Behind the Bastards - Part One: Mike Adams: The Deadliest Fake News Icon You've Never Heard Of

Episode Date: June 25, 2019

In Episode 69, Robert is joined by Dan and Jordan from Knowledge Fight Podcast to discuss how Mike Adams got rich spreading death and paranoia online. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's spreading dangerous misinformation? My empire of fake news websites. I'm Robert Evans, hosted behind the bastards with another really bad introduction. Sophie is not here to be disappointed in me, so the disappointment will have to flow from my guests for today, which are, of course, Dan and Jordan from the Podcast Knowledge Fight! Hello, thanks for having us.

Man, it is a real honor to be your first ever repeat guest. This is a real treat. I don't think that's true. We have regular repeat guests. Dan doesn't listen to the show. I'm sorry, Robert. He's been lying to you this entire time. That was me trying to come out of the gate with a hot bit, and it just fell flat. Well, I listen to y'all's show constantly.

It's one of my regular pieces of gym listening. You do a show about Alex Jones and his entire world of madness. And Jones himself is such a typhoon of nonsense that he provides you with enough content for what, five to seven hours a week of podcasts? At least. It's too much, whatever it ends up being, for sure. Yeah, it's really crazy. We've been doing the show for like two years, and I'm still surprised from time to time.

He's nuts. Somebody showed us that we had done 300 episodes, and we had no idea. That's an insane amount of content. That was like six months ago. We have no idea. You blazed past that number at this point again. Well, today we're talking about someone who is very much in the orbit of Alex Jones. Although at this point, it might be fair to say that Jones is more orbiting around him,

or maybe they're one of those situations where I think you both know more about astrophysics than I do. But aren't there situations where you have like two suns in the solar system, and it's terrible for everything? Do you mean a binary star system? There we go. Thank you, Star Trek, man. I know no further things than that it's called a binary star system. I was just bluffing so hard.

It was great. Jordan also doesn't know who you're about to talk about. No clue. You don't. I intentionally withheld that information from you. It's our gig, man. I'm not supposed to know what's going on. Oh, beautiful.

Beautiful. Well, our audience will not know this person. You will know them well. We are talking today about Mike Adams. Duh. Wasn't the elated response. No, that's what the response he deserves. So I'm going to start with a lead in from something you guys already know a little

bit about, but is something I think we'll draw the audience in before we start it back at the beginning of Mike's career. So if you'll indulge me in this. Sure. On February 14th, 2018, roughly 2.30 p.m., a Nazi piece of shit walked into the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and started shooting. He left 17 people dead in his wake, along with dozens upon dozens of traumatized students who would deal with the mental scars and survivor's guilt for the rest

of their lives. Some of those children went on to become gun control advocates. One of the most prominent of this group is a young man named David Hogg. Now, when someone chooses to enter a political debate like the gun control debate, they open themselves up to argument into their views being questioned, but certain segments of the armed right were not content with just disagreeing with David Hogg. A concerted effort began to turn him into a boogeyman, a fascist monster, and

potentially a government deep cover agent. Less than a month after the Parkland shooting, a website called Hogwatch went live. Were you guys aware of Hogwatch? All too. Yeah. I bet you've forgotten, but I was aware of that for sure. I know it exists, but I refuse to believe it is anything other than a

dedicated farm cam. And that's the end of that. Old maids going up and polishing up her pigs. Do you remember when the National Park had those dedicated cameras for eggs to see when they were going to hatch? That is what I want Hogwatch to be. I remember when we all thought that's what the Internet would mostly be, is weird little things like that.

That was a good time. And it's like, speaking of Hogwatch, one of my favorite things on the old Internet was this crazy old hillbilly in Louisiana who would just like kill Havalina in increasingly convoluted ways. It was his job. These are an invasive species, and they would destroy all of these rice farms and stuff. And there were too many of them to deal with with conventional weapons.

And so he built like drone rigs and stuff to help him. And it was just like this lunatic out in the middle of nowhere. I wish that's what Hogwatch was, but it's not. Unfortunately. The website called David Hogg an anti-gun sociopath, a gun control fascist, and declared him the most dangerous man in America. The fact that this teenager used curse words in public a few times led to him being dubbed a profanity laced foulmouth student who is seething with anger.

Yeah, justifiably so. Like that's fine. I mean, yes, seeing a lot of my friends shot would fill me with anger. My response would be fuck that. Yeah, pretty normal reaction. Hogwatch was ground zero for spreading the myth that David Hogg was a crisis actor when a vicious meme comparing a picture of Hogg to a picture of Adolf Hitler was deleted from Facebook.

A fellow named Mike Adams, founder of the website, wrote this. One meme that has also been banned apparently shows Hogg raising his right arm in a manner that the Nazis used to raise their arms juxtaposed next to Hitler raising his. The comparison works because it's exact. Now, no one knows if Mr. Hogg is a believer in Nazi ideology. It's doubtful, or if the racing of his arm at the rally was intentionally provocative, but the optics are a lot truer than Trump's take a pledge gesture.

More than that, Trump has never advocated for anything close to what Hitler advocated for and did to Jews, to inferior races, and ultimately to the German people in his own country. He then goes on to argue that Hitler was a gun control advocate and thus he and David Hogg have one thing in common, which is of course not true. Hitler actually loosened gun control laws in Germany after the end of the Weimar Republic under which most guns were banned. He just didn't loosen gun control laws for Jewish people.

But yeah, so Mike Adams is the founder of Hogg Watch, and that alone would be enough to earn him the title of bastard. But over the last 20 years, Mike has done so, so, so, so much, so much more. Adams has been an integral part of the anti-vaccine movement, the Y2K paranoia craze. He got involved in fucking Ebola panic and urged people to spoilers, drink Ebola infected blood. So this is a guy, this is a guy worth talking about for about roughly

two hours. So now we're gonna, we're gonna delve into this shit. It's really fun. I'm thrilled to be talking to you about this because personally I know so much about Alex Jones and I look into him obsessively. But Mike Adams is a real piece of his world that I know very little about. So as much as I am sort of an expert in a lot of these worlds, I am going to be shocked by a lot of this, I think.

