Mike Adams is forced to walk back his violent rhetoric about executing those promoting COVID-19 vaccination

About six years ago, I started noticing a disturbing phenomenon in the antivaccine underground, namely the increasingly violent rhetoric of antivaccine activists. At the time, I quoted an article by an antivaxxer named Dara Berger, who compared the antivaccine movement to that of the antiabortion movement, which perhaps a more apt comparison that she realized, particularly this part:

So getting back to the question of will they [pro-vaxers] ever become violent. Well I think in an indirect way they already have become violent. They are trying to force our children to take vaccinations against our will. They are trying to get our previously vaccine injured children to take more vaccines and don’t care that we feel it will put them in grave danger. They are also trying to force the siblings of this vaccine injured child to get vaccines, even though they may have the same genetic makeup and susceptibilities. Where did this all start? A couple years ago Paul Offit said that he wanted to do away with the religious exemption. He wanted the small percent of unvaccinated children to be vaccinated. Why? So he could make millions of dollars! So what did he do? He wrote a book on the subject that didn’t happen to garner the best reviews. He worked tirelessly with pharmaceutical companies and lobbyists to pay off senators and other lawmakers to get them to introduce bills such as SB 277 in California that stripped away a parents right to decide, by using their child’s education as leverage. In California, you now have to vaccinate your child in order to be able to attend a public school in 2016. Unfortunately, many families need a dual-income and may have to succumb to giving vaccines in order for their children to go to school. They may not have the ability to leave their job and move to another state. And not everybody has the ability or can afford to home school their child. Some of these children may become injured as a result. Vaccine injury is a violent act against a child especially if it is forced and without consent. Vaccine injury can leave a child with permanent brain damage. Anyone who lives with a vaccine injured child knows how absolutely devastating life after vaccine injury can be. And the pharmaceutical company who produced the vaccine offers no help and is nowhere to be found.

Sound familiar? Remember, this is from 2015, not 2020 or 2021. As I noted at the time, whether she recognized it or not, Ms. Berger had directly echoed the rationale used by violent anti-abortion protesters for their actions. They believe that abortion is murder and that stopping murder justifies the use of extreme measures, up to and including violence. As I had been seeing more and more during the debate over SB 277, the California law that had just passed that eliminated nonmedical exemptions, Ms. Berger was likening routine vaccination to a violent assault on children. She even made it explicit by saying that “vaccine injury is a violent act against a child.” Whether Ms. Berger realized it or not, it’s only a short jump from this sort of rhetoric about how vaccination is “violence” against children, causing brain damage and even death, to justifying doing anything to stop it, including a little pre-emptive violence, if necessary, just as some radical anti-abortion terrorists have concluded.

In that post, I also included a number of increasingly violent memes that I had found in various antivaccine discussion forums, as well as various antivaccine Facebook groups and in various Twitter timelines. A few examples:

Unfortunately, the violent rhetoric has only increased over the years. By the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit early last year, the groundwork had been laid with years of rhetoric and memes portraying school vaccine mandates as violence, the forced poisoning of children, as unacceptable violations of freedom and “parental rights.” When the antivaccine movement made natural common cause with COVID-19 cranks, antimaskers, and anti-“lockdown” protesters (as well as QAnon conspiracy theorists) based on their shared opposition to public health measures, the only thing that surprised me was that, inspired by its violent rhetoric, antivaxxers hadn’t (yet) engaged in violent resistance.

Then, yesterday afternoon, I saw an article by Mike Adams on Natural News entitled It’s time to arrest, prosecute, and EXECUTE researches who use human children for covid vaccine medical experiments:

If you click on the link to the Adams’ article, you’ll find that it looks rather different now, although the URL still includes the word “execute.” By last night, when I was writing this article, Adams had walked back his outrageous rhetoric (sort of) with an “update:

And as part of the update:

UPDATE: This article is being misconstrued. It does not call for violence. It calls for Nuremberg style trials against those researchers who are using children for medical experiments.

This article is being removed until further notice.

