Mike Adams, the Health Ranger behind Natural News, operates a vast online empire spreading anti-vaccine misinformation and historical distortions. With traffic rivaling major outlets, he promotes false claims linking vaccines to autism and denies World War II atrocities, alleging Hitler sought peace and equating US vaccine deaths to Syrian chemical attacks. Following bans from major tech platforms for fabricated stories about LGBT progressivism, Adams labeled CEOs like Zuckerberg as enemies of humanity alongside dictators. Ultimately, his reliance on SEO-driven conspiracy theories rather than factual engagement cements his status as a dangerous purveyor of pseudo-science. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Mostly Human: The Con Artist00:02:24
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Manchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Woods.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Jim Carrey vs Mike Adams00:15:29
What's Lansing my rectal polyps?
I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we talk about the worst people in all of history.
And every week, I try a new and terrible introduction.
My guests today are Dan and Jordan from Knowledge Fight.
What did you think of that one, guys?
Was that all right?
I thought it was okay.
It was spectacular.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Are you guys big fans of Rectal Polyps?
Big, big fans.
Big fans.
I had that feeling.
I named my first son Polyp.
Oh, that's such a cute name for a kid.
Paul, yep.
I named my first son Rectal.
I was planning on having two, but you know, time makes fools of us all.
Indeed.
Rectal Evans does not sound like a good name.
I do not want to be born with that one.
We got a real boy named Sue situation going on here.
Meanwhile, Polyp Holmes.
Yeah, Polyp Holmes.
Now that works perfectly.
Gorgeous.
Yeah, Polyp Holmes is a solid.
Polyp Holmes is going to cut one hell of an RB album.
Rectal Evans is going to join Blackwater.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, my goal with any child I have is to be so bad at being their parent that we wind up having a bloody glass-filled fight in a bar at some point.
Like, I want that experience from the end of Boy Named Sue.
Then you do an episode about your own father.
Yeah, about my own father.
I was going to say, you do an episode about you if you named your kid Rectal.
We are talking about Mike Adams.
Yes, that's right.
That's right.
Who talks about butts, but mainly to sell people silver that they should put inside of their butts.
Which is a real thing that Mike Adams sells, colonic silver, which is butt silver.
Fun times.
So, based on everything we've learned about the Health Ranger so far, most of you probably take it as a given that he's not exactly going to be on the right side of the vaccine issue.
And so, we're clear, the right side of the vaccine issue is that vaccines are good.
I think we're in agreement there.
I think we should all be in agreement about that one.
Nah, I'm still on Team Polio.
I'm still on Team Polio.
It's coming back.
You and Jessica Beal.
That's a defensible argument, though.
If you're anti-vaccine, not because you don't think they work, but because you hate people and want them to get polio, that's a consistent line.
Yeah, absolutely.
If Exxon just came out and was like, we want to kill people with our climate change bullshit, you'd be like, I mean, I guess that's a reasonable argument.
I don't know what to tell you there.
I can imagine just like the CEO of Exxon in a Patagonia jacket at like some coastside, like putting his leg up on like a boulder, lighting a cigarette and tossing it into the ocean and saying, here at ExxonMobil, we think the environment.
You can argue with the conclusion, but not how they talk about it.
Yeah, it's like, okay, at least you're consistent.
BP just released an official statement changing their motto to, oh, fuck them.
Just get out of here.
So, yeah, I don't think anyone's going to be surprised to know that Mike Adams is a staunch anti-vaxxer.
I think you might be surprised to learn how influential Mike has been in terms of helping the anti-vaccine movement grow and metastasize.
Now, it is easy to trace the influence of stuff like that Wakefield fuckers bullshit Lancet study because vaccination rates fell as soon as it went viral.
The impact of a guy like Mike Adams is harder to parse out.
It's clear that he championed every single popular claim about vaccines being dangerous there ever was.
It's clear that he spread false information about vaccines having toxic levels of mercury, that he ranted about the supposed connection between vaccines and autism, and that he claimed that the medical establishment had engaged in a systemic cover-up campaign in order to suppress the evidence.
But, like, a lot of people have written about all of that stuff.
What makes Mike Adams special is the size of his platform.
Think progress notes.
According to the service ComScore, Natural News hosted over 2 million unique visitors in the month of December 2014.
The website's Google page rank is a respectable six, and the same number enjoyed by other more mainstream preachers of the natural space.
The CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey's blog, also receives a six, as do the landing pages for Andrew Weal and Deepak Chopra.
They add that Adams claims that he has personally authored over 2,000 articles, including investigative articles, satire, and op-ed, and that his writings have collectively been read by over 100 million people over the last decade.
Did you say satire?
Yeah, yeah.
I think we're going to run into some of his satire later.
Oh, no about Swift.
Yeah, they note that Adams' news feeds regularly get higher numbers.
Like his newsfeeds are larger than that of The Atlantic or the Los Angeles Times.
So he's influential.
This is not just some guy ranting against vaccines.
This is some guy that more people trust than The Atlantic.
As long as nobody's reading Friedersdorf, I think I'm okay with that.
He's one of Jordan's great.
He's one of my fucking mortal enemies.
I mean, yeah, I mean, history's greatest monster.
But yeah.
Talking about Mike Adams right now.
Now, when that Think Progress article dropped, Natural News had about 1.5 million followers on Facebook.
By 2019, they had almost 3 million, which is more followers than Infowars ever had at its height.
John Entine is an author and award-winning journalist.
He runs the Genetic Literacy Project, which fights misinformation about GMOs and other anti-scientific gobbledygook.
He's another one of the people who's been writing about Mike Adams for years while the rest of the world ignored him.
His research confirmed that by 2019, Adams claimed to have more than 360,000 subscribers to his daily newsletter and more than 4 million monthly unique visitors to his websites.
John pointed out that Natural News ranked 1,814 on the entire internet.
This put them roughly on par with the Mayo Clinic, well ahead of cancer.gov, which has less than half of the traffic of natural news, and way, way, way the fuck ahead of the National Institutes of Health, National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, which only gets 73,000 unique visits per year.
Probably the problem is that the NIH isn't doing enough satire.
