Here's a hint to the political left: If you have to engage in fraud and trickery to advance your cause, your cause isn't any good.
That is, however, precisely what happened at the Children’s Health Defense conference, which took place in Austin, Texas, in early November. While the culprits, who were attempting to elicit statements on the superiority of real meat over cultured meat - not a difficult statement to obtain - they were also caught using a clearly fake study trying to link cultured meat to autism. Why? To try to trick people into agreeing with scientifically unfounded information, to get them on film, and to make the speakers look bad.
The fraudsters weren't counting on getting caught, though. But thanks to the Brownstone Institute's founder and president, Jeffrey A. Tucker, that's precisely what happened.
The event was filled with exuberance and trust among the more than 1,000 attendees, all of whom were thrilled to be with real friends at a time in which trust in nearly everything else is in free fall. At last, we were with people on the right side of history.
Within this social context, two 30-something men with British accents were making the rounds to decry fake meat and proclaim the superiority of real meat. This is a position with which probably everyone there agreed. They also looked the part: well-dressed and clean-shaven. Of course we want our activists to look this way.
Ah, but looks can be deceiving - and deceit was precisely what these two were up to. Here's how their scam worked.
The main actor told people his name is Aldrich Willows, an entirely fictional name, though no one seemed to have checked. He explained that he runs the Alliance for Sustainable Protein. The site is down as of this writing but it was created in March 2025. If anyone doubted their authenticity, pulling up their website on the phone was the first riposte, which is what they did with me.
The goal was to get people on film with the camera they had set up outside the security zone. Just before going on camera, they present the victim with a study that they say proves that fake meat causes autism. They have you stand in front of a ridiculous graphic with a patty of real vs fake meat, then they turn on the camera, first eliciting permissions to use what is filmed.
Speaking - well, writing as a biologist, the first thing that would come to mind here is that whatever one thinks of cultured, or fake, meat is that it hasn't been around in significant quantities for long enough to establish any causal connection to autism, or indeed anything much other than indigestion.
But wait! There's more!
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The "study" the two fraudsters were hawking was an obvious fake.
Next they push the unsuspecting person to endorse their study. If you are wary, as I was, the cameraman acting like the producer says, “It would be best for you to clearly state that fake meat causes autism while holding the study.” It’s an intimidating moment because the people being interviewed hate fake meat, suspect that the cause of autism is environmental, and feel a bit of sympathy for these guys.
If the victim does not comply, they keep pushing, clearly trying to get people on camera to say something ridiculous. The study in question is entirely fake, with no author, and generated entirely by artificial intelligence. But they are moving so fast that it is hard to follow what is going on. The study is presumably embargoed, though it has been variously circulating here and there for weeks.
When Mr. Tucker figured out what they were up to and confronted them the next day, the two fraudsters grabbed their gear and made for the exit.
Oh good, someone grabbed a video of the hucksters who defrauded CHD and attempted to get attendees to endorse a fake study. I'm here confronting them as they continued to deny what they were doing. pic.twitter.com/GvICDuOSRE
— Jeffrey A Tucker (@jeffreyatucker) November 12, 2025
The "Aldrich Willows" character was discovered to be in fact one Luke (or Louis) Wilson, who works at the UK's Centre for Climate Reporting. He is, it seems, known for this kind of underhanded reporting. His counterpart was determined to be one Tom Costello, who co-founded the aforementioned Centre for Climate Reporting. Their goal here was apparently to try to get the attendees at this conference to look silly by getting them to endorse a fake study, and in so doing, discredit everyone at the conference as a bunch of cranks. What they weren't counting on was anyone at the event having any actual scientific knowledge. As Mr. Tucker points out:
First, the plan was rather brilliantly hatched, pushing every button, including fake meat and autism with an environmental cause. It’s the kind of story that people who are sick of being poisoned might be emotionally inclined to believe.
Second, the guys were deeply deceptive, only drawing the connection just before filming and then pressing the victim into saying the magic words. People on camera are nervous and often lack the presence of mind to think through all the implications of what they are being told to do.
Third, the plot was foiled because in fact the people at this event do believe in authentic science and have zero tolerance for hucksters.
The really brilliant and entertaining part of this entire episode came when Jeffrey Tucker took to an AI program and produced a very nearly identical fake study, claiming to show a correlation with waffle consumption and Androgenic Alopecia, an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss.
Now that right there is funny.
Here's the lesson: If you have to lie, to defraud, to engage in deceitful antics, to try to trick people into a damaging statement by lying to them, then whatever cause you are pushing is in itself a fraud. We presume that if more facts and hard data were supporting Wilson and Costello's climate agenda or even their fake-meat tomfoolery, they wouldn't have to go to a cheap AI program and produce a fraudulent study - one that anyone who has taken a freshman class in any of the sciences would have spotted as a fraud in about six seconds.
These two, however, were caught, and they were caught due to a combination of their own stupidity, their own dishonesty, and their sad and inaccurate belief that anyone who disagreed with them was ignorant, stupid, or both. That came around to bite them.
That's a win-win for science and good sense, no matter how you look at it.
