Mike Adams, also known as The Health Ranger, is a fierce advocate of alternative medicine. He is anti-vaccination, anti-GMO, anti-medicine.
You may know him as the owner of NaturalNews.com. According to the website, its 20 writers and researchers produce up to 15 articles a day. If this massive undertaking already sounds impressive, you may want to know that NaturalNews.com is only the prominent tip of a very large iceberg.
A bit of online sleuthing revealed that Mike Adams owns over 50 websites. The topics they cover go beyond alternative medicine and help shape an entire worldview: fear of medicine and science (gmo.news, medicine.news, vaccines.news), anti-Left and pro-freedom hype (campusinsanity.com, libtards.news, freedom.news), and doomsday prep advice (survival.news, collapse.news).
On biodefense.com, you will be able to listen to a 45-minute audio clip of Mike Adams instructing you on building an emergency Ebola isolation room at home “after the hospitals are overrun” (never mind that Ebola does not spread easily and that few cases ever made it to North America).
On chlorellafactor.com—a webpage dedicated to an algae sold as a superfood—you will 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 defence against cancer, the evidence isn’t there.
On consumerwellness.org, you will find a legit-looking portal for a nonprofit that funds educational programs. Press releases on the website claim the Center annually hands out educational grants to aid schoolchildren, expectant mothers, 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 website was last updated in 2016, though the organization was granted tax-exempt status in 1995.
To help bring you back within the confines of this online ecosystem, Mike Adams offers you a toolbar for web browsers so that, regardless of which website you visit, NaturalNews.com is never more than a click away. If you were thinking of searching Wikipedia for a particular food or nutrient, stop. Mike Adams owns NaturalPedia, which offers biased health information such as his page on naturopathy. On it, you will “learn” that it can treat irritable bowel syndrome and ulcers. At the bottom of the page, you will see ads for iodine, magnesium, and colloidal silver because, like the denouement you predict halfway through watching a bad movie, you will have inferred by now that Adams has a store.
Digging a bit deeper reveals a weirder complexity to Adams’ ecosystem.
Mike Adams has a search engine. If you’re looking for a replacement to Google that “filters out corporate propaganda and government disinformation”, Adams suggests you use Good Gopher. Searching for “Washington Post”, for example, I was not shown the actual website of the Washington Post; instead, I was sent to TruthWiki, RealInvestigations.News, Disinfo.news, and a whole alternate reality in which the newspaper churns out fake news and is beholden to Monsanto. Some of the “independent news websites” that Good Gopher sticks to and that aren’t owned by Mike Adams include far-right website Breitbart.com and Alex Jones’ conspiracy epicentre Infowars.com.
- https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/quackery/mike-adams-building-alternate-reality-online