Yeah.
Yeah, throw some fucking satire in there, you lazy bastards.
Come on.
So Mike's not just one member of a chorus of loons talking about vaccines killing kids.
He's one of the single people with the largest megaphones for spreading this kind of stuff in the world.
And the fact that he's a lot less flamboyant and interesting than Alex Jones is the only reason why he's probably not more famous.
Among actual scientists, though, he has been reviled for years as a major archon of disinformation.
I'm going to quote from one of John Entine's articles now.
Adams' naturalnews.com website has been characterized by Brian Dunning of the fucking Dunning-Kruger effect, who runs the science.
Yeah, like that fucking guy.
When he chimes in, you know.
Yeah.
Who runs the science case?
Quote Skeptoid is the number one worst anti-science website.
Physician blogger Stephen Novella and clinical neurologist and assistant professor at Yale University School of Medicine characterized Adams as a dangerous conspiracy-mongering crank.
Oncologist David Gorski, aka Orak, called Natural News the wretchedest, scummiest, and quackiest website on the internet.
Alan Levinowitz, a James Madison University professor writing for Slate, wrote, Natural News is a cesspool of pseudo-scientific insanity seasoned generously with political vitriol and outlandish conspiracy theories.
So the Moz Eisley cantina of health.
I'm trying to reach out.
I'm trying to reach out.
No, I know.
I was really stoked about that.
Yeah, that's good.
He's the Moz Eisley's Cantina of convincing parents not to give their kids measles vaccines.
Those quotes always make me think of something.
The problem with brilliant people who care about stuff is that they get very poetic in their insults.
If the guy just wrote and slate, this dude is a fucking idiot, and if you listen to him, you're a fucking moron.
I think people would get it on a larger scale.
Yeah.
Instead of like, he's the chuffiest boy who ever chuffed.
It's like, fuck off.
Well, this gets into another problem.
We were talking in the first episode about like Ver's data and Fair's data and how it's continuously misused by people.
And like, it exists for a good reason.
And scientists created these things for a good reason.
But this is why international science should hire people like us to like...
Okay, so we think we're going to have this kind of database and we'll put it here for the whole public to...
No, That's going to be a bad idea.
Let me tell you why.
Let me tell you what's going to happen.
Yeah, there should be a council of people who know how grifters think.
Like sitting down with brilliant scientists and being like, here's why you need to take a different tact.
Here's the hole they're going to find their way through.
Right.
And then after the fact, they need us also to clown on them, like the Mike Adamses of the world, as opposed to just responding.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You need to dunk on these fools.
Yeah.
Now, Brian Dunning, as noted above, pointed out that Natural News is very influential, saying, for its frighteningly large influence and abysmal quality of information, it earns the number one spot on this list of anti-science websites.
The influence that naturalnews.com gained has led to peer-reviewed papers actually mentioning it, for example.
Wayne Parrott in the University of Georgia Journal of New Biotechnology wrote an article defending genetically modified food and, as an example of the allegations he was addressing, included a natural news article.
I've also found another study that listed natural news as one of 20 or so influential voices in the anti-vaccine movement.
But these peer-reviewed studies are mentioning natural news as a bad thing.
Yes.
Okay, okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They are saying this is an example of a dangerous influence that is causing people to believe lies.
I was influential.
Yeah.
No, no.
But you meant that it was like they were being cited.
No.
Okay.
Christ, no.
Now, while I was researching this article, I came across a study published by the NIH, which I don't know if you guys know this, but it has a terrible Google ranking.
Very unimpressive traffic.
The study was published in 2018, and it's titled The Anti-Vaccine Movement, a Regression in Modern Medicine.
It opens by noting, the premise of the anti-vaccination movement can also be contributed to the demonization of vaccines by news and entertainment outlets.
Voices such as Jenny McCarthy's have proven to be influential, sweeping fear and distrust into parents' minds by parading as autism experts.
Now, interestingly enough, Mike Adams was one of the earliest and maybe the most prominent people to spread Jenny McCarthy's ill-educated anti-vaccine nonsense.
In 2010, Mike Adams published an article titled Andrew Wakefield, Scientific Censorship and 14 Monkeys.
A statement by Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey.
I want to go back in time and talk to me in the 90s and just be like, hey, you know that show singled out?
That's going to get people measles.
Good luck.
That's going to cause dead diseases to come back to life.
20 years from now, no one's going to look good involved in this.
The other thing, too, about Mike Adams with all this stuff is like he's actually good friends with Wakefield.
Like him and Wakefield are buddies.
Yeah, they live in Austin.
I'm sure they go drinking with Alex Jones.
Well, Mike Adams doesn't drink, but yeah.
So he says.
He also is 99th percentile in sobriety.
He is.
And MIT just could not stop flinging themselves at him.
Yeah.
So before essentially, this article was just Mike Adams publishing unedited a statement by Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy about why vaccines are bad.
And before he published their unedited words, he wrote this introduction.
When it comes to vaccines, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey get it.
They see how the pharma industry is engineering a campaign to silence Dr. Andrew Wakefield in order to suppress the publication of startling new evidence linking vaccines to severe neurological damage.
At great risk to their professionals' careers, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey have found the courage to dare to tell the truth about vaccines and autism.
Despite the vicious attacks by the pro-vaccine zealots who will stop at nothing to destroy anyone who challenges conventional vaccine mythology, McCarthy and Carey have issued a powerful, inspired statement that reveals the truth behind the big pharma smear campaign that is intent on destroying the reputation of Dr. Andrew Wakefield before he can publish the final results of this important new study.
He never published the news study.
Of course not.
If I were Mike and I was writing that, I would have thrown in something like, to quote Jim Carrey, somebody stop me before I don't vaccinate my child.
Throw in something.
My kid is smoking with the measles.
I can't think of any good Jim Carrey quotes right now.
Something about the majestic.
I was going to try to say syphilis, but in the same voice he says, alrighty then.
But I can't do a good Jim Carrey, so I'm not even going to try.
Jordan's the Impressions.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sure, sure, sure, sure.
I have a quick question.
Yeah.
I've been wondering this a bunch.
