Dr. Michael Greger is a prominent physician promoting plant-based nutrition as a means of health.
He was also paid a significant amount of money by the Humane Society of the United States, years ago, to further their mission of protecting animals.
Instead, over the span of decades he used the equity fraud standard described below and key positions he held in the animal protection movement to focus investors on food choice in growth-based markets as an effective reform, monetizing animal protection into a form of consumption, benefitting himself and investors in the process.
The growth in those markets did exponentially more harm to animals, and to vulnerable populations, than Greger did to help them.
In the past decade, the number of animals on U.S. factory farms has increased significantly, outpacing any reduction from veganism. Factory farm animal numbers rose by 6% (roughly 97 million more animals) between 2017 and 2022, reaching 1.7 billion, while veganism remains low (under 3% of the population) and has not significantly reduced overall consumption.
The Tell the Truth campaign simply asks him to admit that truth and factor in the negative impact of inequitable growth on humans and animals in order to dispel the illusion of his having made the world a better place.
Greger’s version of human health as a matter of food choice – on funded platforms in which he drowns out the voices of the vulnerable – has for decades masked deadly inequity that is now killing tens of millions of persons, and mostly persons of color.
Animal protection requires radical social change – with numbers that track total liberation. Those who have shifted it towards other ends, in the decades that proceeded Trump and the unfolding of the climate crisis, bear some responsibility for the crises we see today.
Contact Greger here, and urge him to Tell the Truth by describing his impacts in context, and to change standards for how he assesses and reports value.
Background:
Why Equity Fraud? Why Tell the Truth?
Fair Start Movement and TruthAlliance.global offer the most just and effective social justice reforms possible today, but one has to ask the right question to understand why. You have to ask, when someone makes a value assessment and/or impact claim, what it’s relative to, or the fundamental baseline the claimant is using. They may be using the same illegal baseline that caused the climate crisis, one that undoes the value they claim by illegally discounting future lives, treating children of color as worth a fraction of the benefits white children enjoy.
If someone claims a beneficial public impact, they should be able to account for how they factor in the variable of children entering the world, relative to what children’s rights and equity require. If they cannot, their assessment of value and reporting of impacts may do more harm than good.
Anyone can identify what’s called illegal baselining, or equity fraud: how is anyone claiming to create public value and impact accounting for children entering the world during the contemporaneous period of time? How were they accounting for a system of empowering children enough so they have a “one person, one influential vote,” enough to stop the harms of the climate crisis? If there was no such accounting or reporting to this standard, the claimant will have benefited at illegal and deadly cost to others and undone their claimed value. The Tell the Truth campaign identifies such people.
History
Fair Start was established by advocates who saw the corrupt use of a fraudulent Ponzi standard in their prior public-interest work. This standard stems from a twentieth-century power grab by wealthy families privatizing family planning to safeguard entitlements and maintain power, in a coercive political system never empowering its subjects. These families, along with political leaders, were legally bound to adhere to an objective, child-rights and equity standard, which asserts that no child is worth more than another, as outlined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The fundamental measure of value? Infant health and wellness as self-determination, or the ensuring of equal political influence for each individual.
Instead, they used the prevailing “separate but equal” standard to base reproductive rights on a subjective framework with no functional protection for future generations—a move that disenfranchised others, leading to the exclusion of birth equity from valuation and reporting systems and a commercialized version of freedom missing the necessary condition of empowerment.
The twentieth-century power grab used the “separate but equal” standard to treat the act of having children as a matter of parental bodily autonomy, rather than political equity. This assumed existing entitlements and blocked the empowerment of each child—the measurable political equity that is a necessary condition of freedom—and ensured unsustainable and inequitable growth that created extreme concentration of wealth, disenfranchised citizens, and irreparable harm to the environment.
Today, women “liberated” by this reproductive-rights regime, as well as their children, are dying in growth-based heat waves, with no way to use their political influence to save themselves or their children. Worse yet, wealthy funders benefiting from that inequitable growth masked it for decades with downstream charade interventions and low standards for defining terms like “green,” “humane,” and “equitable,” designed to enrich their own children at deadly cost to others.
The power grab also created a false premise in our legal systems, because there is no protective obligation limiting the birth-creation of power relations. Why should we be obligated to protect the lives of those with great influence if they show no obligation to protect and empower those with the least influence so that political systems are legitimate?
Performative Babble Signaling Value While Benefiting From a System That Undoes It
The illegal standard uses manufactured numbers (using an XYZ analysis, where out-of-context statements about value and impact (X) are assessed against the variable of children entering the world during the relevant timeframe (Y) in a way that overshot and degraded children’s birthright conditions, showing a different outcome (Z) than claimed). The standard encouraged inaccurate claims of micro-level progress that benefited the claimant in order to hide larger losses based on macro-level factors like growth. One can’t benefit from a system that brings children into conditions and relations that violate a host of accepted legal standards, including treating infants of color as entities deserving political equity. Use of the standard means many public interventions did more to subjugate persons of color than further their missions.
