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.
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.