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?

Hysterical "Health Ranger" gratuitously attacks Dr. David Gorski -- again

In light of the endless foul stink bombs generated over the past year by the Oaf of Office, #NotMyPresident Donald J. Trump, it may be tempting to dismiss the foibles of Scamworld as relatively minor matters, comparatively speaking. Even so, Scamworld is still this blog's main beat, and although, as I've noted previously, Herr Twitler has sucked a lot of oxygen from this pitiful little outpost of the blogosphere, Scamworld remains a matter of consequence both here and in the larger world, as do the New-Wage/selfish-help/McSpirituality/alt-health gurus who keep that big sick machine humming. Given today's milieu they are doubly consequential in the cases where Scamworld and politix intersect, and since several of this blog's least-favorite snargets are Trump fans, that intersection is pretty busy these days.

Anyway. This isn't the newest of news, but it's less than two weeks old, so just in case you missed it....

One of Donald Trump's most histrionically vocal sycophants is pseudoscientist and conspiracy monger Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams, whom we've snargeted here numerous times before. Adams loves him some Trump and has even written that in order to save a divided America from civil war, Trump should do everything possible to "shut down" the subversive, evil left, apparently by imprisoning them and destroying all of their media. Now, as I've noted before, Adams could just be playing the role of provocateur in order to get clicks and sell his numerous frauducts to stupid right-wingers, and it's possible that he does not really believe that freedom of expression should be totally destroyed in the US. But you never know with these alt-right types.

Another thing to know about Adams is that he is irrationally and hysterically anti-vaccination -- in fact, that's another one of his pet causes, perhaps even more beloved than the cause of keeping his nose well-browned from rooting around up in Trump. On January 20 of this year, Adams posted about a threatening email that a deranged vaccine advocate apparently sent to another vocal anti-vaxxer, Suzanne Humphries, M.D. (Not-Doktor Leonard Coldwell, another alt-right lunatic who's considerably stupider and more evil than Adams, but is just as enamored of Trump, copied and pasted Adams' post for his own "blog.")

The email Dr. Humphries claims to have received is a blatant, expletive-filled death threat, but instead of treating it as an aberration the anti-vaxxers, including Adams, are reacting in their usual way, conflating an isolated loony with the entire "pro-vax" movement. Since the email is crude and only marginally literate, it could hardly be expected to be the work of professional propagandists from Big Pharma, but that is exactly what some of the alarmed anti-vaxxers are suggesting (just read some of the comments on this post on the Vactruth.com site).

Don't get me wrong. I'm certainly not claiming that Dr. Humphries is wrong to be alarmed; she should take every due precaution to protect herself. But tossing the sender of this lunatic threat into the same category as the millions of health professionals, scientists, researchers, and ordinary folks who don't practice the anti-vax true religion is either (1) ignorant; (2) misinformed; (3) disingenuous; or (4) just plain stupid. Indeed, the anti-vax movement is characterized by all four of those factors -- it's a big tent, so big that it even has room for Donald Trump -- so take your pick.

If the Health Danger had just stuck to his anti-vax message in his January 20 post, it wouldn't have grabbed my attention, but he apparently felt compelled to drag Dr. David Gorski, who writes the excellent Respectful Insolence blog under the name "Orac," into the drama.

After quoting -- in full -- the offending email received by Dr. Humphries, Adams added, gratuitously (and out of courtesy for Dr. Gorski, I have removed Adams' embedded links):

This threatening, psychopathic language, by the way, reminds me of Dr. David Gorski, an extremely dangerous, sociopathic vaccine-pushing doctor who viciously attacks and lies about anyone trying to expose the truth about vaccines. Dr. Gorski’s colleague, Dr. Farid Fata, was indicted by the FBI for cancer treatment fraud and is now serving 20+ years in federal prison. Dr. Gorski worked alongside this cancer fraudster and evil criminal in the Detroit area, with links to the Karmanos Cancer Centers.

Natural News has previously reported Dr. Gorski to the FBI and has named him as one of the six most sickeningly evil propagandists currently operating in the realm of medicine. He currently works for the Karmanos Center Center in Michigan and spends his work hours editing Wikipedia to savage “vaccine truthers” by posting false, defamatory and slanderous information on their Wikipedia pages. Dr. Gorski is a surgical oncologist who scars black women for profit and pushes deceptive cancer propaganda on the public, much like his colleague Dr. Farid Fata also did before he was arrested and indicted for multiple felony crimes.

