovereignty,” was founded by Tom DeWeese in 1988. DeWeese was one of the very first on the radical right, if not the first, to attack the UN’s Agenda 21 plan, starting almost immediately after its adoption at the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil.

DeWeese doesn’t mince words. He has described Agenda 21 as a “blueprint to turn your community into a little soviet,” pushed along by “a hoard [sic] of non-governmental organizations” that pressure elected officials to endorse the plan and enforce it through “non-elected boards, councils and regional governments.” “It all means locking away land, resources, higher prices, sacrifice and shortages and is based on the age old socialist scheme of redistribution of wealth,” he adds.

“It sounds so friendly. So meaningful. So urgent,” DeWeese wrote in a 2009 report. “But the devastation to our liberty and way of life is the same as if Lenin ordered it.” The plan, he adds, is a “complete agenda of control” that has been “wrapped in a green blanket, scaring us with horror stories about the destruction of the environment — and so we are now throwing our liberties on the bonfire like a good old fashioned book burning — all in the name of protecting the planet.”

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For years, DeWeese’s center was the chief sponsor of “Freedom 21,” an annual conference of opponents of the plan that have attracted well-known right-wing extremists like Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum(see below); Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media;Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily; Michael Shaw of Freedom Advocates (see below); and Michael Coffmanof Environmental Perspectives Inc. (see below).

DeWeese, who has been close to a number of those in the Tea Party movement, offers an array of videos on his website backing up his contentions, along with DeWeese essays with titles like “‘Sustainable Development’: The Evil Facing America” and “Putting Bicycles Ahead of People.” His center also publishes “The DeWeese Report,” occasional special reports, and legislative updates.

The Constitution Party was founded in 1992 as the U.S. Taxpayers Party by the late Howard Phillips, who ran for president three times without ever gaining more than 0.19% of the vote. It is an essentially theocratic party, saying that its goal “is to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries.” It opposes almost all immigration, abortion even in cases of rape or incest, and the federal income tax.

The party, which at one point absorbed the American Independent Party(the vehicle for segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s own 1968 run for the presidency), is also very much against U.S. participation in international institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, as well as foreign aid.

So it wasn’t much of a surprise when, in 2012, the group took a position on Agenda 21 that described it as “a comprehensive plan of utopian environmentalism, social engineering, and global political control.” The resolution went on to say the plan was being “covertly advanced in local communities” and would attack private ownership of homes, farms and cars “as destructive to the environment.”

It also described Agenda 21 as leading to “socialist/communist redistribution of wealth” — words almost identical to those used by the Republican National Committee, which also denounced Agenda 21 in its own January 2012 resolution.

The plan has been repeatedly denounced at the local level by the Constitution Party as well. Bernie De Castro, the party’s Florida chairman, said: “Agenda 21 is the most dangerous threat to America’s sovereignty that is coming at us like a whirlwind and yet so few Americans are aware of this diabolical threat to them and their families.” The Hollywood, Fla., chapter invited Rosa Koire of Democrats Against UN Agenda 21 (see below) to speak at its June 2012 meeting.

The party’s Arizona chapter recently produced its own resolution on the plan: “We call for a return to the states and to the people all lands which are held by the federal government without authorization by the Constitution.” And its Allegheny County, Pa., chapter urged its members to attend a March 2012 presentation by the conspiracy-minded John Birch Society (see below) on Agenda 21.

Richard Mack, who won fame on the far right for successfully challenging some aspects of the Brady gun control bill in the 1990s, formed the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Assocation (CSPOA) in 2011 with the goal of uniting law enforcement officers to defend the Constitution with “an emphasis on State Sovereigntyand local autonomy.” As a practical matter, that means Mack has pushed the baseless theory that local sheriffs can nullify federal laws.

That antagonism to centralized power made the tough-talking Mack, who was once the public relations director for the extremist group Gun Owners of America, a natural adherent to ideas about the supposedly nefarious nature of Agenda 21. In fact, at the CSPOA’s first annual convention, held in January 2012 in Las Vegas, Mack hosted Tom DeWeese of the American Policy Center (see above), who spoke to the gathering on “Agenda 21 & the International Redistribution of Wealth.”

Joining DeWeese in his criticism of the UN plan were three sheriffs: Glenn Palmer of Grant County, Ore.; Gill Gilbertson of Josephine County, Ore.; and Jon Lopey of Siskiyou County, Calif. The sheriffs reiterated complaints, fairly common in the West, about the large proportion of land controlled by the federal government and logging, mineral extraction and grazing rights on public lands, and related them to Agenda 21 and its alleged attack on private property rights in America.

“This land is our land,” said Gilbertson. “Feds have no jurisdiction!”

The CSPOA’s interest in killing Agenda 21 was not limited to that convention. In June 2013, the organization held a similar session during its second annual conference. It was headlined “Nullify Now: Expose and Reject NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act, which includes a number of emergency detention measures disliked by many on both right and left]/Agenda 21.” Among the presenters for the session were Michael Coffman of Environmental Perspectives Inc. (see below) and Tom DeWeese of the American Policy Center (see above).

The Declaration Alliance was founded in 1996 by three-time presidential candidate and former U.S. Foreign Service officer Alan Keyes, a protégé of President Reagan who has moved further and further to the right over the years. The Alliance says it is dedicated to the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence, but focuses heavily on gun rights, the “right to life” (Keyes opposes abortion in virtually all cases), and the repeal of the federal income tax.

Over the years, Keyes has adopted a whole series of highly controversial positions, saying that Jesus Christ would not have voted for Barack Obama, who he called a “radical communist” with a forged birth certificate; that homosexuality is nothing more than “selfish hedonism”; that state-sanctioned prayer should be allowed in public schools; that evolution is a false theory; and, during a stint as a U.S. ambassador at the United Nations, that he did not support the UN.

Keyes first came out against Agenda 21 in a 2011 blog post that charged that the government was allowing the UN to take over American treasures by designating them World Heritage Sites. He returned to the plan in an alarming 2012 fundraising letter: “Enemies who hate America, despise liberty, and want the United States transformed … into socialism, are relentlessly advancing a seditious new plan — Agenda 21 — to make our nation a vassal of the United Nations.” He went on to say that it was “the most aggressive and ambitious attack on our nation to be put forward by the UN one-worlders” and theorized that it would result in the confiscation of farms, the end of private property and a ban on private ownership of cars.

Kirk MacKenzie, a business adviser and former broker, formed Defend Rural America at an October 2011 meeting in Yreka, Calif., held to fight American Indians and environmentalists who wanted to remove four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River to help bring back the once-thriving salmon population. Although the group did not win that battle —the dams’ removal now seems likely — MacKenzie said the meeting had established a “new standard for grassroots activism.”

The organization is not solely focused on Agenda 21, although sustainable development and its alleged perils are discussed. Nita Still, a Montague, Calif., anti-Agenda 21 activist has pilloried the plan in searing terms on MacKenzie’s site, saying it “means the destruction of our lives” at the hands of “the Soulless Ones,” by which she seems to mean globalist environmentalists who believe in planning.

Sustainability, she writes, will mean taking “55% of the land for flora, fauna, rivers, streams and wetlands because they are Persons with Rights … thousands of new housing, stacked upon each other in the Bay Area because the rural areas will be herded down the road to urbanism and their population decimated.”

Still has a particularly conspiracist bent, taking on many of the bogeymen of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement in her rants about Agenda 21. She says the plan reflects “the desires of the Illuminati and the Committee of 300, plus the Club of Rome, the Council of Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, The Skull and Bones or the Order 322 and the Trilateral Commission” and more.

“They have planned for the whole world to have 90% of the population murdered by abortion and aborting life by disease, famine, wars, wrecking of the economy, industry, technology, giving vaccines and medicines which cause disease and a slow death,” she writes. She adds in her essay that proponents “can also manipulate the weather and cause earthquakes [and] volcanic eruptions.”

The planners, she said, are “more concerned with animals and the environment over human beings.” She adds that the “United Nations is a front for all that is happening in our lives,” aided by a group of international bankers.

The vast majority of opponents of Agenda 21 come from the right, mostly the far right. But in the case of Rosa Koire (pronounced CORE-ee), a self-described lesbian feminist and longtime forensic commercial real estate appraiser specializing in eminent domain evaluation, the criticism is ostensibly coming from the left.

Not that it’s very easy to tell.

The main difference between Koire, who runs the Democrats Against UN Agenda 21 website and is executive director of the closely linked Post Sustainability Institute, is that she says the UN wants to “erect Communitarianism” — as opposed to socialism, or communism — “as the dominant form of world governance.” Communitarianism is a system of cooperative groups that practice some communist principles but are generally less centralized than historic communist states. She also claims that the Democratic Party has been hijacked by socialists.