Funny, but as of last night at least, the article was still there, just with the “update” added. It’s basically the same article, other than the “update” and a little wordsmithing. One example is that this graphic for his “Situation Update” is unchanged:

In another example, the article still claims:

The horrifying crimes against humanity once pursued by the Third Reich are now being repeated in America, but this time under the label of “covid vaccines.”

Healthy human children are being injected with deadly biological weapons — spike proteins that even the Jonas Salk Institute conclusively identifies as the culprit behind vascular disease and blood clots. These children are being recruited into mRNA medical experiments that transform their own bodies into bioweapons factories, churning out spike protein particles that may kill them, all while researchers watch and document the horrifying consequences.

Of course, as I’ve written before many times, even though legally COVID-19 vaccines released under an emergency use authorization (EUA) rather than full FDA approval are still considered “investigational,” from a scientific and practical standpoint it is silly to label them as such any more. After all, they’ve all been subjected to phase 3 clinical trials involving tens of thousands of subjects, and by now worldwide over 1.75 billion doses of these “investigational” COVID-19 vaccines have been administered as of last night, with the US alone closing in on 300 million doses, with an excellent safety profile. Moreover, EUAs are a US regulatory mechanism that doesn’t necessarily apply, even legally, to the rest of the world. Yes, in the US, legally, COVID-19 vaccines still must be referred to as “investigational,” but that’s US law. As for “churning out spike proteins” and “shedding,” those are antivaccine lies. “Shedding” is not a thing, and spike protein is produced at barely detectable levels by the vaccines.

Sometimes, though, antivaxxers realize that they’ve gone too far when the blowback for their words. That’s why, last night as I sat down to write this, I noticed a new article by Adams entitled UPDATE: Natural News apologizes for, and removes, today’s feature article which was misconstrued… full explanation. I laughed as I read Adams disingenuous walking back of his violent rhetoric:

Earlier this morning, Natural News published an article calling for Nuremberg-style trials for researchers who use human children for medical experiments.

The article called for court hearings, prosecutions and punishments against those carrying out these crimes against humanity, in much the same way that Nazi war criminals were prosecuted.

The article was misconstrued as calling for violence against vaccine researchers, even though it specifically emphasized court-ordered prosecutions and punishments and additionally called for due process so that “society” could decide the punishments for those engaging in medical violence against children.

No, Adams’ article was not “misconstrued.” It was quite clear what he was saying. He was calling for executions of scientists, but “court-ordered” executions after trials. That’s the dodge. What most people don’t know because they haven’t been following antivaxxers as long as I and others have is that it’s actually long been a recurring theme in antivaccine fantasies that pro-vaccine physicians and scientists be subjected to “Nuremberg” trials for their “crimes against humanity.” Indeed, let me revisit a man I’ve discussed on a number of occasions before, Kent Heckenlively, who in 2015 wrote a fantasy post I Will Accept Your Surrender, in which he imagined “total victory” by the antivaccine side and magnanimously offered to “accept our surrender”:

And so I’m offering you a way out.  A complete and unconditional surrender.  You can’t ask what we’re going to do to you.  You’re just going to have to trust in our good graces. Maybe sometime in the distant future your children and family might believe you had a shred of courage if you act at this very moment.  But the time for choosing is drawing near.  Choose wisely.

I declined Mr. Heckenlively’s kind offer.

In 2017 Heckenlively made it even clearer exactly what he meant:

Here’s how the Vaccine-Autism war ends.

We win. They lose. The memory of what they have done will cling to their children for generations to come, like the children of Nazi war criminals who were horrified by the crimes of their parents. And what about us? We were the resistance. We were the freedom-fighters. We fought to protect the future. And we will tell our stories.

He even fantasized about pro-vaccine activists as French nobility dragged to the guillotine to have their heads lopped off during the French Revolution and hopes for some “reasonable” (i.e., compliant”) provaccine advocates, whom he contrasts to the French aristocracy before the Revolution:

Not really up on your history?

