Health Danger and Fact Rearranger Mike Adams spews again

Like most career fear-mongers and conspiracy tale peddlers, Mike Adams, aka the Health Ranger, head of the NaturalNews "independent journalism" scampire, seems to care far more about sensationalism than about accuracy. This is no big secret. I'm not breaking any new ground here. The skeptical blogs have been on his case for years, and RationalWiki has an entry about him, which redirects to their entry about NaturalNews.

But I've mentioned Adams a few times on this blog too. I first wrote about him in June 2013, in response to a Natural News post about one of this blog's favorite topics, imprisoned serial scammer Kevin Trudeau, aka KT, aka Katie. In that post I cited Adams' disregard for accuracy, as reflected in a patently false statement about the $37.6 million FTC fine hanging over Trudeau's head. Mike Adams' big headline proclaimed:

Kevin Trudeau ordered to surrender his passports as feds try to force $37 million in GIN refunds

And to this day, nearly three years later, the headline remains intact.

GIN, as most of you probably know, is the Global Information Network, a major scam that was originally Trudeau's brainchild and personal piggy bank. It was officially launched in late 2009 and continues operation to this day, under"new" ownership (a group of Katie's longtime buddies).

But here's the thing (as the stunning, slow-motion-walking, marginally age-appropriate and vaguely predatory-looking women love to say on the Viagra commercials that are currently airing in the US). Wait, I lost my train of thought. Oh, yeah. Here's the thing: that $37.6 million fine Adams blared in his headline has nothing to do with GIN refunds. Rather, it is in relation to a civil contempt case (which also became a criminal contempt case, and it's the criminal case that ultimately landed Katie in prison). The fine had to do with claims Trudeau made in an infomercial about his diet book. But the case itself had been ongoing since 2003, though Trudeau's history of wrongdoing dates back years before that. Even after Trudeau serves his ten-year sentence he will still owe that fine, probably with interest, unless he can negotiate to get it reduced or reversed.

But as I explained in my 2013 blog post, the fact that the fine had nothing to do with GIN refunds was of no import to Mike Adams, whose own post provided only the lamest of criticisms of Trudeau's possible wrongdoings. The main purpose of Adams' post wasn't to call out Trudeau's fraud, but rather to engage in one of Adams' favorite hobbies: wingnut political ranting against President Obama. Adams scoffed at the description by ABC News of Trudeau as a seller of dreams and false hopes, citing Obama as a much worse offender in that regard. Had he chosen to do so, Adams could have corrected the error on his post regarding the fine, and still left his political rants intact. But he didn't. And for the most part he seemed to be defending Trudeau rather than criticizing him, which is why I referred to Adams as a phony hero in the battle against Scamworld.

I recognize, though, that the misstatement about Trudeau's fine is just one small and relatively trivial goof in Adams' massive and seemingly quite profitable ouevre of misinformation, distortion and outright lies. And he's not just a deceiver; he's a deceiver who has, according to several reports, physically threatened those with whom he disagrees, as I mentioned in this 2014 blog post (see under the subhead, "Who is oppressing whom?"). Adams' claims that he is constantly being persecuted, threatened and endangered seem hypocritical when you consider some of his attempts to intimidate and threaten others.

More recently, Mike Adams was front and center in the conspiracy speculation about actor Rober De Niro's decision not to show the anti-vaccination fraudumentary Vaxxed at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival. Here's my blog post, in which I linked to one of Adams' rants about the matter. And now we get to the main point of my present post: Adams uses that rant to seriously defame someone with whom he appears to be obsessed these days: a popular physician blogger. With this series of defamatory posts Mike Adams and some of his staffers appear to have reached a new low.

Mike Adams defames Dr. David Gorski
Adams and Dr. Gorski (aka Orac, author of the Respectful Insolence blog) have been at odds for years, but Adams' recent series of vicious attacks on Dr. Gorski almost seem like he's asking for a lawsuit. Here's another one of his screeds. In this one as in others, Adams falsely links Dr. Gorski with a fraudulent doctor, Farid Fata, whom Dr. Gorski does not know but has repeatedly described as "evil."

And indeed "evil" seems an understatement. Though ultimately prosecuted and put away for money laundering and fraud, Dr. Fata's true evil lay in the fact that he administered chemo to patients for years, telling them they had cancer when they didn't, and then he billed Medicare. He also over-treated terminal cancer patients rather than let them die peacefully, and when he could profit from it he under-treated cancer patients who very likely could have otherwise benefited. Last year he was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison.

Equally as repulsive, Adams is also spreading unsubstantiated rumors -- lies, most likely -- about Dr. Gorski being very unpopular with his patients. The basis of this claim seems to be a collection of what appear to be fake reviews planted by some Gorski/Orac detractors who more than likely have never been his patients.

Clearly Adams is on the offensive to destroy Dr. Gorski's reputation. As has been the case with other scammers I've written about, Scientology Fair Game policies and practices come to my mind. And indeed, for several years rumors have been floating around that Mike Adams has been somehow involved with Scientology. He certainly seems sympathetic to them and some of their viewpoints. This doesn't mean that he is involved with Scientology now (he has said he is not a Scientologist) or that his own Fair-Game-ish strategies are dictated by that evil "Church." But he seems to be using some of the same strategies of lies and intimidation that CoS has been using for decades. And those are disgusting tactics, regardless of one's "religious" affiliation or lack thereof.

Here is one of David Gorski's posts outlining and deconstructing the series of lies that Mike Adams is perpetrating about him.


But Dr. Gorski's attempts to defend himself don't seem to be making a dent in the NaturalNews universe of deception. Turning the skeptics' own terms around on them, Adams labels evidence-based medicine and science "pseudoscience." (And in a particularly loathsome rhetorical strategy, he has co-opted the very real problem of Holocaust denial, nattering on about "vaccine Holocaust denial.")

Adams also labels Gorski as a charlatan and cancer quack, which, given the sins of some of Adams' own alt-health colleagues and scammers, is a classic pot-and-kettle case. As I noted above, these days on Natural News he seems completely obsessed with Dr. Gorski. Immediately below is a screen shot of the home page of Natural News on April 24, 2016. Notice the list of links on the right hand side. The far right column ("Health News") semi-pretends to be a list of links from outside news sources, but they are all from NewsTarget.com, which is very much Mike Adams' site as well.



Trying to conquer the Internet, one comical alt-site at a time
But I guess all of this is to be expected from the guy who is so afraid of people finding out the truth about him and his colleagues that he started his own lame version of Wikipedia: the very ill-named TruthWiki. (Here's the TruthWiki entry about David Gorski. And while we're at it, here's Gorski, as Orac, writing about TruthWiki in 2014.)