If big pharma weren't so actively shitty, like if they were actually often like a bunch of chill folk.
No, I mean, like, if they were acting ethically all the time, of course, Mike Adams would still make these stupid bullshit claims.
There's no reason not to.
You know, it doesn't matter if they're on the up and up or not.
But since they are so fucking inethical, is it do you think that contributes to how easy people find it to believe his bullshit?
I think not the vaccine, I want to say not the vaccine parts of the pharmaceutical industry because as a general rule, like I'm not aware of much in the way of shadiness that goes on with that specific chunk of it.
But I think stuff like the Sacklers and the opioid epidemic and like jacking up the price of various medications like insulin, like I'm that all definitely contributes to people's general mistrust of the pharmaceutical industry.
Yeah.
And yeah, like it's if we lived in some sort of crazy society where we all paid, you know, people like us paid 30 or 40 bucks a year.
People who had millions of dollars paid more.
And it just funded huge amounts of medical research.
And then medication was available free or at cost as opposed to being a for-profit endeavor.
Maybe this stuff would have less traction and diabetics wouldn't be rationing their insulin in order to pay rent.
Maybe both of those things could happen.
I don't know.
That seems like a crazy, crazy pie in the sky nonsense to talk about.
It's too far off.
Come on.
Society could function that way.
Our system where a company lies about the addictiveness of OxyContin for 20 years and 200,000 people die is clearly more sustainable.
Yeah, yeah.
I think so.
Now, there exists on this glorious internet of ours a website called JennyMcCarthyBodyCount.com.
It includes an exhaustively sourced count of every preventable illness caused by anti-vaccine bullshit and every death from 2007 to 2015.
Why isn't Jim Carrey getting a little bit of that?
That is unfair.
This is.
It is.
It is.
And Mike Adams isn't.
Dumb Beliefs and Illnesses00:03:31
He's at least as much a part of this.
They do focus unfairly on Jenny McCarthy.
I thought it was just a website that chronicled every picture she has on the internet.
That body count is very good.
That body count is valid.
They would actually be similar numbers because JennyMcCarthyBodyCount.com counts 152,762 preventable illnesses and 9,028 deaths, and that's up to 2015.
Now, it's your own conclusion in your own head as to how many of those deaths and illnesses we can pin on Mike Adams for being a major, major, one of the most prominent spreaders of Jenny McCarthy's bullshit.
But I'm going to say he gets a cut of it.
Yeah.
It's one of those things, like I'm never too interested in assigning full blame or anything like that.
You're a part of this.
That means you get your part.
You're just in it.
You're in the conversation of who's...
You get your share, whatever that is, of all of these illnesses.
It does seem like blaming a dumb-dumb celebrity for believing dumb shit doesn't make any sense.
Like, the real issue is the people who exploit her dumb-dumb bullshit for their own gain.
I mean, think about how many celebrities have had dumb, harmless beliefs over the years.
Yeah, like John Wilkes Booth.
Like, John Wilkes Booth never hurt anybody.
Now, I only read about Wilkes Booth in terms of his career up to 1864 as an actor, but never harmed anybody.
He was the greatest.
He was the greatest.
Hold on.
He was the Tom Hanks of his day.
Yeah.
God.
What if Tom Hanks assassinates a president?
What would that, can you imagine?
I think most Americans would be fine with that.
America.
I'm not saying this one.
I'm saying a president.
I'm just like, I know.
I agree.
Imagine America grappling with that.
It'd be way tougher for me to watch that Carly Ray Jepson video again, for sure.
That'd be my number one concern.
Yeah.
See, I'm just thinking about what an intense news cycle that would be.
So that NIH study I cited a little earlier on the growth of the anti-vax movement is emphatic about the role the internet has played in spreading this nonsense.
It does not name natural news directly, but it makes a very clear point about how dangerous the kind of misinformation Mike Adams trucks in truly is.
Quote: Not only are these tactics deceitful and dishonest, they are also effective on many parents.
A study that evaluated how effectively users assessed the accuracy of medical information about vaccines online concluded that 59% of student participants thought retrieved sites were entirely accurate.
However, out of the 40 sites they were given, only 18 were actually accurate, while 22 were inaccurate.
These sites were not evidence-based and argued vaccines were inherently dangerous without any merit-based argument.
More than half of participants, 53%, left the exercise with consistent misconceptions about vaccines.
Research has also shown that viewing an anti-vaccine website for merely five to ten minutes increased perceptions of vaccine risks and decreased perceptions of the risks of vaccine omission compared to visiting a control site.
The study also found that the active vaccine sentiments obtained from viewing the website still persisted five months later, causing the children of these parents to obtain fewer vaccinations than recommended.
The role of the online access to false anti-vaccination information just cannot be understated in examining the rise of the spread of the anti-vaccine movement.
So that's a study on exactly what Mike Adams' website does.
And there's documented evidence that sites like his produce a real impact in terms of stopping people from vaccinating their kids.
Vaccine Misinformation Impact00:16:14
And he has spread this kind of stuff to millions and millions and millions and millions of people.
And now it's time for an ad break.
Now, when I come back, enjoy these supplemental products.
Robert, Robert.
I'm not telling you how smooth that was.
Thank you.
I've been practicing training.
Every morning I get up and jog up a mountain like Rambo, or Rambo, but the other movie that Stallone was in.
Eat a bunch of things and then practice my transitions.
Clickably, they're getting better.
Now, when we come back, guys, it's finally time for Mike Adams' rap.
I don't even know what to call it.
His rap work, his piece.
No, I mean, it's beautiful.
It's perfect.
Beautiful.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
His achievement.
His achievement.
Okay.
All right.
His Wu-Tang-esque accomplishment.
Does he have eight other dudes with him?
Actually, maybe.
But first, products.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Monument.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Oespi and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
We're back and we are about to listen to the rap video that Mike Albums put out.
Now, this is not separated from just called him already.
You call Mike Albums.
Better know.
Which is his rap name.
Yeah, that's his rap name right there.
Hell yeah.
Yeah.
He's Mike Albums when he's cutting an EP like this.
Now, this rap song was part of his anti-vaccine campaign, and its title is Vaccine Zombie.
