The Organic Consumers Association, the embarrassing stepchild of the organic industry founded by the late Ronnie Cummins in 1998, has a positive-sounding name but has been nothing except negative for science and the public. Though the United States Department of Agriculture calls them an “organic agricultural products marketing and trade resource” organization they have really just been fifth columnists against vaccines, affordable food, and everything else that helps the modern world.

They are so awful that the Center Against Digital Hate included them among the top 12 sources of false information about vaccines and other public health information. Actual organic farmers have long wished they would stop trying to help.

Now they can wish them well as they go defunct.

Well, not quite yet. They have only furloughed their employees to try and control the financial bleeding, because they were never really supported by “consumers’ at all. Their latest form 990 shows a tepid $50,000 in funds from individuals.

Yet their total income was over $1,700,000. Where was that money coming from? They have refused to disclose that but in the past a top donor was an osteopath named Joe Mercola, who makes a fortune selling alternatives-to-medicine and was fined over $5 million by FDA for selling a tanning bed he suggested prevented skin cancer.

Such a lack of transparency about, let’s be generous and pretend their individual donations are double their fundraising, 95% of their revenue is certainly ironic for a group that has spent nearly 30 years claiming Science Is A Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.

When Bobby Kennedy was representing Democrats, anti-vax sentiment was cool.(2) Not so cool with the wealthy who are 80% on the left once he became Team Republican. That may be why their top funding source cut them off.

COVID-19 showed how dangerous their anti-science beliefs can be.

OCA is not alone in secret funding. Find a malevolent group in business to smear scientists, like Sourcewatch or US Right To Know or plenty of others, and you may find a trail that leads to secret funding. Those groups have also seen dramatic drops in funding, but not in one year.

When half your revenue stops, probably because a donor can’t risk being implicated in campaigns against vaccines, you have to start laying off people.

Yet it may not be that at all, it may be financial funny business that alarmed large donors. Why would OCA fund agave trees in Mexico? And why are they spending $750,000 there? It just so happens that founder Ronnie Cummins bought property in Mexico to grow agave. He became a farmer when he was dying of cancer? Is OCA going out of business because Regeneration International, their “certification” group which we showed certifies you if you have money, no farm needed, is their new front? It is now run by the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements former director Andre Leu.

Or is the organic industry hanging Cummins’ widow, now running OCA, out to dry?

Environmentalism is run by lawyers, so nothing would be a surprise. We won’t get answers any time soon, though. They cover their tracks really well.

The truth was always that science denial is where the conspiracy has been. In 2015, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence revealed that Russia had been channeling money to environmental groups who would help undermine American science in their top two exports, energy and food, using offshore donor-advised funds to avoid accountability.

Which led to the science community creating graphics like this:

With corporations who sell competitors to the products you want to promote distrust toward, and foundations getting money from groups that want to see American science decline, it’s easy to raise millions. Secret slush funds, corporations (and in Europe, direct government funding) are why environmental groups are a $3,000,000,000 industry. All earned while complaining that science non-profits, who don’t even get 1% of that amount, are being controlled by Evil Corporations.

The Evil Corporations that actually created vaccines and kept us fed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

NOTES:

(1)

(2) Back when the anti-vax stuff was all on the left. Which journalists on the left never seemed to know existed until Republicans took it over.

Hank Campbell is the founder of Science 2.0 and the author of Science Left Behind. Follow Hank on X @HankCampbell

A version of this article was originally posted at Science 2.0 and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and the original article. Find Science 2.0 on X @science2_0