Alex Hale’s open letter critiques Snowden Bishop for hosting unchallenged anti-vaccine disinformation on The Cannabis Reporter—including debunked claims by Judy Mikovitz since 2009 linking vaccines to autism and cancer—while leaving episodes on Spotify and iHeartRadio despite removals elsewhere. The letter ties her past advocacy to Plandemic’s 2020 resurgence, which fueled vaccine hesitancy during 2021 rollouts, and demands she remove the content to uphold integrity against misinformation. Failure risks weakening climate activism’s credibility by normalizing grifters and compromised principles, urging direct pressure on Bishop through Hale’s public channels. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that has taken the gloves off for the fight against disinformation.
This episode is titled as an open letter, and it will contain an open letter.
But as the open letter occurs at a particular moment with a particular context, that context must first be described.
Judy Mikovitz is a scientist who has dedicated a great deal of time and energy to spreading anti-vaccine falsehoods.
She has approached this as a career ever since 2009 when she did some scientific malpractice.
She's written two books that have been repeatedly debunked by the medical and scientific communities.
Snowden Bishop was a broadcaster who produced a radio show called The Cannabis Reporter.
This radio show was ostensibly about cannabis advocacy, both for sales of products and for legalization efforts.
As part of that radio program, Snowden Bishop interviewed Judy Mikovitz twice.
Both episodes were released in the early part of the pandemic in March and April of 2020 to a podcast.
Both episodes remain available online and both contain medical and vaccine-related disinformation.
This is Judy Mikovitz's specialty, and there really is no other reason to interview her if you're not looking specifically for that.
Here's a sample from one of those podcast episodes.
You know, the 20,000-foot view of plague of disease, the first book called Plague, was that we identified a new family of retroviruses.
We isolated them from people with not only autism, but cancer, myalgic, encephalomyelitis, chronic fatigue syndrome, MECFS, any number of cancers.
It was first identified as a possibility.
Sequences were found in prostate cancer.
So here now is a new family of viruses which caused devastating diseases that didn't kill you right away as HIV AIDS did, but of course were found.
You know, we found the blood supply to be contaminated as we knew the blood supply was back in the 80s with HIV.
And of course, then one of our colleagues suggested this, that this retrovirus family, because it was related to mouse cancer causing and neurological disease causing viruses.
He said one of the most widely used products where we use mouse tissue is biological therapies, including vaccines.
So how did a mouse virus get into humans?
Well, vaccines.
Okay.
Not everyone is familiar enough with anti-vaccine talking points to fully understand what she's saying there.
So let me be clear.
She says that the blood supply is tainted.
What exactly does she mean by that?
The listener will never know because there's no follow-up or clarifying question ever asked by Snowden Bishop.
So the blood supply is tainted, supposedly, with mouse retrovirals.
This is scary sounding genetic jargon for something that doesn't actually work the way she's claiming.
Retrovirals are bits of RNA that don't recreate themselves back into the viruses from which they originated.
More, according to Mikovitz, these mouse retrovirals cause subsequent disease in the human population that's widespread.
Why widespread?
Because it's the blood supply that's tainted, right?
Multiple diseases are caused by this, according to Mikovitz.
She lists cancers plural, autism, and MECFS, myoencephalitis chronic fatigue syndrome.
Her evidence for this is non-existent.
These claims are vaguely related to the scientific malpractice she engaged in back in 2009.
And in order to justify her failure, she has inverted the reality to pretend that she was right all along and that it's the entire rest of the scientific community that has colluded to deny her research its rightful place among Nobel Prize considerations.
The old grievance narrative re-spun as bold truth-teller routine.
Oh yeah.
And this is all somehow like the AIDS epidemic, which relates to previous medical disinformation Mikovitz has spoken and written about in the past.
All of it is designed to make vaccines extremely scary.
The fact that I had to even explain it, explain what it meant, is a small comfort because at least some people might skip right on past it.
