Is there an orchestrated globalist plot to control the world's population that includes burning down food processing plants, introducing bird flu to commercial poultry flocks, raising the price of fertilizer and disrupting the growing season in Ukraine and Russia with war? No, that's not true: The title of this video is clickbait, there is no "shocking truth" revealed. Many of the issues mentioned in this video are currently affecting agriculture, food production and distribution around the world, but the video's narrator does not provide evidence to back up the theory that this is happening because of "globalist elites" as part of a plan to control the world's people by controlling the food supply.
The claims appear in a video podcast one hour and six minutes long called "Man in America," published on Rumble on May 3, 2022, hosted by Seth Holehouse. This episode is titled "The SHOCKING Truth: Burning Food Factories, Bird Flu, & Engineered Food Crisis" (archived here), which opened:
Food factories are going up in flames all across the United States. Planes are dropping from the sky and crashing directly into them! Millions of chickens are being burned alive in the name of protecting against 'bird flu.' With all of this happening alongside a crumbling global food supply chain, the big question is: are these really just freak accidents, or is something sinister behind it all ... something that will change the way we view food forever?
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The SHOCKING Truth: Burning Food Factories, Bird Flu, & Engineered Food Crisis
This fact check will focus on just two of the many claims presented in this lengthy video -- that food processing facilities are being deliberately set on fire and that bird flu is not real.
Lead Stories has previously published a fact check addressing rumors concerning a number of fires at food processing plants in the United States. These fires have occurred at facilities from very large industrial plants to mom-and-pop butcher shops. There is no evidence that any of the fires are linked or that the number of fires in food processing facilities in the United States has suddenly increased. With such rumors is often a map, used as an illustration alongside a list of incidents not represented on the map.
At 7:17 in the video, Holehouse shares the source of that map, which is iceagefarmer.com. He says the map shows all the disaster and fire incidents affecting the food supply from approximately the past six months around the world. Articles about the incidents are represented by pins in the map.
The list of 20 pins in the United States begins with an August 9, 2019, Tyson Foods fire in Holcomb, Kansas, and ends with a December 17, 2020, fire at a chicken farm in Dade City Florida. This list is several years old. These incidents did not happen, as Holehouse claims, in the six months since December 2021. Many of the fires were still under investigation at the time articles about them were written, but there is no indication of a pattern or a single person or group of people responsible for all the incidents. In the reporting, only one incident in the U.S. appeared to be a clear case of intentional human meddling -- silage corn to be fed to cattle was ruined when scrap metal that had been attached to the corn stalks in the field went into the grinder. One of the pins, at the Nevada-California border, was linked to an article about crop insurance and the California wildfires.
Statements in the introduction, that "Food factories are going up in flames all across the United States. Planes are dropping from the sky and crashing directly into them!" seem to suggest terrorism was a factor in an April 21, 2022, Georgia plane crash. The privately owned plane did not hit a General Mills plant but crashed in the parking lot 300 yards away. The plant is less than a mile from the Covington Municipal Airport. The owner of the plane and a flight instructor were practicing touch and go landings before the crash. Both were killed.
Five days after the August 9, 2019, fire at a Tyson beef processing plant in Holcomb, the president of Tyson's Fresh Meats Division said a welding spark during maintenance likely caused the fire. Holehouse uses a clip from Ben Swann of "Truth In Media," who says (in a longer segment not included in the Holehouse video) that the Holcomb incident "... kicked off almost a domino effect of other plants having similar accidents. Just days later, in August of 2021 the Patak Meat Processing facility burned near Atlanta." The two meat processing plant fires actually happened two years apart.
As for bird flu, the video's introduction puts it in quotes, suggesting that the bird flu is not real and that these birds were killed for some other reason. The 2022 avian influenza is real and is being carefully tracked by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). At 14:00, Holehouse emphasizes that the depopulation of birds at a Rembrandt, Iowa, egg farm was caused by a "single case of avian influenza."
The USDA Response Process for Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), on page 211 of a PDF document, was developed in 2017 after bird flu outbreaks in 2014 and 2015. Step three of the response process calls for:
Within 24-hours of a presumptive positive (case definition), flocks will be depopulated to limit the spread of the virus and further environmental contamination.
At 16:30, Holehouse zeroes in on the owner of the egg farm, billionaire Glen Taylor and name-drops BlackRock, Vanguard and Bill Gates to claim there is a pattern, but he never makes connections or explains what that pattern might be:
Again, folks, we're gonna see a pattern here, you're gonna see something happened, but when we trace it back up, you're gonna trace the origin of where these things happen to a billionaire or a globalist or maybe even big financial institutions like BlackRock and then Vanguard or some people like Bill Gates, who happens to be, you know, included in today's show quite a bit as we'll get into later.
Holehouse never makes a case that these events were caused by a plan by globalists intent on destroying the food supply.