After that, Koire sounds like most Agenda 21 fearmongers. “[Y]our local government is in the process of controlling where and how you live, what you eat, what your children learn, and what laws you will live under.” She also says on her website that the Agenda 21 plan means “to inventory and control all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all energy, all education, all information, and all human beings in the world.”

Koire authored a 2011 book, Behind the Green Mask: U.N. Agenda 21, where she says the plan aims “to protect the rights of future generations and all species against the potential crimes of the present.” She says “the rights of the individual are called selfish and those who would fight for them [are] slurred as immoral.”

Like right-wing critics, she sees the plan as aiming to create regional governmental bodies (such as the European Union) as merely “an interim stop on the road to globalization” that will eventually lead to a one-world government.

The Eagle Forumwas formed in 1975 by conservative anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, who created it out of the remnants of her Stop ERA group, which opposed the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The group has long been involved in a wide array of highly conservative causes, many of them having to do with with women and the family — opposition to abortion, sex education in public schools, working mothers and feminism in general. It also favors English as our official language, assimilation of immigrants, and the right to bear arms. Finally, it opposes international oversight by the United Nations.

In that vein, the Eagle Forum came out relatively recently against Agenda 21, forming the Agenda 21 Task Force to lead the battle. The forum says Agenda 21 seeks to destroy “the morals of our nation,” diminish the role of parents, boost communist values, and, ultimately, turn America into a communistic state.

The UN, the group says, wants to impose taxes to build a huge operating fund that will, in the end, help turn the organization into a “de facto world government.”

The Eagle Forum hosted a conference on Agenda 21 in Sacramento, Calif., in 2012. Speakers included Michael Coffman of Environmental Perspectives Inc. (see below), Michael Shaw of Freedom Advocates (see below) and several sheriffs.

Cathie Adams, president of the Texas Eagle Forum, wrote in a 2012 newsletter that “Agenda 21 DENIES the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment guarantee of property rights and DISAGREES with America’s Founders that fee men operating within free markets are the best stewards of the earth.” “Americans are at a crossroads,” she added. “In November, we must replace all elected officials who support Agenda 21 with those who choose FREEDOM.”

Michael Coffman founded Environmental Perspectives Inc. in 1992as an “educational-research organization” that aimed “to sound a warning to America and the Christian church of serious threats to our freedom.” More specifically, the group focuses on the dangers of “insidious property rights infringements.”

“The effort on the part of the international community to create a world government and religion has far reaching implications,” the group says on its website. “Our goal is to help people understand the consequences to them and our nation if our politics are driven by a belief that big government is the answer to everything and that nature is god and humans are destroying it.”

Coffman has written several books on related subjects: Environmental Perspectives: The Dawn of Aquarius or the Twilight of a New Dark Age; Saviors of the Earth: The Politics and Religion of the Environmental Movement; The Birth of World Government; and Dreamkillers, “a fast-paced novel that provides the horrifying saga of how a town in Maine savaged a sick widow in order to take her land by using smart growth regulations.” He has also produced several similar DVDs, including “Global Warming: Emerging Science and Understanding,” which claims to explain “that man literally cannot be causing global warming.”

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Coffman also offers copies of a DVD entitled “Endgame” produced by Alex Jones, America’s leading conspiracy theorist. According to Coffman’s blurb, it “penetrates the history of the global elite’s effort to create world government.”

Originally called Freedom 21 Santa Cruz, Freedom Advocates was founded in 2000 by Michael Shaw, who says he had earlier participated in the Local Agenda 21 program run by Santa Cruz County, Calif., during the 1990s.

Shaw’s group focuses on the idea that Agenda 21 “is being implemented on the local level in order to establish a collectivistworld government.” It claims that under the plan, “political recognition of inalienable rights is denied.”

Shaw was long a regular at the “Freedom 21” conferences hosted by Tom DeWeese’s American Policy Center (see above), attending in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

“Environmentalism is not about saving nature,” Shaw said at the 2008 conference. “It’s about a revolutionary coup in America. It is to establish global governance and abandon the principles of natural law.” He predicted that sustainable development policies will require a “police state” and ultimately “turn America into a globally governed homeland where humans are treated as biological resources.”

In 2012, Shaw appeared on the propaganda video “Behold a Pale Horse,” which featured far-right country singer Charlie Daniels. “America is in peril,” Shaw said in fairly typical remarks. “A globalist regime has begun undertaking a transformation of what is America.” Later, he got down to specifics.

“The only way this is going to be defeated is to understand the nature of what has enveloped our country,” he said, adding that Agenda 21, along with its many other nefarious aspects, calls for an 85% reduction in the population.

The Heritage Foundation, created in 1973 by three arch-conservatives discontented with President Richard Nixon’s embrace of big government, grew over the decades to the point that The New York Times once labeled it “the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis.” Since former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) took over from leader Edwin Feulner in April 2013, it has grown more conservative still.

The group says in its mission statement that it was founded to “formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.” Starting in 2011, it began to take on Agenda 21 as well.

That year, it described the UN plan as being part of a vast power grab. It has also described how zoning policies related to the plan “limited real estate development to higher-cost homes in order to ‘price out’ moderate-income households, which included a disproportionate share of minorities.” It warned that the plan’s unwelcome effects were being felt at the local as well as national levels.

A paper published by the foundation in 2011, authored by Wendell Cox, Ronald D. Utt and Brett D. Schaefer, warned that Agenda 21 advocates “work to impose land use regulations that would force Americans into denser living arrangements, curtail freedom of choice in housing … and compel people to pay more for their houses and give up their cars” for public transportation and bikes.

Shortly after founding the John Birch Society (JBS) in 1958, wealthy businessman Robert Welch set the tone for his archconservative organization for decades to come when he accused his fellow Republican, President Dwight Eisenhower, of being a commie patsy. By the early 1960s, JBS, the grouchy grandpa of the far right, was also attacking the United Nations as a den of socialists, communists and insiders plotting to take over America.

So it should come as no surprise that these days the Birchers are at the head of the paranoid parade marching against Agenda 21, the non-binding UN resolution passed and signed by more than 170 world leaders, including another American Republican president, George H.W. Bush.

“Agenda 21 seeks for the government to curtail your freedom of travel as you please, own a gas-powered car, live in suburbs or rural areas, and raise a family,” the society charges on its website. “Furthermore, it would eliminate your private property rights through eminent domain.”

“Choose Freedom,” the website declares. “Stop Agenda 21.”

From its headquarters in Appleton, Wis., about two miles from where the remains of serial libeler and Sen. Joseph McCarthy are buried, the society produces slick anti-Agenda 21 pamphlets and DVDs, shipping them to JBS chapters and supporters across the country. The society also relies on staffers like Hal Shurtleff to get the anti-Agenda 21 word out.

An Army veteran and father of five, Shurtleff is the indefatigable field director of the Birch Society on the East Coast. Since 2011, not long after JBS began its anti-Agenda 21 crusade in earnest, Shurtleff has conducted more than 70 presentations in public libraries, rec center basements and hotel conference rooms about the perils to freedom of Agenda 21.

From California to Maine, other JBS chapter leaders have been doing the same.

“We have established a good network of freedom activists who know how to identify Agenda 21 initiatives,” Shurtleff says. “We use Facebook, social media and E-mails. There are dozens of Facebook pages dedicated to Agenda 21 as well as hundreds of Tea Party type groups.”

The Case Study: Baldwin County, Ala.

BAY MINETTE, Ala. – Call them the Baldwin County 9. On Nov. 16, 2012, the entire nine-member Baldwin County, Ala., Planning and Zoning Commission quit in protest and disgust, casualties of the ongoing right-wing war being waged across the country against local smart-growth and anti-sprawl initiatives.

The mass resignation was a drastic and dramatic decision that did not come easily to the men and women on the commission. They were not a band of radical, anti-development tree-huggers, although one was a registered forester. They were respected residents of the community, who had, over the years, put in hundreds, if not thousands, of volunteer hours performing their civic duty, trying to help guide and manage the explosive growth of Alabama’s largest county. The commission members included a certified public accountant, a real estate appraiser, a grant consultant for rural communities and two retired military officers, one of whom is the second highest-ranking official in the Alabama Republican Party.

But that August, as comparisons to The Communist Manifesto, talk of conspiracies to snatch away property rights, and warnings about citizens being herded into “rail cars” filled a government meeting room here, the Baldwin County Commission, which oversees the sprawling county by the sea, rescinded the Planning and Zoning Commission’s masterwork, an award-winning, comprehensive development plan known as Horizon 2025. The plan was killed, according to the group letter of resignation, “on a pretext so devoid of relevance and merit as, in our opinion, to elicit only ridicule on the part of any serious knowledgeable observer.”

The pretext was Agenda 21.

