A now-deleted Tweet from GB News:
‘Something weird has happened this last year. We have seen an unprecedented collapse of birth rates.’
Political commentator Peter Imanuelsen speaks to Neil Oliver about whether we’re facing a population collapse.
Imanuelsen is better-known as Peter Sweden, an “identitarian” activist who came to attention in 2017 after meeting Katie Hopkins. The Huffington Post subsequently noted that Imanuelsen had
previously used Twitter to question the fact that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust as well as expressing some sympathies for the policies of Adolf Hitler.
…He also believes the Jews and the Vatican are colluding in a plot to create a New World Order which is seeking to undermine Europe by moving Muslim populations under the guise of the current refugee crisis.
The relevant Tweets have since been deleted, although they are quoted in full in the article and the urls are provided. Of these, a couple have been preserved on Wayback (here and here), which confirms the article’s integrity. Hope Not Hate followed up with further material. At the time, Imanuelsen responded first with a dismissive brush off (“There were some old tweets but people mature and views change”); then, he moved on to a complaint of “character assassination” (by “leftist trolls” using “old tweets” that have been taken “out of context”) before finally announcing that “I have had opinions in the past that I strongly regret”.
Having such a person as a guest on GB News clearly crossed a line, and one has to wonder if he was billed as “Imanuelsen” rather than “Sweden” in an attempt to avoid controversy. The Jewish Chronicle has reported on the incident under the headline “Outrage as GB News interviews former Holocaust denier about demographics on primetime”.
In the deleted clip (also gone from YouTube), Imanuelsen alleged sharp birthrate declines around the world, including of 9% in the UK. This was not, though, the usual right-wing lament that European women are chosing to have fewer children; Oliver speculated that the cause may have been Covid-19 vaccination, and this was probably why Imanuelsen had been sought out to discuss the subject. Oliver is a trustee of John Bowe’s amateurish “Charity Organisation for the Vaccine InjureD” (blogged here), and as such is heavily invested in seeking out evidence of widespread “vaccine injury” that sceptics prophesised but which is not so far apparent. For some, there is a conspiracy theory that the vaccine may in fact have been a secret depopulation measure, echoing the plot of the Channel 4 conspiracy thriller Utopia from a few years ago.
However, and unsurprisingly given Imanuelson’s background, his claims of dramatic declines are not reflected in the data. As regards England and Wales, the Office for National Statistics found there was actually an increase in live births in 2021:
There were 624,828 live births in England and Wales in 2021, an increase of 1.8% from 613,936 in 2020, but still below the 2019 figure (640,370); 2021 remains in line with the long-term trend of decreasing live births seen before the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
The total fertility rate (TFR) increased to 1.61 children per woman in 2021 from 1.58 in 2020; the first time TFR has risen since 2012… Fertility rates increased overall; however, younger age groups saw declining fertility rates while older age groups saw fertility rates increase.
Data from the United Nations – World Population Prospects as summarised by Macrotrends finds a 0.48% decline for the UK overall during 2021, consistent with figures going back to 2018. The trend for Sweden meanwhile was 0.26%.
Imanuelsen has responded to the renewed controversy by denying that he ever espoused Holocaust denial, alleging that screenshots of old Tweets were fabricated. This was not, though, a complaint that he made in 2017. Within the past day he has also deleted material in which he acknowledged his previous views: his “I have had opinions in the past that I strongly regret” Tweet is gone, although it is still available on Wayback, and he has revised a section on his website called “So Which Views Did I Have & Why ?”, in which he previously wrote:
It’s important to point out that I never hated any people as human beings, but at that time I strongly disliked some peoples actions and what I thought was their actions (like the lifestyle of homosexuality), it was more conspiracy theories, like believing the earth was flat and all kinds of other conspiracy theories, questioning the moon landing, and also regarding things that happened during WW2 like the holocaust.
This also included conspiracy theories about Jewish people running a “New World Order” and other similar things regarding homosexuals and also Muslims.
That is also now gone from this current site. Not all the Tweet screenshots can be independently verified, but even if there are any fabrications among them the general contours of his past remain clear.
Returning to Neil Oliver, Matthew Sweet has a fair assessment:
Maybe it’s best to think of this as a kind of radicalisation. As ever I think the work of @QCassam and his idea of epistemic vice is useful. How the idea of questioning everything can slide into believing anything – which of course makes real injustice harder to spot.
Filed under: Uncategorized
“Jews and the Vatican are colluding in a plot to create a New World Order”
Unfortunately for those who want to be able to resort to clearcut stereotypes to inform whom they should regard as goodies and whom as baddies, it is hard to deny that quite a few of those who have colluded in the various manifestations of the various plans over the centuries to bring about global governance that both proponents and opponents of the project have lately taken to calling a or the “new world order” have indeed been Jewish, whilst others have been rather influential Roman Catholics.