Original article (in Bosnian) was published on 14/8/2024; Author: Maida Salkanović
The U.S. vice president’s slip was misused to falsely claim she supports reducing the human population to combat climate change.
On August 6, 2024, the web portal Epoha published an article titled:
Kamala Harris openly supports the WEF’s global depopulation plan
The article states that United States presidential candidate Kamala Harris said that “reducing the global population is an ‘urgent’ need to combat climate change”.
During a recent speech at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Maryland, Harris argued that reducing the world’s population will give our children access to clean air and water.
“When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce our population, more of our children will breathe clean air and drink clean water”, Harris told the cheering crowd.
However, the US vice president did not provide details on how she plans to destroy the human population.
The White House quickly released a transcript of the disturbing speech with the word “population” crossed out and “pollution” added in parentheses to imply that this is what “the vice president really meant”.
FactCheck.org even confirmed that the video in which the vice president said “reduce the population” is real and not fake.
What is it about?
Claims that Kamala Harris spoke about depopulation in the context of the fight against climate change appeared in July 2023, when they were published by several web portals, including Epoha (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
On July 14, 2023, Harris spoke about climate change and the clean energy economy at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Maryland. In a clip published by local television on YouTube on the same day, Harris can be heard mentioning “population reduction”. At 9:38 of the recording, the following can be heard:
When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce the population, more of our children will breathe clean air and drink clean water.
However, it was a slip. The vice-president said “population” instead of “pollution”, that is, she was talking about reducing pollution, not reducing population. This can be seen from the transcript of the speech, which was published on the official website of the White House. The word “population” in the transcript has been crossed out and replaced by the word “pollution”.
Regarding claims that Harris was talking about depopulation in the context of climate change, the fact-checking website Lead Stories contacted the White House and included the official’s response in an analysis published on July 17, 2023:
I can confirm that the vice president meant to say “pollution”.
Lead Stories further states:
The word “population” no longer appears in the transcript, and the points made immediately before the statement in question make it clear that the purpose of the speech was not to connect the climate change movement with an alleged plan to reduce the population but to discuss economic measures aimed at reducing emissions greenhouse gases, not population.
These claims were analyzed last year by our partner web portals Raskrinkavanje (.me) and Faktograf.
The depopulation conspiracy theory has been popular for years. As we explained in earlier analyses, it rests on the premise that the world is overpopulated and that there are not enough resources for all the inhabitants, so there is a plan of the world elite to drastically reduce the human population (1, 2, 3, 4). In some versions of this conspiracy theory, the elite plans to reduce the population to one billion (sometimes called the “golden billion”) in order to preserve resources for the privileged. Plans to reduce the human population are unfoundedly attributed to numerous actors, such as Bill Gates, the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum.
In a speech last year, Kamala Harris made a mistake that was manipulatively interpreted as a statement about population reduction in the context of the fight against climate change. Therefore, we consider the claim that she is “in favor of a global depopulation plan” to be a manipulation of facts and a conspiracy theory.