This is far from the first time that Adams has defamed Dr. Gorski (see this April 2016 post, f'rinstance, under "Mike Adams defames Dr. David Gorski"). On the very ill-named TruthWiki, which Adams has claimed is an "objective" alternative to that evil bastion of liberalism, Wikipedia, Dr. Gorski has even been gifted with special tags and categories (e.g., "lunatic blogger"). Now, that's real objective. On many occasions Dr Gorski has addressed these false accusations against him, but it does no good; Adams just keeps hammering away.

And make no mistake: As biased, untruthful and irrational as they are, Adams' defamatory rants against Dr. Gorski have exerted their influence on the search engines. Actor William Shatner was even fooled by Adams' nonsense last year when doing "research" on Gorski and the vaccination issue (see "Captain Kirk goes berserk." There's also a link to the Respectful Insolence post about the matter.).

So despite Adams' longstanding whines about Google suppressing and oppressing him, the world's favorite search engine has in fact been one of his greatest enablers.

What you probably won't be hearing from Mike Adams -- or Dr. Suzanne Humphries, for that matter -- is that Dr. Gorski is just as alarmed and disgusted about this email as any anti-vaxxer. And he stated this in no uncertain terms on a January 24 blog post on Respectful Insolence. Wrote Gorski/Orac:

OK, full stop right here. If you’re a pro-vaxer and want to make death threats against anyone, even antivax loons like Suzanne Humphries, you are not on my side. I don’t care what your reasons are. I don’t care if you weren’t serious. I don’t care if it was your idea of a sick joke. I don’t care if you were just trying to rattle her (which you clearly succeeded in doing in a spectacular fashion in this case). I disavow you. I condemn you. I spit on you. I hope the authorities find you, even though I know the chances for a successful prosecution in these cases are low.

Now here’s the thing. I know of no pro-vaccine advocate who feels otherwise. I know of no one on our side who approves of behavior like this directed against antivaxers—or anyone else. We don’t want this sort of stuff being associated with our side, because it’s wrong. We don’t need it, because we have science on our side, and anything like this hurts our cause, not helps us...

Following that, Gorski reproduced the email in its entirety, as Adams and the anti-vax web sites had done. He then added:

Yes, this is utterly vile and despicable, and it just goes to show that there are assholes and disturbed people everywhere, and not all pro-vaxers are pure in motivation and behavior. Regardless of where they came from, such threats deserve only our contempt. Even if this idiot was not serious and was just trying to frighten or rattle Humphries, he (and it’s almost certainly a he) deserves nothing but contempt.

On the other hand…

Am I alone in thinking it…odd…just how eager antivaxers are to publicize this? I’ve gotten the occasional death threat before, albeit, admittedly, none quite so long and extravagant. I’ve never publicized them. I rarely mention them. I know a number of skeptical bloggers who’ve had the same experience. I’ve known skeptics who’ve had stalkers. They rarely mention the issue.

Yet, here we have Suzanne Humphries proclaiming the issue to the world. We also have the Health Danger weaponizing this e-mail against me...

And "weaponizing" is exactly the right word for what Mike Adams is doing to David Gorski. (I will say, though, that it's not really surprising that antivaxers, and indeed many of the most vocal alt-health advocates, are eager to publicize threats against themselves, both real and imagined. In the shrill video he made about the threat against Dr. Humphries, Mike Adams also brings up the fallacious "dead holistic doctors" conspiracy narrative -- which I initially wrote about in this August 2015 post, and then again in July 2016 (under "Dead holistic docs conspiracy rages on"). The alt-health hysterics never miss an opportunity to push that contrived story, which is part of a larger false narrative: that of the Brave Maverick Doctor.)
 
Gorski reiterates that all of the claims Adams made about him in his latest post are lies, as is the insinuation that Gorski would ever write anything resembling that email. He adds that he despises whoever made those threats against Suzanne Humphries, and then wonders if Dr. Humphries would do him a solid and "do the same thing regarding Mike Adams' campaign of lies and defamation" against Gorski.

"I won't be holding my breath," he writes. And given that Humphries seems to be allied with Adams (judging from at least one of her Facebook posts from April 2016), I think Dr. Gorski is wise to hold his breath:

It looks like Natural News is filing a legal complaint that names "Orac", the self-proclaimed sci-blogger whose real name is David Gorsky [sic]. I'm sure his backers will get him the most aggressive attorneys and spare no cost on cutting him loose from the charges. Most of us vaccine critical doctors have been on the other end of his pen...

