Del Bigtree, a longtime ally of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., isn’t just anti-vaccine. He’s pro-infection.
Over coffee at a Starbucks just outside Austin, Texas, Del Bigtree told me he wants his teenage son to catch polio. Measles, too. He’s considered driving his unvaccinated family to South Carolina, which is in the midst of a historic outbreak, so that they can all be exposed. He prefers pertussis—whooping cough—to the pertussis vaccine, which he later described to me as a “crime against children.” It’s not the diseases that Americans should be afraid of, Bigtree insists: It’s the shots that stop them.
Spreading that message is Bigtree’s lifework. He produced Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, a 2016 documentary that helped mainstream the modern anti-vaccine movement by alleging—spuriously—that the CDC suppressed evidence of vaccine harms. His weekly internet show, The HighWire With Del Bigtree, mostly targets the pharmaceutical industry and has helped raise millions for his nonprofit, the Informed Consent Action Network, which files lawsuits to overturn school vaccine mandates around the country. He’s been a close adviser to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and served as communications director for Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign.
This man is out there trying to murder his living family.
he wants to bring back the hermain cain awards.
his children.
The amount of absolute stupidity these days is shocking.
It was always there, the internet just gave them leverage to find each other and make professional sounding networks of absolutely rock stupid fucking people.
It’s honestly the biggest downside of the internet.
Because pro-asbestos and anti-seatbelt people existed, but they didn’t have megaphones to reach the whole world.
Yeah you start to see this stupidity increase in size with every major information transmission breakthrough. A lot of these people would probably be hit with a big stick for being stupid and causing problems historically.
Because pro-asbestos and anti-seatbelt people existed, but they didn’t have megaphones to reach the whole world.
Here’s the question: Idiots and wise people both have this megaphone to reach the world. Why do the idiots seem to succeed much more often?
For the same reason people think Kent Hovind and Ben Shapiro are smart, it takes time and energy to explain why someone is wrong whereas the claim that oneself is right takes less energy. Compare say a Miniminuteman or Stefan Milo to the average pseudoscience video, the pseudoscience video can throw out 20 claims in the time it takes for someone to explain something that is actually correct.
Also the natural social defenses against this type of shit are effectively bypassed by the ability for idiots to communicate and propagate their ideas. Historically communities had the learned, the experienced, and the wise who could generally call bullshit or otherwise deal with the problem directly, nowadays shaming, beating, and killing are notable less effective.
Because most people, even including people who aren’t complete idiots, want to be told what they want to hear more than they want to be faced with hard truths. Simple as.
That’s insulting to rocks.
A reminder that the human brain has not changed since modern humans emerged about 300,000 years ago.
Think about what that means.
The people who spent millennia throwing rocks at the moon, drawing stick figures on walls and hunting mammoths with pointy sticks? That’s just us. That is exactly what we would be doing in that time and place. The people that burned witches? That is us too. Those people had the exact same capacity for intelligence, compassion, and reason as we do.
What I am saying is that the capacity for human stupidity is boundless. It is our intelligence and civilization that defies our nature. We can always be dumber. We might not be able to get any smarter.
There’s this weird phenomenon that people tend to think those in the past were less intelligent than now, when really it was history being spun a certain way. For example: the witch burning thing, most people accusing witches, etc didn’t actually believe that shit. Its coming to light in modern times, that they realized they could grab land and money by accusing vulnerable people, and then just taking their land when they couldn’t defend themselves against a confession under torture.
Keep in mind all the advancements and progress humans have made in mathemathics and sciences over the last few thousand years. Those people weren’t stupid, if they were doing stupid things, its probably because they were evil (like burning witches for their own financial gain)
For example: the witch burning thing, most people accusing witches, etc didn’t actually believe that shit. Its coming to light in modern times, that they realized they could grab land and money by accusing vulnerable people, and then just taking their land when they couldn’t defend themselves against a confession under torture.
Sounds like the people running today’s megachurches. They might not actually believe any of what they are spinning, as long as the rubes are giving them enough money to keep them farting through silk and flying around in private jets (and probably some hookers and blow on the DL, I bet, too).