“It was the principal issue,” longtime Baldwin County Commissioner Frank Burt, who voted to rescind Horizon 2025, told the Southern Poverty Law Center. “People began to study Agenda 21 and the more people became aware of what is happening, not just in the U.S. but throughout the world, they didn’t want anything like it. The plan [Horizon 2025] just fit right into Agenda 21’s overall plan. Nobody ever tied it together before. You can clearly see it is all part of the same plan.”

Chances are, however, unless you belong to the John Birch Society, one of the Tea Parties or some other rightist collective, you have no idea that Agenda 21 is considered a grave threat to truth, justice and the American Way – and apparently to life in Baldwin County, Ala. Odds are also good that you, like most people – with bills to pay, kids to raise, conspiracy theories to ignore – have never read a word of the 22-year-old, almost 300-page United Nations document or even heard of it.

Agenda 21 is a non-binding UN resolution – a proposal, a global guide – designed to encourage, not mandate, nations to pursue conservation, “sustainable” green growth and land use development efforts. It was passed and signed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 by more than 170 world leaders, including President George H.W. Bush.

‘All Government is Bad’

Yet, to the American right, Agenda 21 is a sneak attack on the sanctity of private property, another footfall on the long march to One World Government that is destined to darken our bright skies with black helicopters. It is a UN-inspired conspiracy that seeks, in the words of the archconservative John Birch Society, which is at the forefront of the opposition to Agenda 21, “to curtail your freedom of travel as you please, own a gas-powered car, live in suburbs or rural areas, and raise a family.”

Local initiatives and plans such as Horizon 2025, which was also nonbinding, are simply Agenda 21 in disguise, harmless looking spies laying the groundwork for a foreign invasion. “The conspiracies are real,” one man told the County Commission meeting. “If you want to ignore them, ignore them at your own peril.”

In recent years, Agenda 21 has become an effective rallying cry, organizing tool and bludgeon that right-wing groups have been using to beat back local sustainable growth and anti-sprawl initiatives, including everything from bike paths to smart meters on home appliances. The attacks have caught city councils, planning commissions and smart-growth advocates across the country off guard, leaving them scrambling to mount a defense.

“I had not heard about it [Agenda 21] before they [the county commissioners] started touting it,” Arthur C. Dyas, a member of the Planning and Zoning Commission for 16 years, the last few as chairman, told the SPLC. “Our plan had nothing to do with Agenda 21. I called one of the county commissioner’s hands on it and he just about shouted me down. By, God, this was all about Agenda 21 and the United Nations. And I’m like, ‘What are you talking?’

“It made absolutely no sense to me,” Dyas continued. “I like to believe that he really didn’t think it was about Agenda 21, that he was just using that to beat our brains in with it. But I’m not sure. I’m not sure whether he believed it or not. I just think it was really sad and a disservice to the people of this county for the County Commission to have rescinded it.”

The award-winning Horizon 2025 was replaced a year later, in October 2013, by a substantially shorter plan, “with a lot fewer words,” County Commissioner Burt said. “The new plan,” he added, “is more direct and to the point and just easier to understand. It’s more concise. Our United States Constitution is a pretty short document, too.”

Since the death of Horizon 2025, Baldwin County has become a sort of Rorschach test. For those who believe Agenda 21 means the beginning of the end of American freedoms – from property rights to gun ownership – Baldwin County was a triumph of the will of the people. To supporters of smart and sustainable growth, such as Cara Stallman, one of the Baldwin County 9, what happened that day in Bay Minette, the county seat, was “simply crazy.”

“I felt we were being demonized by the County Commission,” Stallman told the SPLC. “They were beating the scary government drum. It’s the age of the Tea Party, all government is bad. That’s why they threw an amazing, award-winning plan into the trash.”

A Plan to be Proud Of

For years, the Planning and Zoning Commission tried to get a handle on the county’s explosive growth. Retirees were flooding in to take advantage of the miles of sandy white beaches, piney woods, warm weather and relatively low cost of living in Baldwin County on the Gulf of Mexico. Young families were also flocking to Baldwin, clogging the roads and causeways as they commuted back and forth to nearby Mobile for work. From 1990 to 2000, the county experienced a 42.9% increase in its population. Meanwhile, subdivisions were popping up everywhere, with little consideration given to how the many projects fit with each other, the environment and the future. “There was no control over development,” said Dyas, the former chairman of the planning commission. “It was a train wreck.”

There was so much development, going up so fast, that Planning and Zoning Commission meetings would sometimes start at 6 in the evening and end at 4 the next morning. Next, the meetings were split in two: subdivisions on the first Thursday of the month, zoning on the third. “Hell, we were still going from 6 until midnight, 1 o’clock,” Dyas said. “It was unbelievable.”

In 2009, after days of public hearings held by the Planning and Zoning Commission, thousands of man- and woman-hours, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Baldwin County comprehensive plan was adopted by the County Commission by a vote of 3 to 1. “The comprehensive plan was just that, a plan,” Dyas said. “It was not a law. It was not an ordinance. It was a plan, something to use as a guide in future development of a given area.”

The following year, the Baldwin County Planning and Zoning Department was awarded the Alabama Chapter of the American Planning Association’s 2010 Outstanding Planning Award for Horizon 2025. In its newsletter, the chapter praised the plan, saying “Since its adoption, environmental concerns and livability are now also considerations when development is proposed.”

“As for developers,” the newsletter added, “the plan lends stability to the development process – there is now a guide for where development can be located, how it can be developed and its best and most compatible uses. The plan is intended to provide foresight and remove some of the guess work from development to ultimately allow the realization of the County’s vision.”

But by then the great recession had already swept across America and development projects from Maine to California to Baldwin County came to a screeching halt. Bulldozers now sat still and silent in the Alabama sun. Planning and zoning meetings went back to once a month. At some meetings there were no items on the agenda. One meeting lasted a record six minutes. “That’s how fast it tanked down here,” Dyas said. “So, the plan really never had a chance to be fully implemented into the process here in Baldwin County.”

Still, two new county commissioners, who were elected after running on a platform opposed to the plan as too restrictive and intrusive, vowed to rescind it as soon as possible. Now the balance of power was reversed, setting the stage for the Aug. 7, 2012, meeting and the end of Horizon 2025.

Attendees at the August 7, 2012, meeting of The Baldwin County

Commission applaud Commissioner Frank Burt Jr.’s denunciation

of Horizon 2025. By the end of the evening, the commission had

trashed its own comprehensive development plan.

Black Helicopters and Baldwin County

Baldwin County officials said the meeting on the fate of Horizon 2025 was called because there was concern that the county’s comprehensive plan did not adhere to Alabama’s new anti-Agenda 21 law, which went into effect in January 2013.

In the days leading up to the meeting, fliers were distributed warning of the “massive land grab represented by Horizon 2025.” More than 30 people signed up to speak. Many carried small American flags. Most wanted to see the plan killed.

Craig Skaggs, a retired lobbyist for DuPont, was one of the few to speak in support of retaining the plan. He must have felt like Davy Crockett at the Alamo – or maybe Alice in Wonderland.

Skaggs called the state’s anti-Agenda 21 legislation “needless” and the attacks on Horizon 2025 as a U.N.-inspired land grab “pure poppycock,” following “the lead of the conspiracy theories at the Wisconsin-based John Birch Society.”

“Do we really want,” he asked, “rampant growth based on only the changing political whims of county commissions or greedy land interests that often control our politicians?”

Ricky Richardson, of Fairhope, Ala., said Agenda 21 and Horizon 2025 are a “duplicate” and worried about “Americans that kept their blinders on and when they were marching them into the rail cars they still didn’t understand what had happened to them.”

Richardson said he applauded the Baldwin County Commission for essentially snatching off its blinders and “being on top of this and realizing that this is a movement coming from a global initiative and being promoted through local government.”

He left the podium to sustained applause.

Boyd Little and his wife Catherine took the podium and told the meeting that they opposed the comprehensive plan “because we really don’t understand what all is taking place with it.” Little’s buddy and neighbor, a blind farmer named Arthur Frego Jr., said he also could not understand the plan and warned that if “this magnificent maze of paperwork goes through it’s going to be mandatory.”

“And instead of the old reading, writing and arithmetic you were taught in school,” Frego said, “it’ll be rules, regulations and restrictions.”

Another speaker compared Horizon 2025 to The Communist Manifesto and pointed out that Karl Marx’s handiwork was supposed to be merely a guide, too. “Can the plan,” he urged. “It’s draconian. Can that baby.”

Ken Freeman told the audience that he had driven for six hours from his home in northern Alabama, where he owns a cattle ranch on the Tennessee River, to plead with the commissioners to rescind the plan. Freeman is the chairman of Alliance for Citizens Rights, which, he said, has worked on property rights and constitutional issues for more than 15 years. He said he travels the state, taking complicated subjects like Horizon 2025 and translating them into simpler terms, or “Bubba Talk.”

