I recently discussed what is perhaps the most twisted, disgusting anti-GMO tract ever written. It's by Mike Adams, who as Jon Entine said earlier this year, is "a titan in the booming alternative lifestyle business, running dozens of websites promoting ‘natural’ products, many of them bogus or dangerous, which he relentlessly hawks online." The main communication portal for Adams is Naturalnews.com. According to Alexa, the site receives 219, 877 daily unique visitors and 407, 386 daily pageviews. Dr. Oz featured Adams on his show several months ago. Earlier this week, Adams published a screed at his main site that carried this headline:
Biotech genocide, Monsanto collaborators and the Nazi legacy of ‘science’ as justification for murder
The article was accompanied by Nazi imagery and horrible pictures of the Holocaust. Adams equated Hitler's propagandists with today's media outlets and journalists who "have signed on to accelerate heinous crimes being committed against humanity under the false promise of 'feeding the world' with toxic GMOs." Adams refers to this as a modern-day genocide being perpetrated by "Monsanto collaborators." As if this wasn't bad enough, Adams then chillingly suggests (his emphasis),
that it is the moral right -- and even the obligation -- of human beings everywhere to actively plan and carry out the killing of those engaged in heinous crimes against humanity.
This creepy, disturbing rant has taken a darker turn. Today, I woke up to an update posted by Adams:
After this story was first published, someone has indeed launched a website that appears to be inspired by a suggestion from this story. The Monsanto Collaborators website lists the names of journalists and publications that the site says have contributed to the agricultural genocide of GMOs, comparing the 250,000+ suicides caused by GMOs to "genocide" and the Holocaust.
Yeah, we can guess who that "someone" is. This update by Adams singles out Jon Entine and the "Monsanto Collaborators" website lists a number of publishers and journalists, including myself. The whole thing just takes your breath away. One of the listed "collaborator" outlets is Alternet, which over the weekend published a hard-hitting critique of Adams and other popular alternative health hucksters who, as Cliff Weathers wrote in his piece, "often cherry-pick science and use what suits them as semantic backdrop to fool unsuspecting consumers." Last night, Weathers contacted me to say that shortly after his article appeared, he stared getting "numerous crank calls." Unhinged extremists like Mike Adams should be concerning to anti-GMO campaigners, which includes a shrill minority (amplified by some influential voices) that traffics in ugly, conspiratorial rhetoric. Adams has distinguished himself as the darkest, most disturbing manifestation of the anti-GMO movement. I certainly hope Dr. Oz and anyone else who takes him seriously is taking note. UPDATE: You may be wondering if it's counterproductive to spotlight the mad ramblings of someone like Adams? It's a legitimate question that I gave some thought to before writing this post and the one before it. David Ropeik captures why I went ahead. The analogous examples he gives are exactly the ones I had in mind:
This is no different than Right to Life activists calling for the murder of abortion doctors fueling the hatred that leads some to commit such murders, or people so angry at the government that they bomb government buildings and kill innocent victims.
UPDATE: Mike Adams has responded at his website. I can't do justice to it. Best that you read it from the man himself, in full:
After careful analysis, I have come to the conclusion that the Monsanto Collaborators website is a bait-and-switch trap engineered by the biotech industry in an effort to lure in support from GMO skeptics and then discredit them with some sort of insane "call to action" of some kind. Click here to see the evidence and reasoning on this. Because of this, I am recommending that members of the GMO skeptics community refrain from linking to or endorsing the Monsanto Collaborators website.
Additionally, immediately upon publication of this article, the usual GMO corporate shills immediately began to spread utterly false and defamatory information about what this article actually stated, inventing false quotes and intentionally citing sentences out of context. We expect nothing less than lies and fabrications from the GMO crowd, of course, but they have taken it to a whole new level in their attempts to silence this powerful story that tells the truth about the agricultural holocaust that has already killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people.I have always stated in this story, as you can see below: "For the record, in no way do I condone vigilante violence against anyone, and I believe every condemned criminal deserves a fair trial and a punishment that fits the crime. Do not misinterpret this article as any sort of call for violence, as I wholly disavow any such actions. I am a person who demands due process under the law for all those accused of crimes."