Much more recently -- on January 19, to be exact -- Dr. Humphries posted on Facebook about the death-threat email, saying that "the opposition is losing its mind."

I still think that Dr. Gorski may have the grounds for a seriously good defamation case against Mike Adams, but then again, I don't blame him for not wanting to waste time, money, and energy on the lunatic fringe of the anti-vax movement. Keep on blogging, Orac.

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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.

Trump and his Trumpsters: like attracts like

 
Note: I've added some copy and a few links since this post was originally published.
~CC, 25 May 2016

Although physicists and psychologists tell us that opposites attract, the Secret-style Law of Attraction magickal thinkers have long insisted that like attracts like, and many are prepared to hit you with all kinds of faux-quantum physics babble to pseudo-scientifically "prove" their case. On the other hand, sometimes like does attract like, as psychologists also acknowledge, and it doesn't take any magickal thinking to see this principle at work.

Take the preTrumptive GOP presidential nominee and a significant portion of his passionately misguided devotees (please). Trump attracts plenty of people who may not share his membership in the fabled one percent, but they do share his prejudices and hatreds, his ego and arrogance, his dishonesty and compulsion to lie, and his propensity for running off at the mouth (or the keyboard, as the case may be).

I know, I know... not all of his supporters are horrible, hateful, stupid, or uneducated; some are simply tired of the status quo. I'll get to that in a little while.

But first, and focusing on the horrible, the example that pops up for me immediately as a like-attracts-like situation is that of another public figure and one of this blog's unfavorite symbols of evil and stupidity, the cancer quack/conspiracy nut/fake doctor Leonard Coldwell, who is a profoundly devoted Trumpster. Lenny and his orange, bloated idol have a few notable things in common, the main difference being that Trump is much smarter and richer and altogether more successful than Lenny ever was and ever will be. Still he apparently sees Trump as a kindred spirit, and is constantly posting things on his Facebooks about Trump being the next president of the US, the Chosen One, the only person who can possibly save us from the machinations of the New World Order. These are just a few of many examples.

The Health Ranger is also a major Trumpian
Trump's candidacy has provided ample new fuel for the raging bonfire of profound stupidity that characterizes the conspiracy contingent, of which Coldwell is a proud member. Trump himself has promoted quite a few wacko conspiracies and urban legends, and many of his supporters are also conspiracy fans.

One such supporter and professional conspiracy monger is Coldwell's buddy Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams, the alt-health bloviator whom I blogged about again recently. Adams published a video on May 5, 2015 to launch his new "news" site, Trump.news, which is actually a pro-Trump propaganda site. (Adams also launched an anti-Clinton propaganda site, Clinton.news.)

In his video, which I urge you to watch to the end if you can stand it, Adams employs the usual body of NWO/Killuminati/"Them" conspiracy articles of faith to bolster the image of Donald Trump as some sort of anti-establishment, anti-elitist hero floating far above the politics of corruption. Mike Adams doesn't seem to get, or he is deliberately turning a blind eye to, the fact that Trump is the very definition of an establishment elitist who has often taken advantage of our broken and corrupt political system to further his own interests. Trump hasn't tried to hide this fact; to the contrary, he has bragged about it.

I made a comment to Adams' vid on the YouTube site. As I noted in my comment, Adams is clearly pandering to the devoted conspiracy fans who hang on to his every word because he tells such exciting stories, which are often more interesting and entertaining than nuanced realities. I sarcastically applauded Adams' brilliantly insidious suggestion that martial law under President Trump will not only be necessary but that it will be wildly popular, even though martial law under President Obama (which lesser conspiracy nuts like Coldwell were constantly warning about, but which never happened) would have been the end of America as we know it. I can't help wondering if Adams' "prediction" was simply a little social experiment to see how many unthinking people would step up and theoretically embrace tyranny... or was he just being facetious?

I also sarcastically commended Adams' effort to turn tables on the political left, with his insinuations that leftist "domestic terrorism" is actually a thing in the United States -- when in fact the vast majority of mass shootings and other acts of domestic terrorism in the US for at least the past 20 years have been largely the work of right-wing fanatics. If Adams is even half as intelligent as he continually boasts of being, I don't see how he could believe much of the stuff he says and writes, but it does earn him attention and revenue, and I suppose that's all that matters.