Let Action Speak Proverbially Louder Than Words00:07:29
Disinformation distributors like Judy Mikovitz are extremely dangerous because they use their educational credentials dishonestly to sell disinformation under the logical fallacy of an appeal to authority.
They have the education to become very convincing to people who haven't studied biology at the post-secondary level, which is most of us.
Judy Mikovitz is now infamous for appearing in a film which masquerades as a documentary called Plandemic.
It was released in May of 2020, and it was responsible for a lot of people turning down the vaccine when it was offered in early 2021.
Plandemic released very shortly after the aforementioned podcast episodes in which Snowden Bishop interviewed Judy Mikovitz.
Those were released in March and April of 2020.
Now for the letter.
This letter is to one Alex Hale, who is a prominent member of a climate activist group called the Climate Crisis Club that operates on Twitter to organize events and generate interest in their cause.
To Alex Hale.
I would like to address the topic of information citizenry and what it means to be a good information citizen.
Taking responsibility for the information each of us has put into the world needs to become an everyday part of life in a world that has this much disinformation.
The climate activist community has an important role in the overall project of maintaining a strong relationship with reality and with political optics.
Your advocacy must be principled and must keep the ultimate goal in mind without seeking to elevate any single reputation or personality.
It is for this very reason that unscrupulous actors will attempt to use these principles to launder their own reputations.
There is a reason, after all, that we have the term greenwashing.
And principles are the key here.
I ask you to give action to principles to which you have thus far only given voice.
To prove to me and to others listening that you give more than mere lip service to the fight against disinformation.
I ask you to apply social pressure to Snowden Bishop to remove her podcast episodes featuring interviews with Judy Mikovitz and containing dangerous anti-vaccine disinformation from Spotify and iHeartRadio.
The climate activist community cannot be expected to vet every person who comes to them to speak and to claim alliance and support.
But once information has been brought to them, to you, part of the climate community, that casts doubt on a person's value with respect to their membership in a coalition, will the climate community step forward and ask that person to take responsibility for their own past?
When Snowden Bishop comes to your Twitter spaces and wants to speak to your audience about her value to your community, will you ask her when, not if, but when, her podcast episodes containing interviews with Judy Mikovitz will be removed?
Do not look upon this message as a burden that I am placing upon you, but rather a burden that Snowden Bishop places upon you by her collection of actions.
By being a dishonest and untrustworthy information citizen, while also seeking to work in coalition with other people, she places upon each of them a burden of her poor information citizenry.
And by working to prevent anyone in those alliances from knowing about her past rather than addressing it by properly removing those episodes, she works not to assist your activism, but instead potentially to taint it.
You are not the gatekeepers for all social expectations in life, but you are the gatekeepers for the expectations of your allies and those who would seek to appear acceptable by speaking to your audience with friendly and familiar messages.
Messages which are sometimes contradicted by their actions once they leave your presence, and by this disparity betray a fundamental dishonesty that can be used also to tarnish you for helping to give it voice.
Snowden Bishop's actions are a burden placed upon you and upon every honest person fighting against disinformation that she seeks to work with.
You speak of wanting to heal divisions on the left.
I understand this goal and support it.
When you seek alliance with others, you will be affected by their principles as they will be affected by yours.
Snowden Bishop's refusal to remove her podcast episodes featuring anti-vaccine disinformation represent either a lack of principles regarding disinformation or an active reluctance to give up her former beliefs.
By knowing this and deciding to work with her anyway, you would be endorsing those same principles.
Divisions cannot be mended by a relaxation of principles.
Alliances are not well made by lowering the barrier to entry.
Friendships cannot be built on dishonesty.
A coalition built using these principles will attract grifters and opportunists.
Who else but they would be eager to work with someone whose principles sway with the current political breeze?
Better alliances are built by displaying and communicating your principles as unwavering and stalwart, such that any prospective ally would know before approaching that they must also live up to those same principles.
I ask you not only to stand by the principles related to climate activism, but also to lend a hand to the principles of the fight against disinformation.
Let action speak proverbially louder than words.