The Salem witch trials were just land thefts
Yup.
Its coming to light in modern times, that they realized they could grab land and money by accusing vulnerable people, and then just taking their land when they couldn’t defend themselves against a confession under torture.
A reminder that the human brain has not changed since modern humans emerged about 300,000 years ago.
It has changed in shape but not in size. Source
Always a good thing to check the data before posting.
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Recent studies suggrst our brains have shrunk: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/articles/10.3389/fevo.2023.1191274/full
That theory has been challenged.
Discussion
DeSilva et al. (2021) propose that human brain size has decreased, and offer innovative reasons why this may be so, primarily focusing on a model of “group level cognition.” Our analysis of these data fails to find a decrease in human brain size over the last few thousands of years. When the large sample sizes of the most recent human samples are adjusted for, the pattern disappears, and the arguments no longer need to be invoked.
We argue that, when examining questions of micro-evolutionary change, the analysis and data need to be appropriate for the specific scale of that hypothesis. Further, the data need to be otherwise relevant for the hypothesis being tested (see Houle et al., 2011). Given that the adoption of agriculture and the transition to complex societies occurred in different times at different places, the samples need to be specific enough to test the hypothesis across different times and populations, which does not appear to be the case in this instance.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.963568/full
I swear that America - well the world at large, but especially America - has a reality problem.
I see the swell of anti-science anti-intellectual ‘experts’, the aggressive evangelicals beating queerfolk with holy books they haven’t read, the facebook addicts praising pyramid oils and herbs and crystals instead of medicine, the pearl-clutching racists shouting off statistics as justification to expel the ‘others’ … and I just wonder if we’ve collectively lost the ability to think.
Leaded gasoline really did a number on us not gonna lie.
COVID-MANIA did a number on these people.
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In a sane world his children would be taken from him and he would be jailed for reckless child endangerment.
Can’t let your kid walk to school but can do this ? Fuck that
You actually have a point, the guy is openly discussing ways to harm his kids and is in all evidence not a safe person for them to be with.
Normal people: I need to have a medical procedure.
Republicants: I need for you to not have a medical procedure.
You misspelled ‘republicunts’
I Genuinely Am Upset That Your Kids Are Vaccinated
That’s a you problem.
this guy belongs in some sort of highly controlled environment. Either prison or a secure psychiatric facility. I’m not sure which.
School. They belong in school.
The guy saying he wants to get his children sick with multiple horrific diseases does not belong in school.
He is contemplating child abuse. Good public schools might have prevented all this, but he’s a grown ass man and at a certain point, it’s no longer his shitty education’s fault.
Is a re-education camp a bad idea?
Might want to google that term.
As used by most regimes that use the term… yes. Yes it is.
Vietnam after the war “reeducating” south vietnamese leaders, for example.
Or china “reeducating” Uhgyurs “through labor”
Plenty of other instances of genocide that fell under the same idea- Canada’s residential school system comes to mind.
I’m aware of what it means and has been used for, that’s why it was in the form of a question. It was a rhetoric question with a nod to how a fascist states would handle this kind of people who are of an opposing opinion to the state, except this time the state (nearly) agrees with them.
Did you know that Gandhi was an anti-vaxxer?
Vaccination is a barbarous practice and one of the most fatal of all the delusions current in our time. Conscientious objectors should stand alone, if need be, against the whole world, in defence of their conviction.
And
…there is absolutely no need to be afraid of small-pox.
I cannot also help feeling that vaccination is a violation of the dictates of religion and morality.
The vaccine is a filthy substance, and it is foolish to expect that one kind of filth can be removed by another.
Until he wasn’t.
I can’t sleep. These kiddies are fading away like little buds. I feel the weight of their deaths on my shoulders. I prevailed upon their parents not to get them vaccinated. Now the children are passing away. It may be, I am afraid, the result of my ignorance and obstinacy; and so I feel very unhappy.
It turns out that if you expose children, unprotected, to deadly diseases, they die.
I wonder who this fucknut is gonna blame when his kids take an “unexpected” turn for the worse?
Well, seems like he learned his lesson. Would have been better if he had learned it before his bad advice got children killed, but at least he learned instead of doubling down.
