Del Bigtree is the founder of the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) and the host of the Internet talk show The HighWire. He is also the Communications Director for the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose attempts to secure access to the presidential ballot have met with resistance in Nevada and elsewhere in the United States.

Mr. Bigtree addressed those and other issues in an exclusive interview with the Nevada Globe at this year’s FreedomFest, which ran from July 10 to the 13th in Las Vegas, Nevada. An abridged version follows.

Let’s talk about Team Kennedy’s battle to get on the Nevada ballot. What are your thoughts on how that process is going?

Well, we’ve just gone and regathered all the signatures. We’ve shown that Nevada is passionate about having Robert Kennedy Jr. as a candidate in Nevada. So we’ve doubled the amount of signatures, and we’re submitting them under the new guidelines—guidelines that are being changed after we’d already delivered the last signatures.

That is just one of many attempts happening all across the country to try and keep people from having the right to vote for a third-party candidate. It’s really shocking in the United States of America, especially since the DNC [Democratic National Committee] is the one that’s pushing the hardest to try and block ballot access for Robert Kennedy Jr. That’s the party that’s always saying how important it is that everyone gets a vote. Why are they trying to stop an independent voice from being there?

Clearly, the polls show that Bobby is polling at 15 percent or more, all across the country. That alone, to me, if we really live in a free country, should be all you have to prove, that there’s enough passion for this candidate to have a voice and that they should be on the ballot. Instead, we have these signatures; we’ve delivered those signatures, and then they changed the rules around those signatures and how forms need to be filled out. This is a bunch of shenanigans and games that are not serving the American people. It’s actually working against democracy. But we will persevere, as we have in every state where these types of things are being attempted.

Speaking of opposition from the DNC, there has also been opposition locally. The Nevada Democratic Party is suing to keep Mr. Kennedy off the Nevada ballot. Somos PAC, a Latino-focused organization, has intervened against Team Kennedy in a ballot-related lawsuit. What is your response to this kind of opposition?

Well, I think, first of all, we’re really happy that Robert Kennedy Jr. is doing better every day with Latinos. He has given addresses in Spanish and is reaching out to that community because he cares. You know, he worked with Cesar Chavez, on farming bills. His father [Robert F. Kennedy, Sr.] was very close to Chavez, and Bobby [Jr.] picked up that mantle. He has worked with that community to try and make sure that the farming practices are okay, that the pesticides are not poisoning the people that were working there.

Then, when you see his work on the border, he is one of the only candidates who actually went down to the border, spent the middle of the night there, watched how the people are coming across the border and how they’re pouring across our border. That’s affecting jobs for people all across America. I think that Latino voters want to see a legal system that works for them. Robert Kennedy Jr. is representing that. He is representing reasonable approaches to all of these things where we can have tall fences, but also wide gates.

We want to be a nation of immigrants. That’s what makes us powerful, but we also have to protect our borders so that we don’t have the drug cartels making decisions and running our border policy.

He’s there to help build the middle class, to present loan opportunities so that people can buy homes again instead of competing with BlackRock, Vanguard, and all these massive corporations that are funding the DNC and funding the RNC. Robert Kennedy Jr. is representing the people.

For anyone that stands against him or has an opinion against him: this is the United States of America. You’re free to have that opinion. But you’re not supposed to be stepping in the way of democracy and the opportunity to vote for someone.

I think that that is a sad state of affairs for the Democratic party. I think whoever’s in charge of that party right now should be ashamed of how they’ve put themselves in this situation and now we don’t have correct choices.

Now we don’t have the right people up at the stage representing the American people. The American people are not being properly represented right now. Especially when Robert Kennedy Junior is being kept out of the conversation.

We are here fighting for the people to have the right to choose. Anyone that’s trying to take your right to choose away cannot really be considered a friend of democracy.

We’re here at FreedomFest, an event dedicated to the study and the celebration of the culture of freedom. Does the campaign have an opinion on what the Democratic Party’s relationship with freedom has become in recent years, and what it is today?

Well, I think I’ll speak for myself, but in some ways it mirrors the things that you’ve watched Robert Kennedy Jr. say.

I grew up as a Democrat, a progressive liberal from Boulder, Colorado. My parents marched in the sixties for freedom of speech, the right to have access to education, the right to opt out of wars. My family was raised to believe that we were the party that was against starting wars all over the world. That we’re supposed to invest in community, that we’re supposed to work to find compromise, that we can make the world a better place together, exist cooperatively. Protect the environment through protecting resources, but also through commerce and capitalism.

When Robert Kennedy Jr. called me and started talking about running for president, I literally said to him, “You may be the last Democrat I ever vote for,” because I wasn’t ever planning on going back. That party left me. The DNC is now a party of war. We are pushing wars in Ukraine. We have wars in the Middle East. We have tensions with China. This is not representative of what it used to mean to be a Democrat.

Also, the censoring of free speech: it’s incredible. That of all the parties, the DNC, the Democrats, are the ones that now support censoring political speech. I mean, when I think of the Chicago Seven, this is the exact opposite. You picture the Democratic Party standing with bullhorns at one point, talking about how our freedom and our First Amendment rights are everything. But now it’s okay to censor your opposition

That’s being done on the left, by the DNC, more than on the Republican side, which is shocking for me, to have to say that.

I grew up with all natural health, all of the hippies—my parents were hippies. We weren’t vaccinating. We were all into natural health. I don’t know when the Democrats became the party of the pharmaceutical institutions and forcibly injecting us with products, telling us we can’t go to school unless we take a product. And then if I question the testing, like we did during coronavirus, we get censored.

All of these things, this dramatic attack on freedom, this movement, under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, of trillions of dollars moving out of the middle class and into the upper one percent, the billionaire class, if you will: that destruction of the middle class is happening. Where are the unions? Where are all the things that the Democrats used to believe in?

Robert Kennedy Jr. was actually running in that party at one point. From the very beginning, he’s the one that’s always polled and showed he can beat Donald Trump. But the Democrats didn’t want that opportunity. The Democrats didn’t want someone who could actually win. The Democrats wanted someone who they could control, who they could keep moving forward with agendas that no longer represent the Democratic Party of the Kennedys, who were anti-war and pro-middle class. What [the Democrats] want is something different, and we’re seeing what that is: control the media. Hide the president, keep the world from seeing what condition his mental state is actually in.

Where is Robert Kennedy Jr. on CNN? Where is he on MSNBC? When you have a man polling between 15 percent and sometimes 26 percent, and you’re not even talking about that person? You’re not reporting the news then. You’re reporting what you want your viewers to believe. You’re creating their world, you’re not reporting on the world that actually exists.

Robert Kennedy Jr. is going to affect this election, whether he wins or not. And anyone not talking about it, anyone trying to block him from ballots, they don’t actually represent the values of this country. They don’t represent the values of journalism and all of those things that I think are hanging in the balance right now.

Right now, what Robert Kennedy Jr. is focused on is really delivering the message that he is the one who can beat Donald Trump. I think the world now knows Joe Biden cannot win this race. So, really, this is a two-person race. We want that debate with Donald Trump.