I have heard the arguments against taking this stand about this particular person and this particular piece of disinformation, and I have found these arguments wanting.
I have heard that this happened years ago and is in the past.
Drama on Spotify00:12:43
This argument comes from a misunderstanding of the technology at work.
If this disinformation was to be found on Twitter in like a set of tweets, it might be reasonable to simply move on without making any change.
But it is found on Spotify, a platform that has an extremely effective algorithm at matching listener preference to existing content.
On Spotify, this information would fall under the heading of cannabis legalization.
Every new political fight to legalize cannabis in every state in which it is not yet legal drives people to engage with platforms in a way that will encourage the highly effective Spotify algorithm to recommend these episodes.
In this way, the information will enter the minds of new people as the Trojan horse of Greek myth.
These episodes feature a person who has notoriety from other appearances.
Jody Mikovitz has just released a new anti-vaccine documentary featuring Liam Neeson as the narrator, lending his Hollywood charisma to a dangerous message.
This will put Mikovitz into other conversations that will also tend to cause the highly effective Spotify algorithm to recommend these episodes.
In that situation, it's less likely that the disinformation present will be a new message to those who hear it, but it will reinforce the disinformation that Mikovitz has given in other places and will join an anti-vaccine chorus.
Podcasts last a lot longer than tweets or even TikTok videos.
They resurface.
They recycle.
The algorithm on iHeartRadio is not as effective as that of Spotify.
But you can guarantee that they're working on it.
Leaving this information on iHeartRadio in the hopes that the audience size doesn't grow and that the algorithm doesn't improve is foolhardy, considering that iHeartRadio is a company that's actively working on both of those objectives.
In addition to the attention that these specific episodes could get from content algorithms, there's the fact that Snowden herself has talked about her past as an advocate for cannabis use.
Every time she talks about this experience with respect to her radio show, she indirectly brightens the light that shines in the direction of these podcast episodes.
I would not expect her to cut off all ties to all of her previous work, which is why I do expect, as should you and everybody else, that she carve away the bad pieces so that the bulk of her previous work can be unsullied.
Some of the arguments given by Snowden and her cohorts about why this dangerous disinformation should be ignored include the idea that it isn't in fact dangerous at all.
This is called reality inversion.
It's a special form of gaslighting in which the evidence is ignored or bypassed and the conclusion is reinterpreted to have the opposite meaning.
I assure you that it is, in fact, dangerous disinformation.
It includes direct statements claiming that the blood supply has been tainted by mouse retrovirals to cause autism, MECFS, and cancer.
These podcast episodes contain language that is designed to manufacture fear of vaccines, including references to the vaccines going into the bloodstream rather than into the muscle tissue, which is the current practice.
This sort of visceral imagery is done purposely to inspire fear and vaccine hesitancy.
These podcast episodes contain spurious claims about vaccine liability.
This is akin to telling an audience that while they cannot sue the measles and COVID for harms waged by viral infectious agents, they would be justified in skipping the vaccine protection for want of greater means to sue vaccine providers.
The United States has a national vaccine compensation program that works to assist people who have been harmed by vaccines.
If someone wants to increase the effectiveness of that project, they are free to do so.
But pretending it doesn't exist to encourage vaccine hesitancy is dangerous disinformation and needs to be segregated as such.
If Snowden Bishop or anyone else tries to say that this information isn't dangerous, the response should be to tell them to link openly to the episodes on Twitter with a full-throated endorsement of their contents.
In fact, if you, Alex Hale, would like to agree that there's nothing destructive therein, then I invite you to do this exact thing.
Put your reputation on the line for your allies, or admit that you're just playing at this coalition thing.
I've heard Snowden Bishop claim and can provide evidence for, if needed, that Judy Mikovitz said a lot worse things during these interviews and that a lot of it had to be cut out.
This is a negotiation with bad information to allow the listener a reason to cut Snowden Bishop some slack, to create a greater extreme from which to negotiate the truth such that the middle point ends up where it exists already.
To allow the dangerous disinformation to continue existing because in the image given, she has already put in work to prevent, quote unquote, the worst of it.