And one of the questions about Mike Jones, like when I put together that three part Alex Jones series, there's a ton of information about Jones's early life, about his childhood, about what he was up to in high school, like actual journalists like Rolling Stone and whatnot have like picked through his life and talked to people who knew him when he was younger and like, so you can put together a pretty complete picture of his development. We don't have that. One of the mysteries we have with Mike Adams, in addition to why he calls

himself the health ranger, is why no one's been talking about this guy. Because he's actually hugely influential and I don't know why up until very recently he's not gotten any sort of attention. So that's kind of one of the mysteries running through this tale. Because he's been ranging the Southwest solving health problems one city at a time and he shows up right after Chuck Norris does. He's the health ranger. It makes perfect sense.

He shows up right after Chuck Norris and right before Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman. Yeah. He does a lot of cleaning up after Mike Adams. His ancestor was Aragorn, so he's the original ranger. Oh, so wait, so he has the blood of Numenor on him? I think it does. Is that the claim you're making? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, he is a little bit stacked. I'm not going to lie. He created one of the Silmarillion. How many more references can we toss in here? I'm not going to stop. So when it comes to like his actual biography, where he comes from, what his young life is, I don't know very much about that at all. In fact, we're mostly left to the bio he wrote himself on his personal

website, healthranger.com, which always reliable. Super reliable. Yeah. I love that. Do you think there's a possibility it's a fake name and that's why it's hard to trace down his biographical information? You know, I don't think so just because he's run at least one legitimate business and nobody's brought up issues with that before.

Okay. People have delved into him, but at the same time, I really don't know. I really don't know, Dan. It's possible that Mike Adams. The only thing that triggered that is that his name is so boring. Mike Adams. So boring. Yeah.

I mean, so is Alex Jones. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. But for whatever reason, Alex Jones has become like, you can use Alex Jones as a verb. That guy's Alex Jonesing pretty hard. Nobody does that for Mike Adams.

That's true. His website states Adams was born in 1967 in Lawrence, Kansas. He owns a bachelor, holds a bachelor of science degree in college entrance exams and graduate school entrance exams. Adam scored in the 99th percentile across all U.S. students. He aced the English mathematics and science sections of college entrance exams, scoring 100 on three out of four sections, earning numerous offers of scholarships from various universities, including the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology, which he chose not to attend. Sure did. Now, you seem to find a lot of that pretty funny, Jordan. Jordan's laughing his ass off. I'm aggressively shaking my head. No, no, no, no, no. What? You notice something suspicious about the way he phrased his credentials there?

Anytime any one of these guys claims to have a degree. I'm always like, oh, it's from, it's from Turkey. Oh, where's it from? Where is it from? No one knows because he does not say where he earned his BS, which leads me to think that it might be BS. Yeah. Now, I did find a breakdown of his biography on think progress that notes MIT

financial aid has been entirely need-based since the 1960s, which means that he's definitely lying about MIT offering him a full scholarship because they just don't do that. If you get into MIT and you can't pay, then you can qualify for help, but they don't just like, oh, you're so genius. We'll pay your way in. Come on to MIT. That's just not how MIT works.

Interesting. So there's one lie. One in low. Yeah. Yeah. It's fucking MIT. Yeah. They have a dearth of options, to be honest.

Now, Mike claims that he chose not to attend graduate school, but was offered numerous scholarships to do so. And again, he's not specific about any of this. So it's impossible to track down where he even graduated from. I can say other Mike Adams' have graduated from colleges. See, this is what I'm saying. This is why he's Mike Adams. Yeah.

This is a fake name. It seems to be very important to Mike Adams that you know that every college in America badly wanted him and that he wouldn't give in to them. So he seems to have this urge to college tease a little bit. He's negging all of the collegiate world. Negging the higher education system. Yeah. These guys put 99th percentile into their bios the same way Putin is like,

I won with 97% of the vote. Like, you're going too far overboard there. It's too clear. Not to brag, but when I got my GED, I was in the like 97th percentile. Putin, there it is. Not to brag, but before I dropped out of college, I had a solid 2-9. Hell yeah. Nice.

Yeah. And if you triple that, it's basically 99. Not quite, but close enough. Close enough for jazz, is what I'm saying, right? Yeah. Yeah. Now, according to Mike, Mike got numerous offers from colleges to attend graduate school, but he chose not to because alas, he had another mistress.

Software. Mike claims he opened a company in 1993 that, quote, went on to become a multi-million dollar entity that provided email technology solutions to many Fortune 500 firms and specialized in email alert technologies for universities and government offices. Now, this brings us to the first of Mike's claims that we can really dig into. And it kind of seems to be at least largely true. What? Yeah.

The company he launched was called Aerial. It's still around today. They did and do mass email management, and they wound up being used by big names like Microsoft, UCLA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. It is a legitimate company that operates and has worked with some really big players. When I started reading about what his company does, it seemed like it might kind of be a little bit spammy. And one of the problems of researching Mike Adams is I ran into some allegations that

that's exactly what he was doing, that he ran a gigantic email spamming operation. But the article that made those allegations was HealthWise, spelled W-Y-Z-E, media, which is a very strange website. They are definitely weirdo Christian extremists who believe strange things about healthcare. They also dug really deeply into Mike Adams because they hate him and documented their claims about him really authoritatively. So it's one of these like, it's a very strange case. They do claim that Aerial was an industrial spamming operation.

And their evidence for that included citing an Aerial software press release, which included quotes from Mike Adams boasting about Aerial's ability to help companies evade anti-spam software. Ooh. Once a personalized email message is composed, campaign enterprise version 7.5 users can simply press the anti-spam test button to perform an instant check of their outbound mail. The message is then instantly run through a pre-program checklist, which uses a set of evolving criteria to evaluate the outbound email message as anti-spam compliant.

If any part of the email message resembles the traits of spam, the user is alerted that the intended email message could be perceived as spam by recipients of email filters. Now, HealthWise translates this as he's running a big spamming operation. Other sites I've found talking about it make it seem like maybe he's just helping large companies email their customers without their emails get caught by spam filters. It's probable that both things are true. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, the software could easily do both.

Yeah, it's something that has like a use legitimately and then use abusively too. Yeah, which is very fitting for some chunks of Mike Adams' career. Now, he claims that he sold the company in 2003, although other sources I found list him as a CEO still. I don't know if he's still involved with Ariel or not. It's very possible. He claims that he sold it. And it seems like one way or the other, it made him very wealthy.

Yeah, that's one of the few things that I do know about him is he's like insanely rich. Yeah, he's got a shit load of money. He's super rich. Yeah, yeah. I mean, his fucking Treasury Department in Microsoft at a bunch of Fortune 500s really did use his software. And he's kind of in the same spot where McAfee was in the late 90s where if you were like the first guy to offer this service to big companies, you could just make a billion fucking

dollars like for easy. Yeah, he's like a few steps away from where McAfee is now, I suppose. Yeah, they're actually not very different people. Yeah. Although, you know, Mike is much more focused on health and McAfee is much more focused on pounding bourbon and murdering people. So call that health. Self-care is important.

