Ted Turner, Reduce population by five billion people

by Ben Johnson

ATLANTA, GEORGIA, June 7, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Media mogul and population control advocate Ted Turner recently told citizen journalists he would like to reduce the world’s population by five billion people, asking parents to be a “one child family…for 100 years.”

Turner had to answer for his history of provocative statements, and made a few new ones, when members of the website WeAreChange.org caught up with him on camera late last month.

One individual asked the CNN founder what his goal was for world population.

“I think two billion is about right,” Turner said as he walked briskly away.  In October, the number of people in the world reached seven billion.

Before disappearing around the corner Turner said he hoped to eliminate five billion people through the “one child family.”

The interviewer responded, “One child policy.”

Turner answered, “For 100 years.”

In a subsequent interview, Turner was asked if he had said “a 95 percent decline from present [population] levels would be ideal” in the 1990s. Turner replied, “I might have said that, ‘96 was a long time ago.”

In a third confrontation, the amateur journalists asked Turner if he formulated his views during the Bilderberg conference.
Although it is not clear Turner was endorsing China’s one-child policy of forced abortion, he previously denied Beijing had taken “draconian steps” to control its birthrate during a 2009 interview on the Diane Rehm Show. Instead, he claimed China merely “encouraged” its citizens to have one baby, though he volunteered, “I’m not intimately familiar with everything.”

Experts and eyewitnesses were “shocked and appalled” by his comments.

John Smeaton, director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), said Turner was “denying the Holocaust.”

Reducing the world’s birthrate has long been a passion of Turner’s, “as long as it’s voluntary.” He noted people turn against the notion of population control, because “people don’t want to be controlled.” In 2010, Turner proposed allowing women to sell their fertility rights. Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, told LifeSiteNews.com at the time, “There is…something despicable about offering a poor, hungry woman food, money, or clothing in exchange for her surrendering her fertility.”

Such a plan was outlawed by the 1999 Tiahrt Amendment, Mosher noted. 

Turner forecast an environmental disaster of apocalyptic dimensions if measures are not taken immediately. “We’ll be eight degrees hotter in…30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow,” he said. “Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down.” 

The video team from WeAreChange.org asked the 73-year-old businessman if it were hypocritical to support a one-child family when he had five children and was one of the nation’s largest landholders.

The Land Report magazine lists Turner as the nation’s second largest private landholder, behind his business partner, John Malone. Turner owns more than two million acres. 

The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported that Turner’s critics “accuse him of trying to corner the land over the world’s largest underground water system, and of conspiring with the United Nations — to which he has donated millions of dollars through a nonprofit group he created — to build a huge federal wildlife refuge that would remove the land from Nebraska’s tax rolls.”

Turner, a dedicated globalist, donated $1 billion to the United Nations, much of which has been used for “projects dealing with women and population issues.” 

The outspoken atheist told a gathering of Society of Environmental Journalists in 1998 his views were incompatible with Christian doctrine or the Biblical admonition to “be fruitful and multiply.”   

Turner has mocked the late, Blessed Pope John Paul II for his Polish roots, said the Ten Commandments are “a little out of date,” and stated the pope needs to “get with it.” 

In 1998, he told a meeting of Zero Population Growth he and other population controllers fought against “the forces of darkness in general.”

Attempts to contact the website WeAreChange.org were unsuccessful.