UN’s Agenda 21 Seen as Trojan Horse for ‘New World Order’
In the last several years, an obscure United Nations accord called Agenda 21 has emerged as something of a unified field theory for the antigovernment movement. On its face, Agenda 21 does nothing but provide countries and communities with a set of principles to grow smartly — a plan, in short, to fight overpopulation, pollution, poverty and resource depletion.
But for a far-flung network of antigovernment extremists who have risen up to attack it, the nonbinding document that was approved 20 years ago at the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro is not really about preserving the planet at all. Between the lines, they argue, lies a blueprint for the “New World Order.”
In his final days on Fox News, Glenn Beck passionately argued that by agreeing to follow Agenda 21, the U.S. government had colluded with internationalists to undermine its own sovereignty and turn the nation into an environmental refuge where nature would take precedence over people.
“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,” Beck told his viewers, holding up the 294-page document. He cautioned: “Once [internationalists] put their fangs into our communities and suck all the blood out of it, we will not be able to survive.”
The irony is that Agenda 21 is all about survival. It was intended to offer a strategic plan to scale down the use of natural resources to levels that meet “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations.” (The 21 stands for the 21st century.) One hundred and seventy-eight world leaders, including President George H.W. Bush, signed on to the agreement in 1992.
While there is some opposition to Agenda 21 from the left — from groups like Democrats Against Agenda 21 — it’s on the radical right that the UN plan has become a touchstone of a larger theme that equates environmentalism with totalitarianism and the loss of individual freedom. For a growing cast of far-right hardliners, Agenda 21 is a sort of Trojan horse, a totalitarian scheme with a green environmental mask, lying in wait to destroy America as we know it.