For example, Freeman said the black helicopters people are always talking about aren’t actually black. “They’re green with black numbers on them,” he said.

“The people who accuse us of being the black helicopter crowd,” he said, “there must be a lot of black helicopters these days” because earlier that spring the Republican National Committee drew up “a very strong anti-Agenda 21 resolution.”

A watered-down version of that resolution was eventually included in the party platform for the 2012 presidential election. “We’ve got black helicopter people everywhere,” Freeman said.

Before the final vote was taken to “repeal, rescind and void” Horizon 2025, Robert James, chairman of the Baldwin County Commission, looked out at the audience. “This is just a start,” he said. “You need to stay involved. It’s important. And it’s nice to come here today and see so many people that have that passion. But use that passion for more than just this one issue.”

Then the plan was killed, the audience cheered and filled the room with a warbled version of “God Bless America.”

And the Nazis Join In…

Conspiracy theories about the Agenda 21 sustainability plan come principally from propagandists of the antigovernment and property rights movements. But neo-Nazis, never content to let a good plot theory lie idle, have joined in, too.

Consider James Wickstrom, who in other contexts has said that he would like to murder Jews by beating them and throwing them into wood-chipping machines. He dedicated an hour of online video to vilifying the Jewish “internationalists” he sees lurking behind the non-binding United Nations plan adopted in 1992.

:{:{}:

“Agenda 21 is very evil,” says Wickstrom, a key proponent of the anti-Semitic theology of Christian Identity. “It’s extremely evil because it comes from the dark side. You see, the light side is Yahweh the Christ, which is truth, always truth. Then you have the dark side, which is Jewish international communism.”

The people behind RealJewNews, an outlet dedicated to attacking Jews, see it the same way. To them, President Obama and his allies, working to promote Agenda 21, are now in the final stage of implementing the “Jewification of America.”

And Stormfront, a major white supremacist Web forum run by a former Alabama Klan leader, has a thread describing Agenda 21. “Let’s understand what our enemies are doing!” the thread starts. Another poster sets the tone with a typically unrestrained statement: “This is totalitarianism on a scale and degree UNIMAGINED and UNIMAGINABLE by most of us. 1984 is just ahead. It is being implemented right now, while the White Sheeple and even we sleep.”

It’s not much of a surprise that neo-Nazis and other anti-Semites would glom on to the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory. The radical right in America and abroad has long associated Jews with globalism and collectivism — Jews were accused by the Nazis of being behind “Bolshevism” and Henry Ford’s classic libel of the Jews was entitled The International Jew. The idea that the UN really seeks global control fits in with longstanding theories about sneaky Jewish plans for world domination.

“Anti-Semitism is basically a conspiracy theory,” says the American Jewish Committee’s Ken Stern in explaining how Agenda 21 is seen by neo-Nazis as a direct descendant of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purportedly reveals a secret Jewish plot to take over the world. “It’s Jews conspiring to harm non-Jews, and that conspiracy explains a lot of what goes wrong with the world.”

---

Agenda 21: The United Nations Threat To Control Our Lightbulbs, Our Lifestyles and Our Lives

Lloyd Alter (@lloydalter)

I disagreed with TreeHugger Brian the other day, about what is driving the Tea Party madness in Washington. He said money; I said ideology. Here's why.

In my spare time, I am active in the Heritage Preservation movement; I think old buildings and communities are more than relics from the past, they are templates for the future. For the last year I have been trying to determine the cause of a remarkable rise in the belief that property rights are sacrosanct, even in Canada where they were consipicuously left out of the constitution and have not ever really existed. Where heritage preservation used to be derided by many as conservative and reactionary, a bunch of old whiners trying to stop change, now it is suddenly socialist. The more I read, the more I kept coming up against a new term: Agenda 21. And it underpins the ideological opposition to everything from streetcars to planning to lightbulbs to climate change.The actual Agenda 21 document from the United Nations started goes back to Rio in1992 and is pretty innocuous, given that nobody really pays much attention to these things, and they are not exactly the law of the land. It includes goals such as:

Reduce adverse effects on the atmosphere from the energy sector by promoting policies or programmes, as appropriate, to increase the contribution of environmentally sound and cost-effective energy systems, particularly new and renewable ones, through less polluting and more efficient energy production, transmission, distribution and use.

Develop and promote, as appropriate, cost-effective, more efficient, less polluting and safer transport systems, particularly integrated rural and urban mass transit, as well as environmentally sound road networks, taking into account the needs for sustainable social, economic and development priorities, particularly in developing countries.

But as Tim Murphy of Mother Jones recently posted in First They Came for the Lightbulbs, in the mind of a Michele Bachmann it becomes the intellectual basis for her war on lightbulb legislation.

Interview with Tom DeWeese at CPAC 2011 on Vimeo.

One of the main mouthpieces of the Agenda 21 conspiracy is Tom DeWeese, President of the American Policy Center. In fact I think he is the American Policy Center. He explains Agenda 21 in One Easy Lesson, concentrating on Sustainable Development, and writes about how it is a growing movement:

Awareness of Agenda 21 and Sustainable Development is racing across the nation as citizens in community after community are learning what their city planners are actually up to.

He then proceeds to explain how just about everything this TreeHugger believes in is part of a plot.

What is Sustainable Development?

According to its authors, the objective of sustainable development is to integrate economic, social and environmental policies in order to achieve reduced consumption, social equity, and the preservation and restoration of biodiversity. Sustainablists insist that every societal decision be based on environmental impact, focusing on three components; global land use, global education, and global population control and reduction.

Social Equity (Social injustice)

Social justice is described as the right and opportunity of all people "to benefit equally from the resources afforded us by society and the environment." Redistribution of wealth. Private property is a social injustice since not everyone can build wealth from it. National sovereignty is a social injustice. All part of Agenda 21 policy.

In fact, it seems that just about everything we write about on TreeHugger is an Agenda 21 plot.

Local Sustainable Development policies

Smart Growth, Wildlands Project, Resilient Cities, Regional Visioning Projects, STAR Sustainable Communities, Green jobs, Green Building Codes, "Going Green," Alternative Energy, Local Visioning, facilitators, regional planning, historic preservation, conservation easements, development rights, sustainable farming, comprehensive planning, growth management.

Well that certainly defines my agenda, the stuff I care about. Anything "green" or energy saving is evil, part of the agenda of control. Another writer attacks what I would call responsible planning, urban design and energy use:

The entire picture is of an elaborate maze of deceit, meant to obscure the real intentions and, before most may learn otherwise, to ensnare the vast majority of people into a life of cramped, stack and pack housing, mandated public transportation use, serious restrictions on personal food, water, and energy use, and indoctrination of the youth into a socialistic and fascistic outlook on life generally.

And why do people like me go on about the suburbs and the role of the automobile in our society? I have to repeat the whole very long paragraph.

This may sound like an overreach, but consider that Agenda 21 defines what we Americans know as the "single family residence" - which is to say, the middle class suburb with tract homes, soccer moms driving mini-vans, and consumption of energy restricted only by the wallets of the homeowners themselves - as most definitely "unsustainable." It defines our "fixation" with the automobile - and hence the mobile freedom that comes along with it - as a "danger" to the Earth, due to the fact that they emit carbon and require the use of long stretches of asphalt roads and concrete highways. It defines our American standard of energy use - even though, on the whole, we recycle exponentially more than we did only a few decades ago - as similarly "unsustainable." Essentially, Agenda 21 envisions local communities all across our nation adopting "comprehensive community plans" that have as their real, though unstated, purpose the elimination of the very middle class quality of life, that has been the bedrock of our national independence and personal freedoms. In place of the suburb, it wants Soviet-style high density housing; changes in zoning laws that increasingly make it impossible to maintain single family residences (let alone build new ones); mandated use of public transportation (thus positioning the high density housing near railroad or bus depots and excluding from those "human residential zones" most roadways and parking installations); and severe limitations on private food, water, and energy consumption, in return for enormously high taxes that will fund "cradle to grave" care by the nanny government.

Or, as one website summarized it,

It all means locking away land, resources, higher prices, sacrifice and shortages and is based on the age old socialist scheme of redistribution of wealth.

From an ideologue's point of view, Agenda 21 is a beautiful thing, the Theory of Everything. It ties it all together into one neat package, making climate change, light bulbs, transit, smart growth, fuel economy, everything a plot. I became concerned about it because it makes our work as historic preservationists more difficult, since we are now seen as socialist elitists trying take away property rights and stop economic growth, distributing the pleasure of admiring an old building among the many in the face of the right of the owner to do what he wants.

