Popular Anti-Science Site Likens Journalists to “Nazi Collaborators” Over GMO Coverage

A graphic from a Natural News post likening journalists to Nazis.

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Update: Adams has appended a note to the story that likened journalists to Nazis: “After careful analysis, I have come to the conclusion that the Monsanto Collaborators website is a bait-and-switch trap engineered by the biotech industry in an effort to lure in support from GMO skeptics and then discredit them with some sort of insane ‘call to action’ of some kind….For the record, in no way do I condone vigilante violence against anyone.”

For years, Natural News—a conspiracy-minded alternative medicine website that attracts roughly 7 million unique visitors each month—has been crusading against the practice of genetically modifying food. But this week the site’s proprietor, Mike Adams, took the campaign to new extremes with a post comparing journalists who are critical of GMO activists to “Nazi collaborators.” Adams also urged readers “to actively plan and carry out the killing of those engaged in heinous crimes against humanity.” Below is a snippet from his anti-media diatribe:

Monsanto is widely recognize as the most hated and most evil corporation on the planet. Even so, several internet-based media websites are now marching to Monsanto’s orders, promoting GMOs and pursuing defamatory character assassination tactics against anyone who opposes GMOs, hoping to silence their important voices.

These Monsanto collaborator sites tend to be “leftist” publications but also include at least one prominent business and finance publisher on the political right. All of them are Monsanto collaborators who have signed on to accelerate heinous crimes being committed against humanity under the false promise of “feeding the world” with toxic GMOs.

The rambling post goes on to compare the agrochemical giant Monsanto to IG Farben, a “chemical conglomerate run by Nazi collaborators” that “used Jewish prisoners as human guinea pigs in horrific medical experiments.” And it calls on readers to target journalist who Adams views as pro-GMO by publicly listing their names:

Just as history needed to record the names and deeds of Nazi war criminals, so too must all those collaborators who are promoting the death and destruction caused by GMOs be named for the historical record. The true extent of their collaboration with an anti-human regime will all become readily apparent once the GMO delusion collapses and mass global starvation becomes an inescapable reality.

I’m hoping someone will create a website listing all the publishers, scientists and journalists who are now Monsanto propaganda collaborators. I have no doubt such a website would be wildly popular and receive a huge influx of visitors, and it would help preserve the historical record of exactly which people contributed to the mass starvation and death which will inevitably be unleashed by GMO agriculture (which is already causing mass suicides in India and crop failures worldwide).

Adams, a self-proclaimed nutritionist who was featured on Dr. Oz earlier this year, is famous for his far-fetched ideas. He believes, for example, that Americans are being poisoned by lead-infused “chemtrails” and that Microsoft is developing infertility drugs that “target specific races.”  David Gorski of the website Science-Based Medicine has dubbed Natural News “a one-stop shop” for “virtually every quackery known to humankind, all slathered with a heaping, helping of unrelenting hostility to science-based medicine and science in general.”

Still, Adams has a large pool of readers who take his ideas seriously. After he published his screed likening journalists to Nazi sympathizers, a “Monsanto Collaborators” website appeared with images of Nazi soldiers and emaciated corpses alongside a list of reporters whom Adams accuses of being in the GMO industry’s pocket. The heading reads “Journalist Collaborators.”

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We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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