Yeah. It is critical. Now, on Mike's personal website, his bio goes right from selling aerial to founding the website for which he is most famous, naturalnews.com. But there was an interlude grift that he leaves out. In 1998, Mike Adams got deep into the Y2K business. Now, I assume you all both remember what Y2K was. Some of our listeners were young.

So basically in the late 90s, there was a worry that like the calendar switchover on computers from 1999 to 2000 was going to fuck up a bunch of software. And most people were like, oh, it could cause some complications for companies that have digitized, you know, their operations. And crazy people were like, it's going to be the apocalypse. And Mike Adams was on the crazy person side of that spectrum. This doesn't surprise me too much. No, no.

This is right on brand for him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, guys, this is going to pop into the middle of the episode at a weird point because I forgot to call the ad break at the point I was supposed to, but it's time for ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. Nasty sharks.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Mike Adams was actually one of the chief drivers of the fear about a year 2000 info apocalypse. In 1998, he launched a website called Y2K Newswire. Now the Daily Beast summarizes it as promoting all the worst Y2K scares, stock market collapse, power grid failure, food scarcity, societal implosion, even as experts debunked those fears. He sold $99 subscriptions to Y2K Newswire, which he billed as providing access to a wealth of information, much of it too sensitive for public release. So he goes right from software to kind of sailing right into the same seas that Alex Jones was learning to captain.

Right around the same time. How's the website doing now though? Actually, we'll talk about that a little bit. Falling down the ranks a little bit. It doesn't seem like a good long term business model. Yeah, it wasn't ideal. It seems really wild to me that his time in software predates this Y2K fear. That kind of implies that he would have some knowledge about how these programs work and how he knows computers and maybe he has some... But that's what makes the scam even better for him.

He knows there's no chance of anything going negative, so he can ride that out. He has the appearance of false authority. He knows how to make authoritative sounding claims about what's going to happen because he knows actual computer language. He knows enough about computers to scare 60-year-old people who were scared of them and had bought them for their company because some young gun executive was like, we've got to digitize. That is interesting that might have gone hand in hand with his software selling for those major corporations as he saw all of those people trying to adjust themselves to a new software and he's like, these people are too easy to scam. I'm going to start my own side hustle. And then he met Alex. I suspect that may have something to do with it, Jordan.

Now, Mike didn't just sell subscriptions to his Y2K Newswire though. This is going to sound very familiar. He sold survival food for Doomsday bunkers. He sold gold coins because every grifter is legally required to sell gold at at least one point in their career. 100% it's universal. You've got to call it bullion though, I think. And I'm sure he used the word bully and fucking constantly. I wouldn't even be surprised if he was involved with Ted Anderson too, by the way.

I didn't find any evidence of that, but yeah, it's entirely possible. He sold special one year subscriptions to his service for $569 that came with what he called one year basic food unit, which I think was just like dried food and access to his email list for fucking 600 bucks. Hungry over here talking about basic food. Give it to me in a bucket and I'll call it great. On November 18, 1999, as the presumed apocalypse approached, Y2K Newswire started selling 10 ounces of gold coins in a package for $3,350, which is only $700 more than the index prices for gold on the open market at the time. That's a steal. A steal. What a bargain.

Now, according to Think Progress, quote, in a since-deleted excerpt on Adams' site published by ZDNet, Adams boasted that in 1999, in an effort to fine-tune his web marketing techniques, Michael Adams launched a six-month experiment to determine what kind of revenues are possible when combining his proprietary techniques and technologies with a high awareness topic. The result, with only the help of one employee, he created a subscriber base of over 50,000 people and sold over $400,000 worth of information products while offering an open-ended, 100% money-back guarantee. Wow. So, Mike starts using, because he's built this email company, he's starting to understand key words and how computers and the algorithms that are just now being built to govern the internet react to certain words, and so he's figuring out how to reach the highest number of people by specifically angling topics in a certain way. He's figuring out what we would call search engine optimization techniques in 1999. So, he's one of the very, very first people in realizing the opportunity here. One of the things that drew the most people into his Y2K news wire site was an article called 39 Unanswered Questions About Y2K, which is sort of like an early listicle, which is like Mike Adams being like, okay, this is how you get people, not just because they like to- He fucking did BuzzFeed!

He did BuzzFeed before BuzzFeed, or cracked, or more cracked, because we beat BuzzFeed to it, but I'm not better. Nothing more terrifying than a cunning, clever moron like this guy. Yeah. This is awful. Innovative. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. What a monster.

Deeply, deeply innovative. And so, yeah, he gets a lot of attention at the time for just like how effective his spamming techniques are and his ability to reach people with his bullshit is. Now, Y2K came and went, and spoilers, the world didn't end. Very little went wrong at all. Get a lot of refund requests. Yeah. Well, you might think, you might think that this would be at least a moderate embarrassment for a man who had built a career off of warning people that Doom was headed in the year 2000. But Mike Adams actually leaned into it, replacing his website Y2K Newswire with a one-page Q&A.

In it, he noted, in the end, people were lucky. They were not placed in harm's way. Yes! What they didn't know didn't hurt them, but through this entire process, the public never knew the extent to which their government was preparing for Y2K. Was our government prepared to declare martial law? Of course. Government leaders would have been irresponsible not to consider that possibility. That is too good.

That's too good. How dare he get it right? Yeah, he's not a dumb man. It implies a lot of flexibility. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know a lot of these folks do. It's like, you know, when their predictions don't come true, it's like, wow, we were close. It almost happened. They all have to be pivots to be successful.

And, like, Alex Jones used to be a pretty decent pivoter, and he stopped pivoting after Trump got elected. Or, you know, he's tried a few times, but he just can't do it anymore. Well, he has to pivot within the box now. He's not free, like a free-range animal. He's a health ranger. He's not free, like a health ranger. Now, Mike framed government efforts to stop people from panicking about Y2K as the government telling people not to prepare it all for natural disasters. He twisted the government warning people not to stockpile for Y2K and do a conspiracy.