At any rate, in case it isn't clear, Mike Adams is also a Trump supporter, or at least he is playing one on the Intertubes. And why wouldn't he support Trump, who, like Adams (and like Lenny Coldwell), is full of himself, loves to brag about his intelligence and accomplishments, and has an ego bigger than some small countries?


The butler did it. And bragged about it.
One of the things that Lenny and his ilk seem to adore most about Trump is the latter's promise to make and keep America safe from "the other." This of course is just my nice way of saying that Trump is an unapologetic racist and xenophobe, and Lenny is too, though he insists that he's not and he even sued me (unsuccessfully) for insinuating he is.

And speaking of racists and xenophobes, by now you've no doubt heard about Trump's former butler and longtime pal, Anthony Senecal, whose social media posts about his desire to see President Obama dead have recently captured public attention, along with the attention of the Secret Service. As Senecal's implied threats against the president came to light, so too did some of his other fine work on social media, including some racist rants and some nasty remarks about Hillary Clinton.

A couple of months before Senecal's loathsomeness hit the news cycle, there was a rather fawning story about him and his Donald in the New York Times. Not surprisingly, the Trump campaign has since disavowed the former butler, in the wake of the brouhaha around his inflammatory statements. But despite the headlines declaring that Trump did the disavowing, I haven't seen any indication that Trump himself has done any such thing.

In any case, this Salon.com opinion piece outlines the reasons that Senecal's racism and xenophobia actually matter.

...There is no need to rehash every incidence of racist swill in Trump’s long public career. But this all goes to explain even further the worldview that Trump has developed. He has ensconced himself in a bubble where he can hold court at some five-star Manhattan restaurant, gamely recounting the details of some racially charged crime he read about in that day’s New York Post, with no sense of what his ranting might sound like to people whose check he isn’t picking up. He has surrounded himself with racists and misogynists of every stripe, and didn’t throw in at least one or two confidants who could explain to him that he is not running for president exclusively in Alabama in the 1930s.

So why on earth would he notice if his butler was a raging nutball while the guy was exaggerating the distance Trump was hitting golf balls into the Intracoastal Waterway (an actual anecdote in the Times story)? One can picture them out on the Mar-a-Lago lawn, with Senecal telling him those 225-yard drives are actually 275 and nodding along in agreement when Trump rants about Obama refusing to release his birth certificate.

Because this is Donald Trump: An entitled, spoiled rich boy who cannot imagine that any of his pronouncements might be cruel or racist, because he has surrounded himself with people who believe the exact same things, and wouldn’t dare say otherwise if they didn’t because they think their livelihoods depend on keeping their mouths shut.

...It is of much more concern that the Republican Party frontrunner will revert to form and defend Senecal. But it is of the greatest concern that this will simply make no difference to Trump’s supporters – ironically, some of whom might well be the same people who have been screaming about [the Jeremiah Wright/Barack Obama controversy*] since 2008. Why should they care? The butler and his boss aren’t saying anything they don’t already truly believe.

[* embedded link mine. ~CC]

And speaking of the Secret Service, I wonder if they've taken note of this meme that was going around Facebook, originating with the page Our Eye on Islam 2:

With Trump and his loyal friends and followers, it's all one big hate-filled virtual family, and it goes beyond the insular world of the spoiled, entitled gentry. The lot of them -- King Donald and his loyal subjects -- are in fact mining a deep vein of hate that embraces racism, xenophobia and misogyny.

Y'all are invited to a catfish fry
I thought of Trump loyalist Lenny yet again when another story emerged -- this one about Trump impersonating a publicist 25 years ago. He is now denying that he'd done this, even though he had previously admitted to it. So in addition to being a blowfish, the Donald was catfishing long before catfishing was even a thing, before there was really an Interwebz, even. (The question of just who leaked the damning tape is a story in and of itself.) 

Comedian John Oliver had a few things to say about this matter, as well as a couple of other items that have kept Trump front and center in the comic news cycle for the past week and a half or so. 




As regular readers of this blog may know, Coldwell also has a tendency to pretend to be someone else in the service of boasting about his imagined greatness, and/or attacking his critics. He does this via his Facebook posts and fake email accounts and comments on various web sites. One of his former students told me that apart from using fake email accounts to communicate, he even called on the phone once, apparently using a device to disguise his voice and pretending to be someone else; this person called him out on his fakery.