Now, before you go any further, can I ask you if you know who produced this?
Was this like a rich?
I think it's all Mike Adams.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
I think this is all Mike.
So Q-Tip didn't even have a hand in this.
I don't think, as far as I'm aware, as far as I'm aware, I think Old Dirty Bastard shows up at some point.
Okay, good.
Glad his hologram is still guesting.
No, this is a three-minute long video, and it's too information-dense to play all at once.
So I'm going to ask you, Dan, to play the first minute of the video.
Okay.
And then we will stop it, and we will play the second minute of the video.
Oh, in parentheses, the health record.
The CDC says more than one million Americans are already infected.
They play safe for children to get vaccinated.
Swan flu's coming back like a facial attract.
It's like seven to six.
You gotta cover your back, but not with the vaccine.
Don't give them the bat because those medical quacks are making money off that.
They want to inject you, infect you with the vaccine.
They pretend that they reject your ability.
And if you protest, they arrest you and they knock you down.
Can't have people like that walking around contagious.
The truth is outrageous.
Don't you know the drug companies made this flu?
And if you're thinking you wanna obey this, then you gotta say this.
Don't inject me.
Don't infect me.
Don't stick that needle in my arm.
Chemical wreck me.
Don't inject me.
Don't infect me.
Don't stick that needle in my brain and meta direct me.
Don't use me.
Don't abuse me.
Don't push your medical lies and try to confuse me.
Don't just let me know.
All right.
All right.
That's unbelievable.
That is 100% the opening credits to a Nick Kroll Purdue show.
100%.
God damn.
How would you do?
We got to describe the animation for the listeners because they're not going to be seeing this art rudimentary seems like a good place to start in terms of describing.
I would say 2009 era flash animation.
I would give it that.
Also, I have happened to pause it right at a point where it's clearly a Michael Jackson type of thing.
Yeah, the whole thing is clearly a Michael Jackson ripoff.
Yeah, there's a one of the zombies is clearly a knock on Michael Jackson.
I don't know what's going on.
And it's not even musically similar to Thriller.
There's no similarities between the song and Thriller.
It's just about vaccine zombies and Michael Jackson dressed as a zombie that one time.
So he's the centerpiece of the video.
Oh boy.
Honestly, creatively he could do worse.
He doesn't write a terrible hook.
I've heard it.
I've heard it.
Yeah, and I do do anything the doctors tell me.
So I identify with the character in this video.
This is from 2010, too.
So this is before a lot of the evolution of rapid scene in modern days.
Kendrick had only released his first album at this point in time.
He doesn't even know about this shit.
Oh, yeah.
And I think this one probably had a big impact on Kendrick Lamar.
I think it's only fair to say.
I think he might have created a trap music.
You just pulled that from thin air.
I'm just trying to sound cool.
That was an old man being like, what are the kids in Red Lake do these days?
I know trap music is a thing.
My music is more like, da-da-da-da-da.
Guilty discharge.
I'm still listening to Sky and Carly Ray Jeffson.
Well, hey, let's...
Sky never died and is as famous and beloved as it's always been.
And that's the end of that discussion.
Let's play the rest of this album.
All right, here we go.
Don't you know a swan flu is made by man?
Pharmaceutical scam is sold.
Oh, no!
Oh no!
Oh, no.
Whoa, it's not Zach!
But they can't charge a kid to die.
Oh, yeah.
They inject you.
They infect you.
They stick on me.
Alright, I'm actually getting into this.
They use you.
They abuse you.
They say they're saving your life, but they really confuse you.
All you parents grab your keys and shoot them up just how to get it peers.
Inject your teens and your babies in the crib.
And when they get paralyzed, that's when you realize there's no way to undo what you did.
The big drug companies are making the killing, collecting the billions and getting the wig.
Like a jazz bomb villain, cause they're willing to do almost anything just to make money with the flu vaccine.
Wow.
You guys had a pretty strong reaction to Mike Adams appearing in the flesh on that video.
Yeah, I wasn't ready for the animation change from like goofy cartoons to Mike Adams in a rotoscopeless T undershirt.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
This was deeply upset.
That's rough.
That's about enough, I suspect, of that.
That's frightening.
Yeah, it's a lot.
It's a lot to take in.
But you get an idea of how Mike makes his arguments about vaccines to people.
Well, your nutsack will shrivel up and fall off if you vaccinate yourself.
That's one of those, like, watching that part of that, especially, like, it's that weird middle ground that I don't understand exactly how to figure out what's what.
There's a clear attempt to be funny.
Like, clearly, he's trying to be funny on some level.
Yeah, yeah.
But it's mixed in with these audacious, unproven medical claims.
It's hard to figure out where the line is.
Like, how much of that nutsack stuff was a joke?
Yeah.
Does Mike Adams really believe that so?
Yeah.
Every girlfriend I've ever had has said that to me.
The vaccines are going to shrivel you nuts.
No, how much of that nutsack stuff is a joke?
Oh, oh, well, yeah.
Now, we should probably talk a little bit more about what kind of person Mike Adams is.
I just wish we had more detail about his life.
So tragically, we're going to have to refer back to the bio on his website where he notes, Adams has no criminal record and has never been arrested.
You don't need to see that.
It's in my bio.
You don't need to see that.
I actually wrote it in your bio, too.
Oh, did you guys see it?
Well, you've lied.
Oh, shit.
He avoids alcohol, smoking, coffee, and all recreational drugs.
He has never used recreational drugs in his entire life.
I kind of think he might have used recreational drugs to.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If you have to preemptively deny something, that's probably because you already did it.
But also, how do you do an alternative news site that has stuff about crystals and not smoke some weed?
Like, that seems very incongruous to me.
It does.
It does.
Adams notes in his website: Adams is not known to appear on the social scene and usually spends time in nature rather than socializing.
He is occasionally spotted in public at the Whole Foods Market in Austin, Texas.
Adams is well trained in hand-to-hand combat, firearms, and self-defense.
He has authored numerous courses on self-defense and personal protection.
So, Mike Adams goes to Whole Foods and he'll fucking kill you.
Yeah, I like that.