But it is much more than my historic preservation or Michele's light bulbs. It is a spreading conspiracy theory that is becoming the underlying ideology of the crazy right and that has serious legs. It is no joke.

HISTORIC LAWSUIT AGAINST UN AGENDA 21

FILED OCTOBER 15, 2013

The Post Sustainability Institute / Democrats Against UN Agenda 21 and Freedom Advocates are launching a legal challenge to PLAN BAY AREA/ONE BAY AREA (click for a pdf of the Plan) PLAN BAY AREA is an aggressive implementation of UN Agenda 21's "islands of human habitation." We believe that Priority Development Areas are the new wave of implementation of UN Agenda 21 in regional plans. This prototype, when adopted in the San Francisco Bay Area, could then move across the United States. We need your help to fight this. DONATE.

PLAN BAY AREA is an all-encompassing land use and transportation plan that regionalizes all 9 counties and 101 cities of the San Francisco Bay Area by limiting new construction to specific locations (only 4% of the land area) and requiring high density development: more apartments and condos on top of shops. If cities want federal and state transportation dollars they will have to agree to this Sustainable Communities Strategies plan.

PLAN BAY AREA is UN AGENDA 21. ICLEI WORKED ON CREATING THIS PLAN.

PLAN BAY AREA violates both the 5th and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The 5th amendment guarantees property owners the right to just compensation, and the 14th amendment guarantees equal protection.

Rightwingwatch.org.

According to a draft party platform obtained by the Houston Chronicle, the Texas Republican Party is ready to support a sweeping right-wing agenda with planks related to the “Benghazi cover up,” the elimination of the minimum wage and “the myth of separation of church and state.”

Voting

Not only does the draft platform advocate for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Transportation Security Administration and the Departments of Education and Energy, but it also calls for an end to the direct election of U.S. Senators:

Full Repeal of the 17th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: Return the appointment of U.S. Senators by the State Legislatures.

While the state GOP wants Texas voters to lose their right to elect their U.S. senators, the party does on the other hand “support our right to select our judges by direct vote.”

The party also wants to make it more difficult to register to vote and urges Congress to repeal the Voting Rights Act:

Voter registration: We support restoring integrity to the voter registration rolls and Registration reducing voter fraud. We support repeal of all Motor Voter laws; re-registering voters every four years; requiring photo ID of all registrants; proof of residency and citizenship, along with voter registration application; retention of the 30-day registration deadline; and requiring that a list of certified deaths be provided to the election administrator in order that the names of deceased voters be removed from the list of registered voters.

VRA: We urge that the Voter [sic] Rights Act of 1965 codified and updated in 1973 be repealed and not reauthorized.

Science And Education

The draft platform also targets schools, calling evolution a “controversial theory” that should be challenged in the classroom, demanding that schools restrict access to “community organizers” and encouraging schools to embrace “subjects with emphasis on the Judeo-Christian principles upon which America was founded and which form the basis of America’s legal, political and economic systems.”

The platform also includes climate change denial: “While we all strive to be good stewards of the earth, 'climate change' is a political agenda which attempts to control every aspect of our lives. We urge government at all levels to ignore any plea for money to fund global climate change or ‘climate justice’ initiatives.”

The draft describes Agenda 21, a nonbinding United Nations agreement on sustainable development, as a threat to America and calls for “the withdrawal of the United States from the United Nations and the removal of U.N. headquarters from United States soil.”

Social Issues

Along with supporting “reparative therapy and treatment to patients who are seeking escape from the homosexual lifestyle,” the state party also wants to repeal Texas’ hate-crimes statute (or at least its “sexual orientation category”), block non-discrimination laws and seeks a “prohibition of the manufacturing and sale of abortifacients (e.g. morning after pill).”

The draft also calls for bans on “any form of reparation” and Sharia law, and limits to data gathering by the U.S. Census. It opposes “the use of Radio Frequency Identification Chips (RFID) on humans,” while reaffirming opposition to “any direct financial support of special interest organizations, such as ACORN and the ACLU, by any level of government.” ACORN, of course, hasn’t existed since 2010.

Guns

Unsurprisingly, the Texas GOP believes the state should be able to ignore federal gun laws:

All federal acts, laws, executive orders, and court orders which restrict or infringe on the people’s right to keep and bear arms shall be invalid in Texas, not be recognized by Texas, shall be specifically rejected by Texas, and shall be considered null and void and of no effect in Texas.

Just to clarify that they mean business, the party supports “the establishment and maintenance of a volunteer Constitutional State Militia with assistance from County Sheriffs.”

Vaccinations

To cap it off, Texas Republicans also have an anti-vaccination stance:

Immunizations: All adult citizens should have the legal right to conscientiously choose which vaccines are administered to themselves, or their minor children, without penalty for refusing a vaccine. We oppose any effort by any authority to mandate such vaccines or any medical database that would contain personal records of citizens without their consent.

See more here.

===

thrive meovement http://www.thrivemovement.com/agenda-21-q-a-foster-gamble.blog**

http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/disaster-by-design-whats-wrong-with-the-thrive-movement

http://www.dementedagitprop.com/

Demented Agitprop: The Myth and Madness of Agenda 21 Conspiracy Theories

The story behind the groups that believe bike lanes and smart growth are here to steal our land and send us all to the gulag

By Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones

Kindle edition | HTML version

Related: The Anti-Environmentalist Roots of the Agenda 21 Conspiracy Theory

Demented Agitprop: The Myth and Madness of Agenda 21 Conspiracy Theories

At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, the UN passed Agenda 21, a clarion call for all countries across the globe to stand together in the name of sustainable development, declaring that governments should save the future of humanity by curbing industrial pollution, eliminating poverty and disease, and implementing recycling initiatives.

As with most UN resolutions, the proposals were largely ignored—except in the world of online conspiracy theories.

In the world of the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory, the 1992 UN resolution is nothing less than a blueprint for global domination. Bicyclists are the shock troops meant to ready the populace for a New World Order ruled by environmentalist overlords where all property will be seized in the name of smart growth and climate change reduction. Reminiscent of Nazi Germany, people will be rounded up from rural areas and moved into concentration camps under the guise of urban living.

Power companies will use smart meters as Orwellian surveillance mechanisms; “death maps” will indicate where human existence is and isn’t allowed; and inanimate objects such as rocks and trees will be given the same rights as humans in the name of Gaia and communitarianism. Supposedly, this geopolitical transformation is already underway, led by Maurice Strong, former undersecretary of the UN, and Bono, the international Marxist leader of U2.

“Seems crazy, but it’s true” is the common tagline found across a ring of websites and letters to the editor that are dedicated to unraveling the conspiracy, then leading the user through a labyrinth of evidence—cherry-picked from out-of-context quotes and cynically interpreted legislation—alongside copies of the infamous death map.

Conspiracy theories and online culture seem to go hand in hand—from birthers to truthers, JFK to Area 51—and it’s easy to dismiss them as the paranoid rantings of those with too much time on their hands, but the Agenda 21 conspiracy groups actually affect public policy. They appear at local planning meetings, accusing the town council of trying to take away their land, and sometimes the council relents, giving in to the mindless tirades of the paranoid mob.

But there’s much more to these accusations than pure, raving madness. It is a largely contrived movement, supported by natural resource industry groups and land developers looking to block any legislation that restricts access to environmental resources. Groups like the John Birch Society use proponents’ fervent paranoid visions as a demented agitprop for their own interests. This incoherent ranting about a UN takeover of the United States has been going on for decades. It has deep roots in something called the property rights movement, which has long used outlandish global conspiracies to foment dissent against any regulation of their industry.

Historian David Aaronovitch succinctly described the origination of conspiracy theories as “created by the politically defeated and accepted by the socially defeated ,” but in the case of Agenda 21, these theories are more likely to be created by political interests that are far from defeated.

The Darkest Age of Human History

Michael Shaw, founder of Freedom Advocates, accountant, attorney, and owner of the Lockaway self-storage company outside of San Francisco, may be the marquee name for Agenda 21 because of his singular focus on the issue. In his worldview, statewide fire safety councils are America’s soviets, intended to institute communism by way of fire-prevention regulations. He posits that sustainability actually destroys the natural world by placing limitations on resource extraction. It is also intended to destroy our currency, massively reduce the population, create a one-world government, enslave humanity, and cause traffic gridlock.

He refused to be interviewed for this article, stating that he did not trust the press and did not agree to being labeled “anti-Agenda 21 or anti-anything.” He insisted that he is simply “pro-freedom,” even though he has previously mentioned that there is a battle to cleanse towns of Agenda 21, and that membership with a sustainability non-profit called ICLEI (the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) is treason.

