Agenda 21

Agenda 21 is a set of hopeful guidelines for environmental action and social justice established by the United Nations in 1992 at a conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It sets out a variety of goals for public policy at all levels and for civic action by non-governmental organizations. These include fair trade practices, sustainable energy and urban development (i.e. more efficient zoning), and debt reduction for the developing world. Like most such sets of guidelines, it was happily agreed upon and happily ignored for many years, except for ne'er-do-wells like Sweden.

Agenda 21 was frequently cited by conspiracy theorists, such as the John Birch Society, during the 1990s as a purported blueprint for implementing the New World Order and population control, then forgotten by them for a number of years. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, several conspiracy theorists again brought up and repopularized the general idea. The most well-known among them may be Glenn Beck and David Icke. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a variety of people have latched on to the repopularizing of the idea, often in connection with denialism and scaremongering concerning the COVID-19 vaccines.

The flaw with any vigorous political opposition to Agenda 21 is that "the U.S. government and no state or local government is legally bound by the United Nations Agenda 21 treaty," as the Republican National Committee (RNC) – the governing body of one of the two major American parties – accurately asserted in a 2012 resolution even as they officially condemned Agenda 21. Accordingly, it makes no sense to demand that it be repudiated: you can argue with it on the merits of what it recommends, but it's silly to savage a set of recommendations for merely daring to exist. It's tantamount to mounting a bombastic attack on the Food and Leisure section of your local paper just because you disagreed with a food critic's opinion of a restaurant: you might want a different columnist or different recommendations or even a different section editor, but attacking the section for its audacity in existing makes you seem like a raving lunatic.

Reaction to Agenda 21 outside the US
Outside the US, Agenda 21 is moderately known among "Green" types and there are even some local groups that want to implement Agenda 21 and pressure local and federal politics in that direction. Apart from those groups and those dealing with them, basically nobody has ever heard about Agenda 21 nor cares about it&mdash;except conspiracy theorists and those who listen to them.

Glenn Beck's 2012 "exposé"
In 2012, an "exposé" by former Fox News host Glenn Beck seized upon Agenda 21 as an attempt by radical Nazi communist homosexuals to "put their fangs into our communities and suck all the blood out of it, we will not be able to survive." This began an onslaught of paranoia that has continued ever since, with even such high-level American institutions as the Republican National Committee (RNC) officially condemning Agenda 21 as "a comprehensive plan of extreme environmentalism, social engineering, and global political control." The general consensus among a certain segment of the American conservative movement seems to be that socialists and tree-huggers are using Agenda 21 as a template for an insidious contamination of all levels of society. And our precious bodily fluids, no doubt.

Glenn Beck's Agenda 21 keyword list
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David Icke's talk
A 2010 talk by David Icke, uploaded to YouTube in 2016, covers Icke's main ideas on Agenda 21 along with various conspirituality themes, and has played a part in popularizing a version of the conspiracy theory (its broadening of popularity later extending to COVID-19 denialists, of which Icke also became one). Icke claims that Agenda 21 is a Trojan horse for world fascism, which uses concern for the environment as an excuse to justify de-industrialization, the end of democracy, a drastic depopulation culling of the world population, and more. He further compares its implementation with "a version of ".

Icke also connects it all to various other of his ideas, e.g. about secret societies (tied to a great Satanic conspiracy), chemtrails, weather modification used as a weapon against the people (to target farmers and rural populations so that big corporations can gain control of everything), and a planned grand economic collapse.

2030 Agenda
A newer UN agenda from 2015, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (also referred to as Agenda 2030) has goals of a nature basically similar to those of the older Agenda 21. Far-fetched claims of a similar kind about the meaning of the text by conspiracy theorists have also been made similarly to those for Agenda 21. Indeed, the two agendas have come to be mentioned together in some conspiracy theories, viewed as part of the same conspiracy, and mentions of the newer 2030 Agenda have sometimes replaced mentions of Agenda 21 altogether.

For example, one depopulation conspiracy theory has it that the Luciferan nature of Agenda 2030 includes that Goal 12, "Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns", is really a plan to exterminate six billion people worldwide. Nothing is quoted from the actual text for Goal 12 beyond the headline to back that up, and there is nothing in it to quote to back up such a claim. Quoted below, the actual text of Goal 12 is rather less exciting.

Role in COVID-19 conspiracies
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the repopularized Agenda 21 conspiracy theory, in various variations including Icke's, has grown popular among anti-vaxxers and others viewing the pandemic as fake or a "plandemic" used as an excuse for a descent into totalitarianism and more.