Right??? And the thing that stands out to me as full-on banana-pants crazy is how he famously learned his lesson, was humbled by his own platform, and turned it all around; yet, these fuckface anti-vaxxers insist on only publishing what he would have argued to have been the greatest mistake of his life, and use an appeal to celebrity and misinformation by omission to support their repeatedly proven-wrong fetishes. It’s like calling Neil Armstrong a champion for incontinence because he repeatedly peed his pants in space.
I hope he dies of a horrible and preventable disease then
Of the 4 Chaos gods of Warhammer, I could understand people being tempted by power, sex or violence, but disease never made sense to me. Who would want to be a Nurgle cultist? Now we know.
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Nurgle grants eternal life, after a fashion. Easier for me to understand than these IRL death cultists…
Because Papa Nurgle loves you!
I think the fact that we pretty much crushed so many diseases via vaccines and other care in the 20th century that many forgot what it was like to live in the shadow of those diseases all the time. That lack of familiarity (the one thay spurred the acceptance of vaccines and treatment) is what is fueling this shit today.
This is my conclusion too. It takes roughly 2 generations for all lessons to be forgotten. Add in a lack of empathy or critical thinking and here we are.
I think you only hit the point on the 2nd-part:
some people are incapable of empathy OR/AND correct-reasoning, & that supplants ALL arguments.
Don’t need to have the population forget what it really means: the “Israelis” who push evil in Palestine, blatently, are what they are, in spite of their-ancestors claiming Jeremiah & Isaiah as their justifications…
& remap that into Russia/Ukraina, & you get the same thing.
& remap that into what Canada did to the Indigenous people, & you still get the same thing.
I think that sociopathy ( induced ) & psychopathy ( intrinsic ) is, when selected-for, MUCH more significant than people are assuming, in controlling Earth’s history.
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You’re not wrong, but it’s not as long ago as you might have been led to believe.
Boomers and older GenXers are very familiar with polio, for example, because the Salk and Sabin vaccines did not come out until right around 1960. We all knew someone who’d had it, maybe even still had the evidence of it in a limp or a cane, or had died of it. Polio wasn’t the only disease, either: the 1968 influenza carried off a father of one of my friends, and he was only in his thirties. As a child I personally almost died from a reaction to the smallpox vaccine, and I still have a huge scar from it (way better than getting smallpox, though).
The Silent Generation had far worse than we did, and they’re not all dead yet.
So from where I’m sitting it’s not so much lack of personal familiarity as a willful forgetting aided by the skillful use of propaganda.
Its completely insane this isnt legally child abuse. These people are allowed to try and kill their children for a cult.
Except the supreme court has said there needs to be a religious exemption to these things. So then it becomes voluntary. Then there’s some kind of cultural association attached to it (MAGA, for instance.)
Imo, other parents should be able to sue you/fine you if your kid gets the disease and your kid wasn’t vaccinated. Its a type of reckless behavior like speeding in a school zone or shitting on a sidewalk in front of a public toilet.
It would be different if he was just against vaccination. He wants to infect his children with polio. This is cruel and unusual punishment and mistreatment of children. Minimum he should be limiting exposure, this is an intentionally harmful parent.
No: this is actually an opportunity to gamble with his life:
infect him, 1st.
IF it causes significant harm, AND he still wants to do that to his children, THEN CPS takes his children from him.
IF it doesn’t cause harm, THEN keep getting him with other things that people vaccinate against, until finally he experiences WHY vaccinations are used.
THEN if he still wants that harm on his own children, take them away from him.
corner them between correct-logic, actual-evidence, & their-own-ideology, & use the resultant-leverage against their ideological machiavellianisms.
( this would be better than the appeasement that is normal, nowadays, anyways, for our world’s viability )
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Please be The Onion. Please be The Onion.
Fucking damnit
If watching his son either die or become crippled is what he wants, then no, he should not have that. That is completely unfair to his son, and his children should be taken away from him. He’s a menace to both his family and society.
So unbelievably stupid.
Sounds like a job for child protective services. A father wants to intentionally infect his children with known fatal diseases, call CPS today!