All you really need to know is that the French aristocrats who lost their heads in the Revolution were unbelievably blind to the reasonable calls for reform and engaged in monumentally stupid acts which ensured their complete destruction.

And:

The white majority in South Africa knew they were losing to Nelson Mandela’s call for justice and they took actions which averted a catastrophe. Even though the British ended up fighting a war with us, there were voices in England who thought that the whole affair was utter madness. Eventually, their views prevailed. Hell, even some Nazis could see where Hitler was leading them after D-Day and tried to change things by blowing him up.

In case you didn’t get the message, Heckenlively included this image:

I like to emphasize that there is nothing new under the sun about the antivaccine movement, even during COVID-19. None of the rhetoric, lies, tropes, or disinformation is new. It’s just old wine in a new bottle, old disinformation repackaged for COVID-19. Indeed, Adams isn’t the only antivaxxer who’s gone a bit too far and then tried to walk it back. For example, Del Bigtree, producer of the antivaccine propaganda film disguised as as documentary, VAXXED, has long been fond of this sort of rhetoric. Here he was, for instance, at an appearance in my state in 2016:

Here’s just a taste:

If we do not fight now, then there will be nothing left to fight for. And I think that is where everyone in this room, I pray you realize how important you are in this historic moment. We will never be stronger than we are right now. We will never be healthier than we are right now. Our children are looking like this, a generation of children, as we’ve said on The Doctors television show this is the first generation of children that will not live to be as old as their parents. Are we going to stand…are we going to sit down and take it? Or are we going to stand up and say: This is a historic moment, that my forefathers, those from Jefferson all the way to Martin Luther King, the moments where people stood up and something inside of them said I’m going to stand for freedom and I’m going to stand for it now. That is in our DNA. It is pumping through me, and I pray that you feel it pumping through you, because we must look back. Our grandchildren will look back and thank us for having stood up one more time and been the generation that said, “We the People of the United States of America stood for freedom, stand for freedom. We will die for freedom today.

Yes, Mr. Bigtree tends towards the overly dramatic, and at times he’s let his violent rhetoric get away with him. Here he was in 2016 again:

As Matt Carey pointed it out to me, this was the relevant segment, which is starts at about the 44 minute mark in the full video:

Basically, Bigtree was saying “now’s the time” for guns:

…but now we’re watching the most powerful lobby in the country and in the world poisoning our children. And our government is helping them. What are we going to do about it? We have the power. But we have got to stop being afraid to talk about it. If you’re afraid to talk about it, your Twitters, your Facebooks, I don’t want to bring it up at my PTA meeting, I don’t want to at lunch or at Thanksgiving dinner, then I can imagine those same conversations were happening in Nazi Germany among the Jewish people. Let’s not talk about it. I don’t want to bring it into my reality. It’s still 20 miles away. I’m still allowed in this theater, not that one. All I have to get is this little star. All I have to do is to sign this little thing saying that I’m not going to vaccinate because I think they’re dangerous—and they are dangerous. I’m just going to sign this paper. I’m going to let them put me in a log. At some point, they have gone too far.

Do you think it’s a good idea to let the government own your baby’s body and right behind it your body? That is the end for me. Anyone who believes in the right to bear arms. To stand up against your government. I don’t know what you were saving that gun for then. I don’t know when you planned on using it if they were going to take control of your own body away.

It’s now. Now’s the time.

As Carey noted, at best this rhetoric was irresponsible. At worst it was a call for violence (even though I strongly suspect that Bigtree (and probably Adams too) is a proverbial chickenhawk, someone who talks a big game but doesn’t back it up). I bet that Bigtree probably doesn’t even own a gun himself. Even though Adams does brag about owning guns, I bet that he, like Bigtree, would probably run at the first hint of violent confrontation. On the other hand, what worried me (and still worries me) is that some of those listening to people like Bigtree and Adams might not run and would be the enthusiastic instigators of violence.