But I argue that this is not an appropriate defense.
Claiming that one could have stolen a lot more items from a house, but that one chose not to, does not make anyone any less a burglar.
Nor does the idea that even worse disinformation was removed before releasing a podcast make Snowden Bishop any less an anti-vaccine disinformation peddler.
I've heard Snowden Bishop claim, and again, can provide evidence for, if needed, that multiple doctors reviewed the information before it aired.
This is a logical fallacy called appeal to authority.
It gives the receptive listener a reason to think that everything is good and fine and that they don't need to put any effort into listening to the episodes themselves.
It's an attempt to tell the audience that they can simply trust Snowden Bishop at her word.
That word is losing value each day these episodes remain online.
I've heard Snowden Bishop claim that it's impossible to remove these episodes from these platforms.
This is in direct contradiction to the fact that she has already removed them from her website and from Apple podcasts.
Fun fact, just prior to their removal on her website and Apple Podcasts, it was claimed by those close to Snowden Bishop that she was also unable to remove them in those places.
These are familiar claims that hold no water.
I've also heard Snowden Bishop claim that it would be too difficult to remove these podcast episodes from iHeartRadio because she would have to go to hundreds of individual radio stations to remove them.
This is a falsehood.
iHeartRadio is a single podcast feed for a reason.
One feed.
Manufacturing an exaggerated amount of work to justify a lack of action is dishonest.
But I also argue that if it is difficult work, this is not a reason to let this go.
How much effort is put into ending anti-vaccine disinformation?
How can Snowden Bishop claim to be an ally of the people putting in that effort while also claiming that her time is worth more than maintaining her own platform responsibly?
How can she claim to be part of the fight against disinformation while expecting others to put in more effort to stop her own disinformation than she has?
It's also been said by advocates for Snowden Bishop too many separately for it to be anything other than the equivalent of a directive from a single source that my effort to mention the existence of these episodes is an attack on Snowden Bishop herself.
Indeed, I expect this message today to be maligned as such.
This part gets a little delicate as I attempt to thread a needle here.
I don't want to devalue emotional appeals.
They most certainly have their place and time, most especially in cases of assault, as very often the emotional appeal is the only tool available to the assaulted.
But the use of emotional appeals to sway in other situations must stop.
I believe this is the part of the discourse that is more broadly labeled as the drama.
It's the overuse of these emotional appeals that waters down their impact in the more necessary situations.
It hardens the audience to grief and hardship and works to increase the level of disbelief in situations when belief in the emotional appeals is most needed.
There is, after all, a reason why the boy who cried wolf is an enduring cautionary tale.
My message today will be labeled as the drama in an attempt to dissuade you or anyone else from paying heed.
You can decide for yourself whether or not this label applies, but at some point it would be useful if we could call people's unnecessary emotional appeals out for what they are so as to not weaken the impact of the voices the impact of victims of assault and not tax the empathy of the audience.
If you feel that this message today rises to the level of an attack, then let that stand on the record for everyone else to assess your judgment.
Say it loudly.
Let everyone see both my message and your judgment of it and let the people decide.
But I caution against allowing this to fall under a label of the dramatic out of a mere desire to avoid drama.
Dishonest actors will use the label of drama as its own emotional appeal in a pernicious twist.
They will apply the drama, then use the label of drama as a defense against anyone who counters it, thereby allowing the emotional effect of their drama to stand unchallenged.
If Snowden Bishop wanted to avoid all of this angst, there were avenues she could have taken, and she has had plenty of time to do them.
She could have removed these episodes herself.
This is actually a claim she's made before, that she removed the episodes herself already.
This is not entirely true.
They were removed from Apple Podcasts and her website.
And she did not do so on her own without influence.
They were removed at my insistence last year on January 9th, 2025.
Again, I can prove this with PDFs of chat logs from Discord, should anyone wish to read them.
Find Snowden's Account00:14:03
Just send an email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com with a request for the Snowden Bishop chat logs, and I will send those straight to your inbox.
