Since announcing his presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has at times tried to downplay his history as an anti-vaccine activist. Last year, the Democrat-turned-independent candidate told NBC News that he wasn’t “leading” with the issue. So why did he just appoint a prominent anti-vaxxer as his new communications director?
The hiring of Del Bigtree — a man with exceptionally paranoid, conspiratorial views of the medical establishment — signals that going forward Kennedy will likely lean into extremist stances in his insurgent campaign. It also suggests that he sees his campaign as dependent on a niche movement, which could in turn limit his general election appeal.
Bigtree describes his new boss not as a politician with compelling views on a wide variety of issues, but as a warrior for his extremist movement.
Since 2016, Bigtree has run the Informed Consent Action Network, the second-best-funded anti-vaccine organization in the country. In a letter announcing his new job, he boasts about growing up as an unvaccinated child who only consulted chiropractors for medical needs. He co-produced the 2016 documentary “Vaxxed,” which made the widely debunked claim that childhood vaccines have caused an autism epidemic that was subsequently covered up by the government. Bigtree has offensively compared vaccine mandates to Nazism, wearing a yellow Star of David at anti-vaxxer rallies and promising to hold Nuremberg trial-esque proceedings for Covid policy architects.
In discussing his new gig with Kennedy, Bigtree describes his new boss not as a politician with compelling views on a wide variety of issues, but as a warrior for his extremist movement. His letter announcing his new campaign role, addressed to the “medical freedom community,” overflows with Covid misinformation and characterizes Kennedy’s candidacy as a “miracle” that has the power to “stop the globalist’s New World Order.” The world’s Covid response, Bigtree writes,…
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