Steemit.com vastly overstates the reliance of Intelligence sources on deagel.com, to the point of outright lying. Deagel.com is not a reliable source of information and has a history of making doom-and-gloom predictions regarding population numbers and GDP levels, dating back at least as far as April 2009. In addition, their "model" assumes an economic crisis exponentially worse than any ever seen in the world today, and not a nuclear war or pandemic (which would reasonably be the only methods to achieve the sorts of depopulation numbers predicted.) The website shows clear bias against government organizations as well.
The steemit.com article tries to oversell the importance of deagel.com for their narrative.
WikiLeaks documents have revealed it was legitimately used as reference material in a Stratfor report on the technological capabilities of The People's Republic of North Korea
In reality, a single email leaked from Stratfor Enterprises, LLC references Deagel.com. Note that this was a single email in a leak from the company of over 5 million emails, and is also the only email obtained by WikiLeaks that references the phrase "deagel" in its entire database. The context of the 'deagel.com' reference is telling as well. The reference is in an attached document, describing the capabilites of the North Korean Taepo Dong-X IRBM
Taepo Dong-X
Variant with solid-propellant missile engine. A Deagel.com report, dated Sept. 17, 2010, provides an estimated range of 1,553 mi to 2,485 mi (2,500 to 4,000 km) for the Taepo Dong-X, sufficient to target Japan and Guam. However, an Oct. 1, 2003, U.S. Congressional Research Service report puts the range as up to 9,400 mi (15,040 km). As of 2009, it was reportedly still in development.
(Note: The Taepodong-X is apparently one of the more uncommon names for the Hwasong-10, or Musudan missile.)
A single reference to the range of a North Korean IRBM, with data that is freely available online, does not speak well of the quality of Deagel.com's research and reporting. This is backed up by the Deagel.com entry on the Taepodong-X, which contains no information that could be easily found by reading the Wikipedia article.
Deagel provides news and intelligence on international military aviation and advanced technologies
Deagel.com's "news" stories are copy-and-pasted press releases from other sources, with a single attribution at the bottom of the news articles, if the owners of Deagel.com even care to do the copy-and-pasting at all.
Deagel.com has been predicting a drastic reduction of the population of the United States for the better part of a decade. While their previous predictions are not available on their website, The Internet Wayback Machine has been cataloging the page since 2007.
(Note that the predictions for US GDP values follows a similar pattern, but are not included here)
Prediction Date Prediction Year Population Actual
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 2008 2017 323 million(1) 325.7 million
------------------ END 2017 PREDICTIONS --------------------------------------
April 2009 2020 271 million 331.0 million
April 2010 2020 264 million 331.0 million
August 2011 2020 248 million 331.0 million
------------------ END 2020 PREDICTIONS --------------------------------------
June 2012 2025 187 million
May 2013 2025 182 million
July 2014 2025 88 million(2)
October 2014 2025 69 million(3)
August 2015 2025 65 million
October 2016 2025 61 million
August 2017 2025 54 million
May 2018 2025 100 million(4)
August 2020 2025 100 million(5)(6)
Dates and Predictions of Note
-----------------------------
(1: This is the only prediction where the population increases from the current count)
(2: First recorded instance where the prediction is sub-100 million.)
(3: Note explaining their predictions first appears on the bottom of the page)
(4: First recorded instance where the prediction has gone up from a previous prediction)
(5: Deagel.com goes through a UI overhaul, and the note mentioned in the question and referenced in note 3 of this chart disappears for unknown reasons)
(6: Current prediction as of 24 August 2020)
Previously, under the page for their 2025 Forecast was a long note explaining their reasoning for the numbers of the United States (and Western European nations to a lesser extent). As of 24 August 2020 this note is no longer available on their site, as their forecast page has been modified.
An immediate red flag is raised in the first paragraph, where they state in no uncertain terms
We assume that the official data, especially economic, released by governments is fake, cooked or distorted in some degree.
They start with the assumption that any numbers released by the United States Government is a lie, and work from there. This conveniently allows them to ignore any data provided by official sources that conflicts with their results, a hideous combination of No True Scotsman and Cherry Picking.
The explanation then veers suddenly off into a paragraph regarding the Ebola Virus, and asking readers to imagine a hypothetical scenario where the virus grew to Pandemic levels, infecting hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans. This entire paragraph ignores basic facts about the virus, including its transmissibility, its total mortality, and the fact that even the worst recent Ebola outbreak only killed 11 thousand people in Africa, a continent with much lower standards of hygiene. Of course, all that doesn't even matter because
no pandemic or nuclear war is included in the forecast.
The reasoning they give behind the vast depopulation of the United States is, instead, migration. The next paragraph predicts that
The collapse of the Western financial system will wipe out the standard of living of its population while ending ponzi schemes such as the stock exchange and the pension funds. The population will be hit so badly by a full array of bubbles and ponzi schemes that the migration engine will start to work in reverse accelerating itself due to ripple effects thus leading to the demise of the States....We see a significant part of the American population migrating to Latin America and Asia while migration to Europe - suffering a similar illness - won't be relevant.
They then cite the collapse of the Soviet Union as proof that the population will collapse to the levels they predict, but contain the important caveat that
The American downfall is set to be far worse than the Soviet Union's one.
However, even at the worst point of the collapse of the Soviet Union's population (which was actually after the collapse of the Soviet Union as a whole) the population dropped from approx. 290 million to 285 million. This is a far cry from their projected 80-90% depopulation projection, and their entire thesis is based on several extremely radical presumptions.
- The American Stock Market and banking system will collapse almost entirely
- A number of economic bubbles will collapse in rapid succession
- Extremely large numbers of skilled American workers will migrate from the country
- American based companies will bail out of the United States in droves to Asia and Latin America
Their claim for economic power shifting to Asia is an imaginary axis that shifted from the Mediterranean into Northern Europe, then in the middle of the Atlantic, before finally settling in the United States, and that it will continue to shift westward, with no sources or reasoning given.
While the numbers presented on the site are horrifying, there is zero evidence presented that backs the numbers up. The model that they claim to use starts with assuming massive economic crashes, dwarfing the collapses of 2008 and 1929, which would cause significant portions of the US population to migrate to other countries for work, and other portions of the population to just die.
We do not have an exact breakdown for what they expect the split to be between these two groups, but the numbers do not seem reasonable regardless. A split that skews towards large migration numbers would be, by a wide margin, the largest refugee crisis ever seen on Earth, dwarfing even the largest refugee crises known to man. If the number skews more towards deaths, the numbers would rival or exceed The Black Death in sheer number of deaths. Remember again that no pandemic or war is projected in their model, so this would involve people dying at Black Death rates for no reason.
