A Brief History of the End of the World
by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
July 13, 2025
Recently on The Corbett Report podcast I was discussing Antichrist or Armageddon. If you haven't seen that episode yet, check it out here.
In that important exploration, I mentioned that in my time in the independent media I have seen dozens and dozens of predictions of the end of the world—predictions often conveyed to me in hyperventilating emails about how I simply must spread the word about these imminent threats to ALL LIFE ON EARTH!
Well, you know me! I'm always happy to oblige my dear readers and listeners! So, here I am, dutifully passing along my readers' warnings of certain death! . . . after the deadlines for these many predicted cataclysms have already come and gone.
And, once we've examined a handful of these false predictions, perhaps we can get a better handle on why people are so interested in tales of Armageddon and how we can better invest our time and our energy.
Are you ready? Let's go!
Beware Operation Blackjack!
Remember back in 2009 when The Telegraph decided to run "Blackjack – A slide show story"? If you're like most people, you probably don't. But I certainly do.
Like many people at the time, I was struck by the sheer weirdness of this . . . thing. What even was it, exactly?
A slideshow? . . .
In the (online) pages of a major newspaper? . . .
Purporting to relate the tale of the "entirely fictitious" Operation Blackjack, including "a series of terrorist nuclear attacks on major [W]estern cities?"
Why was a newspaper running a slide show about a nuclear terror attack anyway? Why were they at pains to write "The events portrayed in this slide show are entirely fictitious" under each and every single slide? Why was it so weirdly specific, noting that the bomb is set off by "a coalition of home-grown extremists, Islamists and Christian doomsday-cultists" at precisely 8:03:27 AM on June 22?
For those who don't remember (or weren't following it at the time), the sheer strangeness of this series of images was certainly part of The Telegraph editors' intention. The piece was simply published without comment or explanation in the "Culture" section of The Telegraph website as if it were just another lighthearted "What's On in the City" guide or a fun summer reading list.
It's almost as if it were being published specifically to attract attention from the then-growing online conspiracy truther movement. And—SPOILER ALERT!—that turned out to be exactly what it was!
Of course, the publication of the initial slideshow was only the beginning of the Blackjack weirdness. What followed was a Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5 of the increasingly convoluted story, in which it was eventually revealed that the attacks were in fact being plotted by shadowy deep state agents for the purpose of instituting a fascistic world government.
Along the way, conspiracy-hunting readers were treated to a number of cryptic clues, including a fake North American Union ID card sporting a very real hexadecimal code.
A code that, when converted to text, assured readers: "This is not simply entertainment."
For those who want to follow the entire twisted tale of Operation Blackjack—including the ultimate revelation of who perpetrated this elaborate hoax—I suggest you familiarize (or re-familiarize) yourself with Episode 091 of The Corbett Report podcast, "Beware Operation Blackjack."
But, as I note in that podcast, the long story short is that, of the thousands of people who followed this unfolding saga in real time—many of whom earnestly believed that an actual nuclear false flag incident was about to take place at seven identifiable locations around the globe—almost none of them actually did anything about the imminent threat. They simply sat in front of their computers, decoding hexadecimal codes and posting clues to internet fora.
There's a lesson in there somewhere, but I don't have time to find it because . . .
The World Is On Fire!!!
Have you heard of the "climate clock"? It's a digital clock on the face of a glass building in downtown Manhattan counting down the days until July 21, 2029.
Why July 21, 2029, you ask?
As the clock's website helpfully explains, that is when we will reach the so-called climate tipping point, i.e., the point at which we will no longer be able to stop catastrophic climate change by curbing our deadly carbon dioxide emissions.
. . . Well, OK, the clock's website actually explains that the original climate doomsday clock was set to December 31, 2027. I guess we gained a couple of years somewhere along the way. Come to think of it, perhaps the science behind this "climate countdown" idea isn't quite as rock-solid as its proponents claim.
Perhaps that's why, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we have all the way until 2040 to limit the impacts of global warming and prevent a climate catastrophe.