You're not going to find him at a debutante ball, but he'll be at the Whole Foods and he is trained.
He will fuck you up.
Tell me how much difference there is between that and maybe the Unibomber's self-described bio.
Come on, man.
Kaczynski wasn't good at judo.
No, no, he was not.
Terrible at judo.
Incredible presence on the Graham, though.
Really took to social media like a duck takes to water.
Now, one thing we all know for sure about Mike Adams is that he has thin skin when it comes to people criticizing him directly.
This might be part of why he's not more widely known.
On April 3rd, 2014, John Entine wrote a profile of Adams for Forbes, where he is a contributor.
Mike lashed out to Forbes the same day, claiming John's article contained factual inaccuracies and slander.
He told Forbes to take it down, and they folded like an origami crane.
Adams demanded substantial corrections, none of which dealt with the actual meat of John's claims.
Adams didn't want to be called anti-science or an AIDS denialist or a 9-11 truther.
He wrote this to Forbes: I am contacting you to firmly request that you immediately retract this article and refrain from allowing obvious biotechnology frontmen such as John Entine to exploit your website for such false and defamatory hit piece articles filled with many factual errors and rumor-mongering.
This article, in fact, falls into the category of cyberbullying.
Are we still in his bio?
No, no, no.
This is what he wrote.
Forbes.
That's a good letter, though.
Yeah, now, because he's a real journalist, John Entane published the gigantic document exhaustively laying out the evidence for every claim he made against Mike Adams.
You can go read it right now.
On the subject of AIDS denial, it includes screen grabs of an article written by Mike Adams titled, AIDS, the Great Medical Con, as explained by Daniel Icke.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
AIDS.
I'm denying it.
Don't call me an AIDS denier.
Here's what he wrote in that article: HIV does not cause AIDS.
HIV does not cause anything.
A staggering statement giving the hype and acceptance of the scientific establishment and through them the public that the HIV virus is the only cause of AIDS.
HIV is a weak virus and does not dismantle the immune system, nor is AIDS passed on sexually.
Did he write this in the Reagan era?
Like, when did he write that?
No, that's like from 2010 or some shit.
That's unacceptable.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
Now, to me, that sounds almost like a daily affirmation that he tells himself.
Hey, hey, don't worry about it.
Mike, Mike, we're going to be fine.
You can't get AIDS, Mike.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Now, to back up his statement that Mike Adams is a 9-11 truther, John Entine included this article that Mike wrote, Jumping Rope and 9-11 Truth, How Sheeple Have Been Trained to Avoid the Unpopular Truth About World Trade Center 7s.
Dr Oz and Nazi Propaganda00:08:34
There's numerous examples of both of these things, of his being this kind of person.
That one's plain as day.
Yeah.
And while Adams accused John Entine of cyberbullying, the email that he himself sent John seems to fit that definition much better.
As you are now well aware, you are about to be named in a personal lawsuit which will cite the extensive body of your defamation and cyberbullying efforts, all of which have been archived and timestamped for court evidence.
You can count on this lawsuit requiring considerable resources of your time and money for the foreseeable future.
You are no doubt also aware that I have many friends in law enforcement and that we are simultaneously pursuing an effort to have you arrested and charged with cyberbullying crimes.
In fairness, he is a Ranger.
Yeah, he is a ranger.
He got those tabs.
He got his health ranger tabs.
He's got his head.
Chuck Norris on call.
Law enforcement for sure.
His challenge coin is just a vial of Ebola.
Now, as far as I'm aware, the defamation suit against John Entine did not proceed, and John Entine continues to write fantastic articles about Mike Adams.
He was particularly furious in May of 2014 when Dr. Oz, America's most prominent medical con man, who will probably sue me for that line, invited Mike Adams on as a guest on the Dr. Oz show.
No, that's not real.
No, that's not real.
That fucking happened.
You can't do that.
You can't do that.
That's crazy.
That's second to the music video.
Like, you should lose your medical license for sitting down and talking to Mike Adams and doing anything but saying, how dare you?
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
TV show.
Yeah.
Medical license.
Yeah.
I'm still going to go with medical license, too.
I think we've learned.
We're going to put that in there, too.
Throw that up in there.
I think we've learned that in America, not a goddamn thing will get a TV show taken over.
You should lose your fucking freedom for that shit.
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty bad.
Now, as Think Progress notes, the doctor's 12-minute segment with the Health Ranger was concerned with Adams' research into the levels of heavy metals contained in a variety of supposedly organic foods.
Dr. Oz directed viewers to Adams' website in order to find out which ginkgo biloba protein and cacao supplements passed the tests performed in Adams' own lab.
Those pages offer recommendations and esoteric explanations on the levels of heavy metals discovered in each product, but nothing on the methodology and instrumentation used to arrive at these vital and commercially impactful conclusions.
I really can't overstate how fucking dangerous this is on Dr. Oz's part.
Having Mike Adams on and giving him a chance to plug his websites and wares and focusing the conversation on one narrow area that seems legitimate is just about one of the most irresponsible cases of platforming I can imagine.
And there's not even any evidence that Adams' research into heavy metals on these drugs is accurate in any way, shape, or form.
Think Progress reached out to eight of the vendors Mike reviewed badly on his website.
They found that no one in the supplement industry was willing to go on record talking about Mike Adams.
One company's president, whose products are certified organic and meet all the necessary standards of the EU and FDA, agreed to talk on the condition of anonymity, stating that people in our position don't want to validate his arguments or acknowledge them.
We don't want to kick him in case he decides to come after us.
The minute you open your mouth on that echo chamber, you're on the defense and there is no coming back.
That sounds real.
Yeah, that sounds entirely exactly what you'd expect.
It's so reasonable and so smart for them to do that, and yet at the same time, it makes you so sad because what we should be doing is fighting fucking head-on is burn this guy to the ground for the liar that he is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, that sucks.
Yeah.
Now, over the last decade and change, there have been a lot of alterations to the way the internet works.
Google's altered their algorithm numerous times to try and make life harder for people like Mike Adams.
The rise of social media has further changed the landscape, and Mike has had to adapt to stay relevant and profitable.
He's like a shark.
He's like a shark.
