On January 6, 2021 Del Bigtree took the stage at the MAGA Health Freedom Rally a few blocks away from where Donald Trump had just instigated a riot. He joked about how the former president was a hard act to follow.
But he dug deep and persevered by stringing together key dog whistles of Trumpian disinformation and resentment: public health officials are corrupt, COVID is a scam, and the election was probably stolen.
Such performances have gotten Bigtree’s Highwire show nuked by YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. But they’ve also made him wealthy, and with his new appointment as RFK Jr’s new Director of Communications, his political star is now rising.
Matthew runs down what we know about Bigtree, and what he thinks this appointment will bring.
Show Notes
An Important Message To The Medical Freedom Community from Del Bigtree
RFK Jr. hires top anti-vaccine activist as campaign communications director
The Disinformation Dozen — Center for Countering Digital Hate | CCDH
Brief: RFK's Health Propaganda Roundtable — Conspirituality
Brief: RFK Jr Loses New Age Support Over Israel — Conspirituality
Pandemic Profiteers — Center for Countering Digital Hate | CCDH
Tracy Beanz - The HighWire
How three conspiracy theorists took 'Q' and sparked Qanon
Anti-Vaxxer Del Bigtree’s Unhinged Quest for Unvaccinated Blood Leads Him to Mexico
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I wish I could tell you that Tony Fauci cares about your safety.
I wish I could tell you that this pandemic really is dangerous.
I wish I could believe that voting machines worked and that people cared.
You've been sold a lie!
That is Del Matthew Bigtree, the anti-vax kingpin, speaking at the podium of the MAGA Health Freedom Rally just after noon on January 6th, 2021, on a stage just blocks away from where Donald Trump has begun to instigate a riot.
The clip is from Scott Kennedy's Shot in the Arm documentary, which we covered in episode 184.
This past New Year's Eve, RFK Jr.
named Big Tree as Director of Communications for his presidential campaign.
I'm gonna run down what we know and what I think it means.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And I'll add to that tagline today how it looks like our all-American, speak-the-truth conspirituality candidate has made a high-stakes bet that an outright propagandist will lead him to the White House.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
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And, starting this coming Friday on Patreon, I'll be hosting an 8-week livestream series called Conspirituality 101, with plenty of resources and time for Q&A.
It's all free for subscribers.
Okay back to january 6th As that mob began to march on the Capitol, Big Tree opened his speech by joking about how the former president was a hard act to follow.
But he dug deep and persevered by stringing together key dog whistles of Trumpian disinformation and resentment.
Public health officials are corrupt, COVID is a scam, and the election was probably stolen.
While performances like these have gotten Big Tree's High Wire show nuked by YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, they've also made him wealthy.
And with his new appointment as Kennedy's comms guy, his political star is now rising.
Reporting for NBC, RFK Jr.
tracker Brandy Zdrozny writes, quote, Big Tree replaces Stephanie Speer, a former editor of Children's Health Defense's news website, this is RFK Jr.' 's non-profit, who now takes the role of press secretary.
I held the positions of Press Secretary and Communications Director with plans of handing off the Comms Director role once we found the right person for the job, Speer said in an email.
We found that person, and that's Del Bigtree.
Del brings decades of experience as an Emmy-winning producer, digital assets master, and social media expert, among many other attributes.
Of course, they didn't just find him.
Kennedy and Big Tree found each other years ago through their collegial relationship as the CEOs of the two most well-funded anti-vax organizations in the country, part of the network that earned them both tags in the Center for Countering Digital Hate's Disinformation Dozen report in March of 2021.
Public collaboration between the two men dates back to at least September of 2018, when Kennedy appeared as a guest on Big Tree's High Wire alongside anti-vax celebrity Jenny McCarthy to provide a rundown on then-current legal actions his Children's Health Defense Organization was bringing against the Department of Justice over allegedly covering up vaccine injuries.
That appearance foreshadowed the labour division of their current arrangement, with Kennedy monologuing at length and Big Tree providing the stage set, super high production values and softball prompts.
Big Tree got his start in the Infowars biz as field producer for the Dr. Phil show, The Doctors.
And then he made his debut in anti-vax propaganda in 2016 as the producer of Vaxxed from Cover Up to Catastrophe.
Now this film lionized Andrew Wakefield, the originator of the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism.
And from that point on, BigTree has developed, implemented, and broadcast the full battery of anti-vax arguments.
False claims about mercury, false claims about poor testing protocols, the notion that vaccines did not eliminate polio, or that they change a person's DNA.