But then the fine folks at the IPCC might want to synchronize their clock with that of María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés, the former President of the United Nations General Assembly. Back in 2019 she declared that we in fact only have until 2030 to appease the weather gods and avert atmospheric Armageddon.
Or maybe we should listen to the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, whose no doubt "super-scientific calculations" inform us that humanity has only until 2027 to head off this environmental doomsday.
However, let us not forget the warning of the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Simon Stiell, who has told us that the great global warming reckoning will actually take place in 2026.
Yes, there's nothing that the high priests of the carbon cult like more than setting the countdown timer on the doomsday clock to increasingly shorter and shorter durations. Observe:
Now, if you look at such a concatenation of progressively foreshortening countdowns to calamity and think to yourself, "Goodness! We're going to need to start measuring the time until the end of the world in days pretty soon," I have news for you: you're wrong!
Why? Because as it turns out we're already dead!
Don't believe me? Just ask former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres. Back in 2017 she warned that we have only three years left to save the planet—which, by my calculation, means the world ended five years ago.
Or ask King Charles. Way back in July 2009—when he was still a lowly prince—he informed the world that we had "just 96 months left to save the world," meaning that the world in fact ended in 2017.
Or ask Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the UN Environment Programme, who in 1980 told us that "entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000." (I'm checking my atlas at the moment but haven't determined which nations have been wiped off the face of the map in the past 25 years. I will update you if and when I locate those missing nations.)
So, to summarize: the world is already doomed. The experts have spoken. The only question left to be determined is when, precisely, the world will end (if it hasn't ended already).
But there's no time to work that out because . . .
The Shemitah is Coming!!!!!
Remember back in 2015, when a crack squad of investigators discovered the Shemitah cycle?
You know, the Shemitah cycle! The pattern of crashes and market cataclysms that happen every seven years that is somehow or other related to the seven-year cycle of debt forgiveness related in the Bible?
Well, if you don't remember, you have some catching up to do! But if you want the crash course, the idea is that back in biblical times the Jewish people celebrated every seventh year with a general forgiveness of debts. And, at the end of the seventh of these seven-year cycles (i.e., every 50 years), there is a “Jubilee” in which all land reverts to its original owner and all slaves are set free.
This sounds great . . . but some highly credible sources discovered back in the 2010s that this seven-year blessing of a God-fearing people had become, in our godless times, a curse. Instead of a debt jubilee, every seven years now precipitates an economic crash, and the seventh of every such seven-year cycle brings with it some world-shaking calamity.
Various lists of events were proffered to justify this calculation. To wit:
1901–1902 Year of Shemitah — Stock market drops almost 50%.
1916–1917 Year of Shemitah (*Super Shemitah Year) — Stock market drops 40%. United States enters WWI. Germany, Russia, Austria, Turkey and Great Britain suffer economic collapse.
1930–1931 Year of Shemitah — The Great Depression. The worst financial crisis in modern history.
1937–1938 Year of Shemitah — Half of the stock market collapses, sparking a global recession.
1944–1945 Year of Shemitah — End of German Reich and Britain's hold on territories. Establishment of America as the world's superpower. Bretton Woods Conference giving the US Dollar Global Reserve Currency status; and diminishing of gold’s influence.
1965–1966 Year of Shemitah (*Super Shemitah Year) — Stock market drops almost 25%.
1972–1973 Year of Shemitah — Stock market crashes almost 50%. Global recession; US oil crisis.
1979–1980 Year of Shemitah — Global recession.
1986–1987 Year of Shemitah — “Black Tuesday”; stock market crashes by one-third.
1993–1994 Year of Shemitah — Bond market crashes.
2000–2001 Year of Shemitah — 9/11. Markets open on final day of Shemitah, September 17; stock market falls 700 points.
2007–2008 Year of Shemitah — On the last day of the Shemitah Year, September 29, the stock market drops a record 777 points.
2014–2015 Year of Shemitah (*Super Shemitah Year) . . .
