When you change the way the ‘forces that be’ control you and the society you live in, you know your strategy is working when you get attacked, impersonated and are the target of sustained (and skillful) disinformation. While it is not pleasant to be attacked, if the attacks follow a particular pattern, it gives you powerful confirmation that you are on the right track and that what you are doing is having an impact. That’s what appears to be happening with Natural Solutions Foundation!
The Four Classic Disinformation Drains: Deceit, Deflection, Distortion, Defamation
For example, I recently got an email accusing the Natural Solutions Foundation of opposing licensing of Naturopaths in Virginia. We take no such position, of course. The person who wrote it said he was a strong supporter of ours until we took that position. Turns out that we never said any such thing (I really believe in Naturopathy) and that it was another, similarly titled group that was opposing it. He said that a lot of his friends who used to be our supporters had “joined the bandwagon against Natural Solutions Foundation”.
In his letter of apology for thinking we were really the bad guys, my correspondent said, “Unfortunately a lot of friends of mine got the email and joined the bandwagon opposing [Natural Solutions Foundation] without realizing what they were opposing. The gist of the email was that if naturopaths were licensed, they would have a monopoly on supplements, etc….”
Of course we did not write any such thing! Ever since we became the leading voice of health freedom, the Natural Solutions Foundation has been attacked with a variety of spurious, specious and just downright silly allegations. It’s called “Disinformation” and it’s a classic way to disrupt an effective force for change. The idea is to destroy confidence and credibility by a continuing stream of smear, deceit, innuendo and lies of all kinds.
The intent is to drain funding, and energy it takes to respond to the disinformation and, ultimately, drain credibility – the “Death by a Thousand Cuts”.
The Natural Solutions Foundation has no intention of dying, however, whether by cuts or cold or croup or anything else. I recently noted with great interest that someone has set up an “organization” and an eBlast that looks a lot like ours, claiming to be a health freedom communication fighting for your rights and asking you for money.
Now, it is fine to set up organizations and seek funding. In fact, the more people fighting the health freedom battle, the better. But in this case, imitation may be the sincerest form of … disinformation. It looks to me like the idea is to siphon off much needed funding by pretending to be the Natural Solutions Foundation!
Let’s face it: funding is the limiting factor in the health freedom battle. Sufficient funding allows us to do our work. This “organization” (and the other disinformation circulating about us) tries to make it seem as if what we are doing is driven by fraudulent motives, or worse!
At the same time, a person claiming to be both angry and a scientist has been savaging us in the blogisphere. That is very odd because virtually every response we get in the blogosphere is strongly positive. This person’s not only unfriendly, he (or she) is downright libelous!
Here is a note which our counsel, Ralph Fucetola, just sent me a few minutes ago on this very issue:
“Well, Rima, we must be doing something right, since some shady characters and some “quackbuster” skeptic types have recently targeted us. I note we were scammed by a pro, by the King of Online Spam, as this person is frequently called. At the same time, we’ve been attacked by someone who calls himself ” the Angry…” something or other. Interestingly, there may be a link between these two events!
“So, first to the scam: the security of our list appears to have been breeched. We are, of course, taking strong legal action to prevent further damage and to compel the King of Spam to refrain from any further use of our list. After all, we have the members of our community to protect and we are doing exactly that.
When [deleted] came to us last year offering to help our health freedom fight, he was both sincere-seeming, knowledgeable and helpful. He even helped us design the format we often still use for our eblasts. He gave us this design service as a gift and we certainly appreciated it. In fact, the design he is using now was an earlier version of our email blast which we have the rights to!
We believed we could trust this person so we eventually gave him access to our web site and to our list in order to, he said, “help us out…” with communication strategies to help us get our message out more effectively. Then we discovered to our horror that he was apparently keeping a large amount of money for himself that one of our supporters was contributing and keeping money people paid for products they purchased through the Natural Solutions Foundation. We were really distressed. The purchasers got their product (we never got the money, of course), the merchant was badly hurt and we, of course, immediately cut [deleted] completely out of our lives.
That was, more or less, the last we heard from him – until now. This took place shortly before the Holidays last year. Now, though, we see he has a “new health freedom group”, an “alliance”, out there, with eblasts very similar to ours, sent, we fear, to an earlier copy of our elist. This “new group” has nothing to do with us.”
Ralph asked me to let you know that “While the Natural Solutions Foundation has set up Yahoo!Group forums and are working with a very special group of health and freedom advocates to create a lobbying Health Freedom Strategic Alliance uniting the vitamin industry with health freedom advocates, we have NOT authorized any spin-off or “look alike” groups. Please let your friends know that if anyone receives suspicious information that counterfeits our efforts, we need to know. It would help us greatly if people would forward whatever you get from this other group to us at dr.laibow@gmail.com .”
Then Ralph goes on to say, “Back to the second event, the “Angry” person. Natural Solutions Foundation is often cited on blogs in a favorable light; those references are reported to us by our web host and we always post our thanks. Well, the Angry man is upset with two sentences from your landmark video,’Nutricide: the DVD‘ (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=156), which exposes the genocidal results of the Illness Industry. Hundreds of thousands have seen it on Google Video and I suppose it was inevitable that eventually someone would fail to get the point and try to waste our time nitpicking – or worse. AND there is a strong, but unconfirmed, indication on Angry’s blog that he is working with Mr. Spam King! [You can watch “Nutricide on our website, www.HealthFreedomUSA.org– REL]
So we are being attacked by someone who impugns our veracity and says that because HE cannot find something in the huge mass of Codex documents (and maybe does not know how to read the ‘bureaucratese’) what you said is somehow false, a lie, a deception, a fraud. Not logical, this, but perhaps he is driven by some other motivation. Oddly, perhaps, Mr. Angry has also blogged about a forced chemotherapy drugging case in CA. We’ve learned that there appears to be a connection between that case and the [deleted]. What is going on here? It sure has me perplexed.
What I do know though, is that we appear to have been had. The lesson is clear: only trust people like you and General Bert who have been in the struggle for decades.
Disinformation and deception come in a surprising variety of flavors and they all taste very bitter!”
Natural Solutions Foundation’s privacy policy is clear, and is clearly stated on our website: we NEVER sell, rent, barter or share our email list. NEVER.
What we did not account for was having a trusted person in our midst who may have decided to use our list for his own purposes. If you get something from this phony “health freedom alliance” (and it looks somehow familiar to you) please send it our way. It will provide evidence for the legal action we are taking in this situation and will help us greatly!
We are working hard on your protection!
You may find it interesting to know that we have new secure servers (which cost us the best part of $1000 per month) and a much stronger site being hosted there.