And the internet is run entirely on windmills now.
Also, sharks don't exist.
No, sharks do not exist.
That's obvious, though.
I found a great article by the McGill Office for Science and Society published in 2018 that traced out Mike's online empire at what might have been proved to have been its height.
They found at least 50 websites owned by him, from natural news and other phone news websites like GMO News and Medicine News and Vaccine News to anti-left-wing sites like Campus Insanity, Libtards.news, and Freedom.news.
There were also the predictable prepper websites like Collapse.news.
Quote from McGill.
On chlorellafactor.com, a website dedicated to an algae sold as a superfood, you'll be scared into thinking every seller of chlorella wants to kill you, except for Adams, who, of course, wants you to know that his store offers clean chlorella, even if it means less profit than retailing cheaper, lower-quality chlorella.
While Adams trots out this food source as a defense against cancer, the evidence isn't there.
On consumerwellness.org, you will find a legit-looking portal for a non-profit that funds educational programs.
Press releases on the website claim that the center annually hands out educational grants to aid school children, expectant mothers, and school nutritional programs and low-income families.
Under board of directors, a single person is named, Mike Adams.
There is an invitation to join our advisory board, but no members are listed.
The site was last updated in 2016, though the organization was granted tax exempt status in 1995.
Sneaky.
Yeah.
Was that the same year Scientology got tax exempt status?
Shit, it actually might have been.
It's a hell of a year.
It was close, yeah.
It wasn't, yeah, it was not that far away.
Now, that report also notes that Mike Adams has published a browser toolbar designed to keep readers permanently connected to his online empire even when they visit other sites.
That's really smart.
Yeah.
That's crazy over top smart.
Yeah, I hate him.
I hate him so much, but I hate him even more because I'm like, fuck, that's a good idea.
Yeah, it's a great idea.
Now, I didn't download that toolbar because I am not willing to have my laptop take that bullet for this podcast, but I did some other research.
For one thing, Mike owns Naturepedia, which allows people to look up ailments like IBS and see that the healthiest cures are supplements that Mike Adams sells on his own stores.
And that is coincidental!
Yeah, weird how that works.
Now, Mike also has his own search engine, which he bills as a replacement to Google.
It's called Good Gopher.
Yeah, Good Gopher.
Its bill is filtering out corporate propaganda and government disinformation.
Sites that say Mike Adams is full of shit.
That's code for that.
Well, it's not quite what I had expected.
So I found out about this in that McGill report, which notes that searching for the Washington Post doesn't take you to the Washington Post.
It sends you to TruthWiki, realinvestigations.news and disinfo.news.
That's just a good Boolean search.
Yeah, yeah.
So I tried out Good Gopher myself just to see what sort of results it gave.
And I entered in what is my very favorite single word search term, which is just the word Hitler and nothing else.
I just wanted to see where that took us.
I like it.
That's a good litmus test.
I like it.
Let's just see what he's got to say about Hitler.
If result one on that website is like, was Hitler that bad, guys?
Come on.
Then you're great.
Result three, Jordan.
Result one, I'm guessing.
I'm guessing.
Result one is the Sloan Foundation, which the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation on Truth Wiki.
Result two is the IG Farben Pharmaceutical Conglomerate on TruthWiki.
And then Result three was a blog called Macro Cosmic Thinking, Pot Calling the Kettle Black, The Vilification of Hitler.
Oh, God, no.
Yeah.
No.
Yeah.
It's the kind of Nazi propaganda that tries to mask itself as just correcting their records.
So it says that, like, you know, Hitler really wanted peace with France and England after he invaded Poland.
They're the ones who like pushed for war and stuff.
Oh, of course.
This is a secret treaty.
He invaded a whole country, guys.
Anyway, it also notes that every side in World War II used labor camps.
So really, was the Holocaust so bad?
I'm starting to come around on this guy.
Now, Mike Adams didn't write that, but the search engine that he built provides that as the third return when you search just the word Hitler.
Yeah, but I feel like if you search just the word Google in his search engine, it would come back with like, was Hitler that bad?
Did Hitler make Google?
Yeah, was it Google?
Creating Alternative Spaces00:04:34
I did not tragically try that one.
But that's the way it always kind of goes with these folks who try and create their own spaces because they like everyone else, this space is so terrible.
They create things like Gab and BitShoot and all that.
And it's just infested with exactly that sort of search result.
Yeah, and fucking Mike Adams is the guy who built Google for Nazis.
Yeah.
But if you want some products that aren't for Nazis, check out the products and services that support this podcast and our program.
They are not for Nazis.
I don't even know what ads they are.
It might fucking be another Coke Industries ad, in which case that one kind of is.
But the others, definitely not.
Products!
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
Clayton Eckard Paternity Scandal00:15:03
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Oh, boy.
I'm just, I'm doing my best with these ad plugs, you guys.
I think you're doing great.
Yeah, I think you're doing great.
That was a great ad pivot.
There was one hiccup in the first episode.
I think you're doing great since then.
Yeah, fine.
Thank you.
Thank you.
A lot of people say you shouldn't even mention Nazis close to making an ad plug, but I think that's cowardice.
I agree.
Now, on June 8th, 2019, The Daily Beast published its first deep dive into naturalnews.com, the first one from a truly mainstream website.
The title was, The New InfoWars is a Vitamin Site Predicting the Apocalypse.
At the start of the article, they point out a recent natural news headline: LGBT progressivism horrors.
Parents want to start physically maiming their own babies to slice off all gender organs in the name of progressivism and equality.
The article is authored by Mike Adams, and in it he writes, The next escalation of this war on biology will, I predict, involve parents maiming their newborn infants by slicing off their penis and scrotum shortly after birth in order to rid the child of gender inequality.
So that's why don't any of these people bring up like Barbie dolls, Barbie and Ken dolls?
Like they didn't have genitals.
Why don't any of them bring that up into their conspiracy?
Yeah.
Like trying to normalize the idea of not having genitalia.
Why not?
Why would they do that?
I don't know, but why are you giving these people free solutions?
It's unfortunately something me and Jordan do a lot.
Yeah, we tend to give punch up to the evils.