Adams is also the guy who decided to give Google a run for their money by launching the also ill-named GoodGopher. GoodGopher very carefully filters out what they consider "disinformation" and government/Big Pharma propaganda, instead stacking their search results with alt-nutty and rightwing sites (which are euphemistically called "independent news media") such as NaturalNews (of course!) as well as Breitbart, The Blaze, Washington Times (owned and run by Moonies), Drudge Report, Western Journalism and more.

It's a pretty lousy search engine, but it's tailor-made for the no-evil monkeys who want to avoid any fact or opinion that might shake their carefully constructed world of alt-health advocacy, Scamworld delusions, conspiracy theories and right-wing spin.

And despite Google's well documented evils such as tracking and privacy invasion -- not to mention the whole thing about sponsored links -- Google does seem to be trying to preserve and improve the integrity of search. Moreover it's not as if Google censors Mike Adams or any of his other lunatic fraud buddies. If you Google "Mike Adams," the first couple of entries are his own sites. There are some inconvenient results mentioning his quackery, though, which of course you'll not find on GoodGopher.

Another example: If you Google "Leonard Coldwell," there's currently a big sponsored entry that pops up first, describing Coldwell as an "Author" -- and it's all fluff and no criticism. It even refers to him as a doctor. But again... darn those critical links, which seem to pop up in the top results no matter what Coldwell's SEO team does. RationalWiki's piece always seems to be up there.

Speaking of which, here's the RationalWiki entry on GoodGopher.

The conspiracy that isn't
Like so many in the "alternative media" sector, Mike Adams never met a conspiracy theory he didn't like, particularly if it involves Big Pharma and other aspects of modern medicine. Especially vaccinations. The vax-conspiracy fans have all sorts of stories about how vaccinations are a nefarious plot by the New World Order to control the population by making undesirables sterile or outright killing them... or that vaccinations are being used to implant RFID chips to track us... or they're being used to make us all gay... you get the drift.

Where Dr. Gorski is concerned Adams has gleefully fabricated several conspiracy tales, not just falsely linking Dr. G. with the loathsome Dr. Fata but also bringing Wikipedia and The Huffington Post into his twisted, tangled narrative.

In his latest series of screeds Adams has accused Gorski of creating, editing or somehow being involved in manipulating the edits of a Wikipedia post about the documentary Vaxxed, which includes many critical comments about the film. Never mind that Gorski insists -- and the Wikipedia edit history indicates -- that Gorski had nothing to do with it. Adams continues to spread his lies, and his fans enthusiastically embrace his version of "reality."

Another tale that has the reality-impaired fringe of the Interwebz buzzing is the claim that Huffington Post pulled an article about Vaxxed that was written by a guy named Lance Simmens, who had been a contributor to HuffPo for eight years. Although that supposed "censorship" is actually a standalone story and has been treated as such by most of the sites that mentioned it, leave it to Mike Adams to conflate the story with his false accusations about Gorski, both in his headline and post on April 19.

Now, there are several reasons to be critical of Huffington Post, and I've criticized them in the past for posting fluff by scammers such as convicted killer James Arthur Ray and Scientologist Grant Cardone. Another reason to not be a fan is their utter disregard for independent contributors. Dr. Gorski has also criticized HuffPo. And according to Wikipedia...

The Huffington Post has been criticized by several science bloggers and online news sources for including articles by supporters of alternative medicine and anti-vaccine activists and for allegedly censoring rebuttals written by science bloggers before publishing them.^[64][65]

So I seriously doubt there was some conspiracy to quash favorable reviews of or comments about Vaxxed on The Huffington Post. I doubt even more seriously that Dr. Gorski was involved in "censoring" the article.

But Mike Adams knows his audience well. The comments on his various posts about this so-called "conspiracy" -- and indeed all of his posts about Dr. Gorski -- are truly comical, and none of his followers seems willing to believe that things could be other than the way Adams laid them out. A few defenders of Gorski (not me, but others), and even Gorski himself, have been allowed to comment but were dismissed by the minions. 

In truth there is no conspiracy here. But, to quote one of this blog's favorite mantras: The facts don't matter if the story is good. And Adams knows that his readers love them some good conspiracy whoppers, and he gives them what they want.

Loony wants in on the drama
Not surprisingly, the aforementioned fake doctor, cancer quack and fellow conspiracy nutcake Leonard Coldwell is faithfully copying and pasting the defamatory blog posts about Dr. Gorski on his own "blog" on his main web site. There are no comments there so far, though I tried to post a comment yesterday on the April 18 offering, with a link to this blog post of Dr Gorski's. 

One of the posts that Coldwell copied and pasted from Natural News wasn't written by Mike Adams but rather by one of Adams' staffers, Julie Wilson. It was published on April 20. This part, where Ms. Wilson quotes Adams, seems particularly defamatory:

"If we genuinely care about the health and safety of cancer patients, we must reasonably ask how many patients have died under the care of Drs. Farid Fata or David Gorski? How many of those patients were African-American?" asked Mike Adams, author of Food Forensics,science lab director of CWLabs dot com and creator of Medicine dot news.

"Is there a disparity in patient outcomes between blacks and whites? We already know that Dr. Farid Fata committed systematic medical murder involving Karmanos in Detroit. That is now established fact. What we don't know is how many other people have died from dangerous medical interventions carried out by other colleagues such as Dr. David Gorski."

Bringing the race card into it in this way seems to be a new record even for Adams. And Adams' continued insistence on linking Dr. Gorski with Farid Fata does seem almost criminal.

And this April 23 post by Adams himself, describing Dr. Gorski as "a deranged, mentally ill cancer surgeon who is widely known as a pathological liar" is over-the-top wacko, sounding very much like the kind of stuff that Coldwell writes about his critics (e.g., me, Salty Droid, et al.). Except the spelling is better than Lenny's. In this post Adams even brings other alt-health scammers into play, quoting Ty Bollinger of "Truth About Cancer"infamy. But again, I have to wonder if Adams is just baiting Dr. G for a lawsuit.

By the way, to give you another view of just how objective and reliable Adams' TruthWiki is, here's the entry on Leonard Coldwell. As you can easily see, it is taken straight from Coldwell's web propaganda.

At any rate my attempts to comment on Natural News, as well as my attempts to comment on Coldwell's blog, have been a failure so far. It is probably a losing battle. But as long as the skeptical blogs remain up on the Internet, and searchable via real search engines, there's at least a chance for people to see Adams and his ilk for what they are. Here is the Skeptical Raptor with a concise summary of Mike Adams' lies about David Gorski.