And he's done this in hundreds of broadcasts and speaking events.
He has no medical training, and by his account, grew up homeschooled, unvaccinated, and only ever saw chiropractors when he was sick.
Now, shortly after the film dropped, Big Tree founded an anti-vax nonprofit called Informed Consent Action Network, and by 2019, he was drawing a salary from it of $232,000 a year.
But the pandemic was a windfall for Big Tree and his group.
From Zdrozny's report on ICANN's tax filings, the 2022 revenue was $13.4 million and Big Tree's
salary had swelled to $284,000. Zdrozny notes, it is unclear how Big Tree's new role in the Kennedy
campaign might affect his position as executive director of the non-profit, which the IRS
prohibits from engaging in political activity.
be.
Now prior to the announcement, Big Tree had already been stumping hard for Kennedy for months, featuring prominently in key campaign events.
On October 9th, Big Tree was the emcee for Kennedy's speech in Philadelphia in which he announced his break from the Democratic Party to run as an independent.
Back in June, Big Tree was a featured speaker on an online health policy roundtable hosted by New Age author and Kennedy 24 messaging director Charles Eisenstein.
So Derek provided really good coverage of that event and I'll link to that brief for you in the show notes.
Big Tree closed out the meeting.
He began by heaping scorn on mainstream journalists and then, as you'll hear, he threw in a QAnon dog whistle and then brought it home like his preacher father.
And when he steps in the presidency, in that moment, that great awakening, we will know it happened because the only way it happens is because all of the people stood up to support it.
When the corporations, we overcame the corporations.
We overcame the corporate powers.
We overcame darkness.
Because we all did what we could.
We all put as much as we could into it.
And we became humanity again.
We became dreamers again.
We became believers again.
And our children watched us make a difference in this world.
That is what is happening here.
Be a part of it.
Don't sit back and watch it.
Watch it.
Don't die wondering.
Other panelists at the roundtable included Plandemic director Mickey Willis, pseudoscience
entrepreneur Joe Merkula, and GreenMedInfo proprietor Sayer Ji.
Now BigTree's appointment comes amidst recent staff shuffles and ideological tensions as
the Kennedy 24 campaign pivots into mainstream mode and has shown gains in some polls based
on favorability ratings among younger voters.
Former campaign manager and lifelong pacifist Denis Kucinich quit as campaign director shortly after the Hamas attacks of October 7th, protesting his candidate's support of Israel retaliating with overwhelming force.
Shortly thereafter, Sayer G withdrew his support as well, and Charles Eisenstein has for months now been openly critical of Kennedy's hawkish stance, but is so far remaining on in his advisory role.
To this point, Big Tree has been quiet on Kennedy's support-Israel-whatever-they-do policy.
In a New Year's Eve letter tweeted out to almost 300,000 followers, Big Tree positioned his rise to this, his greatest opportunity to date, as he says, as the pinnacle of an anti-vax career and a pandemic spent resisting the dark forces of medical tyranny.
Bobby knows, Big Tree wrote in his conspiracy theory Bingo Screed, that our nation can heal itself if we remove the toxicity of corporate influence.
No one knows better than you how health has been weaponized against the innate power of humanity, and now, as the globalist empire seeks dominion over the world through the WHO, WEF, and UN, our voice needs to be louder than ever before.
So, for years, Big Tree has honed a message that is pitch perfect for Kennedy, who builds his rhetoric on the fascist conflation of body and nation and the wellness world conflict between medicine and spirituality.
In both cases, purification of one category leads to the liberation of the other.
It's a perfect register for Kennedy as well because this is a guy who has mastered the Gish Gallop stump speech in which everything is connected, where mercury in fish means there must be mercury in vaccines, where a lab in Wuhan working on coronaviruses must mean that COVID was engineered to be harmless to the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews, and where the murders of his uncle and father are central to everything bad that has happened anywhere and always.
Besides amplifying Kennedy's conspiracism, Big Tree also cranks up the messianic glow that lights Kennedy's outsider campaign with echoes of his natal Catholicism and overlays of New Age self-help and AA content.
According to Big Tree, Kennedy, quote, is a spiritual man with a profound devotion to God, who exhibits a power through humility that is beyond anything I have witnessed in the leaders of my lifetime.
So let's take a look at that lifetime now.
As mentioned, Big Tree describes growing up homeschooled and unvaccinated.
He only ever visited chiropractors as a child when he was sick.
And it's from within this very tight circle of family and faith and intuitive healing that he's gained the confidence it takes to pontificate about the entire world.
