Best known as an anti-vaccine lawyer and activist, Leigh Dundas is now in the media spotlight for her role in helping to organize disruptive trucker convoys at the U.S.-Canada border – but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Dundas is also closely tied to a number of far-right extremist groups and conspiratorial movements, including QAnon.
Dundas, a prominent anti-vaccine organizer in Southern California, is a member of the “Legal Eagle Dream Team” for America’s Frontline Doctors, an organization founded by indicted January 6 insurrectionist Dr. Simone Gold, which actively undermines public health experts and spreads blatant COVID-19 misinformation. Dundas started gaining an online following in 2020, after sharing a story to her personal Facebook page claiming a woman’s lung had collapsed because she was wearing a mask. Her post was reshared in popular anti-mask and anti-lockdown Facebook groups. Dundas later attempted to organize a “Nationwide Strike” against “all employers mandating the vax” that was supposed to last from November 8-11, 2021. In reality, it amounted to little more than a poorly attended protest and a brief traffic jam in San Francisco.
She has since been organizing and promoting anti-vaccine trucker convoys in the United States and Canada. According to Talking Points Memo, Dundas “first got involved several weeks ago when a group of Canadian truckers invited her to help with their protest.”
“We started working with them to identify the strategic border crossings and how we could support them from the United States side and also what this looked like,” she said.
Dundas organized a small-scale convoy on the U.S. side of the border in support of the so-called “Freedom Convoy,” which has already caused millions of dollars in economic damages and shut down multiple crossings into Canada, and she reportedly has plans “to ignite a similar series of anti-vax protests in the U.S.” next month. But these efforts to protest vaccine mandates are only the latest instance of Dundas’ attempts to spread far-right conspiracy theories and extremist rhetoric.
Dundas is an election conspiracy theorist who promoted violence ahead of the Capitol insurrection
Dundas’ conspiratorial advocacy isn’t limited to just anti-vaccine misinformation – she has also repeatedly spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.
Days after the election ended, Dundas began posting about “SharpieGate,” the unfounded conspiracy theory that poll workers in Arizona “had voters supporting President Donald Trump fill out their ballots using Sharpie permanent markers in order to invalidate them.” She also spread conspiracy theories about voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems, and even implied that Bill Gates was attempting to influence election results.
Dundas spoke at a November 22, 2020, “Stop the Steal” rally in Yorba Linda, California, that promised to “unleash hell.”
According to The Washington Post, Dundas “posted video of herself telling a crowd the day before the Capitol chaos that ‘we would be well within our rights’ to take traitorous Americans ‘out back and shoot ‘em or hang ‘em.’”
On January 6, Dundas was present at the Capitol insurrection and gave a speech once again promoting violence, telling a crowd to “stand the hell up because you are far better off fighting on your feet and being prepared to die on your feet than living a life on your damned knees.” Dundas is even on video that day standing just feet away from the notorious “QAnon Shaman” outside the building’s main doors.
Dundas has compared Biden’s election and COVID-19 measures to the Holocaust
Dundas has also compared President Joe Biden’s election to “a Second Holocaust.”
This wasn’t a one-time comment, as Dundas regularly downplays the severity of the Holocaust in order to criticize COVID-19 policy measures. A recent op-ed in The Jerusalem Post defined this dangerous practice of intentionally diluting the memory of the Holocaust, arguing that such comparisons are “an insult not only to history itself but especially to the 6 million Jews who were murdered.”