Happy searching. I'll try to keep you posted about developments in this ongoing drama, but you can also keep apprised via Respectful Insolence and Dr. Gorski's posts on the Science Based Medicine blog. For his part Dr. Gorski seems to be taking it all in stride. As he wrote, "being lied about by Adams is a badge of honor."
 
PS added on April 25: On the Science-Based Medicine blog, Dr. Gorski wrote:

NOTE: Anyone who has seen several derogatory articles about me on the web and is curious about what the real story is, please read this, this, and this.

I'd already linked to the second item a couple of times on this blog, but I thought it worth repeating, especially since the conversation there is ongoing.

PPS added on May 5: When Googling this topic this morning I came across a blog post on Forbes.com from another physician, Dr. Peter Lipson, a practicing physician specializing in internal medicine. Clearly Dr. Lipson is a friend of Dr. Gorski's and no fan of Mike Adams, and for me it's easy to see why on both counts. From Dr. Lipson's post:

Just this week, Adams published a piece titled, ”Karmanos cancer surgeon Dr. David Gorski linked to ‘skeptics’ kingpin James Randi caught on tape soliciting bl*w job from young man – source.” The really scary thing here is that the headline is the least inflammatory part of the article.
Let’s put aside the fact that the headline seems to imply that Gorski was the one doing the soliciting. Further reading shows that he simply knows the man who Adams is accusing of sexual improprieties. That sort of cowardly, defamatory garbage is just the lede. The real attacks come in the body of the blog. Here’s the point-by-point breakdown of Adams’s lies, dishonest allegations and defamatory (at least in my lay opinion) accusations:

• Non-existent FBI investigation:

Dr. David Gorski–already the subject of a Natural News investigation that has submitted numerous allegations to the Federal Bureau of Investigation…

If you read carefully and follow the links, you see that Dr. Gorski is not the subject of any investigation but the one in Mike Adams’s own head. Adams’s writes that he himself has pestered the FBI to look into Gorski for…”reasons”? Making it seem as if a well-respected surgeon is the subject of a federal investigation is a dangerous road to go down.

• Alleged “racketeering”:

  Dr. David Gorski…is the mentally deranged leader of an online hate group calling themselves “skeptics.” An ongoing Natural News investigation has revealed that Gorski is just one of several co-conspirators who engage in online racketeering, identity deceptions and alleged cyber crimes to commit scientific fraud while destroying their targeted enemies in the holistic health realm.

  Much of this is simply deranged opinion, but to state as fact that someone is “mentally deranged” and “leader of an online hate group” is dangerously close to making harmful, knowingly false statements about someone. And to state as fact that someone is engaged in a racketeering scheme seems to go well beyond “opinion.”

• Guilt by association:

  David Gorski’s colleague was just convicted of massive medical fraud and sentenced to 45 years in federal prison

  This is as far as I can read without actually vomiting. Here in the Detroit area, a cancer doctor named Farid Fata was sentenced to prison for crimes that, for doctors like David Gorski and me, are so horrific as to be nearly indescribable...
  

I quoted Dr. Lipson at length -- and I hope he doesn't mind -- because the NaturalNews article linked to in his post (and here is that link again) appears to be gone now. Instead the link directs to a classically and characteristically arrogant but relatively innocuous August 2014 piece called, Top ten scientific achievements of Natural News and the Health Ranger (so far).

But clearly the offensive article existed for a while, since enough still shows up on Google search results from today (May 5, 2016) to indicate that Dr. Lipson wasn't just pulling words out of thin air.

And equally clearly, Adams isn't finished with Dr. Gorski, for here is yet another defamatory screed from today.

How long will Adams continue to get away with this before someone takes legal action? As I said above, he seems to be baiting Dr. Gorski. Maybe he thinks he can nab Gorski et al. through discovery if they take the bait and sue him, or maybe he's just looking forward to being Gollum and crying that he meant no harm, but the fat Hobbit is out to get him.

But meanwhile Adams is possibly causing real harm to Dr. Gorski by pulling every dirty SEO trick in the book, littering the Internet with defamatory content via dozens of dummy sites in order to vilify the good doctor. (Why doesn't Google penalize Adams for that? Or do they? I don't know enough about how this stuff works to be able to tell.)

Amusingly, the dummy-site strategy is much the same thing that the profoundly stupid and evil Not-Doctor Leonard Coldwell accused me of doing to "defame" him, though in that case he was falsely accusing me, as I can barely keep up with my one little blog and my Facebook profile, both of which have my real name and online contact information.

And so it goes. The question is: when will it stop?

From TRUTH Social to alt-health scam sites: Trump & other right-wing grifters continue to battle Big Tech, fuel fascism, & rob the rubes

By now you've almost certainly heard about #NeverWasMyPresident Donald Trump's grand plan to launch yet another alternative to major social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook -- his way of sticking it to Big Tech for banning him.

I'm referring, of course, to the absurdly ill-named TRUTH Social, which will be developed by a new enterprise called Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG). Announced by Trump surrogate Liz Harrington on Twitter on October 20, 2021, TRUTH Social is being launched to "stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech."

Trump had famously already failed at least once in the social media arena, promising months ago to immediately launch a platform of his own after he was booted off of Twitter and Facebook due to his incitement of the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Or maybe his big plans just got delayed. In any case, instead of the promised social media platform, a laughable blog appeared briefly... and was gone within a month. There was buzz for a while that Gettr was the new home for Team Trump and his allies... but that buzz faded too.

The idea of alternative Twitters and Facebooks and so forth is not new, of course. Right-wingers have been snowflaking for the past few years about being "censored" online, and many have taken their toxic whines not only to the courts but also to numerous alternate social media apps that have sprung up in recent times. But a Trump-branded social media alternative is truly newsworthy, because Trump unfortunately remains so high-profile, not to mention that he's the biggest and loudest whiner of all when it comes to griping about censorship.

If you think that TRUTH Social is going to be a safe haven for "free speech," however, think again. First off, the site will censor its own users. Saying bad stuff about Dear Leader or his platform or its parent company is verboten.

And if you think that this platform is destined for long-term success, you need to reconsider that too. From The Daily Kos, October 21:

...Most of the attention focused on [the announcement about TMTG] has been centered around the announcement of something called “TRUTH Social”—also known as yet-another-Trump-focused-Twitter-clone. But that’s not the real point of TMTG. The real point is that this is a scheme through which Trump can collect several hundred million dollars, even if his new social platform never posts a tweet, or a toot, or a fart, or whatever they end up being called.