As we reported in our book, Big Tree's father, Jack Groverland, has been a preacher at Unity Church of Boulder, alongside his mother, Norma Big Tree, who serves as choirmaster.
The Unity movement emerged in the late 19th century as part of Christian New Thought, founded by Myrtle Fillmore, the former schoolteacher who believed she'd cured her chronic tuberculosis through the power of prayer.
Now, Jack and Norma met in the New York City theater scene in the 1960s, and you can kind of see it today.
The stagecraft at their Boulder Unity franchise just shows it.
She wears feathers and beads honoring her Mohawk heritage.
He wears linen, silky, Nehru-style jackets, often embroidered.
The sound and lights are sharp, and the synthesizers drone during the breaks in the liturgy.
It's pretty clear that Big Tree inherited his performance chops.
The stage altar is layered with silks and curtains and festooned with iconography.
There's Tibetan seed-syllable thangkas, a menorah, a golden cross, a tantric deity in bronze.
Very syncretic.
In March of 2020, only days after the WHO declared a pandemic, Grover Lynd took to the stage to deliver a sermon called Coronavirus and the Truth, in which he quoted heavily from A Course in Miracles to remind his parishioners that sickness only happens to those who believe they are separate from each other and from God.
So Groverlyn's focus, I would say definitely, inspires his son's programming and ideology, with both men indicating how intolerable the pandemic is from a New Age point of view, where anything a person regards as fearful is an illusory projection of one's own ignorance and one's own fear.
For them, it's an indignity to think that we must hide ourselves from each other with social distancing for fear of making each other sick.
This is an idea that violates the most stubbornly hopeful belief of New Age wellness people, that one's inner nature is wholly good, wholly pure, that it's inconceivable that the invisible part of oneself, especially the breath upon which the soul rides, might be dangerous to others.
In one sermon that he delivered early in COVID, Groverland read from a PowerPoint slide projecting quotes from A Course in Miracles.
Quote, To love oneself is to heal oneself.
Quote, Therefore they are asking for the love that would heal them, but which they are denying to themselves.
If they knew the truth about themselves, they could not be sick.
Now all of this is very much in line with Kennedy's vision of biomorality, in which clean living and spiritual practice are the key ingredients in preventing disease.
When Kennedy announced his run for the presidency, then as a Democrat, on April 19, 2023, Jack Groverland was seated on the dais right behind him, wearing a slate blue Nehru jacket.
So, Big Tree will definitely be bringing his family ethos to the campaign and using it as a metaphor for political relationships.
Here he is, in October, speaking on the RFK All The Way podcast.
I talk about the fact that, you know, when I raise my kids, I'm doing something similar to what my parents did raising me, which is they raised me to always question authority.
My parents said that you, in your instincts, in your intuition, or who you listen to, there is a connection between you and God, and you sit and you pray, and you meditate about the things that, you know, are affecting your life, and you go with what you feel right about, and nobody overrides that.
Now, when you raise a child like that to question authority, you have to recognize that the parent is the authority in the room.
And so it makes parenting very difficult.
And I've done something similar in my house.
You know, I want intelligent, dynamic children that can grow up and And be leaders in their world.
And so, you know, the rule in my house is, look, if I tell you to do something, if you disagree with it, you are allowed to make a legal, you know, defense against it, you know, and I will hear it out.
And if it's a good defense, then, you know, you'll win and we'll move on.
So a few things to point out here.
This very liberal-sounding democratic process might point to good attachment parenting and healthy ego-building on the family level, but when this parent-child microcosm is scaled up to the state level, unchanged, as we often hear it spoken about in New Age circles, it can easily drift into a dismissal of expertise, but also the ableist attitudes of hyper-individualism.
It's all well and good when the kids are doing all right in intelligence and dynamism, as he says, but if the child is struggling in ways the family cannot understand, that's when the shit will hit the fan.
And what Big Tree and Kennedy have decided, along with, it seems, the rest of the anti-vax movement, is that when children are struggling or are simply different in ways that do not permit them to comply with capitalism, It's not a natural event that outside resources can help.
Family stress indicates that someone has been poisoned.
Someone has been attacked and controlled from the outside.
The insular and natural perfection of the family, along with the pristine nature of the child and the perfect instincts of the parents, have been disrupted.
Now it's worth noting here that Big Tree's idyllic family vibe does not jibe with what Kennedy describes from his own childhood, which was filled with Catholic devotions, where a crucifix hung in every room, and childhood visits to the Oval Office were broadcast throughout the international press, there were super high expectations, and also a lot of chaos and neglect.
