By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

Brownstone Institute was a proud exhibitor at the huge Children's Health Defense conference, Austin, Texas, November 7-9, 2025. 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.

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.

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.

Just for gags, I generated another study using Grok that shows a causal link between eating waffles and going bald. Anyone can do this in about 5 seconds.

Finishing with my interview, after a long day of interviews, I quickly forgot about the entire strange episode. I figured that it was some naive activists who were drawing unconfirmed connections between two bad things. But in my mind, my attitude was whatever: such events draw all types.

It was not until the next morning when it dawned on me what they were doing. They were scammers who had targeted the health freedom movement. They were piecing together a film for a documentary that would claim that all of us are naive and rallying around fake science to advance our political agenda.

Very clever.

The next morning I confronted them and told them that their plot had been revealed. I explained that they should be kicked out and their film confiscated. Alarmed, they grabbed their camera and left everything else, including their lights and bags of material, and ran to the elevators.

Someone captured this image of the two being confronted.

Further research reveals that the main person is not Aldrich Willows but rather Luke or Louis Wilson. Lucio Eastman of Brownstone discovered this while perusing the code to their website, which is now down.

Wilson works for the Centre for Climate Reporting. This is their website. He is a major climate activist who does undercover reporting, affiliated with the Net-Zero movement that the WEF has promoted. The funding trail leads to the usual suspects in the NGO space with major funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ikea, Bloomberg, and others.

Here is...