The truth behind TRUTH Social is right there in the first paragraph of the announcement, which is not focused on the technology behind the platform, or anything that Trump is bringing to the table. Instead, that paragraph is dedicated to explaining how the project has been given "an initial enterprise value of $875 million" and "a cumulative valuation up to $1.7 billion." Which is amazing, because what it seems to have is nothing more than a credit line and some highly generic code that was hacked within minutes of the beta address becoming known.

No sooner had the first test invites been handed out than someone spoofed Trump's account and posted, well, as Daily Beast contributor Steven Monacelli accurately puts it, "a photo of a pig defecating on its own scrotum." Two hours after it first went up, the whole site came down.

However, it doesn't matter if the site ever sticks its head above the waste pool again. Because that's not the point. Donald Trump is potentially walking about with $340 million, even if it fails completely. That's the point.

The site seems to be up again now, but right now it's just a page that invites you to "Join the Waiting List!" or to pre-order the app in the Apple Store. The launch is supposed to happen in November of 2021.

But there seem to be a few other bumps in the road, not the least of which are credible accusations that the Trump app's developers appear to have purloined code without giving due credit to the code's creators. Oops.

Coding issues aside, it goes without saying that this whole thing was designed as yet another money op for the former Grifter-in-Chief, who was a grifter long before he infested the White House, and has continued his grifting nonstop since being legitimately voted out. (If you sincerely believe he wasn't legitimately voted out, you're in a cult. Please seek help.) Like countless other media outlets that have reported this news, the Daily Kos article cited above goes on to explain the scheme.

What Trump is attempting here is something called a SPAC, or Special Purpose Acquisition [Company]. It's also known as a "reverse merger" or a "blank check company." It's a scheme in which some low-value shell company that's already listed on a stock market "buys" a private company, then relists itself under the name of that new company. In almost all cases, what's really going on is that the private company is just taking over the empty husk of that shell company—a company that may have existed for no other purpose than to serve as a placeholder for some future SPAC.

Why go through these steps? Because getting listed on a stock exchange generally requires clearing a number of hurdles, including meeting requirements from the Securities and Exchange Commission. SPACS can just pop into existence, taking a fast track to a stock listing while dodging almost every qualifying step.

The Trump SPAC falls under a specific category known as a "celebrity SPAC," in which a high-profile person, known as "the Sponsor," raises capital by taking the SPAC public in an IPO. The SPAC uses the cash proceeds from the IPO and a large stock issuance to acquire a private company and make it public. But unlike traditional IPOs, the Sponsor gets a 20 percent stake without having to invest much of anything -- and there's much less regulatory scrutiny. While not all SPACs are scams, this one almost certainly is. The Kos article describes it as "nothing more than an exchange-based Ponzi scheme in which the original Ponzi is guaranteed to walk away with a mountain of cash." In short...

TMTG isn't a social media platform. It's a scam. Trump doesn't need another social media platform. He needs suckers willing to buy stock. And Trump has always been very, very good at locating suckers.

So while it's fun to point out that TRUTH Social has some of the most restrictive rules of any platform, including rules that prohibit criticizing TRUTH Social, it doesn't really matter. The whole platform can be sh#t pigs all the way down. It can collapse under its own incompetence. None of that means a thing. What matters to Trump is that he gets to walk away with a bundle.

That's pretty much all that has ever mattered to Trump.

The SPAC stock linked to Trump's platform is Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC), and granted, it was quite the talk of the market last week, when DWAC shares shot from $9.96 per share at closing on Wednesday, October 20, to $94.20 per share on Friday, October 22. That's an astounding 845% rally in a mere two days. But as CNBC reported today (October 25), DWAC was down 10 percent after 2:00 PM ET, so there appear to be signs that "the Trump-fueled craze has died down," according to the CNBC piece.

Short-seller Iceberg Research unveiled a bearish position on the DWAC on Monday, saying that investors face uncertainties in this blank-check deal as Trump could become a dominant shareholder after the merger.

“Now that initial excitement has passed, we see only risks for investors in near future. Based on Trump’s track record, at current price, renegotiation is likely to keep more of the merged company for him,” Iceberg Research said in a tweet.

“SPAC holders don’t own a piece of this project yet. Trump has leverage, not them.”

But I'm not shedding any tears for these investors. At this point, anyone who invests in anything related to Trump deserves to lose money. And as far as I'm concerned, that also goes for the countless small donors who have fallen for his myriad fundraising scams --- such as phony "membership cards" and other "exclusive" benefits (or promises thereof) designed to keep the rubes feeling like they're Someone Special. He'll almost certainly continue to run these scams long after the current SPAC cash cow has been milked dry. The cult members will just keep on forking over, feeding his coffers and his ego while he smirks and talks bad about them behind their backs.

* * * * *

Trump may be the most high-profile right-wing grifter to whine about Big Tech and try to compete directly with the major platforms, but he's far from the only one. Take Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams (please). Besides being a particularly vociferous Trump fanboy and advocate of martial law as long as a right-wing president is imposing it, Adams is a longtime peddler of alt-health frauducts and "advice" as well as a promoter of conspiracy theories and far-right-wing talking points. (He was also one of the featured speakers, along with Eric Trump and Roger Stone, at a three-day fascism/alt-health rally in Nashville this past weekend, The Truth [sic] About Cancer Live.)

Years ago Adams, apparently unhappy with the standards imposed by Wikipedia, created his own Wiki platform, "TruthWiki," which is every bit as hilariously misnamed as Trump's TRUTH Social. In an April 2016 Whirled post (under the sub-head, "Trying to conquer the Internet, one comical alt-site at a time"), I described Adams as...

...the guy who is so afraid of people finding out the truth about him and his colleagues that he started his own lame version of Wikipedia: the very ill-named TruthWiki. (Here's the TruthWiki entry about David Gorski. And while we're at it, here's Gorski, as Orac, writing about TruthWiki in 2014.)

Dr. Gorski is an oncologist who's one of the people on Mike Adams' enemies list; Adams has seriously defamed him numerous times in his Natural News blog posts.

Then there's Adams' answer to Google, GoodGopher. From the 2016 Whirled post I quoted above:

GoodGopher very carefully filters out what they consider "disinformation" and government/Big Pharma propaganda, instead stacking their search results with alt-nutty and rightwing sites (which are euphemistically called "independent news media") such as NaturalNews (of course!) as well as Breitbart, The Blaze, Washington Times (owned and run by Moonies), Drudge Report, Western Journalism and more.