His paranoid outlook may be traced back to when he attempted to run electricity to his La Selva Beach, California property, which was zoned for agricultural use. The electrical line was ostensibly being run to power a well, but he was denied a permit by the county because the amount of energy he was attempting to run could have powered an entire housing subdivision. He eventually took Santa Cruz County to court with the Pacific Legal Foundation as his counsel in an extended legal battle, declaring that the county’s restrictions on his property constituted a legal taking even though he never applied to have the zoning changed. He also accused the state of trespassing, planting non-native seeds, and leaving endangered long-toed salamanders on his property to sabotage his plans. Whether any long-toed salamanders existed on the property was never determined.

Shaw has since turned the land into Liberty Garden, an example of how private ownership can set a prime example for environmental preservation of native species without the need for big government, which somehow creates a monopoly on natural resource protection. His website is heavily dedicated to emphasizing the manual labor he has invested in maintaining the property’s vibrant display of native plant species while still being hindered from economically developing it.

Currently, visitors’ access to Liberty Garden is limited to invited guests only, with an entrance protected by gates, surveillance cameras, and signs threatening any government agents who try to enter.

Although Shaw’s gripes sound like the simple frustrations of somebody eager to change zoning restrictions for his own benefit, he has aligned himself fully with the right wing of the property rights movement. At the Ninth Annual Freedom 21 Conference, Shaw joined other luminaries of the right-wing world to discuss property rights, the evils of Agenda 21, and the threat of NAFTA. Bob Barr, the very conservative ex-presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party, was banned from the proceedings for having previously met with Al Gore.

Cheryl “Rosa” Koire is different from other local activists typically drawn to the property rights battle. A self-described gay, liberal, anti-war Democrat who runs the Post Sustainability Institute, Democrats Against Agenda 21, and the Santa Rosa Neighborhood Coalition, she does not mince words when describing the UN resolution as a literal Nazi takeover, with bicyclists as shock troops. With her background as a real estate appraiser and her work for the California Transit Authority, she is able to lucidly describe how easement and eminent domain law will eventually lead to rural cleansing. The American countryside will be purged and its residents forced into urban hellholes.

Koire’s story as an Agenda 21 activist starts when property she owned in Santa Rosa, California was declared blighted and fit for eminent domain by the state in anticipation of the as-yet unannounced Sonoma-Marin train line. She fought the ruling by accusing the state of intentionally declaring properties blighted, not in preparation for the Sonoma-Marin train line, but as a part of a UN land grab.

She turned her plight into a book called Behind the Green Mask, which is essentially a rehash of Terry Anderson’s anti-environmentalist tome Behind the Green Curtain, but is focused entirely on the new threat imposed by urban planning and zoning boards rather than environmentalists.

In her view, the Supreme Court’s Kelo v. City of New London decision, which allows local governments to use eminent domain to take property with just compensation for private use as long as it fits within the public’s interest, is all part of the plan. Supposedly, local planners will use obscure social manipulation strategies like Hegelian dialectic and the Rand Corporation’s Delphi method to fake an open, democratic debate about the direction of their community. It is all Kabuki theater, as the decisions have already been made and community input is there simply to give the perception of democracy. Smart meters that record a home’s power output are actually there to report on those who oppose rural cleansing. Traffic circles are flawed for reasons that may or may not have something to do with a global UN conspiracy.

She frequently cites “Redevelopment: The Unknown Government,” by Chris Norby, a centrist Republican of the California State Assembly , as an influence, but “The Unknown Government” is by no means a wild-eyed conspiracy theory. In bland, legal detail, the book describes:

…the distortions caused by the fiscalization of land use, eminent domain abuse, and sales tax competition that results in big-box stores, car dealerships, and sports teams demanding special tax breaks from cities.

Or, essentially, how private companies abuse loopholes in land-use law to the detriment of the community.

But rather than accuse private redevelopment interests of false blight claims, Koire associates them with the overarching government interest in controlling people’s lives. She turns what would be a good example of property rights abuse in the interests of private industry into an argument in favor of less regulation of private industry, support for big-box developments, and an opportunity to rail against communitarianism—a sort of localized version of communism.

What she sees as Kabuki theater in action may simply be a description of how city councils tend to ignore her conspiratorial rantings when she shows up with bullhorns and video cameras to declare the whole meeting a masquerade.

How these ideas get uniformly promulgated can be traced to Tom Deweese at the American Policy Center, a small think tank out of Warrenton, Virginia, which previously worked to fund the Contras in Nicaragua and distribute a Philip Morris-funded newsletter that accused the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) of being controlled by environmental terrorists in the wake of the EPA’s 1992 decision to regulate secondhand smoke.

Deweese has been ringing a demagogic alarm about Agenda 21 since the ’92 UN Summit in Rio, but only with the Tea Party’s rise have his ideas really taken root. His Deweese Report newsletter, which he claims reaches over three million recipients by email and direct mail campaigns, is now solely focused on the threat of sustainable development and the UN’s slowly encroaching power. The issues covered range from the insidiousness of stakeholders in public-private partnerships to the looming threat of new urbanism.

According to Deweese’s book, Now Tell Me I Was Wrong, we are in the “darkest ages of human history,” ready to face a new Inquisition. The tactics the Nazis used to eliminate the Jews are the same ones being used “in every city council meeting, county commissioner meetings, state government hearing and Congressional hearing in this nation to impose Agenda 21.”

Sustainable development is the cornerstone of all government and the root of all our problems. Bono is a Marxist that is not actually interested in helping Africa, since debt relief would be disruptive to the continent’s economies. Bill Gates wants to depopulate the planet with vaccination initiatives. The White House Rural Council is here to create a land czar dictatorship over the countryside. The $4 billion-dollar environmental non-profit world controls the government and big business. The Department of Homeland Security categorizes extremists as “anyone concerned about the economy,” and smart growth will construct inescapable, walled cities that nobody can escape.

He cites Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem as a major influence; the book envisions a dystopian future where we will all be nameless hordes contained to controlled palaces of mating and die in the “home of the useless,” all overseen by the Elders.

Deweese also sells an anti-Agenda 21 kit on his site (for $195), which includes packets of information on how you too can fight sustainable planning in your neighborhood, and introspections into how the U.S. education system and the Affordable Care Act are all part of the same diabolical plan. The infamous Agenda 21 “death map” is on the back cover.

A Loud, Unpopular, Yet Influential Minority

As demonstrably ridiculous as it all sounds, these paranoid visions have infiltrated planning meetings across the country, resulting in the abandonment of large-scale development projects like oyster bed restoration in Virginia, highway construction in Maine, and high-speed rail in Florida by small yet vocal protests demanding that the UN cease their dictatorial power grab. An attempt to protect manatees in Citrus County, Florida with boating restrictions was considered an abomination because “[placing] animals above man is against the Bible and the Bill of Rights .” Alabama recently banned sustainable development as a practice outright. Other states like Tennessee, Minnesota, and Arizona have tried similar resolutions. Texas Senate candidate Ted Cruz called Agenda 21 a “globalist plan that tries to subvert the U.S. Constitution and the liberties we all cherish as Americans.” Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich both called it a threat to U.S. sovereignty.

In particular, the anti-Agenda 21 movement has focused on ICLEI—a non-profit that helps communities by providing software to identify greenhouse emissions—as the subversive element that has infiltrated every local government on behalf of the UN.

The organization was started a few years before the ’92 UN Rio Summit as a way to coordinate with atmospheric scientists on the successful battle to rein in ozone layer depletion and has since moved on to focus on climate change. Although it certainly works off of the same sustainability concepts found in Agenda 21, ICLEI is not part of the UN. This is a relatively easy fact to discover, but there is really no easy way to absolutely prove that a seemingly harmless NGO dedicated to encouraging energy efficiency is not part of a global conspiracy simply because they adhere to a similar philosophy.

So far, 21 communities across the U.S. have dropped ICLEI to the delight of anti-Agenda 21 activists everywhere. To say that 21 cities in the U.S. are living in fear of a UN takeover is not completely accurate. Dan Knapp, a representative of ICLEI, mentioned that there are often debates over whether jurisdictions can afford the annual membership fee and that sometimes the vote to drop out simply coincides with anti-ICLEI protests.

A vocal minority can also overrun planning commissions, and a number of the anti-Agenda 21 groups have advocated anonymous representation, so an accurate measurement of the dissent can be difficult to determine. A recent survey by the American Planning Association showed that few respondents knew what Agenda 21 even was. Gary Wysocky, a member of the Santa Rosa city council who is often harangued by Cheryl Koire’s particularly vociferous group as part of the “bicycle Taliban,” described it as “a loud minority, but not particularly influential—they don’t win over many adherents.”

There is also the unspoken cultural battle afoot that underpins the whole debate. Any money spent on smart growth and urban centers is money not spent on rural areas. Developers hoping to win over the locals at the town council meeting with a preview of their new mixed-use apartment complex replete with computer-generated urbanites are often met by waves of boos and accusations by those unfriendly to their metropolitan lifestyle vision. Combine all of this with a misunderstanding of community planning, a fear of urban living, a fear of technology, and a fear of change, and one could see how certain individuals could fall prey to the allure of an all-encompassing conspiracy by a distant, monolithic, international organization.