The government, he said, was trying to discourage individual preparedness. Later on in his fact sheet, Mike launches into what might be the earliest example I've found of FEMA conspiracy mongering. Whoa. The pre-Y2K information battles brought forth a new dangerous line of thinking, that individual preparedness is bad for society as a whole. This theory, supported and publicized by various government leaders, removes the responsibility of preparedness from the people, moving it to centralized government agencies like FEMA. Bam. There it is.

What year did you say that was from? 19 or 2000. Right after the new millennium. The fucking balls on that guy. It is the most annoying bullshit that they always get that. If the disaster doesn't happen, the preparedness was them hiding the secret from you. If it does happen, the fact that you didn't prepare enough is why the government is trying to kill you. There's no win.

They always get you. It's a flexibility. Yeah, you have this. And as further evidence of that, you could see, and I think a reasonable person would see the way that the whole world kind of moved to compensate for the Y2K problem and fixed all of the problems and computers that we had, so it wasn't a big issue. You could see that as like, oh, maybe the technological order of our society is a little bit more robust than we thought. And we are capable of adapting to problems like this. Mike Adams wrote that this was actually a bad sign because now the fault tolerance of our civilization was still untested.

Oh, it's like super bugs. We're all too healthy. Yeah, now we're all too healthy. We don't know it. We didn't get a chance to collapse a little bit. Oh, you sweet summer children. Yeah. Now, Mike Adams also claimed in this article that he never made a dime off of selling Y2K preparedness equipment.

Contrary to what was misreported in several newspapers and websites, Y2K Newswire was never in the Y2K supplies business. It never made a dime from product sales or recommendations, and it refused to accept advertisements on its website. This sounds a lot like Alex's whole like info wars doesn't sell anything. Info wars store sells everything. Yeah, yeah. They're different things. And later in this, he also claims to have donated like tens of thousands of dollars to the Red Cross from the profits he made selling Y2K preparedness equipment. Or the Red Cross, shouldn't he be against them?

Yeah, they're a religious organization of some sort. He's pretty religious, but yeah. Now, the end of that post notes the shutdown of Y2K Newswire, which Mike shut down after putting this post up, and claimed that he was moving on to write at a website called zeop.com, which he described as a personal empowerment website, dedicated to improving the lives of one million people by bringing them new knowledge and skills covering alternative medicine. And not one person more. No, exactly a million.

One million, exactly. You guys are joking around, but this sounds like a pretty cool venture. If this website helps one million and one people, I'm going to have to kill somebody. One in one out. It's like a hot club. Now, zeop.com was only active as a health and wellness website until mid-2002, when Mike Adams seems to have wound it down to focus on natural news. However, as I trawled through the site's archives on the Wayback machine, I noticed something interesting.

The domain seems to have been allowed to ally Fallow for a year, but then it came back in mid-2004. But this time, zeop.com was not a health and wellness site. It was a mass email subscription service for websites operated by Arial Software, which by this point, Mike Adams claimed not to own anymore. Fingro prints. Fucking guy. That's such a tip-ma-cap to you, sir. Well done. How dare you, you fuckface.

Now, in 2003, Mike Adams launched Natural News. At least that's when he claims he launched Natural News. The Daily Beast dug into it and found out that he didn't register the site until 2005 and didn't actually start publishing articles regularly until 2008, but somewhere between in that five-year period. He was thinking about it before. I founded it in my mind. Yeah, he built it in his head first.

Now, they got to even lie about the small stuff. Even the smallest stuff, they got to lie about it. Yeah, it's like Paul Manafort. If they stop doing the thing that they do, they explode. So they just habitually do it. Now, naturalnews.com was initially, at least, a pretty standard woo and crystal sort of website about fringe healthcare treatments. Many of its articles focused on concerns that are pretty common on the left wing, too.

Fears about GMO crops. Articles about how Monsanto is literally worse than Hitler. Claims that Big Pharma is poisoning people. Pretty standard fare, which you'd kind of expect to find on any sort of lefty health news website. And in its early days, naturalnews regularly adopted fairly liberal attitudes toward social issues. They even did things that might have verged on decent reporting. For example, this 2008 article, illegal immigrants create far lower healthcare cost burden than previously assumed.

Written by David Gutierrez, the article seems to be, it reads like an acceptable piece of reporting. I'm going to read a quote from it just because everything that comes after this is going to seem so fucking crazy. That like, it's insane to me that it started here. A common argument among those pushing for a tougher line against illegal residents is that such people provide a drain upon public healthcare resources. But according to Phoenix Nunez, former director of the South Central Family Healthcare Center, illegal residents tend to shy away from primary care visits because they are daunted by having to provide social security numbers, identification, and employment histories.

My gut would have told me that they'd be higher users of emergency services because they're not coming in for routine preventative care, Nunez said. The assumption is not borne out by the UCLA study, which also refutes the idea that illegal residents use less medical care because they tend to be younger and healthier than the general population. According to the researchers, the difference in medical visits remained even after adjusting for age, health status, insurance status, and poverty. This kind of study is really important because it forces you to look at the data

and rethink your assumptions, Nunez said. What? Yeah, that's like a normal reasonable article about something meaningful. How dare the health ranger sully his good name with reasonable reporting? Bullshit. I don't know what the fuck was happening in 2008, but that's an article they published, and it reads... I don't know, that's the hardest thing I've had to hear so far. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It just is a perfectly normal-seeming article. Now, what set natural news apart during its early period,

what's not its content, which was mostly forgettable, but the skill with which Mike Adams manipulated Google's algorithms to maximize his traffic? In addition to natural news, he registered a string of health advice websites. Expectantmothers.com, newstarget.com, hoodyafactor.com, which I don't know what the fuck that is. Emergingfuture.com, spamanatomy.com, vitaminfactor.org, counterthink.com, healthfactor.info, junkscience.info, brainhealthnews.com, lowcrestaraldiets.dietslink.com, publichealthnews.org, pharmawatch.info, hometoxins.com, poisonpantry.org, depressionfactor.org, webseed.com, and consumerwellness.org. Now, all of these websites would regularly link back to natural news using its articles of support

for their claims about the dangers of GMOs and why you should buy various supplements, which of course Mike Adams sold on the natural news store. Mike essentially created an alternative fact ecosystem consisting of dozens of websites, many of which seemed legitimate and claimed to be the work of actual medical professionals. These sites would bolster each other's credibility and spread advertisements for products Mike sold on naturalnews.com. Mike Adams was one of, if not the very first people to pioneer this strategy. Yeah, it's almost like a weird, just completely self-contained affiliate marketing operation. Yeah, file that under things that we didn't know should have been crimes a year ago.