It's a pretty lousy search engine, but it's tailor-made for the no-evil monkeys who want to avoid any fact or opinion that might shake their carefully constructed world of alt-health advocacy, Scamworld delusions, conspiracy theories and right-wing spin.

I went to the GoodGopher site a little while ago, for the first time in years, and typed a name in the search engine. It was a name for which I knew there were numerous results on GoodGopher; at least there had been when I checked it last. But all I got for search results was a message: "Server is busying [sic] right now, please try again later." All righty, then!

Mike Adams may not be giving Wikipedia or Google a run for their money, but what his sites lack in quality they collectively make up for in quantity. His disinfo empire includes scads of alt-health and alt-"news" web sites, some of which are no doubt generating income from suckers, and with some of these sites he also seems to be succeeding in one important task: spreading the type of political disinformation that is eroding American democracy and further nudging us down the road to authoritarianism and fascism.

On October 18, ArsTechnica published the revelation that Robert Willis, aka "Hacker X" -- the hacker who helped build an enormous US-based disinfo network that helped Trump get elected -- had confirmed that he was actually working for Mike Adams at Adams' NaturalNews.com site.

Willis had joined NaturalNews.com in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election and helped the site build out a network of anonymized websites that looked independent but secretly promoted the "health" information and pro-Trump political writings of Mike Adams and NaturalNews.com.

NaturalNews has long been linked to disinformation. In 2019, The Atlantic named it one of the top producers of anti-vax content on the Internet. The site has touted homeopathy, urged "natural" remedies for things like cancer, and warned about "chemtrails." NaturalNews content has been banned from Facebook, and the site has been called a "powerful conspiracy empire."

Willis claims to have made little money from his work for Adams, and says that he has remorse "for a few reasons." He claims that he didn't really know what Adams was all about when he first joined his site, which is kind of hard to believe.

As for all the pro-Trump, anti-Clinton "fake news" that Willis eventually helped to propagate, he claimed that the reason he "didn’t know it was fake news at the beginning is because the machine needed to be built before it could be used, so I didn’t spend time inside stories outside of overseeing social media and numbers, at which point I did not factor in the aspect of whether the articles were true or not. I was strictly breaking down stories by headlines and breaking it down into numbers. With an occasional crazy headline that seemed harmless."

Okay, sure. Willis says the whole experience has made him apolitical and that he didn't vote in the 2020 election. Here's his statement about about his actions. And here's a post about "Hacker X" and Mike Adams by the aforementioned David Gorski, the target of some of Mike Adams' most vicious defamation.

* * * * *

If you feel like climbing even further down into the pit of alt-site failures, you might stumble across a silly Facebook alternative created last year by phony doctor/cancer quack/neo-Nazi/Trump fan/alleged predator and all-around evil dimwit Leonard Coldwell, who has been in a perpetual huff for the past decade or so about repeatedly being thrown into Facebook jail. Back in October of 2020 Lenny's favorite handmaid griped about Facebook for about the ten-dozenth time on his main English-language web site:.

Make no mistake accounts are being targeted. Those who have spoken out for truth on matters such as politics, COVID-Hoax, Masks, for natural health and not big pharma, called out Monsanto and Bill Gates, or even Georgy Sorros [sic] who wants to destroy the world as we know it are being scrutinized for every word they type.

Why?

Because Facebook is a communist/socialist website who [sic] is pushing the agenda of the New Normal hard. They want you all to be obedient. They want (end game) for you to be vaccinated mindless drone of a slave to the system.

But never fear; there was a solution from the great "Dr." C:

Dr. Coldwell has created his own version [of Facebook]. Champ book. You are invited! https://champbook.tribe.so/  while much of it is currently in German we also are gaining many English speaking members and would love to have you. There will never be censorship like there is on Facebook.

Which isn't to say that there won't be censorship, I suppose. But it all seems moot because Lenny and most of the rest of the world appear to have all but forgotten ChampBook, as you'll see if you take a look at the endless stream of spam that meets the eye when you land on the site. But I have to admit that there is quite an impressive list of "Most reputable losers users," with a very reputable spammer called Мария Иванцова being number one, and Lenny himself appearing at the bottom of the list of most reputable users when I checked the other day, and not appearing on that list at all when I went back to check today. (Мария was still number one, though.) Poor little Lenny: he can't even compete with spammers and bots on his own site. Sad.

* * * * *

None of what I've written above means that I am opposed to competition, including and perhaps especially in the area of social media and other online forums. Monopolies aren't good for business or, ultimately, for democracy. Nor does it mean that I am blind to the misdeeds -- some of them quite egregious -- of the Big Tech platforms. As more info continues to spill out about Facebook, for example, it becomes ever more painfully obvious that Big Tech companies value profit over any of the other fine values, such as truth or the well-being of their users, to which they pay lip service. But the problems created by Big Tech won't be solved by right-wing scammers, whose ludicrous forums are little more than echo chambers at best, and all too often are vehicles to pick the pockets of vulnerable people.

Grifting is not just a right-wing thing, of course. But these daze, the right-wing grift machine, fueled by an unending stream of fascist bat-crap both online and off, seems to be posing the greatest dangers, not only to public health but also to the health of American (and world) democracy. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated this problem, but it has been brewing for years now. Whether the grift comes in the form of a Trumpian "investment opportunity" and "TRUTH" platform, a slime trail of fake-news sites from "The Health Ranger," or a flaccid Facebook alternative from an angry and deranged little German scammer, it's all part of the same problem.

It has never been more important to stay informed, rather than misinformed or willfully uninformed. And it's never been more important for eligible voters who want to stop the madness to make sure they're registered, and then to get out there and vote.

Another tempest in a teapot: Google delists and relists whiny Health Ranger

A fiery screed from the rabid right
A cloud of lies and a piercing, "I've been censored!"
...The Health Ranger whines again!
[Cue William Tell Overture]

I've been noticing that lately there is a lot of intensely whiny snowflakery in Scamworld, and some of these whimpering snowflakes happen to be alt-right nuts as well as scammers. They do love their persecution narratives, it seems, even more than they love their Cheeto Jesus and their guns. One such alt-right scammer (and friend of scammers) is Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams, long-time frauduct peddler, histrionic promoter of conspiracy narratives, and passionate Donald Trump supporter.