Of course, those of a skeptical bent will note that this highly cherry-picked list sometimes cites very specific and identifiable events that took place on a specific date (like the record drop in the markets on the last day of the 2008 Shemitah) and sometimes mentions vague and amorphous trends that smear out across an unmeasurable period of time (like the "global recession" we are told took place during the "1979–1980" Shemitah year).
But the types of people who would point out that dubious lists like this are in fact random strings of cherry-picked events and trends that are in no way related to a seven-year cycle are obviously godless heathens, and they're probably no fun at parties, either, so boo to them!
Anyway, the point is that the Shemitah in 2015 happened to be the seventh of the seven-year cycle, so that was gonna be a Super Bad End of the World As We Know It economic catastrophe that was going to send people into the streets, tearing off their shirts in anguish as they watched the World As We Know It disintegrate around us.
I mean, I'm sure we all remember where we were during the Great Shemitah Catastrophe of September 23, 2015, don't we? The day that the World As We Knew It ended forever!
. . . Oh, wait, what are you saying? Nothing at all of any significance took place on that date and the world went on exactly as usual?
Well, whatever. There's probably some post-hoc rationalization we can come up with to retroactively explain why our prediction didn't come true.
Anyway, who has time to worry about why the world failed to end in 2015 when we have more important doomsdays to worry about? I mean, have you even read . . .
Pike's WWIII letter!!!!!!!
Have you read Scottish Rite Sovereign Grand Commander Albert Pike's August 15, 1871, letter, in which he presciently foretold not just the First World War ("brought about in order to permit the Illuminati to overthrow the power of the Czars in Russia and of making that country a fortress of atheistic Communism") and the Second World War ("brought about so that Nazism is destroyed and that the political Zionism be strong enough to institute a sovereign state of Israel in Palestine") but the THIRD World War!
If you're the sort of person who hangs out in conspiracy realist spaces, you certainly have read it before. You've probably read it often enough that you can cite his famous prediction by heart:
The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the 'agentur' of the 'Illuminati' between the political Zionists and the leaders of Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other.
And if you haven't read it yet, just wait a few weeks. Someone will make another SHOCKING report exposing the UNBELIEVABLE prediction of the next Great War! Oh, there it is, right on time!
There's only one slight problem with this wonderful End of the World story: Pike did not in fact write those words.
Yes, I hate to rain on everyone's Armageddon parade, but the so-called WWIII letter is not, in fact, an authentic letter written in 1871, which you might have surmised from the pesky little fact that it speaks of Nazism and other concepts that didn't exist at that time.
"But maybe Pike was just such a divine seer that he was able to foretell the coming of the Nazis, &c.!" the true believers will no doubt rejoin.
But that's only because they haven't read my expose on this hoax letter, which links to the actual first-ever reference to the letter and shows there's nary a "Nazi" or a "Communist" or a "World War" to be found anywhere in it.
The real story of the letter is rather convoluted, but it boils down to:
Michael Haupt said that William Guy Carr said that Cardinal Caro y Rodriguez of Santiago, Chile, said that The Cause of World Unrest said that the confessed hoaxer Gabriel Jogand-Pagès aka Dr. Bataille aka Leo Taxil said that Albert Pike wrote Giuseppe Mazzini in Le diable au XIXe siècle, v. II, 1892–1894, p. 605 (but actually pp. 594–606).
Or, in visual form:
In case that perfectly sensible infographic didn't make it clear, not only is the Pike WWIII letter another incorrect prediction of the coming Battle of Armageddon, it's not even a real prediction. It's a hoax that has been propagated in various forms for a century now by various fraudsters.
That liars are going to make up dramatic lies about The End of the World is perhaps not that surprising, though. The real question is: "Why do people fall for these lies over and over and over?"
But we don't have time to contemplate that. Haven't you heard about . . .
The Deagle (or is that Deagel?) Death Divination!!!!!!!!!
I hope you've all made your peace with the world, because it's virtually certain that you and/or a majority of your loved ones will be dead in the next six months.