An apprehension towards change might be understandable if it were not for the same extreme mindless rhetoric, same feared plot of international socialism, same techniques, same organizations, and some of the same voices from the anti-environmental Wise Use movement twenty years prior.

A Secret Society to Bring About Economic Collapse

How exactly did a dry policy document on recycling initiatives get interpreted as a blueprint for world domination? After all, Agenda 21 is a non-binding resolution on best practices for sustainable development. It is more of an instructional pamphlet on how not to waste resources than anything resembling international law.

Why any of this would be a threat to U.S. sovereignty is unclear. It doesn’t mention abandoning single-family homes, social justice, redistribution of wealth, rural cleansing, or eliminating private property. Smart growth—an innocuous term equivalent to development planning but commonly denounced as Orwellian Newspeak—is nowhere to be found in the text.

Maurice Strong, ex-Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, is accused of being the mastermind behind it all for stating that “the only hope for the planet is for industrialized civilization’s collapse” and that it is “our responsibility to bring that about” at the opening statement of the 1992 UN Summit, but those words never appear in his speech. The words are taken from an interview where he discussed the plot of a sci-fi novel he hoped to one day write where “world leaders form a secret society to bring about an economic collapse.”

Agenda 21 is sometimes referred to as an ominous precursor to actual international law, much like the Montreal Protocol’s standard on chlorofluorocarbon emissions, but even those agreements are little more than soft law, as there are no repercussions for those who break them. And even if a country did break them, they would be breaking a treaty that they themselves were interested in enacting for the sake of environmental concerns. And the Montreal Protocol was a highly successful environmental agreement that stopped ozone depletion and has yet to implement international socialism.

Of course, there is no evidence that Agenda 21 is a plot for world domination. Most of the conspiracy claims are denounced with a cursory Google search, and the rest require a heavy amount of hyper-pedantic cynicism to interpret phrases like “credit schemes for the poor” as a plot to divest the poor of credit. Other comments by Maurice Strong about the wasteful air-conditioned, fossil fuel-using, meat-eating lifestyles of Western nations may be the closest thing to a social engineering smoking gun, but even that quote seems tepid in retrospect.

Somehow the UN, which is often denigrated as useless and ineffective by the same actors, will organize and convince a large mass of people to abandon their homes and move into concentration camps against their will. Tempting as it might be to label these threats as simply distributed mass hysteria, the movement is a largely contrived extension of the natural resource industries’ battle for property rights called “Wise Use.”

Similar to the anti-Agenda 21 and Tea Party protests of today, Wise Use has a parallel history of fomenting dissent at the behest of private industry’s interests with overblown, nonsensical, and apocalyptic language against any and all environmental regulations. It is the same international, socialist, enviro-Nazi conspiracy rhetoric and coordination tactics, and the same names that are seen today. Rather than battles over stream restoration and endangered species, the focus has now turned toward urban planners and zoning regulations.

Also known as “Multiple Use,” or “Shared Use” in Canada, the Wise Use movement is a collection of private interests—mining, timber, ranching, construction, agriculture, chemical manufacturers, and oil and gas companies—who have been battling with the federal government over natural resource rights and regulations since the days of Teddy Roosevelt.

Ever since the Mining Act of 1872, private resource industries have had free use of federal lands in many locations to mine, log, and graze cattle with little or no payment to the government. When the government tries to regulate access to those federal lands—be it by blocking stream access to ranchers, closing off mountain roads to loggers, or regulating pollution in the vicinity of a mining operation—legal, political, and sometimes physical conflicts have erupted over whether these actions constitute a “taking.” If an environmental regulation is defined as a taking, rather than the EPA fining polluters for not regulating their emissions properly, polluters could sue the government for the loss of potential income from said restriction. Such a decision would set a precedent that, applied across many mining operations, oil refineries, and chemical plants, would mean billions in government payouts.

In the seventies, this dissent against government control of public lands led a number of ranching groups to form the Sagebrush Rebels. The Sagebrush Rebels were allied to fight the implementation of the growing environmental movement who had won numerous legislative victories in the late sixties and seventies: the Wilderness Act, Roadless Area Review and Evaluation Act (RARE), National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and National Forest Management Act. These policies were put in place to restrict access to government-owned lands and resources that were being used for free or for far below market value while being maintained by the government. The Sagebrush Rebel alliance was able to push their pro-ranching, logging, and mining agenda into the White House with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The story of Wayne Hage is the prototypical example of this battle over government land regulation. A public lands rancher, he grazed his cattle on government-owned lands until the government blocked access to a water source used to feed his cattle. Hage sued the government under takings law for their restriction and eventually won. His twenty-plus-year legal struggle won him $14 million in damages plus interest, and he became a late symbol of the Sagebrush Rebellion and ranchers’ rights.

Because there is so much at stake, any struggle over government regulation anywhere in the country—from an easement used to create a bike lane, a zoning regulation on housing construction, or an attempt to designate a river as “wild and scenic”—could become legal precedent or a rallying point about the injustices of governmental interference and therefore a front line in the conflict over property rights. Throughout the nineties, natural resource industry interests took to this fight by funding front groups to help foment dissent against park rangers, environmental activists, or anybody that stood in the way of anything but one hundred percent private use of park lands.

Groups with innocuous-sounding names like “Friends of the Rivers” worked with right wing think tanks like the John Birch Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the Heartland Institute under the philosophy of Lyndon Larouche to claim a grand socialist plot by the UN. Calling environmentalists “watermelons” (green on the outside, red in the middle), they declared all EPA gestapo regulations to be part of an interconnected global hippie conspiracy aimed at destroying U.S. industry and a new paganism that “sacrifices people and worships trees” in order to recruit members and make money. In their view, ozone depletion was a concocted myth meant to justify land seizures. According to these groups, climate change is also a myth, trees cause smog, and toxic waste cleanup is a misuse of public financing.

Those same think tanks, funded by the natural resource industries, provided boilerplate legal language for politicians to employ across different states and local governments. Pro-bono legal organizations, like Pacific Legal Foundation and Mountain States Legal Foundation, were funded by the same natural resource companies and would seek out and represent individuals with disputes against the government over takings law. A 1984 Yale Law Journal analysis criticized them for not actually serving the public interest as required for 501(c)(3) designation. More often than not they were found to be serving the interests of their oil and ranching industry board members in lawsuits against environmental regulations.

The tactics of Wise Use are thoroughly documented in David Helvarg’s groundbreaking book The Battle Over the Greens. In it, Helvarg details the same ideology and tactics at the heart of the Tea Party and anti-Agenda 21 movements to come. In many ways, these later groups are merely an extension of Wise Use being led and reinforced by the some of the same actors. It is the same technique of strategic fearmongering at the local level for private interests. Or as Helvarg explains, “the strength of anti-environmentalism is not in its membership rolls but in its ability to mobilize a network of core activists to intervene in and politicize local conflicts, creating a perception of power that they hope can be used as a springboard for further expansion.”

Long before the Tea Party accused Obama of being an “Alinsky radical,” groups like Bill Grannell’s People for the West!, Charles Cushman’s National Inholder’s Association, and Ron Arnold’s Center For the Defense of Free Enterprise used the techniques of Saul Alinsky to blame the preservationist elite for the ills of rural Montana. Bill Grannell even took Alinsky’s classes in Chicago before going on to use Alinsky’s tactics for the interests of ranching groups. Instigating instant riots at town meetings, spamming government fax lines, phone lines, and talk radio call-in shows, and threatening a UN takeover of all private property were some of the common tricks of the trade.

Financial backing for Wise Use would decline because of associations with militias in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing and the election of a pro-industry president in George W. Bush, but it didn’t disappear. It would eventually make a new resurgence with the Tea Party and its short-lived attempt to alter the 2010 Congressional elections while denouncing the looming threat of Agenda 21.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Wildlands Network, a small non-profit aimed at protecting native fauna on the verge of extinction by connecting habitats across the U.S., is often invoked as Agenda 21’s guideline for mass human relocation, but the project has been misinterpreted to the point of absurdity. They are often denounced as the architects of rural cleansing, where, in the interest of biodiversity and urban development, people in rural communities across the country will be forcibly moved out of their homes and into cities by the government through eminent domain.

Kim Vacairu, a representative of the Wildlands Network, responded plainly that the non-profit does no lobbying, does not work on policy, does not purchase land, does not work with eminent domain law, and “has never received a dime from the federal government.” They mainly work with private landowners, almost exclusively in the West, to create wildlife corridors between national parks so that mountain lions are not turned into roadkill.