For quite some time now Adams has been beating his chest about being a heroic voice of truth, standing bravely on the front lines of the fight against the "lying mainstream media." More recently he volunteered himself as a soldier defending the "legitimacy" of Trump's "presidency." I wrote about that just this past December:

In an "open letter" to His Unholy Orangeness, Adams urges Trump to refuse to let the mainstream press corps into his (ultra)White House at all. After all, declares Adams (repeating by rote what every faithful Trumpian knows), the mainstream media are Drumpf's enemy and "they will do anything and everything to destroy you."

Though Adams' faux-fight against the legitimate press has been an overwrought attempt to get the #NotMyPresident's attention, so far I've seen no evidence that Drumpf has even acknowledged the existence of Mike Adams. This is in contrast to Trump's bromance with top-of-the-steaming-heap conspiracy monger, Alex Jones.

But being ignored has not kept Adams from sticking his nose as far up Drumpf's aperture as he can possibly get it, rooting around up there and then smearing the results all over his pro-Trump platforms. Apparently he thinks that if he keeps on doing that, his efforts will be rewarded eventually. In that regard Mike Adams is like many other loudmouths on the alt-right, as noted by the Washington Post last November, immediately following the election.

So let's get to the whiny part already. Adams' latest online drama, which plays right into his "brave warrior for truth" shtick, occurred last week when his main site, Natural News, got penalized -- "delisted" -- by Google. For several days he whined and whined and whined about it, beginning with a "Red Alert" on February 23, which bore this headline (accompanied by a picture of a nuclear bomb detonating):

RED ALERT: Fascist Google begins PURGE of pro-Trump websites as prelude to massive false flag or coup attempt

On that same day, a White House petition was initiated to "Ban Google's Blatant Suppression of Free Speech." At the time I'm writing this, the petition has 64,851 of the 100,000 sigs needed in order for the White House to at least acknowledge it.

By February 26 Adams was in full shrill conspiracy mode:

Mike Adams, Alex Jones attacked… is it a prelude to a false flag event targeting Trump?

As most of you are aware, last week we witnessed massive attacks on independent media. Alex Jones, who is by far the leading voice in the war against tyranny, was stripped of $3 million in ad revenue after being banned from AdRoll. We saw Milo, one of the loudest Trump supporters, be ripped apart after making irresponsible statements that the media was able to manipulate into pro-molestation remarks, causing him to lose his $250,000 book deal and step down from Breitbart. And now NaturalNews.com, which has been a pioneer in exposing the lies of big pharma, vaccine makers, and dirty food pushers, has had all of its 140,000 articles scrubbed from Google, even while Google refuses to provide any evidence justifying the blacklisting. We see this for what it is; a massive conspiracy to silence the truth.

Before all of these events unfolded, Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger, had a suspicion that something was about to happen when an anonymous person offered Adams $50000 to destroy Alex Jones. On his February 17th podcast Adams explained that after he had refused to take the money or lie about Jones, the person threatened that the media would retaliate and destroy Adams. Just five days later we witnessed this come to fruition.

Are these attacks on such high profile independent media members a result of being Pro-Trump? Jones has a direct connection to Donald Trump and had a significant influence on him being elected. Milo has been an avid cheerleader for Trump and his executive orders on immigration. Adams owns the popular Trump.News website, which provides real news about what is happening in the Trump administration, and threatens the fake news spewed out by mainstream media.

The mention of Milo above was, of course, a reference to Milo Yiannopoulos, whose book deal was recently canceled by Threshold Books, a division of publisher Simon and Schuster. Here's Vox:

Shortly after Threshold’s deal with Yiannopoulos was announced, prominent liberal intellectuals announced that they would be boycotting Simon & Schuster. The Chicago Review of Books announced that it would not review any Simon & Schuster books in 2017. Literary superstar Roxane Gay pulled her upcoming book from Simon & Schuster’s list.

And that’s because Yiannopoulos is not a garden-variety conservative author. He is a professional troll who weaponized Twitter as a tool for (racist, sexist, transphobic) harassment so effectively that Twitter was forced to permanently ban him. On his ongoing college speaking tour, he has doxed trans students, putting their lives in danger. He routinely makes hyperbolically offensive statements like “feminism is cancer,” designed to rile up liberals, and then when liberals get angry, he winks and says he didn’t really mean it: He was just being provocative.

But none of that — not Yiannopoulos’s history of harassment and bigotry, not the widespread outcry and the loss of major authors — was enough for Threshold Books to think twice about acquiring his book in the first place, let alone cancel his contract. It took the resurfacing of a video in which Yiannopoulos explicitly defends pedophilia for Threshold to pull the plug.

For many on the left, including writers like Gay, the timing of Threshold’s decision demonstrates that the publisher doesn’t really care about Yiannopoulos’s right to free speech so much as it liked what he was saying before he got to the part about pedophiles — and, more importantly, that it believed its customers would like what he was saying. Threshold thought it could make money from his book, and now it doesn’t think it will.

...In other words, Threshold has sent a clear message: Explicit bigotry, harassment, and hatred are tolerable among conservative thinkers. Defense of child molestation is where we draw the line in the sand.

Don't shed any tears for Milo, though; I have no doubt he'll take his book elsewhere and find acceptance. I suspect he still has a large platform and a dedicated fan base. It's all about free speech, you know.

Anyway. In a separate post on February 26, Adams groused that Google had refused to 'splain its "blacklisting" of Natural News.


Conspiracy-fan-in-disguise Erin Elizabeth, the Health Nut (previously mentioned on this Whirled) got in on the hysteria and histrionics early on with this brief post. Her conspiracy-minded fans joined in the conversation; you can read their thoughts about "censorship" and various devious plots thereof in the comments to the post.

And my favorite blogging doctor David Gorski, aka Orac, whom Adams has viciously defamed, enjoyed a brief moment of schadenfreude.

Google did speak up about the matter shortly after the whinefest began. Apparently a webmaster guidelines violation was the real reason for the "banning," which, it should be noted, wasn't an outright ban but just a penalty. And as for the delisting occurring without warning, the Search Engine Land article noted this:

Natural News said in its post that “Google sent no warning whatsoever to our ‘webmaster tools’ email address on file with them,” but not all penalties will receive a notification via Google Search Console. More extreme and deceptive violations will not receive such notifications.

But Adams insisted that Google was lying about their reasons, and he insisted that several "liberal" sites such as CNN, HuffPost and BuzzFeed were guilty of the same violations he'd been accused of, and they hadn't been penalized.

Whine, whine, whine.

In any case, as of today (February 28) Natural News is safely back on Google's index.
Naturally Adams claimed credit, insinuating that the petition he had started had done the trick and that "your voices have been heard." Basically his "official statement" about the relisting was yet another extended whine...