As I note now yet again, this is the sort of thing I’ve seen many times before. Indeed, Adams does it on purpose. You might remember how he called scientists who support genetically modified organisms “Monsanto collaborators” and wrote this in 2014:

Interestingly, just yesterday German President Joachim Gauck celebrated the lives of those brave Nazi officers who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. (1) Their attempted Wolf’s Lair bombing failed, but it was an honorable attempt to rid the world of tremendous evil by killing one of the people responsible for it.

This official ceremony sends a message to the world, and that official message from the nation of Germany to the rest of the world is that “it is the moral right — and even the obligation — of human beings everywhere to actively plan and carry out the killing of those engaged in heinous crimes against humanity.”

This fundamental philosophical truth is now enshrined in history by the highest office of the nation of Germany herself, the very nation where mass government propaganda spearheaded by a highly-charismatic political leader drove the population to commit genocide in the name of “peace.”

Not surprisingly, at the time a lot of people were alarmed by Mike’s rhetoric, which seemed like a direct call to kill scientists involved in genetically modified organisms. In the context of the rest of Mike’s screed, which ranted against “Monsanto Collaborators,” likening them to, of course, Nazi Collaborators,” it sure sounded that way:

“Nazi collaborators” were individuals and corporations that promoted the power and reach of the Nazi party, publishing pro-Nazi propaganda and attacking anyone who criticized Adolf Hitler or the Nazi regime. Collaborators included many scientists, academics, publishers and of course politicians, all of whom played key roles in furthering the genocide that saw over six million Jews heartlessly slaughtered by the Nazi regime.

Today, a number of once-independent media sites are selling out to corporate interests and quickly becoming Monsanto collaborators. This is readily apparent by noticing which media sites attack Dr. Mercola, the Food Babe, Jeffrey Smith, the Health Ranger or anyone else fighting against the scourge of GMO genocide against humanity. These attacks all have one thing in common: they are orchestrated by paid biotech muckrakers — people I call “Monsanto collaborators.”

And, of course, Adams likened glyphosate pesticide to—what else?—Zyklon B, pellets that released the cyanide used for the mass murder of Jews.

In 2014, as now, Adams was quickly forced to walk back the rhetoric behind his not-so-veiled call for violence against GMO advocates, just as Bigtree denied that his “time for guns” quote was advocating for violent resistance to vaccine mandates, all while disingenuously bobbing and weaving and claiming that his words had been taken out of context (they had not) and that he had been “standing up for the Second Amendment” (as if that made it better). They intentionally go up to a line with their rhetoric, cross it a bit, and then say, “Whoops! I didn’t really mean actual violence! I just got carried away.”

The problem is, not everyone gets the message. For instance, in 2019 a man named Austin Bennett followed and shoved California State Senator Richard Pan:

Anti-vaxxer shoves California lawmaker who wrote vaccine crackdown bill. This is the modern anti-vaccine movement. https://t.co/0IIjd1WU7o

— Vincent Iannelli, MD (@AboutPediatrics) August 21, 2019

And when those sympathetic to the antivaccine movement tried to dismiss Mr. Bennett as nothing more than a crank:

Sure Jay. Then why is he getting support in most anti-vax forums? pic.twitter.com/lYH7voFix8

— Vincent Iannelli, MD (@AboutPediatrics) August 22, 2019

And, yes, Mr. Bennett is a buffoon and a fool, but buffoons and fools, drunk on anger stoked by the rhetoric of people like Mike Adams, can cause harm. Just this week, in fact, a woman named Virginia Brown took it to another level:

Members of the Blount County Sheriff’s Office arrested Virginia C. Brown on Monday morning after deputies working at the site saw her drive an SUV through a closed cone course and into an enclosed tent where several health department and national guard personnel were working, according to WSMV TV.

Workers at the tent told officers that Brown’s vehicle almost hit seven people in the tent, according to the Blount County Daily Times.

Witnesses said Brown yelled “no vaccine” during her ride, and several witnesses told deputies they thought that the driver was going to kill them, according to a sheriff’s report.

