When COVID‑19 arrived, Bigtree repurposed The Highwire — his weekly webcast produced by his group ICAN — into one of the pandemic’s loudest hubs for conspiracy theory. Early in 2020 he propagated claims that SARS‑CoV‑2 was lab‑made, urged audiences to refuse any forthcoming vaccines, and shockingly counseled followers to seek natural infection rather than accept public‑health measures. In one now‑widely reported line he argued that society had thrived by allowing the weak to be culled — “the sick get eaten by the wolves. That's how we've thrived.” Platforms took notice: YouTube terminated his channel in July 2020 for pandemic misinformation and Facebook removed selected videos; Bigtree shifted distribution to services like Rumble and Roku (despite Roku’s stated policies), and continued cross‑posting to Twitter for a time. He also partnered with Mikki Willis, producer of the Plandemic series, to stream Plandemic III exclusively on The Highwire — further intertwining Bigtree with the most notorious pandemic misinformation franchises. The combination of banned platform removals, explicit calls to reject vaccines and to embrace infection, and the promotion of debunked remedies and conspiracies positioned Bigtree as a major vector in the pandemic’s informational chaos and attracted scrutiny from public‑health researchers and mainstream media.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 2020s
Pandemic Extremes: Urging Infection, Platform Bans, and Streaming Plandemic — Bigtree’s COVID‑19 Crusade
The Highwire; The Highwire streaming Plandemic III / 2020s
When COVID‑19 arrived, Bigtree repurposed The Highwire — his weekly webcast produced by his group ICAN — into one of the pandemic’s loudest hubs for conspiracy theory. Early in 2020 he propagated claims that SARS‑CoV‑2 was lab‑made, urged audiences to refuse any forthcoming vaccines, and shockingly counseled followers to seek natural infection rather than accept public‑health measures. In one now‑widely reported line he argued that society had thrived by allowing the weak to be culled — “the sick get eaten by the wolves. That's how we've thrived.” Platforms took notice: YouTube terminated his channel in July 2020 for pandemic misinformation and Facebook removed selected videos; Bigtree shifted distribution to services like Rumble and Roku (despite Roku’s stated policies), and continued cross‑posting to Twitter for a time. He also partnered with Mikki Willis, producer of the Plandemic series, to stream Plandemic III exclusively on The Highwire — further intertwining Bigtree with the most notorious pandemic misinformation franchises. The combination of banned platform removals, explicit calls to reject vaccines and to embrace infection, and the promotion of debunked remedies and conspiracies positioned Bigtree as a major vector in the pandemic’s informational chaos and attracted scrutiny from public‑health researchers and mainstream media.
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