Revolutions are messy business, they require participation by a type of personality that is not very savory; militant, bombastic, a little crazy. 

Such traits mean those people are only valuable for a limited time. But that is not the way revolutionaries work; at the first signs of growing pains in the new government they helped create, they are likely to turn on you too. Che Guevara was a sociopath and mass murderer and therefore just the kind of guy Fidel Castro needed - until the Cuban Revolution was over, then it was time to send him somewhere else and if he should happen to die, so much the better, Castro knew he could declare him a hero and sell a lot of shirts to people in San Francisco with his picture on them.

In the American Revolution, Sam Adams was the firebrand. He had lost his shirt as a businessman but found his calling as an extreme patriot. His form of zealotry was unwelcome at the national level after the war was won, however. 

Organic food has its own Adams doing its dirty work in its culture war - Mike Adams, the self-styled Health Ranger and founder of the vaccine denial, quack medicine and food conspiracy site known as NaturalNews.com. Adams is prone to bombast and hyperbole, he is a linguistic terrorist and an eco-fundamentalist, and those are all good things in a nascent movement, but now that organic food is a mature $35 billion industry with a whole lot of people relying on its good will, they need to send those firebrands off to other countries, like happened with Guevara, or to run local committees, as happened with Sam Adams.

Otherwise, they get what is happening now; Adams published an article where he compares anyone who embraces food science with Nazis - and he even started a website to compare such Monsanto 'collaborators' to Nazis and conspiratorially claims Monsanto did it to make him look bad.  

The science side is not without its bombasts but, unlike organic food, they are not mainstream. There are some people who latch onto every survey of psychology undergraduates and declare them evidence that Republicans are mentally inferior, for example, and some who claim we should dutifully line up for any vaccine Merck produces after its next multi-billion-dollar settlement, and some who circle the wagons around anthropology papers that are nothing but anecdotes - but they are a tiny few. As organic food becomes more corporate mainstream, it will be to their detriment to have Adams in their ranks because shoppers are already being led astray on numerous issues, such as being anti-vaccine and anti-energy, and he takes crackpot beliefs to a whole new level.

What about that Monsanto Collaborators website? Adams, of course, denies he built it but we know he has to have created it because (a) Monsanto can't do anything without handing Ketchum $2 million, so it wasn't them on such short notice and (b) technologically savvy organic people are not inspired enough by Adams to spontaneously create this on their own.  He wants the public to think he is an important figure, the same way Sam Adams wanted people to think he was as important as George Washington, but it isn't so. For throwing some tea into the harbor, sure, but revolutions take more than terrorism.

Mike Adams is not the George Washington of the alternative, like Dr. Oz, or even it's Benjamin Rush, like Joe Mercola, he's more like a Benedict Arnold - he claims to be sympathetic but he will turn on the movement the first time he doesn't get his way.

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Image credits: Wikipedia and Wikipedia. With apologies to the descendants of Benedict Arnold for comparing him to Mike Adams.