He's the third of 11 children, and he remembers precious and regimented prayer times with a father who was most of the time on the road.
And when he's 14, the house is thrown into turmoil when Kennedy Sr.
is murdered in L.A.
He's expelled from a string of private schools.
He's largely raised by a personal assistant to the family.
Then there's 14 years of heroin addiction and many more years after that of philandering, all flowing out of that chaotic natal family.
Now it could be that Kennedy senses some relief in Big Tree's idealized vision of family life, and it could be that the New Age conviction in our original perfection is a kind of salve for the Catholic view of original sin, which Kennedy carries through in his comments on his 12-step discipline almost every time he speaks about it.
He'll often speak of having to keep himself in a posture of continual surrender lest his darker angels take over.
So, with all of the focus on family, it's not surprising that the fast-drying cement of the Kennedy campaign is an urgent and morbid focus on the health of children.
The kids are never alright in the Kennedy world, and everything is always getting worse.
Now, I've played the following clips before.
This first one is truly insane.
We know, you know, if you've ever compared an unvaccinated kid to a vaccinated kid, you see, The bright eyes, and the engagement, and the social interactions, and the curiosity, and the affection, and you compare them.
A child even had one or two vaccines, and they're completely different.
And those injuries don't get measured.
They're just a blight on this, and they poisoned an entire generation of American children.
And then there's this chilling bit from a Washington, D.C.
rally just almost exactly a year ago.
Every capitulation is a signal to the oppressors to impose new forms of torment or torture or compliance or obedience.
Every time you comply, you get weaker.
The hill that you're gonna die on is the hill that you're on right now.
And they're coming for our children.
So I think we can expect a steady stream of family-centering rhetoric from the big tree machine.
Now, it's going to rhyme with Mickey Willis' American family content that he's pumping out in video after video.
But it will be somewhat vague and softer than the family-oriented jargon coming from Evangelical or New Apostolic Reformation or Project 2025 folks and their views on gender identity and reproductive rights.
And this is because Kennedy does have nominally liberal followers and also a lot of libertarian followers.
And it's hard to make the argument for medical freedom and bodily sovereignty, except when it comes to women's bodily rights and the healthcare that trans people want and need.
But just how far will Big Tree be able to stay away from full-on red pill trans panic territory?
How deranged is he?
Deranged enough that, as of this year, he's hired Tracy Beans as a staff writer for the Highwire website.
Beans, also known as Tracy Diaz, is a conspiracy theorist who, in November of 2017, was part of a core group of YouTubers who pulled QAnon out of 4chan and into the mainstream.
Let me just underline that.
BigTree has hired one of the OG QAnon promoters as a staff writer on his anti-vax website.
That means that his Slack channels or whatever he uses must be whiplash interesting because in one moment he's strategizing with America's mainstream conspiracy theorist and presidential candidate, and then in the next he's giving editorial direction to a QAnon promoter.
Now, despite many indications of grift and profiteering, Big Tree may have the grace of authenticity on his side.
He appears to be a true believer.
Back in May of 2021, he even risked his life for his anti-vax beliefs.
It all started when chronically bleeding hemorrhoids landed him in the hospital with dangerously low hemoglobin.
Big Tree needed transfusions, but was so convinced of the dangers of the COVID vaccine that he insisted on being transfused with unvaccinated blood Now after being told that the blood banks of his hometown of Austin, Texas, not to mention anywhere else in the US, do not categorize donors according to vaccination history, Big Tree and his staff believed they found clean blood through an unnamed cancer doctor with a surgery clinic in Cancun.
So he popped a bunch of ivermectin, flew to Mexico on a supporter's private jet, soaked up five transfusions, went under the knife for proctology stitchery, and then he finally stabilized so that he could get back out onto the COVID denialism circuit and say things like this.
So when Joe Biden says, all of you not vaccinated, what are you waiting for?
What are you waiting for?
I'm waiting for some damn science to take place up there in the White House!
I'm desperately trying to get infected with COVID-19, if I was going to be totally honest.
I've hooked about half of you today, and I hope somebody has it, so I can get this thing out of the way.
And here is why.
Yeah, the paper's going to go crazy.
Don't be.
She said, go out and catch this cold.
So let me be perfectly clear.
For all of you that are healthy, not suffering from diabetes and obesity and cancer and other comorbidities that are under the age of about 75, let me be perfectly clear.
You need to Go out and catch this cold.
Thank you everybody for listening to another episode of Conspirituality Podcast.