Yeah, a long time ago. No one thought at the dawn of the internet we should make it a crime to create your own universe of lies. Yeah. I think just no one thought you could pull it off. Someone will stop them before it gets actually activated. No one will buy it. That turns out to do. Yeah. Now, like any good grifter, Mike invented a sympathetic backstory for himself. He started claiming that at age 30 he'd been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Rather than taking the advice of doctors, he'd started researching wellness. And as one of his website bios reads, he cured himself of diabetes in a matter of months

and transformed himself into the picture of perfect health and mind, body and spirit. So, using this backstory and the fact that Mike Adams is a legitimately stacked and very fit looking man, he embarked on selling bullshit health solutions to millions and millions of people. You've called him stacked twice now, which is... What, man? I'm going to call a swole a swole. Boy is yoked. We can attack somebody and not... I can attack Alex Jones and admire his incredibly thick neck.

Absolutely. Credit where credit is due. You've got to give it up to the swallow pirates. According to the Daily Beast, quote, In August 2007, Adams wrote a 5800 word independent review of the Amazon herb company, a multi-level marketing organization selling herbal supplements. The article and others originally appeared on his site NewsTarget, but were transferred to natural news with their original timestamps intact. The special report offers a detailed third-party review of the Amazon herb company from a truly independent perspective,

meaning I'm not an employee or associated with the company, and I have absolutely no financial ties with them either, Adams wrote in his review. Now... That makes me think he does. Yeah, yeah. The result is that he and the founder of the company had entered business together in 2006 or 2007 based on Arizona nonprofit business records dug up by the Daily Beast. And the Amazon herb company was not the only multi-level marketing scam Mike got involved with.

Can I ask you a question really quick? Absolutely. Is that related to Amazon the company or Amazon as the rainforest? It's, I think, using the name of the rainforest because rainforest makes you think of health, even though it's one of the most deadly disease-riddled places on the planet, actually. Just making sure, because it would be very bizarre if he was involved with someone running an herbal MLM that was affiliated with the Amazon company. No, no, no. Not as far as I can tell.

I'm always weirded out by people because you run into a lot of use of Amazon and rainforest imagery in health companies and stuff. Oh, for sure. And I spent my childhood reading the stories of Victoria and colonizers who would wander through the Amazon and 90% of them would die horribly of flies burrowing into their bodies and stuff. That's because they didn't eat the right stick or something. Yeah, to me, the Amazon is a place of horrors.

But yeah, to Mike Adams, it was an opportunity to make a lot of money. And he did. And he made even more money working with an MLM called Moxor, which sold Omega 3 supplements made from green-lipped muscles. Mike wrote articles about the supposed health benefits of these supplements and advised his readers to enroll as distributors with the company. Of course, Mike also was on the board of Moxor as well and was an employee there, but he didn't talk so much about that.

So he hits upon a solid business plan early on, which is you build this audience, you get a lot of people reading your stuff, and then you start selling them on MLMs, which he does twice in a row, but then doesn't seem to do later. So it may be that he found out that the MLM biz isn't as profitable as he would have hoped. He got bored. The man has conquered so many worlds. Like Alexander the Great, he cried salt tears. No more MLMs were there for him. Well, and Jordan, he was already rich at this point.

But Mike Adams is not the kind of guy who likes to flaunt his wealth. And in 2008, he bragged, Today I live in a modular trailer unit in Austin. I still drive a Toyota pickup truck. I dress like a rancher in blue jeans and flannel shirt, and nobody gives it a second thought when I'm out in public. Some people want to look rich and popular, so they wear a lot of bling and drive a high-end car they can't afford, and they live in a house they can't pay off,

and they try to fool everybody into thinking they're rich and powerful. I'd rather fool people into thinking I'm not powerful. That's so fucking annoying. That is the most annoying thing you could do. I'm annoyed. It creeps me out even more than someone who wants to have like really nice watches and trick people into thinking they're rich. It's like, why are you hiding? Well, and that kind of goes into a little bit about how this guy's deeply influential

and has done a lot of damage over the years, but has flown under the radar. And it's like, oh, that's his goal. He knows on some level that turning himself into an Alex Jones type would not have gone well for him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You pop your head up and then you get bumped. Kind of like whack-a-mole kind of thing. He's got the type of wealth and the type of ashholish nature of using it

that makes you think maybe he's actually just got a pyramid somewhere that he's like all of his money has gone towards an actual pyramid that he's going to be buried in like Nicholas Cage. Like that's all he's doing. With all the associate writers of natural news around him. I thought you were going to say that Nicholas Cage was going to be buried with all of the associate writers of national treasure of those movies. Got Diana Kruger.

It's called kayfabe. Is that what it's called? Commit to the bit. I will say this speaking of Nicholas Cage and then we'll get back to topic. I will be shocked if he is not buried with other living human beings. I agree. Yeah, that just seems very on brand for Nick. And I think there will be about like 30% of the population is like let him do it.

He's crazy. He's fine. He's nuts. Nicholas Cage in his greatest role. The murderer of eight people. He's nuts, but he's interesting. Now in 2008, the same year that he got involved in those MLMs, Mike wrote a book called The Seven Principles of Mindful Wealth.

In it, he describes his operating philosophy. He describes his operating philosophy as, quote, getting past self-imposed limits on wealth. Karma doesn't pay the rent. Good karma isn't the recognized currency in modern society. Dollars are. Which again, like he seems to be one of these guys who every now and then will drop a little hen is like, I don't give a shit about good karma about being a good person. Like I'm about making that fucking money.

But he phrases it in such a way that it's like, like a self-help sort of tip rather than like, him, what he's really saying, which is like, being a good person doesn't pay the rent. Mm-hmm. Yeah, but did have the ring of some like really bland self-help stuff. Yeah. It's just like, all right.

Yeah, whatever. Yeah, there's just a little bit of darkness in here, but it's bland and boring enough that you don't notice it, which is again, a good summary of Mike Adams as a person. Now, I wanted to take the time to discuss and deconstruct one of Mike's larger articles here, both to give you an idea of how he presents his ideas and how to illustrate how much his website changed from 2008 to 2012. So in February 2012, Mike himself published an article titled, Microsoft buys eugenics technology from Merck,

becomes drug development partner with top global vaccine manufacturer. So the article starts by revealing that Microsoft had just bought a piece of genomic information software from Merck to use in their amalgam life sciences platform. This is a program you probably haven't heard of that Microsoft sold to research institutions, drug companies, and universities in order to help them evaluate data while carrying out clinical tests. It sounds pretty dull, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, not if you're Mike fucking Adams.