Don't believe me? Just look at this!
What? Don't you recognize this? It's a stunning prediction of near-total death, disaster and calamity that is about to befall us. This particular screenshot demonstrates that, sometime in the Year of our Lord 2025, the population of the United States is going to fall from 332 million down to 99 million, a drop of 70%.
For those of you who (like me) are not in the US and think you might avoid this coming calamity, let me share the bad news. Much of the rest of the world's population will be similarly decimated in the coming months.
The population of Japan? Down 18%!
The population of Canada? Down 30%!
The population of France? Down 42%
The population of Israel? Down 54%!
So, what unholy terror, precisely, will be unleashed upon the world to account for such havoc? And who is predicting this, precisely? And where are they getting their information from, precisely?
Who knows! Who cares! The point is, we're all gonna die!
For those who are truly lost, I'm referring of course to the stunning forecast of population decline by 2025 from Deagel.com, a website that primarily publishes technical data on military technology. Up until 2022, however, the website also contained a mysterious forecast showing that a number of countries were going to suffer significant population decline by 2025.
The fact that no one knew what this site was, where it got its information or why it was opining on future population did not stop the usual sober sources in the alt media from SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS about the impending ARMAGEDDON that was going to WIPE OUT MUCH OF HUMANITY!!!
After all, don't you know that Dr. Edwin A. Deagel, Jr. was an active CFR member and a Rockefeller toadie to boot!!!
Of course, certain party poopers came along to point out some problems with this terrible tale of tribulation.
Like the fact that all of Deagle.com's previous population predictions had turned out to be stunningly incorrect.
Or that the website itself notes that "the forecast is nothing more than a game of numbers whether flawed or correct based upon some speculative assumptions."
Or that Deagle ("le")—as in Deagle.com—has nothing whatsoever to do with Edwin Deagel ("el").
But why are you going to let some pesky facts get in the way of a good scare story? Especially when there are still a few months left for this one to come true! Quick, start spreading the news about our encroaching demise to everyone you know!!!
Etc., etc.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm sure you get the point by now. Do I really need to go on?
Oh, OK.
Remember when the probability of a WWIII-provoking nuclear terror attack was "extremely high" on June 6, 2006, because . . . 6/6/6?
Or when the "next 9/11" was absolutely going to happen in the summer of 2007 because some retired Army captain had taken the Bush regime’s ginned-up fearmongering at face value?
Or when we were all supposed to be afraid of a false flag on January 21st (or 22nd) of 2009 because Colin Powell said there was going to be an event "we don't even know about yet" at that time?
Or when there was going to be a nuclear false flag in November 2010 because of a still image from an episode of The Simpsons? (Or when that exact same image also predicted a false flag event in 2012?)
Or when the economy was going to collapse on July 20, 2014 because, "G is the 7the [sic] letter of the alphabet and this might be a reference to 7/20/2014"?
Remember when an anonymous "trust me, bro" insider swore there was gonna be a nationwide curfew/lockdown in Canada on Dec 2, 2020?
Or when WWIII was going to start on November 23, 2023, at 6:05pm because someone's Alexa assistant said so?
Or when Japan was going to be wiped off the face of the map last week because a Japanese manga from the 1990s foretold it?
And we haven't even touched on the flip side of these predictions yet. After all, if the world we're living in is so corrupt and evil, then the End of the World As We Know It—i.e., the toppling of the deep state—would obviously be a good thing.
So, do you remember when the white hat insiders were going to release an army of "trained ninjas" to "pluck out the eye at the top of the Illuminati pyramid"?
Or when the queen of NESARA was going to zero out all debts, abolish all income taxes and declare world peace?
Or when the all-knowing QAnon announced that "we are taking back our great country" and offered the bold (and completely false) prediction that Hillary Clinton would be arrested between 7:45 AM and 8:30 AM on Monday, October 30, 2017? (Still waiting on that one, Q!)
Believe it or not, I could go on even longer!