So that article, as you probably guessed by the first bit, is not at all him reporting on anyone actually suggesting that parents slice their children's genitals off, but based on his prediction that parents will start doing this because he's a maniac.
Do you think that when circumcision was a thing in the Jewish community in the original tribes like 7,000 years ago, there were some people who are like, man, here's what they're going to do to you, man.
They're going to keep your penis on.
That's why we got to cut it off.
Like this whole reverse lunacy of conspiracy theories.
Do you think circumcision is cutting a penis off?
I don't know.
Did they?
Riddle me that.
I'm very confused.
There's no way to know.
What I will tell you is that every protest I've been to, there is one confused elderly man walking around with a sign talking about how circumcision is evil, regardless about what the protest is about.
It could be a Black Lives Matter march.
It could be a protest for pot legalization.
There's got to be an old guy with a sign about how circumcision is evil.
And all of them are Joe Biden.
I've definitely run into some foreskin advocates in my days of protest.
It's always confusing.
Yeah, it's just like, what, dude?
Come on.
Now, also, I should note that The Daily Beast pointed out the article was punctuated by a mid-page sales pitch for organic broccoli sprout capsules.
Okay, okay.
All right.
Yeah, I'll sell that shit.
Got to sell that shit.
I can use some broccoli.
In pill form?
Yeah, in pill form.
The best form for all medication.
One day after the publication of this article, the Daily Beast article, which is really quite good, Facebook banned natural news from their platform.
This followed bans from Google News, Apple, YouTube, Pinterest, and Twitter.
The ban from Facebook came last, probably because Facebook is garbage, but it is probably the ban that will hurt Mike the most.
After being banned, Mike took to right-wing news site GatewayPundit to claim that he was the victim of a vast and sinister conspiracy.
The title of that article was Tag Team Tech Terrorism.
Facebook deletes conservative-leaning natural news after Daily Beast publishes horribly sourced junk hit piece.
According to Natural News founder Mike Adams, the hit piece was so wildly inaccurate and horribly researched, the details they published were so ridiculously fabricated that I've never even heard of many of the accusations before.
They reported on actions by a previous owner several years ago.
Our nonprofit publishes public reports.
I've never even taken a salary from a nonprofit.
They go on to note: it certainly appears once again that liberal publishers are working with Facebook to eliminate conservative voices online.
Mike Adams added, it's clearly coordinated.
The timing was irrefutable.
It's tag team Rico terrorism.
I love the phrase tag team Rico terrorism.
What does that mean?
Yeah, two Ricos.
So it's two Ricos?
Yeah, one of them's outside the ring, the other one's inside the ring.
Okay, okay.
So when you're in the middle of one Rico case, you get tagged out, and there's a new judge who comes in.
Like if that, like, one Rico gets exhausted, they can go to the sides of the ring and tag team.
One Rico just gets tired.
You can't, you know.
Your Honor, I just, I just, I got to take a break.
I got to take a break, Your Honor.
We're going to bring in the other guy.
Yeah.
You thought we were done racketeering?
Here's another.
Yeah, yeah.
That whole thing of like people like, they're tag teaming me.
It's like that, in terms of wrestling rules, that's not really that much of a difference than you just fighting one guy.
Like if the other guy attacks you, then it's a disqualification according to rules.
It's very minor squad when a group of people complains about you being dangerous for half a decade and nothing is done.
And finally, a major news site writes an article about you and then Facebook caves.
That's not tag teaming.
No.
That's chickens coming home to roost.
Yeah.
Basically.
Yeah.
Chickens coming home to roost and also chicken shit behavior on behalf of Facebook.
Yeah.
Now, after talking to Gateway Pundit, Mike next posted an angry response on Natural News, calling himself the victim of a smear campaign by techno-fascists.
He unveiled a new graph, which I should have sent you guys, but didn't.
It's just, in yellow text at the top, it says enemies of humanity.
Oh.
Then, and it lists Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Mousie Dung, and has all their pictures.
And then underneath them and underneath the word now, it has underneath Adolf Hitler, Mark Zuckerberg.
Underneath Benito Mussolini, Jack Dorsey of Twist.
Of course.
Underneath Joseph Stalin, Jeff Bezos.
Sure.
Yeah, underneath Pol Pot, Sundar Pachai.
Sure.
Oh, we're really running down the list real quick, huh?
And underneath Mao Zedong, Tim Cook from Apple.
Famed Maoist.
Tim Cook.
And underneath Tim Cook is Nikolai Ceaușescu for some reason.
I don't know why they tossed that one in there.
I'm starting to have trouble imagining this as a graph.
I love Benito.
It's an infographic, I'd say.
I love comparing Jack Dorsey to Benito Mussolini because that one kind of works.
It does kind of work, doesn't it?
It kind of works.
I think you're that far off.
Kind of spot the fuck on.
A few days after this, Mike went on Infowars and talked to Alex Jones about his fears that Congolese refugees at the border would bring Ebola into the United States.
Yeah, we've just recently talked about it.
I have seamlessly sailed us into familiar waters to drop you guys back off at your comfortable home.
Because I am a great captain.
In this article or in this episode, Mike Adams accused these fleeing people of being essentially a bioweapon, which is about a quarter inch away from literal Nazi propaganda in the 20s and 30s and how it represented Jewish refugees fleeing the Soviet Union.
Can I stop you?
He didn't essentially call them a bioweapon.
He did.
He straight up called them a bioweapon.
Yeah.
The guy who posted a recipe including drink some Ebola virus called other people a viral bioweapon.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's him putting up an infographic that says enemies of humanity and cites the greatest dictators in history as monsters is humorous to me for that because he's basically making Nazi propaganda and also made Nazi Google.
But it's also a little bit, I don't know, humorous is the wrong word to me.
Mike Adams is a war crimes denier, is a Syrian war crimes denier.
That's the lead that I was awkwardly getting to.
In 2017, after a chemical weapons attack by Bashar al-Assad and Syrian civilians, Mike quoted a piece of President Trump's address in a national news column.
Assad choked out the lives of innocent men, women, and children.
It was a slow and brutal death for so many.
Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack.
No child of God should ever suffer such horror.