Mike wrote, quote, Rupert Vessey, the vice president of Merck research laboratories, openly admits his deal puts Microsoft in the role of being a bold drug developer. This is a key statement to understand because the term bioinformatic can only mean one thing. What stores information in biology? There is only one digital information storage system in human biology, and that is, of course, DNA. Therefore, the idea of developing bioinformatic solutions really means to develop gene-targeting drugs and vaccines. This is fully consistent with Bill Gates' admitted agenda of reducing world population with the help of drug companies' technologies.

And, of course, mechanized mosquitoes. Oh boy. I can't disagree with anything that he said right there. I'm pretty sure he's really nailed it. His leaps of logic are right on. He does bring up the mosquitoes in this article. Of course he does. All these fucking people do.

Mike goes on to note all this comes on the heels of other recent news that Bill Gates is funding sperm-destroying technology to cause widespread male infertility. Now, are you aware of Bill Gates' sperm-destroying technology, Dan? We've wrestled with some of Bill Gates' false nefarious plans through Alex's rhetoric in the past. I'm not sure if we've touched on the specifics of how he's going to get rid of sperm. Yeah. Did he invent Kleenex? No. The actual story that he's referring to is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave $100,000 to researchers who had developed a non-invasive method of birth control, which in this case involved destroying sperm with ultrasound.

So that's the actual story, which he translates to Bill Gates is going to kill your sperm. Well, I mean, if you do with ultrasound, you could do it. Eventually, we'll get a gun that'll just shoot somebody's sperm from like 500 yards. I think that's an effective tinder deterrent. Now, Mike puts all this together and concludes that Bill Gates is plotting to depopulate the planet. In order to kill off large swaths of human beings, the most efficient mechanism to use is a self-replicating gene-targeted bio-weapon. Microsoft's Amalga Life Sciences Technology, developer March, which he misspells Merc's name there, theoretically provides a viable platform to develop precisely such bio-weapons. It is interesting that no announcements from the company appear to have been made since being acquired by Microsoft in 2009, indicating that their work is now being conducted in total secrecy behind closed doors.

I bet they did make an announcement. I bet they did. They did! They made an announcement in 2016 that they'd sold the company to GE because it wasn't profitable. But to Mike, the case is clear. There is no better way to promote the vaccine profits of the pharmaceutical industry than to actually release an engineered bio-weapon virus into the wild, and there is no faster way to reduce the world population than to engineer either a vaccine or weaponized flu virus that burns through the human population, targeting those of an undesirable genetic profile who need to be cleansed from the human gene pool. I've got to read this next paragraph, Dan. Think about this the next time you think about purchasing Microsoft Office, Windows, or some other Microsoft project. By doing so, you are funding what could very well be a global eugenics agenda with the ultimate goal of wiping out a significant proportion of the human race.

If you save something in a DocX file, you are killing your children. I am so glad that I've spent most of my life torrenting Microsoft Word just so that I haven't. Your hands are clean. My hands are clean. Oh my God. Didn't he used to work with Microsoft in his email company? Yeah, he definitely did. They were client-a-fist. Now, it occurs to me, we're now 40-something minutes in. I've forgotten two ad breaks, because I am a hack and a fraud. So this ad break that people are going to hear is going to be the second ad break.

I'm just bad at this. I'm bad at my job. You should hate and be ashamed of me. But you should still buy the products that support this show. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial. Discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. God, that was really unprofessional of me. I'm ashamed of myself. I mean, you could look at it as unprofessionally. You could look at it as we're having a fun time talking about a horrible dude. Yeah, we're really sorry for entertaining you. No, I mean, I thrive on the shame a little bit and since Sophie's not here, I'm just going to have to imagine the judgment. But I'll be okay. I'll get through it. I'll get through it. So as the Obama years rolled along, Mike grew more and more committed to using his power for explicitly political ends. Up until about 2010, he was more or less an apolitical figure, avoiding falling hard on one side or the other of the ideological idol.

But as with his friend Alex Jones, the election of America's first black president was a profoundly radicalizing experience for Mike. According to the Daily Beast, quote, In 2010, when Natural News began selling its own products, most were hippy food products like cheesy kale chips or raw macadamia nut butter. The more questionable products included a buffet of supplements and parasite cleansing droplets. Today's store takes on a more apocalyptic tone. Under a category called nuclear and biological, readers can buy breathing masks for children and $160 electromagnetic field reader. Meanwhile, far right conspiracy theories have begun to crowd out articles on the benefits of turmeric powder. When I began writing for them in 2010, I wrote for about four and a half years. It was mainly health.

One former natural news writer who spoke on the condition of anonymity told the Daily Beast. There were still some political commentary. It's become more extreme in their viewpoints. That coupled with some other things going on with that site and how they were restructuring writers was one reason I left. I didn't agree with a lot of what was being said on the site. It genuinely wouldn't surprise me if that was actually a quote from Mike Adams under an assumed name like, I'm Reich Tatum. Speaking of background, I'm not thrilled with what's happened with my left side. It's one of those things most of the people who talk about him do so anonymously because we'll talk about this later. He's pretty vicious at the people who come out against him, which I think is again part of why he hasn't been covered more.

Because he strikes back when you go after him. If you take a swing at Mike Adams, he's going to try and take a swing back at you. The clearest sign that things at Natural News were shifting in a truly dark direction came at the end of 2012, when Adam Lonza killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Two days after the massacre, Mike Adams wrote a post on naturalnews.com. The title was gun control. We need medication control. Newtown school shooter Adam Lonza lightly on meds labeled as having personality disorder. Now, this is a familiar line of discussion to you guys. Alex Jones has the same opinion. There was a large part of his immediate stuff about Sandy Hook was definitely a lot of medication stuff.

Yeah, and that is one where I think Jones had Mike Adams beat because Jones has been on the they're all Xanax zombies or whatever line for a long time if I'm not mistaken. All the way back to Columbine. Yeah, well, I'm not sure if he was relevant at the time of Columbine. But yeah, yeah, for sure. In the 2009 2008 period, we cover a lot of times shootings. He does talk about Prozac heads and what have you. So yeah, I mean, it's definitely been a longstanding part of his rhetoric. Yeah, so I'm going to quote what Mike Adams wrote in that article. According to ABC News, Adam Lonza, the alleged shooter, has been labeled as having mental illness and a personality disorder.

