Obviously THEY ARE PLANNING TO KILL US ALL. So contend many conspiracy theorists, who - according to this episode of "Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura" - really have taken this supposed global plot right over the edge of sanity.
The Bilderberg Group is interesting from a conspiracy perspective in that the meetings are verifiable fact. Unlike so many conspiracies, the Bilderberg Group is a real thing that actually happens. They have a website and everything.
(I am bemused to note that a committee of the most powerful people in the world can't manage to figure out the title tag, much less preloading images in order to make the color transitions for their menu items' rollover effects seamless.)
Strangely enough, this doesn't make it more difficult to deny claims that the group is planning to severely "depopulate" the world.
Most of the Bilderberg claims revolve around a global death plot. There are too many people, you see. Too hard to control. In order to take the planet's reins, the Bilderberg Group participants are planning to kill up to 80% of the current population. (Why they should do such a thing when it's the number of people that launched them to power in the first place is never addressed.)
My guess? It's a lot of rich people paying a lot of money once a year to be made to feel even more important than they already do. Shocking memo: these people have insatiable egos. That's how they got where they are in the first place.
When you get right down to it, my ability to buy into this conspiracy is undermined by my decades of real-world experience to the effect that nothing useful ever happened at a meeting, much less a three-day conference. NOTHING. Of all the forms of human effort, meetings and conferences are surely the least productive.
If a global group of elite maniacs really does plan to create a "hellish prison planet" (in the words of conspiracy theory expert and radio host Alex Jones), they are unlikely to be planning it over a three day conference. Most likely they are killing their own kind with endless Powerpoint presentations. (I must admit, the thought gives me a warm glow.)
This episode runs off the rails (as all Conspiracy Theory episodes eventually do) when Ventura starts investigating HOW the Bilderberg Group plans to kill us all. Suddenly the show bogs down in a morass disparate threads, each crazier than the last. Water fluoridation is a plan to introduce long-term toxicity into our bloodstreams. Vaccines are actually a toxin, deliberately administered by the World Health Organization, which is simultaneously spreading swine flu via nasal spray "so-called inoculants."
I've heard a lot of crazy-ass stuff from the anti-vax crowd. But "vaccines are a WHO plot to KILL EVERYONE" is a new one to me.
Unfortunately I'm afraid that the truth is far more mundane. Vaccines do not represent the beachhead of a "genocidal Holocaust." No one is changing the course of the world via a three-day annual conference. And if we're all going to hell in a handbasket, it's our own doing, not the evil machinations of a secret underground power conspiracy.