As Natural News was being censored by Google, we were also being assaulted and called liars by the same left-wing media that routinely attacks Donald Trump. By censoring Natural News, Google empowered a massive wave of defamation articles that deliberately sought to exploit the absence of Natural News in the rankings to spread knowingly false lies and hatred about Natural News and myself in particular.

In essence, Google just enabled one of the most vile hate campaigns ever witnessed on the ‘net, all while denying Natural News any ability to defend itself against such hate-based smears and malicious lies. It is the electronic equivalent of binding your hands, slapping duct tape over your mouth, and throwing you to the lions. All this from a company that once claimed to “do no evil.”

In effect, Google censored us, then allowed others to smear us, then hosted a webmaster forum which attacked us and called us liars, then refused to provide us with any evidence of wrongdoing, all while silencing our ability to defend ourselves in the public space.

There’s no question in my mind that none of this would have ever happened if Natural News had been a Clinton-supporting website. There’s no question in my mind that Natural News was discriminated against because we were a convenient political target that could be silenced as part of an elaborate smear campaign to drag our reputation through the mud, scare away future visitors and harm our revenue-generating traffic as a form of economic sabotage...

Somebody call the waaahhhhhmbulance.  

Speaking of vile hate campaigns, Google has also enabled Natural News' vile hate campaigns against people such as David Gorski/Orac, and for that matter, against Hillary Clinton and everyone who voted for her... but I digress.

None of this is to suggest that Google is a completely benign force or that its penalization of websites is always logical or consistent. We all know that's not the case, and website owners and bloggers have been bitching about this for years and years. But in this case the reason for Natural News' delisting seemed fairly straightforward, and with the problem fixed... there's no problem, right? Wrong. Adams felt compelled to inject his overwrought conspiracy narrative and political ranting into the matter, even bringing Herr Drumpf and Adams' customary nattering about "false flags" into the drama. But hey, it added to Adams' martyr creds and probably didn't hurt his revenue stream.

And don't forget that Adams has his own search engine, GoodGopher. GoodGopher filters out what they consider "disinformation" and government/Big Pharma propaganda, instead stacking their search results with alt-nutty and rightwing sites (euphemistically dubbed "independent news media") such as NaturalNews (of course!) as well as Breitbart, The Blaze, Washington Times (which is owned and run by Moonies), Drudge Report, Western Journalism and more.

On GoodGopher you can choose "mainstream media" for your results, but you'll mostly get FOX News results, and if you get an outlet such as the Washington Post you'll see it has been "flagged by the user community for malicious or misleading content." Clearly, "misleading" and "malicious" are in the eye of the beholder. (This blog doesn't show up in the listings under either independent or mainstream media. It's as if it simply doesn't exist on the Internet at all. Maybe this going-on-eleven-years experiment was just a dream...) 

Adams also has his own "alternative" to Wikipedia, the ludicrously misnamed "TruthWiki," which is chock-full of fluff/promo copy for predatory fraudsters and right-wing nutcake political ranting. 

In any case Adams is still fighting the good fight and continuing to wax histrionic about the "vile assaults" that he and Natural News are "enduring" from "lunatics" and people whose minds have been poisoned by fluoride and mercury and whatnot.

Adams' whining reminds me of the whining of the stupidest and most evil man in Scamworld, Not-Doktor Lenny Coldwell, whenever Lenny gets suspended from Facebook, which is fairly frequently. Lenny generally whines that he got "banned" because he supports Trump and/or because he tells the "truth" about cancer cures. But in truth he gets thrown in Facebook jail because people report him for hate speech. Both Lenny and Adams play the martyr card to the max, falsely claiming they're being censored for truth-telling.

In a more general sense the Health Ranger's laments also remind me of serial scammer Kevin Trudeau's vintage whines (and current gripes) about being oppressed by the government for telling the "truth" and fighting for your and my First Amendment Rights.

Meanwhile, the true threat to the First Amendment (and much of the rest of the Constitution) is sitting in the Oval Office with his wrecking crew, plotting out ways to destroy America and re-mold it according to their plutocratic, theocratic agenda.

By the way, there is another Natural News article that has been making the social media rounds lately, bearing the headline:

In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler arrested and executed ‘fake news’ journalists who rightfully claimed that Jews were being exterminated

Adams didn't write that piece; it was authored by prolific right-wing propagandist and Natural News contributor Don Wrightman, but it is prominently featured on the Natural News site, and as I write this it is at the top of the list of "Most Viewed Article" on the site. And even though it was published in December 2016, it is currently being shared on numerous right wing sites. Some folks who are emphatically not right-wingers are sharing it as well on social media, not considering the source and the real reason for the article.

Given the context, including the links within the article (particularly the link to Adams' "truth-telling" site liberty.news), it is abundantly clear that this piece was a protest against critics of Mike Adams and his fellow "independent journalists" rather than a statement about Herr Drumpf's war against the legitimate media. So all of you Trump critics who have been sharing this article should probably reconsider your choice. Clearly this piece is little more than another blatantly transparent effort to make Trump's and Adams' critics, including the media, look like the real "Nazis"/threats to freedom, while portraying Adams, Alex Jones, Breitbart and the rest of the fact-free "press" as the true First Amendment defenders/martyrs.

And c'mon people. Y'all are too smart to believe that.

Mike Adams and the fact-free press step up to defend "legitimacy" of Drumpf reign

The bad news: Donald Trump is still the not-my-president-elect, and Leonard Cohen is still dead. The good news: For the time being, the other Leonard C who has occupied space on this blog -- the truly stupid and evil LC, Not-Doktor Leonard Coldwell -- seems to be suspended from Facebook once again, as recently celebrated on UK wag Longdog's hilarious blog. This time it appears that the suspension isn't limited to his main English Language Facebook page, "Leonard Coldwell," but also to his main German language page, "Dr. Leonard Coldwell," his totally fake-profile page "Eyn Rand," and the English-language page for his failed GIN ripoff, the IMBS-ing U Master Baiter'sSociety. So that is a small bright spot.

But this blog negotiates a landscape that is more often marred by bad news than brightened by good. And there's more bad news to report (granted, it's also amusing news, but bad news nevertheless): the fact-free press, led by cynical conspiracy monger, frauduct peddler and Trumpian rabble-rouser Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams, has stepped up to "defend the legitimacy" of the Trump presidency, calling upon the conspiracy-theorist-in-chief to use his presidential power to "blockade" the "lying mainstream media."