These are precisely the words typically heard in a person who is being treated with mind altering psychiatric drugs. One of the most common side effects of psychiatric drugs is violent outbursts and thoughts of suicide. The Columbine high school shooters were of course on psychiatric drugs at the time they shot their classmates in 1999. Suicidal tendencies and violent destructive thoughts are some of the admitted behavioral side effects of mind altering prescription medications. Adams next pivots to claiming that prescription drugs cause 100,000 deaths per year and using this as a justification for why guns should not be banned. He goes on to write, for guns to be as deadly as medications, you'd have to see a Newton style massacre happening 10 times a day every day of the year. Only then would gun violence even match up to the number of deaths caused by doctor prescribed FDA approved medications. Cause does an interesting word in there.

Yeah cause does an interesting word. And I've got a breakdown of exactly why this is bullshit because I think it's important. I can't take credit for doing all the research on this. I found it on the personal blog of a fellow named Dr. David Gorski. Now Dr. Gorski writes under the pseudonym ORAC on a blog called Respectful Insolence. He's a real doctor and a real surgeon and he also writes for science based medicine which is a great site. He's a very credentialed fellow and since most of the mainstream press has ignored Mike Adams for years and years and years, pissed off scientists and medical professionals like David for a long time have been the only people really keeping tabs on him.

And David did the hard work of breaking down exactly why Mike's claims in this article are bullshit. He points out that the main study cited by Mike Adams was published in PLOS One by Thomas J. Morage, Joseph Glenn Mullen and Kurt D. Furberg and entitled Prescription Drugs Associated with Reports of Violence Towards Others. Now the study was a result of the FDA's adverse event reporting system from 2004 to 2009. And the authors basically looked for drugs whose users seemed to be involved in an unusual number of violent altercations. They picked out 31 medications including 11 antidepressants, 3 ADD drugs and smoking cessation drugs as well as, you know, so I don't know if you guys listened to the episode I did on the anti-vaccine movement, but one of the main pieces of evidence that anti-vaxxers will use for the dangers of vaccines is VAERS data,

which is the vaccine adverse events reporting system. So anytime someone has a vaccine and something bad happens to them, it goes into this database and it's useful for researchers trying to determine if there might be patterns of illness associated with something, but it doesn't prove causation. And the database that this information is being drawn from that they're using to conclude that psychiatric drugs cause violence is the same sort of database and it has the same problems. For one thing, it doesn't tell you, you know, they're picking out all these people who had violent altercations after being prescribed psychiatric medications.

The VAERS database doesn't tell you if they had violent issues before being put on those drugs. So it's possible that all of these people had violent criminal histories before getting medicated and then continued to commit crimes. We don't know. Does it give a full account of their context, what their lifestyle is, where they live, their economic position? No. It is a passive reporting system and it is only meant to be used and like a high level thing for doctors to be like, oh, you know, we've noticed this weird cluster of behaviors associated with it. We should look into this way, way, way more and do focused research and only then should we conclude that there is a problem.

But people like the authors of this unscrupulous people, like the authors of this report, can use the data to make a claim that there is an association between violence and psychiatric medication. And that seems to be what's happening in this exact study. David Gorski goes on to note, quote, about the authors of that study. Mr. Moore has received consulting fees from litigators and cases involving peroxetine, which is one of the drugs in the study, and was an expert witness in a criminal case involving varinicline, which is another one of the drugs in the study. Dr. Glenn Mullen has been retained as an expert witness in cases involving varinicline and psychiatric drugs including antidepressants, antipsychotics, bendosiasopines, mood stabilizers, and ADHD drugs. Dr. Furberg has received consulting fees from litigators and cases involving gabapentin.

And also Dr. Glenn Mullen has written books about solutions to getting off of antidepressants and claimed that antidepressants cause violence and profited off of books he's written making those claims. Was the book called, have you tried just feeling better? Yeah, it's the same shit with Andrew Wakefield. All of these doctors had been hired by lawyers to make the case that they made in this study and then used to help the lawyers they were working with sue companies. Yeah, as you were saying that I was just aggressively nodding because it was just so familiar. It's the same fucking thing.

So that's the chief evidence Mike Adams has to support his claim that it's psychiatric medications that are behind mass shootings like Sandy Hook and not the fact that literally anybody can buy a gun for no reason. Well, he has those studies and weirdos like John Rappaport telling him that they see the truth. Now, Mike Adams quickly found that mixing in far right conspiracy theories with his bogus health news was an incredible recipe for printing money in the Obama era. By 2014, his site was regularly drawing in two to three million unique visitors per month. Mike used his understanding of search engine optimization tactics and his eye for the next big thing in bogus medicine to capitalize on every health fear that went viral on the Internet.

He became a semi-regular co-host of Alex Jones's Info War Show. Do you know when that started? I don't know when that started. I think it was around 2012 though. Okay, because he seems like a pretty long time guy. Yeah, he's been at it for years. And I don't know why he started calling himself the health ranger. I'm so sorry. It's a cool name for someone like him. I understand why he would do it, but I want to know if there's like a good backstory. I'll tell you why because he's got a fucking zord in his garage, goddammit.

I would love to be a health ranger. Yeah, sounds like a hoot. Now, during this period of time, Mike wrote articles for his site with titles like implantable RFID chips capable of remotely killing non-compliant slaves, vaccines lower immunity, fluoride means lower IQs and more mental retardation, and jumping rope in 9-11 Truth, how the sheeple have been trained to avoid unpopular truth about World Trade Center Building 7. What was that? What was that? Hold on. Did you say jumping rope in 9-11? Yeah. Alright, cool, cool, cool.

You don't know about the jump rope experience? See, I was back on Double Dutch and the fucking Waco disaster, so I missed that one by a while. Oh, I see. And I've been on hopscotch in Randy Ridge. Yeah, see, there you go. Ruby Ridge. Randy Ridge. We should start calling it Randy Ridge. Yeah, Randy Weaver. Yeah, Ruby Weaver, Randy Ridge.

Ruby Weaver, Randy Ridge. That's my warm-up exercise that I do before every podcast. That's my, if I ever get hired to write a children's cartoon and I want to hide little bits of darkness in it, I'll have a Ruby Weaver and a Randy Ridge as characters. Throw in a little joke that six-year-olds under no circumstances get. Randy Ridge sounds like where horny teenagers go to overthrow the government. They're up on the Randy Ridge. No.