I haven't even begun to tell you about all the private emails I get from no doubt well-meaning people who urge me to share the news that "A DIRTY BOMB OR SUITCASE NUKE WILL EXPLODE IN NYC ON SEP 25" (2023) or "Israel will nuke Syria on Oct 26" (2023) or "remote viewing and predictive linguistics data imply a Nuke is going to go off in 1 to 2 weeks" (2023) or "On the 8th day of April, there will be a Solar Total Eclipse, just 2 days before a conjunction between Mars and Saturn" so "it does seem like war is coming" (2023) or when Kamala Harris will absolutely die in a plane crash on Feb 24 (2024).
Heck, going through the dozens and dozens and dozens of such emails I've received from different people in the past couple of years alone, I found one that was so close! Apparently "God's prophetic signs that Jesus commanded his disciples to watch for" revealed that "Israel and the US would bomb Iran on 6/9/25." Remarkable! Of course, the same email predicted that Paul Simon will die on August 1, a solar flare CME will knock out the North American power grid on August 13 and an asteroid will hit Earth on August 31, so you'd better buckle up! It's gonna be one hell of a summer! (RIP Paul Simon.)
Anyway, perhaps you're starting to appreciate what I mean when I say I hear about the End of the World on a daily basis. So, here's the real question: What does this obsession with Armageddon really mean?
The World Is Always Ending
Look, I get it. It's fun to contemplate the end of the world. It's an exciting topic!
What's more, we as a species are hard-wired to look for threats. So, what is an apex predator species who is threatened by so very little in its thoroughly conquered natural habitat supposed to do to occupy its time? Why, talk about the Ultimate Threat, of course! The apocalypse!
For the hard of thinking, let me be clear: I am not here to denigrate the idea that there are genuine threats out there. Or that some of those threats are potentially species-threatening.
But I am here to talk about how people in our online age have turned those threats into so much clickbait nonsense and how they have gamified people's natural preservation instincts for clicks, likes and attention. Because, in the long run, the only thing this constant flood of false predictions and doomsday disappointments actually does is demotivate people and discourage them from taking action in the real world.
They end up like the online warriors "fighting" Operation Blackjack by sitting at their keyboards playing an elaborate Augmented Reality Game and decoding cryptic clues in a newspaper cartoon strip.
Or they end up like the QAnoners, "trusting the plan" and waiting forever for the political saviour who will never arrive.
Or they end up like the Deagel (or is that Deagle?) devotees who have decided that some anonymous, sourceless, meaningless "forecast" posted to some website they hadn't heard of ten minutes ago has the ironclad truth about what's going to happen to the world population in 2025 and there's NOTHING anyone can do about it!
Or they end up like the climate cultists, who have decided that since humans have such horrible carbon footprints they simply can't think of having children (and you shouldn't either, you selfish monster!).
Or they end up chasing some other rabbit down the endless rabbit hole that is the internet and end up basing their whole identity on the ice age / pole reversal / comet strike / alien invasion / planet X calamity that is going to end us all, just you wait!
To all these people, I say: your concern for humanity is admirable! So, why not turn that concern into productive human activity? You know, creating new infrastructure, or inventing new technology, or raising a generation of capable, loving human beings who will be fit to survive the next "end of the world" scenario?
In the end (no pun intended), I think this all boils down to two things:
1) Even if I knew for absolute certain that the world was going to explode on my 75th birthday and the entire human population would disappear in an instant, I would still rather have spent my life learning and creating and playing and making friends and making love and LIVING LIFE than wallowing in fear and selfpity over the coming annihilation; and
2) I would sincerely hope that, if nothing else, this editorial causes at least one or two people to pause a moment in quiet contemplation before they send me that email detailing their STARTLING PREDICTION about the CATACLYSMIC EVENT that is CERTAINLY ABSOLUTELY TRULY 100% GUARANTEED to happen tomorrow!!!!!!!!! . . .
. . . Oh wait, nevermind. Looks like there's a massive coronal hole at the moment. Bracing for slew of new emails in 3 . . . 2 . . .
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