A deputy who witnessed the incident eventually performed a traffic stop on Brown, WVLT TV reported. He arrested her and drove her to the Blount County Detention Facility. She continued making anti-vaccine statements on the way to the facility.

Brown claimed she was only going five miles an hour. The sheriff’s office said she drove her car through the tent at a “high speed.”

My only surprise is that there haven’t been more and worse incidents like this. Further, what doesn’t surprise me is that Adams’ “apology” is really a “notpology,” as he makes excuses, first whining:

We now live in an era when anyone calling for a merit-based society founded is accused of “hate speech,” while anyone calling for court-ordered punishments and sentences against people found guilty of crimes against humanity is accused of “calling for violence.”

As a result, Natural News and myself are being viciously attacked for daring to call for prosecutions against those who use human children in medical experiments.

Like all cranks, Adams likens justified criticism of his words to “vicious attacks” and tries to deny that he called for violence. He called for state-sanctioned violence. Sure, it was a fantasy, given that pro-vaccine scientists have done nothing wrong and are not deserving of punishment, much less the death penalty, but Adams’ violent rhetoric gives you insight into the mind of antivax conspiracy theorists:

We specifically do NOT call for violence against anyone, as our goal is to end medical violence against children. To end this medical violence, we believe that courts must prosecute those responsible for carrying out medical experiments on children. We do not believe in vigilante justice, and I have emphasized repeatedly that violence is the wrong approach to solving these problems. I have also repeatedly emphasized that I call for myself and others to honor the court decisions on such prosecutions.

Nevertheless, we apologize for not stating our positions more clearly, and we have removed the article in question. We plan to restate this in a more meaningful way that will not be misinterpreted.

Got it? The only reason Adams is facing “vicious attacks” is because his words were intentionally and maliciously “misinterpreted.” He’s basically saying, “I don’t apologize for calling for the deaths of provaccine physicians and scientists, just that I didn’t state my position ‘more clearly’ and in a more ‘meaningful’ way such that I was easily ‘misconstrued.'” It’s incredibly disingenuous, and if you don’t believe me, get a load of this:

Those who speak out against this practice are targeted and threatened, as we are being threatened now. There is a war being waged on humanity, and those who are working to protect innocent lives and stop the injection of spike protein bioweapons are being targeted and criminalized.

As the publisher of Natural News, I want to protect innocent life, halt vaccine violence against children, and restore health freedom in America. This is why I am being targeted, and this is why Natural News is being silenced.

Those responsible for crimes against humanity should absolutely be arrested and prosecuted by the courts, as I have consistently called for. Nevertheless, I believe I can do a better job of explaining this concept so I will work to choose my words more carefully in order to contribute to a better understanding of what’s at stake here and the importance of due process for all those involved in these crimes.

According to Mike Adams, he’s being “persecuted” for opposing vaccine mandates and was only calling for lawful “prosecution” of pro-vaccine physicians and scientists for “crimes against humanity.” Meanwhile, the comments after his notpology are overwhelmingly supportive of his previously violent rhetoric. Their general message is that Adams has nothing to apologize for and was absolutely correct to call for executions. One even said, “Never apologize to the enemy!”

I’ll conclude by pointing out once again that I realize that the sort of rhetoric coming from the likes of Del Bigtree and Mike Adams is largely performative. Obviously, I don’t believe for a minute that Bigtree is going to take up arms to stop school vaccine mandates or that Adams is really going to seriously call for the execution of scientists. With their histrionic rhetoric, Adams and Bigtree are in essence doing no more than just preening for their audiences and firing up their followers. However, it’s not at all difficult to imagine someone like Austin Bennett or Virginia Brown taking someone like Del Bigtree or Mike Adams seriously. Is it so difficult to imagine that rhetoric like what Mike Adams is promoting could provoke some antivaxxers to violence? After all, it hasn’t been the pastors and politicians likening abortion to murder who have attacked and killed physicians who perform abortions. It’s been those who listened to them. Indeed, I’m a bit worried for A-list vaccine advocates, such as Dr. Richard Pan, Dr. Paul Offit, Dorit Reiss, Dr. Peter Hotez, Dr. Vincent Iannelli, and many others. I’m even a little bit worried for myself, although I’m probably just not big enough of a fish to attract that much attention.

