GMO Safety Cheerleaders Debunked: Why You Shouldn’t Believe The Online Shills

GMO Safety Cheerleaders Debunked: Why You Shouldn’t Believe The Online Shills

By Kurtis Bright

Government Lining Up with Paid Corporate Shills to Disseminate Disinformation on the Safety of GMOs

There are semi-smart people out there who find it fashionable these days to deride opinions that speak negatively about Monsanto, genetically modified crops, and all things GMO.

And maybe some of them are not even being paid by the company and its cut-out middlemen.

Maybe.

If you follow certain comment boards on sites like Reddit, you will quickly find they are flush with comments using surprisingly similar wording, argumentation, and fallacious reasoning to defend poor little picked-on Monsanto and its ilk.

It’s almost as though the same talking points were distributed along with marching orders on how to use them...

One huge part of this trend is of course due to Monsanto’s massive public relations arm distributing millions of dollars into various sources combating its cartoonishly evil (but well-deserved) reputation. The company and its busy little sock puppets have worked hard to create social media buzz that pushes back.

Their sophistication in recent years has grown exponentially in the ways they manage these sock puppet accounts; there are some people among these trolls who are very smart. But you can spot the paid shills when you start to notice the people who lack the capacity for nuance and reasoning in the face of contradictory opinion.

It’s not only that these people would have you believe that GMOs are safe, and that only dangerous paranoiacs and the uneducated believe otherwise. The ludicrousness of the straw-man positions they argue against is a dead giveaway.

Nonetheless, you should take care when you are stuck reading or listening to their arguments, just as you would with those of the government, which is equally untrustworthy as we have seen ad infinitum.

Forget for a moment that virtually all pro-GMO safety arguments neglect to acknowledge the use of pesticides and herbicides on the crops, residue from which then enters your system. Instead they like to pretend that the GMO argument is simply a matter of benignly tweaking the DNA of the plants or animals in a manner akin to that of dog breeders or wheat farmers over the millennia. But the fact is we can look back on the Food and Drug Administration’s early views on GMOs and see how far astray we’ve gone.

Author Steven Druker focuses on just this issue in his book Altered Genes, Twisted Truth. A delineation of his background, education and research can be found in a recent open letter he wrote to the Royal Society in Britain. In it, he lays out a truth that hides in plain sight beneath the entire GMO debate: government regulators are guilty of rigging the game heavily in favor of the corporations who are seeking to control the entirety of food production for all humanity, and they have done so without solid science to back their decisions.

“Although it purports to be based on solid science and the open flow of information on which science depends, the massive venture to reconfigure the genetic core of the world’s food supply has substantially relied on the propagation of falsehoods,” Druker said in his op-ed. “Its advancement and very survival have been crucially and chronically dependent on the misrepresentation of reality – to the extent that more than thirty years after the creation of the first genetically engineered plant, the vast majority of people the world-over (including most government officials, journalists, and even scientists) continue to be misled about the important facts.”

If you find yourself being pummeled by the arguments of the so-called “skeptics” on comment boards and the like, please take a moment to check out Druker’s piece--and maybe even his book.

The battle over our food supply and corporate profits is deadly serious, and we all need to educate ourselves on it.

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