Further, Snowden Bishop could have created some new podcast media that explains adequately her position.
And she doesn't need to have produced her own podcast to do so.
Podcasts abound like dandelions in late spring.
And the idea that she wouldn't be able to find a suitable one to effectively communicate and clarify her standing and beliefs is better understood as her not making the attempt.
She owes it to the people whose alliance she would seek to make her beliefs known, both how she came to them and how she's come to her positions now, in a simple and easily digestible single episode link.
She wants you to trust her because of what is in her mind while also obfuscating what is in that same mind.
And let it not be said that I seek to ostraciz or cancel or overtly punish Snowden Bishop for her previous beliefs.
i have interviewed for my own podcast many people who have previously held unreal beliefs in stephanie kemerer's case she used to believe the sandy hook shooting was fake and that 9 11 was an inside job
She now works for the Honor Network to take down disinformation related to Sandy Hook and regularly appears on the Adventures in Hell World podcast to add her voice to fight political disinformation.
Brent Lee used to believe in a grand conspiracy in which the global elite were demons who required blood sacrifices to sate themselves.
He believed that all mass casualty events were fake.
He has since hosted and produced the Some Dare Call It Conspiracy podcast debunking these and similar ideas and appeared as a speaker at many events organized to fight disinformation.
He also appeared in a BBC documentary podcast in which he got the opportunity to apologize to a family member of a victim of a mass casualty event in an extremely touching moment.
Lydia Green used to loudly advocate against vaccine use.
She now runs a Facebook group called Back to the Vax advocating for vaccine use.
She has produced a series of podcast episodes to articulate how it was that she came to have anti-vaccine views and subsequently how she came to realize that these ideas were built on lies.
Lydia has also made many appearances, many appearances as a speaker to advocate for vaccines and how to help people understand their own subjective realities well enough to maybe leave behind those dangerous ideas.
This is only a partial list, but it's already instructive.
These individuals regularly show contrition about the harm their disinformation caused.
They never deny the nature of the disinformation that they previously shared and encouraged others to believe, nor do they downplay the scale of what was done.
They accept full responsibility for their platforms and are the models for good information citizenry when leaving behind conspiracy ideation.
Their stories become powerful tools for helping people understand that there is a way back to reality from unreal beliefs.
Before anyone puts the argument into the conversation, allow me to anticipate it and counter it.
It is true that not everyone who previously spread unreal beliefs needs to take the same path as the three that I mentioned.
Brent, Lydia, and Stephanie.
Everyone who reliably changes their thinking on this does so with some time out of the limelight to get themselves and their social arrangements in line.
And some choose to stay silent after taking that time.
That is perfectly acceptable and should not be maligned.
But I argue that when a person re-enters the socio-political space and wants to join the fight against disinformation, they need to take the steps clearly outlined by the examples listed previously.
To attempt to hide your former disinformation is extremely distrustful behavior.
To keep it active online, even more so.
If you actively distributed disinformation that had the potential to harm people, you owe it to the information environment to account for that disinformation directly.
There is a not insignificant chance that Snowden Bishop still harbors some of these beliefs, that she hasn't fully cast them aside, and that this explains why she works so hard to not remove them.
Belief is a complicated thing, and it's completely possible for a person to believe both things at once, that they're now doing the right thing by using a fight against Trump as a proxy for their as a proxy for their previous beliefs, but to also not be certain those beliefs were entirely wrong.
It is very dangerous for their ability to process reality, and it's not recommended.
Snowden Bishop needs people near her who will help her let go of her former beliefs, not the people she has now who will compromise themselves and their integrity by acquiescing to her refusals.
They are enabling her.
Will you also be her enabler?
In addition to the reasons Snowden Bishop has given as to why she should not be required to remove these episodes, I have heard Snowden Bishop and her confidants make specious claims about myself that have been intended to reduce other people's confidence that I'm an honest person in this space.
This is done while Snowden Bishop goes to your spaces and preaches a message of healing.
My effort has been compared to a crusade.
