Last week, Mike Adams, who calls himself the Health Ranger and runs the site Natural News, posted a truly insane article which seems to advocate violence against scientists and journalists who support genetic engineering.
I wasn’t going to write about this at first: It’s just so far out there, so beyond the fringe, that I assumed it wasn’t worth anyone’s attention. But Natural News articles pop up on my Facebook feed so frequently that I figured it might be a valuable public service to publish a post about the site for future reference.
My friends who share stories from Natural News aren’t nuts. They just don’t realize how crazy the site is. They’ll see something that aligns with a pet peeve and assume that it must have some basis in reality. (The thinking goes something like this: Aha! I knew antidepressants were bad. I should let my friends know …)
Natural News has 1.2 million followers on Facebook, and it publishes on themes that appeal to people who (like me) worry about effects of technological disruption of natural systems in our bodies and in the environment. But the site is simply not credible. It’s filled with claims that vaccines are evil, that HIV does not cause AIDS, and that Microsoft is practicing eugenics — see this Big Think post, or this Slate article, for a pseudoscience rundown.
The health-science stories have a surface-level gloss of technical language, which make them seem plausible unless you read them carefully. But if you look at some of the articles on politics it becomes a little more transparent: This is nothing but a conspiracy-theory site.
Read more: http://grist.org/food/heres-why-natural-news-is-neither/
Allow me to add a few words of my own to this subject. Conspiracy theorists have quite frequently recently been proven right, but that is not what I was actually going to stress too much.
The “Health Ranger” (good grief) also talks about microchip implants coming to the USA in the same way as they are already mandatory in the EU. This is, obviously, total baloney, as are a lot of health stories of his.
The site works on the same fear mongering principle as do so many so-called prepper sites aiming for you to buy the stuff that they and their sponsors want to market to you.
© 2014