I mentioned Coldwell's email ruses on my very first full blog post about him in May 2012, and noted them again on several other occasions, sharing screen shots such as this one, where, accusing me of being both a dog-killer and a sexual predator, Coldwell pretended to be his brother "Nicolas" (real name Jens Anskohl). Sometimes he has even pretended to be someone else pretending to be someone else, as in this post where he pretended to be one of his assistants, writing on behalf of his brother.

As Bernie at the GINtruth blog documented on a March 2013 post, Coldwell has also used the name "Rudi Kauder" as an alias to threaten his critics and defend himself. During two different [failed] lawsuits against Salty Droid -- one in 2014 and one in 2015 -- he used aliases and fake email accounts to try to intimidate Salty. And as I've mentioned here a few times previously, even before Bernie or Salty or I ever wrote a word about him, Lenny was trolling on other sites where he'd been criticized, pretending to be someone else, such as his longtime business partner and friend, Dr. Thomas Hohn of Germany. Here's an example from 2010; see the first comment. Clearly it is all Lenny, all the same semi-literate writing style.

But Lenny is just a fourth-rate huckster, and although he has taken up an inordinate amount of space on this little blog, and despite my sincere belief that he has hurt and continues to hurt many people with his misinformation, deception and alleged other atrocities, he really isn't the potential threat to the free world that Donald Trump is. In other words, I recognize that Trump's boorishness and hatefulness, not to mention his history of impersonating others and then lying about it, matter much more in the big scheme of things than do Lenny's rants and loony ruses.

As several commentators, including comedians such as John Oliver, have noted, the fake-publicist story didn't even have to be a story. Trump could have simply said what he said back in the day: It was a joke, an admittedly childish prank, gone sideways. Instead he has chosen to lie, pretending that he hadn't even been aware of the accusation till an interviewer pointed it out to him.

But that incident demonstrates how, then as now, Trump has tried to control the narrative about himself. Like Lenny Coldwell and many other narcissistic psychopaths, Trump loves being the center of attention but hates it when the conversation about him isn't going his way. Both Drumpf and Lenny can dish out the nasty comments about others without flinching but are remarkably thin-skinned when they are the target of even mild criticism. And also like Coldwell (and for that matter like the Church of Scientology, another insane control freak), Trump has found that the Internet has made such control immensely more difficult than it was back in the 1990s. Of course that doesn't stop Trump (or Lenny or the CoS) from striving to maintain control, via spreading lies about their critics, suing or threatening to sue them, trying to suppress publication of critical material -- and in the case of Trump, threatening to gut the First Amendment if he becomes president.
 
Dirty money
Another matter that should have raised a red flag or two for Trump's followers, but so far doesn't seem to have done so, is that whole "self-funded campaign" issue, which came into focus again after billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, whom many of Trump's fans have condemned for being a "Zionist," recently pledged to donate $100 million to the Trump campaign. It appears that Drumpf is now poised to do the very same thing for which he only recently mocked "Little Marco" Rubio.

Writing on Redstate.com, Jay Caruso noted:

The issue here is, Trump managed to sell himself to the 39% of the people who voted for him in the primaries as a true "outsider" who wasn't controlled by anybody. Trust me, I've had more than enough Trump supporters yell at me their guy is not "bought and paid for."

So much for that.

Chances are, there will be some kind of rationalizing this complete change of heart but it will likely be a laughable excuse. After all, this is the same man who proclaimed anybody that booed him at a debate was somebody that gave somebody other than himself, money.

This really is not surprising. Trump is not a man at all concerned about principles or ethics. He wants to be President and while railing about money and donations during the primary helped him, he no longer needs to engage in such rhetoric. To him it was a means to an end, nothing more.

I'm still half wondering whether Trump actually wants to be president, or whether he merely wants to be the last contestant standing in what he views as just another reality show.

Of note, Lenny Coldwell is one of those rabid anti-Zionists (and actually anti-Semitic) Trumpsters I referred to above, but so far it appears that he hasn't uttered a peep about the Adelson money machine and the Trump campaign.

The Trump train chugs along
Will the latest revelations about Donald Trump even matter to the loyalists? Probably not. As Reince Priebus, chair of the Republican National Committee, said about some of Trump's other atrocities: "People don't care."