Considering the amount of invective the Wildlands Network gets for being near the heart of the global conspiracy, Vacairu says that they rarely get any inquiries. “It hasn’t come up in the last two years.” Yet the group supposedly produced the “death map” (found across almost every Tea Party website rallying against Agenda 21), which lays out a plan for mass relocation of the human population.

The map shows all federally-owned lands combined with all state and county-owned lands, with restricted pathways interconnecting them. All of it is classified as off-limits to human activity. On the map, whole towns are designated as uninhabitable; the Adirondacks are a 9,375-square mile exclusion zone.

Independent of motive, the map would be damning evidence of a non-profit’s overreach if it did not show the copyright of the map’s actual creator, an organization by the name of Environmental Perspectives, in the lower-right corner. Environmental Perspectives had the map drawn up as a prop for Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison’s 1994 debate over the UN Convention on Biodiversity. Anyone can purchase a copy from the Environmental Perspectives website for $10 apiece.

The ire against Wildlands seems to be aimed not at that particular NGO, but at a nebulous “Wildlands Project,” which is used as a catch-all for any federal policy or NGO that attempts to protect National Park lands or endangered predators. At one point, environmental research professors Reed Noss and Michael Soulé outlined a Wildlands Project that would protect areas of biodiversity for endangered animals in the West, but Noss addressed the controversy in an interview with RANGE magazine, stating that:

There are unethical people out there perpetrating ridiculous lies in an attempt to discredit us. The Wildlands Project has never proposed relocating people to accommodate our reserve designs. [...] Nevertheless, certain folks in the Wise Use Movement have fabricated maps, attributed them to us, and circulated them to rural newspapers, websites, and so on, apparently intending to frighten local people and turn them against conservation. [...] Those relatively few private lands identified as core areas are lands belonging to The Nature Conservancy, land trusts, conservation-minded ranchers, and other folks who voluntarily manage their lands for conservation.

As it turns out, Environmental Perspectives is the brainchild of Dr. Michael Coffman. Although Coffman does not specifically work on Agenda 21, he does preach a Larouchian worldview that takes aim at international paganism, claiming that climate change is a hoax used to bring forth a biblical end times. With a background in forestry and previous work as a representative for the paper industry, he offers what he calls a Judeo-Christian stewardship of the environment that integrates free markets, private property rights, and traditional values, but mainly encourages industry to use as many resources as they want.

For someone threatening that a pantheistic cult is about to drive all of us off our property in preparation for the end times, Coffman’s tone is very reasonable. When mentioning the struggle for logging rights in the Adirondacks during the 1980s and 1990s, he strongly chided that, “the people there fought hard for economic use of their land all while being insulted by the New York Times,” framing it almost as a labor issue. This would be a compelling argument if not for the details of that struggle, which include an organized campaign of arson, gunfire, and death threats against the Adirondack Parks Agency, all for the sake of the timber industry, which had clear-cut the majority of the forest, risking the Hudson Valley watershed.

Coffman also runs the Local Environment and Resource Network (LEARN), which aims to inform localities on how to sidestep federal environmental regulations by establishing local policies. According to LEARN, an obscure loophole in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) indicates that if a local or state government establishes their own unique environmental conventions, the federal government must cooperate with the locality. The LEARN success stories provided are the same battles of natural resource industry versus environmental regulations on national monument land seen during the Wise Use movement: mining road access, stream restoration easements, and timber salvage limits.

Coffman is also executive director of Sovereignty International, the organization founded in 1996 by Henry Lamb (with members of the National Federal Lands Conference and the cattle industry) that is dedicated to fighting global governance. Almost immediately after being created, Sovereignty International used their newfound existence to claim that the UN was looking to establish an international “blue hull” Coast Guard. Threatened by this attack on U.S. autonomy, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma immediately stepped in to help stop U.S. ratification of the Law of the Sea treaty, asserting national security concerns.

Sovereignty International’s Henry Lamb is the linchpin for all things Wise Use and Agenda 21. He is ex-vice president of the Land Improvement Contractors Association and former head of the Environmental Conservation Organization—an umbrella group for over 300 smaller Wise Use organizations founded by developers to oppose wetlands protection. He also worked to defeat the UN Convention on Biodiversity from ratification in the U.S., founded Freedom 21 with members of ranching groups to organize anti-Agenda 21 conferences, and writes the occasional article for WND (formerly World Net Daily) on how Agenda 21 is not merely a conspiracy theory but an actuality happening right before our very eyes. He also appears in Tom Deweese’s anti-Agenda 21 planning toolkit, and Deweese sits on the advisory council of Sovereignty International.

Both Deweese and Lamb appear at property rights conferences funded by the same resource industry-funded think tanks from the Wise Use era: the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute, and the John Birch Society. The speakers at these conferences are often the same stellar names found within the Wise Use movement—e.g., Michael Coffman and Dan Byfield of Stewards of the Range (a group created by the son of Wayne Hage)—but also include those dedicated to the anti-Agenda 21 movement, like Rosa Koire, Orlean Koehle, and Michael Shaw. Those same think tanks, along with right-wing legislation mills like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) provide boilerplate legal documents that municipalities can use to ban sustainable development and any environmental restrictions on land use.

Together, they have found a common ground—property rights—with which to rail against the government.

Species protection, such as the infamous struggle over spotted owls in protected forests, was a large Wise Use battleground in the ’90s, and anti-Agenda 21 groups have taken up that torch by lambasting protections for long-toed salamanders, Delta smelt, shortnose suckerfish, and Mexican wolves as part of the same UN plot. The same goes for the rural fire safety councils that were lamented by Michael Shaw. Those fire safety councils have long been called socialist plots because they stand in the way of letting forests burn, which would leave the land ripe for plunder by salvage logging companies.

Any use of eminent domain or control of private property by the government is anathema to both groups. Rick Perry is demonized as part of the Agenda 21 plan for his involvement in the Trans-Texas Corridor highway project, not because of questions about the project’s funding or usefulness, but because it was a “massive private property land grab,” according to Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson. Similar arguments likely stopped the highway project in Maine and the oyster bed restoration project in Virginia; both were accused of being Agenda 21 schemes.

But more often, the anti-Agenda 21 aim is to remove any restrictions on subdivision developments. Sometimes, this means Tea Party groups working directly with local homebuilder associations against wetlands protections. Septic tank regulations are usually a touchy subject for anti-Agenda 21 activists in places like Florida, the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and southern California, where development companies are looking to build in rural areas devoid of sewage systems, while local governments are looking to make sure septic runoff does not affect streams, estuaries, and drinking water.

Orlean Koehle, California chapter president of the staunchly anti-feminist Eagle Forum created by Phyllis Schlafly, is very active on this front. She often speaks at conferences alongside Rosa Koire and Michael Shaw on stopping Agenda 21 and ending smart meters because of the potential health concerns from “electro-smog.” She also heads the Sonoma Land Rights Coalition, which vociferously argued against septic tank regulations to prevent sewage runoff and against the idea that those regulations constituted a legal taking.

In their view, any support for higher-density living—mixed-use development, bike lanes, public transportation—becomes a proxy war over rural development. Eventually, anything that might be pro-environment is also considered part of the plot. Attempts to prepare for sea-level rise in Northern Virginia were considered a tacit agreement that climate change is real and therefore part of Agenda 21.

And in that sense, all of the paranoid visions of Agenda 21 blend into the doctrines of Wise Use. Ron Arnold, the originator of the Wise Use movement and creator of the term “rural cleansing,” has also proselytized against Agenda 21, which he calls “a pantheistic altar,” “socio-economic Armageddon,” and an “action plan for...taking away hunters’ and anglers’ guns and curtailing their access to land that is held in the public domain.”

One begins to wonder why somebody would risk their legitimacy and perceived sanity for such paranoid fearmongering, yet there is a method to their madness. The grandiose accusations of UN conspiracies sound ludicrous, but they form an internally consistent theory. This ideology unifies the interests of various industries under one philosophy, grabs people’s attention, and demonizes their enemies. It justifies the personal grievances of those unwilling or unable to understand and debate the environmental consequences perpetrated by irresponsible actors on the larger community, even if the presumptions it makes about reality are patently absurd.

But it still may not make complete sense. Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm once described the Sagebrush Rebels (the ranching groups that contested government regulation of public lands and led to Wise Use) as:

A murky fusion of idealism and greed that may not be heroic, nor righteous, nor even intelligent. Only one certainty exists—that Sagebrush is a revolt against federal authority, and that its taproot grows deep in the century’s history. Beyond this, it is incoherent. Part hypocrisy, part demagoguery, partly the honest anger of honest people, it is a movement of confusion and hysteria and terrifyingly destructive potential. What it is no one fully understands. What it will do no one can tell.

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