After all, if you really, truly believe that abortion is murder, then violent means to stop it can easily seem justifiable. Similarly, if you really believe that provaccine scientists and physicians, along with government public health officials and pharmaceutical companies, are truly injecting a toxic experimental gene therapy brew into millions of people, including children, in a massive unethical human experiment that is killing lots of people, then a violent response can seem justified. You can see it in the sort of rhetoric that flows freely in antivaccine forums and in various memes, examples of which I’ve posted. Basically leaders of the antivaccine movement are playing with fire in the form of violent rhetoric in the explosive warehouse full of antivaxxers and QAnon supporters. I fear that one day that combination is going to result in a disastrous explosion.

ADDENDUM: Big surprise! Today Adams claims that the reason he took his article down was because he had been warned that it was exactly the sort of thing the “deep state” was looking for as a pretext for a “false flag” operation to blame antivaxxers like him for violence:

The most relevant call came from someone I did not know, and whose number did not appear on my phone. It was sheer chance that I even answered it. As I explain in my Situation Update podcast below, this person identified himself as a supporter of my site and said he works for the federal government. What gave his claim credibility was the fact that he knew my number and he was able to initiate the call from a source that did not reveal his phone number to me.

He said he became aware of my article calling for war crimes tribunals against vaccine researchers, and he warned me that this is exactly the kind of article the deep state is hoping to see published because they are planning to carry out a false flag violent attack to blame “anti-vaxxers” and gun owners.

He urged me to take down the article and podcast immediately, which I was actually already in the process of doing because of previous phone calls and previous conversations with other people that I won’t get into. Importantly, he explained more…

Hilariously, somehow Adams has apparently never heard of tools that hide a caller’s number from Caller ID. On my iPhone, there’s a little toggle in the preferences for the Phone app to “hide caller ID.” Really high-end nefarious next level stuff there!

And:

First, he said that the false flag operation is perhaps just weeks away. He explained that the ATF, with Chipman to be in charge, will be ready to move against AR-15 rifles, and they need a big “event” to achieve that. At the same time, the vaccine industry is desperate to find a way to criminalize and shut down all anti-vaxxer content online, since banning it on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube still hasn’t been as effective as they hoped. So they figure they can “kill two birds with one stone” and stage a violent false flag attack of some type that will depict anti-vaxxers as violent gun owners pursuing murder and mayhem. With the obedient media ready to push whatever narrative they’re handed, this story can be told with tremendous effectiveness, resulting in a nationwide outcry to criminalize and shut down both “anti-vaxxer” speech and to confiscate all AR-15s nationwide.

And:

In this call, I was told that if I continue to talk about war crimes tribunals, Natural News would be completely taken down and removed from the internet. My guess is that the people involved in gain-of-function research have come to realize they will really face war crimes prosecutions as more truth unfolds, and they are using every tactic possible to threaten those who might remind fellow human beings that running mass medical experiments on humanity is a crime against humanity.

So Adams is admitting defeat (for now) and making a strategic retreat:

Thus, I am reluctantly going to have to hold off on the war crimes topic until the public is ready to hear the truth as the post-vaccine death count explodes due to Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) or other similar effects. Once vaccinated people start dying en masse, it will become obvious that the one thing they all have in common is the covid vaccine.

But by then, of course, the depopulation agenda will have largely succeeded. Once the masses are killed off by the vaccine, they can’t really rise up and demand an investigation, can they? It seems the depopulation pushers have already won.

Because of course. Of course Adams had to shut down his “truth telling” because “they” are currently too powerful. Funny how that gives him an easy face-saving way to retreat, when what really likely happened is one of two things. Either Adams got cold feet when he saw the intensity of the pushback against his violent rhetoric, or, as I said above, this was all performative and he had his face-saving “retreat” ready to go ahead of time. I suspect the latter.