That was President Trump.
And after quoting this, Mike Adams wrote, If you replace the word Assad with CDC or the vaccine industry, it all makes even more sense.
Vastly higher numbers of children right here in America have been cruelly murdered in the barbaric attack of toxic vaccines than have ever been killed by chemical weapons in Syria.
Ah, yeah.
You got to give it to a guy who swings for the fence.
Big swing.
I know that's a big swing.
Big swings.
Guys turned on.
Casey is at the bat.
Yeah, Casey is eating the bat in order to gain its powers.
I don't know what the fuck that is.
Oh, Jesus.
That's...
Fuck you, Mike Adams.
That's all I've got.
That's the whole fucking episode.
Yeah, he does suck tremendously.
He's a real piece of shit.
It's so weird that so much of his actual career damage that he's done is so much of that perpetuating the anti-vax dangerous health ideas and then somehow has pivoted into the worst political ideas too.
It's hard to own both of those spaces so seriously.
They dovetail so well into each other though.
And it's easy to use relative intelligence kind of words for it, but if you're susceptible to the kind of right-wing rhetoric that gets you to hate random immigrants that you've never met, that you have no concept of, why wouldn't you at the same time be susceptible to buying pills that have cures for diseases that you've never heard of for problems that you've never considered?
It's the same kind of short circuit in your brain that allows you to believe in both of those things so easily.
Yeah, and I do want to return before we roll out to the kind of question that I've been wondering throughout this research process, which is like, why didn't anyone know about this guy until recently?
Like, why didn't he get more attention while he was doing all this?
And I wonder if some of it's just that if you watch him actually speak or watch his videos, like I came across a bunch of his videos that I was going to include in this because they had crazy titles about vaccine denial.
He's so fucking boring.
Yeah.
Like when he actually talks, he's so fucking boring.
He is the blandest man in the world.
Yeah, but then when you go back to that idea of like, I want to trick people into thinking I'm poorer than I am.
Yeah.
That boringness is kind of a self-defense.
And speaking for myself, as someone who's listened to thousands of hours of Alex's show, like I've run into him co-hosting the show often, and whenever I do, I'm like, off.
I'm sure that I could be more upset by him before this point had I've actually listened to the episodes he hosts, but I just get five minutes in, like, I'm not interested in you.
I'm trying to learn about Alex.
You're so goddamn boring.
I think it is a self-defense.
Yeah, and not just that, but his is a career built entirely upon SEO.
Like, entirely upon keywords.
So him speaking, you know, it's kind of behind the scenes.
Exactly.
So him speaking would be boring because he's not creating his search words while he's speaking.
He can't extemporaneously do that.
And so he doesn't get any real traction from it.
Fucking A.
Yeah.
I think he's flies under the radar really well.
Yeah.
Well, he has until, yeah, I mean, he definitely did for a lot longer than Alex Jones.
And I think my nickname for him might be Smart Alex Jones.
Yeah.
Because that's essentially, they had the same career path.
He just was smart enough and, like, I guess not quite as narcissistic because he didn't need to put himself out in front of things as often.
And as a result, he made way more money and hasn't been sued by people.
Yeah.
So.
Hopefully he will, though.
Yeah, he should be.
Yeah, when you at least have a good 30 or 40% stake in a lot of people dying of preventable diseases, it feels like you should have some sort of karmic reckoning coming somewhere along the line.
And he openly doesn't give a shit about karma.
So there's that.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, Karma doesn't pay the fucking bills, Jordan.
Sure don't.
Hey, you're telling the choir here on this.
You know what pays the bills?
Is Vaccine Zombie?
Oh, never.
Oh, yes, ads do pay the bills in my case.
I thought that was an amazing ad pivot there.
No, no.
I mean, Mike Karma is terrible, but it's because of that scimitary.
We don't need to get into that.
Do you think he's ever made money off that rap song?
Do you think he's made a cent off that?
God, I don't know.
The site says it only has 26 views, which can't be true.
So what?
We're 12 of them?
Yeah, that can't be accurate because it also hasn't changed since I viewed it multiple times.
I think their view counter is just broken.
It would be believable, though.
Yeah.
Like, I oh, the first comment on it is someone.
I just scrolled down to the comments.
The first comment is someone whose username is the word liarst.
And it says, that's so good.
That guy has been on the internet from the beginning if his name is Liars.
My mind is.
That's amazing.
Oh, dear sweet Jesus.
All right, guys.
I'm exhausted.
This is the episode.
Plug your pluggables.
We have a podcast.
It's called Knowledge Fight.
It's all about Alex Jones, and we put out episodes three times a week, Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
Liars Username and Exhaustion00:04:08
People can find us on iTunes.
Our website is knowledgefight.com.
Indeed, we're at knowledge underscore fight on Twitter, and I'm at GoToBetjordan.
Jordan's Twitter is chock full of vaccine denial.
Yeah, no, that doesn't sound right.
That doesn't sound right.
But yeah, and I will be hosting Zaney's in Old Town the entire month of July.
So if you want to come down and say hi, that'd be great.
And yeah, I have no anti-vaccine content on my Twitter.
Me neither.
Me neither.
Shit post a lot about Nazis on it.
So if you want some of that, you can go to iWriteOK on Twitter.
You can find this podcast on the internet at behindthebastards.com.
You can buy a t-shirt off of tpublic.com.
Just look us up.
You know what the name of this podcast is because you listen to it.
And please do check out Knowledge Fight.
It's my favorite podcast for bench pressing towards.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
That means a lot.
It fuels me with the anger that I need to get that last couple of reps in.
So I appreciate it for that.
Well, we only pray that you're never trying to set a record while we accidentally make a really funny line and you choke yourself out with a dumbbell.
We pray that never happens.
That is the gamble that I take every time.
You got to stay alive.
You've got to stay feeling alive.
I'm a gambling man.
And now in true Alex Jones form, I'm just going to start playing the gambler and singing along to it loudly and demanding that you all listen.
A little in joke for people who are up on their AJ knowledge.
All right, he won't.
Thank you so much for being my guest today.
And thank all of you for listening.
The fucking podcast is over.
Go do something good with your lives.
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