#2892: Carey Gillam

Carey Gillam is a professional fearmonger, pseudoscience promoter, disinformation merchant, conspiracy theorist and “investigative journalist” with the group U.S. Right to Know (USRTK), an “investigative research group” funded by the Organic Consumers Association and conspiracy theorist celebrity Joseph Mercola: Gillam is, suitably, their director of research despite having no background in science. In 2022, Gillam also became managing editor of The New Lede, a “news” organization funded by the activist Environmental Working Group, and she has been a regular contributor to The Guardian, where her work has focused on environmental degradation and the food system. An illustrative example of her work (for HuffPo) is discussed here. She was previously a Midwest reporter for Reuters, but left that position under somewhat unclear circumstances after her opinionated reports on crop biotechnology were exposed by colleagues and scientists as unfounded pseudoscientific conspiracy theories.

 

Like many similar groups, USRTK started out as an enviromental activist organization motivated by a reasonable distrust of corporations and a thirst for accountability, but paranoia (and the usual appeal to nature taken as a guiding creed) soon got the better of them and led them straight into pseudoscience and conspiracy theories – at first mostly about Monsanto, glyphosate and GMOs, but they quickly pivoted to more general conspiracy mongering: The group is perhaps most familiar these days as a resource for conspiracy theories related to covid-19 – in particular the (false and quite dingbat silly) notion that COVID-19 sprang from so-called “gain-of-function” experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology – and their nonsense was widely used as a source even by mainstream media that were unaware of their ties to Mercola, The National Vaccine Information Center (“the most powerful anti-vaccine organization in America”) and Robert Kennedy jr. Part of the reason for the media’s error is presumably that the USRTK, as opposed to, say, NVIC, tries to maintain a sheen of trustworthiness and legimitacy and to avoid overt conspiracy mongering – as Callum Hood points out, the USRTK is a “respectable-looking branch” of a vast ecosystem of interlocking anti-vaccine and science denialist groups.

 

Gillam herself has close ties to Robert Kennedy Jr.: excerpts of her book on Monsanto was for instance published on Kennedy’s website, and she has appeared on his podcast. Indeed, Gillam is good at drawing attention to herself, and the book in question, The Monsanto Papers, was widely featured on – and gained her several interviews with – various pseudoscience and conspiracy sites. The book is evenhandedly reviewed here, and does exactly what you’d expect it to do: According to Gillam, both in the aforementioned book and in her other books Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science, Monsanto markets glyphosate while knowing it to be carcinogenic (it isn’t) while not warning users about the danger (because there isn’t); then they attack its critics (Gillam is a victim, of course). For the claim that roundup is carcinogenic, Gillam has plenty of anecdotes; as for the science? Well, through comprehensive and repeated reviews of thousands of studies, 17 national and international regulatory and scientific agencies have found glyphosate to be safe and non-carcinogenic; one single one (IARC) has – for demonstrably dubious reasons – not (discussed here and here). Guess which one Gillam cites as definite proof (the rest are presumably part of a Monsanto-led conspiracy).

 

Diagnosis: Well, categorizing her as a loon is probably imprecise; Carey Gillam knows exactly what she’s doing: She is a profession FUD merchant bent on undermining trust in any institution, investigation or evidence that doesn’t line up with and support the conclusion she has arrived at for ideological and pseudo-religious reasons. But she is extremely influential and has a significant fan base.

 

Hat-tip: Genetic literacy project