Indeed it appears that the Trumpsters don't give a flying fudge about their idol's shortcomings. They aren't put off by his offensive and belittling treatment of women over the decades, for instance. (The link in the previous sentence doesn't even go into the more sordid allegations. Long before there was "Katie Johnson" (whose lawsuit, particularly given the timing and other issues, doesn't seem credible to me), there was Jill Harth, whose lawsuit was apparently real but who subsequently withdrew the suit, possibly for reasons that might make you go, "Hmmmm." Also see this link for more on the Harth story.)

Nor do the Trumpians care about potential irregularities with Trump's tax returns, nor about his racism and xenophobia or that of his close associates (in fact for many, Trump's starring role in the hatriarchy is a plus), nor about his alleged mob ties or his numerous bankruptcies, nor about his Scamworld ventures such as Trump University and the Trump Network, nor about his sleazy behavior regarding the million bucks he pledged to donate to help veterans. Most notably they don't care about the fact that he has been lying and lying and lying -- and has consistently been easily snared in those lies -- since his presidential campaign began.

They love him anyway, because he makes them feel good by providing them with scapegoats and validations of their own worldviews, as well as inflated hopes for "taking America back" to a golden past that was anything but golden for untold millions of people.

Some of you will say I am being too hard on Trumpsters and glossing over the fact that for many, the sense of disillusionment with "politics as usual" is as genuine as the disillusionment that drives Bernie Sanders supporters. Moderate-conservative columnist David Brooks was kinder to Trump supporters than I have been, writing, in this March 2016 opinion piece for the New York Times:

...some respect is in order. Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else...

...Trump’s supporters deserve respect. They are left out of this economy. But Trump himself? No, not Trump, not ever.

Reading this piece reminded me again that yes, it is likely that some Trump supporters are not bigots, xenophobes, misogynists or all of the above, though undeniably many are, and some are darned proud of it too. It is likely that there are decent folks among the support base, people who are still striving, with some degree of success, to filter out some of the more hateful and disgusting aspects of the Trump persona so they can continue to justify their support of their candidate. (And there are some who simply do not believe the myriad allegations of racism and abuse, and see those accusations simply as spin by a hostile liberal/mainstream media.)

Many of these people loathe Hillary Clinton because of what they see as the utter nastiness of the whole Clinton legacy or because they don't see her as genuine (though I also suspect that many of these folks are either ignorant of or willing to disregard her history, and some of the factors that made her who she is today). They may also fear Bernie Sanders because the word "socialist" makes them quake in their boots (though the quaking really isn't justified), and/or they see him as increasingly unstable. Even so it floors me that people are so disillusioned with American politics that they would ever seriously consider voting for Biff Tannen as the nominal leader of the free world.

Most of all, the current "enthusiastic embrace of ignorance" in America truly distresses me.

NNATE
Bringing it back around to the main beat of this blog, the observation that "people don't care" also holds true for Scamworld hucksters (like Lenny) and their loyal fans -- fans who may be hampered by various combinations of their own vulnerability, lack of education, desperation, cynicism regarding the status quo, or innate credulity. In the end critics have very little influence on idol worship. "The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on." So it has always been. I don't expect things to change any time soon, if ever.

Where Scamworld is concerned, I have accepted that there are No Neat and Tidy Endings -- NNATE, as my friend Julie likes to abbreviate it -- and that my little barking and snarking efforts on this remote outpost of the blogosphere don't make much difference. People who want to believe in someone or something will believe it, and even those who acknowledge irregularities or misdeeds will insist that the message is more important than the messenger anyway. (That's an opinion with which I beg to differ, though in the case of most Scamworld gurus and right-wing politicians, I dislike the message as much as the messenger.)

The point is that Scamworld's job security is something I've grown to accept, if begrudgingly. But I sincerely hope that a sufficient number of people who are so attracted to or hypnotized by Trump's bombast and hateful rhetoric will at some point be repelled. Let's hope that something -- ideally, the combined force of millions of "dogs" who are willing to make a deafening noise at the polls -- will stop the madness that is the Trump caravan (or the "Trump train" as some of his prideful followers and meme-sharers like to call it) before it hauls the whole of America over the cliff and into an abyss from which we may never emerge.

Related musings, on this Whirled and off:

• Some thoughts for Stupor Tuesday
• Donald Trump and Kevin Trudeau: turds of a feather?
• The devil at the crossroads of poltix and Scamworld
• Salty Droid -- Network Marketing for Dummies (September 2013)
• Salty Droid -- Donald Trump's Rich Dad University (August 2013)
• Steve Salerno -- Donald Trump, the self-esteem industry's perfect candidate 

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