Oh, boy. So, hearing all that, Jordan, Dan, you probably won't be surprised to learn that Mike rushed to capitalize on the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Now, as soon as it hit the news, he launched a new website, Biodefense.com, which was filled with advice on how to fight the disease. Likewise, after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, he launched cesiumeliminator.com, which sold products it claimed would protect people from radioactive fallout. Both websites regularly linked back to natural news as evidence for their claims. In addition to this more run-of-the-mill grifting, Mike also approved publication during the Ebola outbreak of one of the craziest articles I think I have ever read. Treating Ebola with homeopathy. Oh, yeah.

All right, here we go. This article ran on Mike's site. It was approved by Mike, but it was authored by a Norwegian homeopath. And it is essentially the recipe for a homemade Ebola remedy. I'm going to read that now, the whole recipe, in case any of y'all are in the market for an Ebola treatment that I sure will work. This better include salt to taste. This recipe. It's pretty shocking. How to make your own Ebola remedy. What you need. A face mask and gloves. Good. Of course. Good start, good start.

So far so good, yeah. Two bottles, 50 milliliter, up to 500 milliliter in glass or plastic bottles with caps. Fine. Clean water, mineral or tap water, okay. And Ebola samples. Whoa, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. All right, I'll turn. All right, all right, all right, all right. I get the Ebola samples, but isn't there fluoride in the tap water? That's my real concern.

I'm sure that was Mike Adams' same concern, but he decided like, no, Ebola is serious enough, they can risk the tap water. Right, right, right, they can risk the fluoride. I got you, I got you. It's in Norway. There's no fluoride in Norway. Norway is tap water. He specifies it as some spit or other disease products such as blood from a person infected with Ebola or who is suspected sick with it. Any small quantity will do. Shouldn't this guy call it sputum? Why is he calling it spit? This is unprofessional. Oh boy, it's, it's shocking. Yeah. Oh man, that's going to be an ingredient on Hell Kitchen at any moment now.

Oh, there's more ingredients. An alcoholic liquid such as whiskey, brandy, rum, et cetera. All right, all right. And six, half an hour of your time. It's like you're making a little cake. Procedure, fill the bottle with water, leaving about 20% space at the top. I saw that coming. Place the Ebola sample in the water, in the water, in the bottle.

Close the top of the bottle with the cap. Hold the bottle and strike it hard against a solid surface such as a large book 40 times. What, hold on, what, 40 times? Yeah, 40 times. Hold on, what, huh? 40 times exactly. Exactly 40 times. Exactly 40 times.

40 times. Exactly 40 times. You fill your bottle with a live Ebola sample in water and then you hit it against a book and then you pour. What if I lose count? Oh, you're fucked. You're fucked and you need to get more Ebola. Now, next you pour the contents of the bottle out.

You refill the bottle with water and then you repeat three to six a total of 30 times. What do you do with the water with the Ebola in it that you have poured out? You just pour that in the drain? Yeah, just pour it down the drain. Cool. Seems safe. Huh. Using the stock bottle, you can supply the Ebola remedy to as many people as you want.

There's no limit? No. Even his website had a million limit. Yeah. Where does the booze come in? That's to help you deal with having Ebola. Yeah, I don't see a clear point at which I'm supposed to add the booze. Oh, no, no.

When you store it, you add 10% by volume. Of course. The alcohol is a preservative. Of course. Naturally. Of course. Now, guys, you may know, none of us are doctors, but you may have noticed that advising people to acquire samples of Ebola, swash it around in a water bottle, pour it down sinks, could

potentially transmit the Ebola disease to new people. It feels like a possibility. Feels like a chance if you're advising people to collect samples of the Ebola virus. Yeah, collecting a sample part is really the buried lead in this advice. Like, where are you going to get that? Holy shit. Now, the recipe is so bad, so dangerous and toxic, that even Mike Adams was forced to eventually remove it and put up a disclaimer saying, natural news does not condone any

member of the public attempting to interact with Ebola. After that, Mike immediately included a related news link with another natural news article, Ebola vaccine to be manufactured by criminal drug company with felony record. So. He found it. He found the right tone. Yeah. He found the pivot.

He got the exit door going as well. I like that. You can watch the first shot, but you may have a second one. Yeah. You don't need to make one free throw. Yeah. He got his own rebound. Master of the pivot, Mike Adams.

I also don't like the word eventually being in your sentence about like, he eventually took that down. Yeah. Yeah. It took a little while. That's not good. Now, fellas, speaking of pivots, it's time for me to pivot to the end of this episode. What?

Yeah. A lot more to talk about with Mike Adams, including, were you guys aware that he'd made a rap video? What? Oh, Jesus. No. Oh, yeah. How dare you?

Oh, hell yeah. Why did you not open this episode with the guy we're about to talk to made a rap video? That's what I wanted to hear. Yeah. It's pretty, pretty special. Wow. If people weren't thinking about sticking around, now they are. Yeah.

Who shot JR? Yeah. So, uh, before we, before we roll out, will you guys, uh, plug your plugables here? Yeah. For sure. We, uh, have a website where our show is our podcast. It's knowledge fight.com. We're on Twitter on iTunes, all those other places, knowledge fights.

Uh, yeah. He's, uh, we're at knowledge underscore fights. I'm at go to bed Jordan and I will be at, uh, Zany's for the entire month of July. If you want to come down, uh, I'll be there in Chicago in Chicago in old town. Yeah. Sorry. So, or alternatively, find a business of any kind with the name Zany's in your own area.

There might be a chicken restaurant. Travel there in mass. Probably work. In demand, demand at gunpoint if necessary that Jordan be allowed to host a comedy show. I'm in. Yeah. We will accommodate if anyone forces the issue on this. I am not busy is my point.

I'm Robert Evans. You can find me online at, uh, I write okay on Twitter. Uh, you can find this podcast at behindthebastards.com. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at fbastards pod. We sell t shirts behind the bastards, uh, or no, we don't sell them there. We sell them on tpublic.com. I'm exhausted. Um, this is the end of the episode.

Go hug a cat, uh, feed a homeless person, uh, I probably shouldn't allege any other crimes here. I was going to say something about flipping a cop car, but I'm not going to say that. I'm not going to say that now because I already urged people to, uh, commit one set of crimes and I'm going to keep us to one crimes per episode. So we're done. The episode's over. Go do with your families.

Alphabet boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse with like a lot of guns. It's our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to alphabet boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in

a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass, and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.