You'll notice that the last link in the paragraph above leads to the aforementioned Not-Doktor Stoopid's "blog," which rarely contains original content but is mostly a curation of misinformation from other sites. In this case, LoonyC curated a post from Mike Adams' Natural "News" site. Both the re-post and the original post on Adams' site were published on December 2.

In an "open letter" to His Unholy Orangeness, Adams urges Trump to refuse to let the mainstream press corps into his (ultra)White House at all. After all, declares Adams (repeating by rote what every faithful Trumpian knows), the mainstream media are Drumpf's enemy and "they will do anything and everything to destroy you." Says he:

It's time to deprive those lying, deceptive media outlets of all the oxygen in the room. Blockade them from all White House announcements and presidential events. Bring in the real media... the independent publishers, radio hosts and bloggers who are truly the only remaining free press in America.

We all have teams of writers, video editors, bloggers and researchers ready to report the real news about the successes of your new administration. We will defend your legitimacy as President and help defend the Republic against the assaults of the Fidel Castro-worshipping lunatic fringe left.

My own network of online sites includes Trump.news, WhiteHouse.news and hundreds of others. Combined with Infowars.com, PrisonPlanet.com, DrudgeReport.com and others, we already dwarf most of the mainstream media outlets in terms of reach. We absolutely dwarf all mainstream media in terms of the public trust factor.

He forgot to mention "in terms of the utter-disrespect-for-inconvenient-facts factor." They've got it all over the "lying" mainstream media on that one.

Adams also uses his post as an opportunity to boast to Trump about his own search engine, GoodGopher, which, he writes without any apparent irony, "excludes all the mainstream media liars and news fabrication propagandists working for CNN, WashPost, NYT, MSNBC and so on. We already have an authoritative list of who's who in the independent media. Compiling a contact list would only take a day or two."

"What good is a totally censored search engine?" you may be asking. All the good in the world, it seems, if you feel a need to lower a cone of ignorance over yourself every time you do an Internet search. It's sort of like the cone of silence in the old Get Smart TV series, except instead of preventing the escape of secret information, it prevents the infiltration of facts. Or maybe it's more like parental block, except instead of protecting kids from online exploitation it protects willfully stupid adults from learning real facts.

Facts may be stubborn things, but they're not nearly as stubborn as those who like to make up their own "facts."

Adams, like everyone else in the conspiracy biz (not to mention the basket of gullibles who embrace and spread phony conspiracies on social media), seems to have a very casual relationship with the truth, and that is putting it charitably. To advance his own agendas he isn't above perpetuating distortions and libelous falsehoods (e.g., his recent smear campaign against Dr. David Gorski, aka "Orac," as I wrote about in April of this year). Nor is he above casually posting complete misinformation that doesn't libel anyone but is simply, ludicrously inaccurate.

If Adams were just another blog-fodder blowhard there wouldn't be much cause for concern. But there are larger and more serious issues that stretch far beyond cranky little blogs like this.
For Adams is both riding the crest of an enormous wave of disinformation and making that wave bigger. He's part of the "alternative" press/"independent" media that are the vanguard of the
"post-truth" era. These are the media that are tailor-made for Trump, and he for them. It's a match made in infotainment (with the emphasis on "tainment") heaven. 

Granted, the mainstream media have made serious missteps themselves, and we shouldn't let them off the hook. And I'm not just talking about the insane amount of non-critical attention and free promotion the media have consistently handed to Trump on a silver platter, or the way they embraced the "Crooked Hillary" narrative and made a huge deal about the non-issue of her emails. I'm also talking about the way major news outlets such as Washington Post may have lent undeserved legitimacy to a questionable group, PropOrNot, in their own reporting about "fake news." The conspiracy lunatics and the alt-right and the Trumpians are all over that one, but Rolling Stone and Fortune also weighed in critically. Even so, it would be folly to discount the possible roles played by Russian operatives in influencing the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and certainly foolish to dismiss the influence of fake-news sites and the under-informed voters who take these sites seriously. 
 
Apart from the dumbing-down issues there are more serious matters of public safety at stake. On Sunday, December 4, 2016, Edgar M. Welch, a 28-year-old white gunman from North Carolina, apparently fueled by the ludicrous and debunked "Pizzagate" conspiracy narrative, walked into Comet Ping Pong, a pizza restaurant in northwest Washington D.C., and fired from an AR-15 rifle. He had driven six hours from his home to "investigate" rumors that the pizzeria was harboring young children as sex slaves, as part of a child-abuse ring led by Hillary Clinton. Yes, there are idiots who truly believe that; Ron and I just got scolded by a couple of them on Facebook within the past few days. If you ask me there are far too many people who seem to be unhealthily obsessed with pedophilia, and it's not the Clintons and their cronies.

Fortunately Welch was arrested before anyone was hurt, but what about the next angry nutcake who walks in? Comet Ping Pong has reported that they have received lots of disturbing threats in the wake of Pizzagate, and even some of the neighboring businesses have received threats as well.

Pizzagate is far from the only blatantly false conspiracy tale making the rounds, and what is disturbing is that Donald Trump himself seems to be a big believer in conspiracy theories and conspiracy web sites, and is stocking his administration with others who have a fondness for fake news sites and conspiracy stories. And if that doesn't worry you, just a little bit... then what are you doing on this blog?

Once again without irony, Mike Adams concludes his December 2 post thusly:

 It’s time to #TakeDownCNN once and for all. The network doesn’t deserve to operate in any free society (but they might feel right at home in North Korea). And it’s time to support the rise of the new, independent media in America.

Uh-huh. Freedom of the press is an inalienable right in America, but only freedom of certain types of press: the fact-free, totally self-serving-to-cynical-scammers-and-hatriarchs variety.

But if you care about actual freedom of the press, and about responsible journalism, there's plenty you can do. Start with becoming a fact-checker yourself. Read with a critical eye, especially if the content seems to fit too neatly into someone's preferred narrative (even or especially your own). And hold the mainstream media's feet to the fire, but don't dismiss them just because they're mainstream. This isn't to say that you should automatically dismiss a source just because it's "alternative" or "independent," but keep your eyes open and your b.s. detector active, always.

Otherwise, Trump and his cynical champions and surrogates may lead all of us around a corner from which there will be no turning back.

PS added on 19 December 2016: Here is some background information about the traditions of irrationality and hysteria that ultimately gave rise to Pizzagate. Waves of hysteria have been part of American history, not just for decades but for centuries. The problem is that today, the popularity of social media makes it easier than ever to spread the hysteria, and fake news sites make the irrationality much more difficult to battle.