It's no secret that various forms of "dark money" fund groups like US Right To Know and political allies like Center for Media and Democracy, which runs the political attack site SourceWatch.
But the desperate gambit of using Freedom of Information Act requests to bully scientists into silence has backfired; economists like Dr. Chuck Benbrook have been exposed as conspiring with the entire spectrum of progressive anti-science groups, including the magazine Mother Jones and academics like Dr. Marion Nestle and, of course, Dr. Oz, which had two people from the same organization on his program to foment fear and doubt about food.
One more may be added to the list of science deniers for hire that includes Lisa Graves, Gary Ruskin, Tom Philpott and Benbrook; University of Sussex biology professor David Goulson, the darling of partisan journalists in the war on the chemistry side of agriculture, who has been supported by an anti-science group known as 38 Degrees, found European blogger David Zaruk. Without declaring that obvious conflict of interest.
It goes deeper than that. He has been found to create conclusions before research is done and coordinate with public relations groups, according to Jon Entine of Genetic Literacy Project.
He is also involved in International Union for Conservation of Nature, which engaged in a conspiracy to manipulate journals and other activist groups into getting a ban on the pesticide class known as neonicotinoids despite any evidence they are harmful (beyond what he and a few others apparently manufacture.) You can read about that in When It Comes To Neonics, Activists Understand PR Better Than Chemical Companies Do.