These actors engage in hypocritical value signaling and performative babble, doing many seemingly useful things while “triple-dipping”: benefiting from inequitable birth positionality, growth-based wealth, and charade micro- and downstream public-interest work that hides the upstream macro-level harms from which they benefit at deadly cost to others.
Communications without the underlying obligation are hypocritical babble, with the communicator signaling values to others in the hope of improving their position in an illegitimate system, while refusing to legitimate the system by elevating a protective obligation to infants and animals in the formation of power relations above any other obligation, including deference to the state that purports to represent those infants.
For example, Paul Shapiro—a well-known animal-protection advocate—used the equity-fraud standard and a constant flow of inaccurate claims over the span of decades to help shift the movement from on-balance animal protection toward a system of vegan Ponzi-scheme food investments, and then founded his own company in order to cash in.
The power grab thus ensured a public-interest industry built on equity fraud, one that did more to enrich some children (like Barron Trump) at deadly cost to others (infants in the Sahel) than it did to long-run protect animals, the environment, children, and political systems. In this system, the wealth bubble created over decades of never having to pay the cost of children’s birthrights—not values—controls public-interest outcomes. Philanthropists assume entitlements unencumbered by both their professed and object values, when in reality they owe more than they could give as charity or invest.
The Solution: Tell the Truth and Be Part of a System of Protective Obligation—or Not
All Fair Start is is the research conclusion that all facts are relative to values, and value and impact claims either constitute or deconstitute legitimate political systems relative to a legally required ideal of measurable empowerment. It is physically impossible to be free without a preemptive, obligatory, collective discourse that ensures a system of family planning aligning measurable birth and political equity as the preemptive obligation with the coercive authority of the state, bringing all children above a threshold of empowerment.
The Tell the Truth campaign is the closest thing to that discourse because it requires admitting the use of an illegally commissive standard and communicatively reorienting the person in the political system to a preemptive obligation to future children. Like efforts to use non-binary pronouns or land-occupation declarations to change mindsets fixed around binary genders or colonial control of Indigenous land, the Tell the Truth campaign uses admission of benefiting at deadly cost to future generations—especially persons of color—to change how we think about obligation.
The campaign demands admission that we all used a system with an embedded baseline error that dilutes votes and commercializes democratic relations by overshooting and degrading political, social, and ecological thresholds, rather than applying an empowerment and resourcing threshold beneath which no child should be born.
The campaign acts as a “legitimacy lever,” taking the death debt from the use of the “separate but equal” reproductive-rights standard rather than the “no child is worth more than another” standard, and using it to leverage a legal, corporate, and grassroots effort in the United States and Europe to identify and preemptively enjoin key targets using equity fraud. This would, by 2028, not just remove Trump, but the fundamental cause of Trump: the power grab that assumed entitlements rather than legitimating them, and disembedded freedom from empowerment and isolated humans from one another, rather than having them measurably empowered and embedded via birth equity as the overriding human right.
How? Anyone can require their governments to block the use of the equity-fraud standard (usually through an illegal or unfair-competition-law injunction) because governments’ authority—including the authority to entitle wealth and property—derives from a preemptive obligation to measurably empower those subject to that authority. It’s illegal not to hire persons because of their color. It’s also illegal to use a standard in one’s work that enriches some—mostly white children—at deadly climatological and birth-inequity costs to millions of children of color.
Legitimate organizations that empower others cannot compete against those who exploit them. They can’t compete with those who omit facts that would show more harm done through a system that quietly turned claimed values into wealth. They can’t compete with those who want to improve their position in an illegitimate system rather than legitimate it. The Tell the Truth campaign is backed by grassroots, corporate-certification, and legal efforts to block equity fraud through state attorneys general who are obligated to legitimate their governance by actually empowering those subject to it.
Conclusion
To avoid equity fraud—which is an essentially racist Ponzi scheme with moving goalposts for what constitutes social justice in order to allow economic growth that enriches some and kills others—we all must assess value and report impact by accounting for the requirement on all of us to pay the costs of empowering children as they enter the world. The standard for doing so is sufficient entitlements and incentives to bring every child into the world in conditions, and with relations, that ensure one person, one equal and influential vote relative to political-equity metrics.
If one cannot show that—accounting for the costs of future children being empowered enough to use their political system to protect themselves from things like the climate crisis (equal offsets relative to zero, or one person, one equal and influential vote)—those assessing and reporting were using the equity-fraud standard. The Tell the Truth campaign divides the just—who back legal injunctions blocking equity fraud—from the unjust, who exploit birth inequity to triple-dip on their arbitrary benefits at deadly cost to others. The unjust hold wealth and entitlements that they refuse to legitimate with children’s rights, using violence to defend it while women and infants—unaware of their rights, including their rights to self-defense—die.