It's been described as stalking and creepy.
My effort could only be stalking if it breached the barrier of personal information that Snowden Bishop hasn't made public.
All information I've found has been extremely public and actually very easy to find.
Describing my effort this way is an attempt to make the work of investigation itself have negative value.
It's meant to conjure in the minds of receptive listeners the idea that if they themselves bother to look at this publicly available information, that they could also be labeled with the icky words.
This is the language of the political bluff.
It says, this is what happens to those who mention this thing I'm uncomfortable about.
Do this yourself and you can also have me do this to you.
Also, I don't want to claim any effort that wasn't my own or that wasn't an achievement.
I mentioned previously that the episodes in question were available on Snowden's website.
The link to that website is even now available on her Twitter bio.
It didn't take Colombo to figure it out.
In addition, I wasn't even the person who looked there.
Someone else pointed me to it.
I realize that all this effort will only have been to remove but a single voice from the anti-vaccine chorus.
Recognize that this is not an argument for allowing it to remain, but rather an argument meant to convince you to give up, to throw up your hands and declare that since you can't fix everything with this one thing you're doing now, that you shouldn't bother doing it or to try fixing anything.
This specious argument is likely familiar to the climate activist community as the Nirvana fallacy.
But I also will remind you that this is not only about removing that one voice from the chorus, but to state plainly to everyone who would be your allies that you do indeed have principles, that your actions follow your rhetoric, that your politics is shaped by reality rather than that your reality is shaped by politics.
At last, as I near the conclusion, I ask, will you stand up for your own reputation and ask Snowden Bishop when she will be removing these podcast episodes?
And by doing so, will you assist in the creation, maintenance, and communication of a set of common social expectations surrounding what it means to be a good information citizen.
Will you help to establish a set of social pressures that puts the onus for disinformation on the people who produced it and thereby have the best access to remove it?
Will you tell Snowden Bishop that you require more than merely lip service to the idea of taking responsibility?
Will you tell Snowden that responsibility is demonstrated through actions rather than promises?
And by doing so, remind everyone who wants to step forward as coalition partners that not only do they need to act responsibly for their own, accept responsibility for their own actions, but that by moving into alliance with you, they will be entering an atmosphere in which said expectations of responsibility are normalized.
Will you protect the quality of your reputation such that anyone who wishes to ally with you will understand that the value of such an acceptance should not be taken lightly or dismissed?
Will you tell Snowden Bishop that the responsibility for the maintenance of her platform rests primarily with her?
Will you tell her that the expectation that anyone else put in more effort than she does to counter the dangerous disinformation that she has produced is unacceptable in an ally?
What would a political victory against Trump look like if all the principles surrounding reality and information responsibility are compromised?
How pyrrhic and empty will such a victory be as you celebrate the fall of Trump only to wish you could still understand where exactly the line between fantasy and reality resided?
Are we in so desperate a position that it no longer matters the conditions under which we might gain victory?
And if so, where would the climate fall on anyone else's list of priorities when choosing which principles to compromise in order to defeat Trump?
If you won't treat anyone else's concerns about information management with appropriate gravity, then how is anyone else meant to take your concerns about climate and the environment to heart?
Thus ends the open letter.
If you want to also provide social pressure to Alex Hale to encourage him to do the appropriate thing, there's good news.
You can.
You can go to Alex Hale's link tree, where all of the links where you can contact him are available.
It's linktree with a dot between the R and the two E's slash NBPT rocks.
You can find his Twitter account.
You can find his Blue Sky account.
You can find anywhere else you might want to find him right in there.
And you can write a message that says, I call on Alex Hale.
And if you're on a social media platform like Twitter, I would wish that you link him with his at, which on Twitter, it's at NBPT Rocks to ask Snowden Bishop when her anti-vaccine podcast episodes will be removed.
If you want extra bonus points from me, you can provide the link to this podcast, either on a podcast platform or on YouTube.
Sign Off Clear00:00:19
as it will be on all of those in your message so that he understands exactly what he's responding to.