A story in seven parts:
• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: The Intellectual Godparents
• Part 3: Mapping the MAHA-verse
• Part 4: What Are They Afraid Of?
• Part 5: The Wellness-to-MAHA Pipeline
• Part 6: The Siblings With RFK Jr.’s Ear
• Part 7: What Can Secretary Kennedy Actually Do in Office?
Part 1
In May 2016, in the middle of Donald Trump’s first run for president, the salad chain Sweetgreen announced a cheerful clean-eating campaign called “Make America Healthy Again” centered on the removal of bacon and Sriracha from its menus. The slogan went into disuse — it was briefly resurrected by a radiologist and Fox News contributor who released a book in 2020 by that name — until it resurfaced in grand fashion on August 23 of this year, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his presidential campaign and threw his support behind Trump. At a joint rally that night in Glendale, Arizona, Kennedy told the audience that, despite their differences on other issues, he and Trump had bonded over a shared commitment to restoring the nation’s health and fitness. “Don’t you want a safe environment for your children?” Kennedy asked. “Don’t you want to know that the food that you’re feeding them is not filled with chemicals that are going to give them cancer and chronic disease? And don’t you want a president who is going to make America healthy again?”
The fusion of the Kennedy and Trump brands rendered MAHA a tangible political-cultural persuasion, and Trump’s election has given it a path to real influence in Washington. The movement’s unorthodox wellness agenda, articulated on message boards and podcasts, holds that the nation has been made sick by everything from vaccines to pesticides to food dyes to seed oils to processed foods to microplastics, all of it fueled by corporate regulatory capture. It proposes to remedy the sickness via the adoption of wholesome school lunches, raw dairy, unfluoridated water, regenerated soil, plain old vigorous exercise, and other holistic fixes, some of which circumvent the guidance of the medical Establishment. The movement has drawn in Hollywood actors, nutrition influencers, dissident physicians, organic vintners, small-scale farmers, longevity entrepreneurs, psychedelic-drug advocates, and New Age environmentalists. What links them is RFK Jr., who shares every one of their concerns, even if these camps may not always agree with him or one another, and whom Trump has tapped to serve as his secretary of Health and Human Services.
In This Issue
The Future Is MAHA
Nominating a vaccine skeptic to lead the nation’s health bureaucracy is an almost sublimely disturbed move, akin to putting Bernie Madoff in charge of the Treasury Department. Equally disorienting has been the elevation of the mostly sedentary, Filet-O-Fish–eating president-elect into the role of a supposed wellness crusader. Yet the MAHA alliance makes a lot of sense in its own way. If MAGA, the overarching movement to which MAHA now belongs, represents the triumph of the faction of the electorate alienated from this country’s elite and institutions, then MAHA similarly is a vehicle for all manner of disaffected people, from the crunchy to the paranoid to the chronically ill, who have been searching for a charismatic outsider to launch an assault against the powerful forces that have kept Americans unhealthy for so long. The hope of the MAHA faithful — as well as cautiously optimistic sympathizers from Senator Bernie Sanders to food writer Michael Pollan — is that only a movement so heretical and cross-pollinated and possibly dangerous could summon the political muscle to heal what truly ails America.
The MAHA impulse can be traced to numerous previously disparate sources. There is the hippieish natural-food movement that ultimately evolved into high-end chains like Whole Foods and Erewhon and TikToks of conservative tradwives herding sheep or cooking “ancestral” meals. There is the growing community of people, often women, whose debilitating illnesses are frequently dismissed by doctors, leading them to alternative medicines and self-diagnosis. There is the anti-vaxx campaign led by celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, who rallied fellow parents against childhood vaccines on the grounds, dismissed by nearly every scientist who has studied the issue, that they caused autism. And there is the profound unhealthiness afflicting the country on the whole, from an opioid epidemic that traces its roots to the prescription-drug industry to an obesity epidemic fueled by food conglomerates and bankrolled by the government in the form of agricultural subsidies and food-stamp-bought sugary drinks.
COVID-19 helped coalesce these strains into something like a worldview. Thanks to shifting or flawed guidance around masking, social distancing, and virus contagion — as well as impositions on those who refused to be vaccinated and slowness to clock the unintended consequences of lockdowns — many who would form the MAHA movement grew radicalized against the prevailing public-health orthodoxies. From there, the broader medical firmament came under suspicion as millions of Americans dealt with symptoms that baffled doctors and led patients scrambling for nontraditional solutions. It was during the pandemic that MAHA’s already disillusioned standard-bearer, RFK Jr., a lifelong Democrat, became known less for his environmental advocacy than for his anti-vaccine views.
Pandemic attitudes split not only along partisan lines but according to how much one trusted experts like Anthony Fauci. Masks and vaccination status became unlikely political signifiers, pitting various nonconformists against the more compliant “Pfizer Democrats” of the professional classes. City dwellers, theoretically invested in diverse mingling, adopted isolated regimens and worked from home, and on the left, the pursuit of safety came to look like a belief system in its own right, stoked by a habit of policing errant behavior. MAHA, with its disdain for authority and received wisdom, would come to look like the opposite of that.
MAHA’s suspicion of vaccines and other chemical substances is redolent of older and more paranoid fears of contamination, such as in the Dr. Strangelove scene in which the psychotic General Jack D. Ripper warns of the perils of water fluoridation. But the movement does not really venerate purity or cleanliness as much as it does a grimier quest to reconnect the body to the earth and its bounty. Before the pandemic, I would encounter Facebook videos from PragerU, a conservative media organ that pitched itself as a counterbalance to leftist campuses. Its main influencer was a preppy “gotcha” artist named Will Witt, now a raw-milk dairy farmer who stopped using toothpaste. Turning Point USA, another campus-oriented right-wing organization, sells GOT RAW MILK? T-shirts. In fact, raw milk — currently the subject of a bird-flu recall — is in ascendancy across the right, including with arch-libertarian Kentucky representative Thomas Massie, a cattle farmer and off-the-grid homesteader who calls his home “the Shire” and Washington “Mordor.”
At the same time, MAHA confounds attempts at ideological characterization. Helena Bottemiller Evich, a veteran food-policy reporter, wrote in the run-up to the election that MAHA’s cross-partisan influence could already be seen in a House Ways and Means Committee hearing on chronic-disease prevention. “It was one of those rare hearings where you could not tell — at all — whether someone was a Democrat or Republican based on their comments,” she wrote in her newsletter, Food Fix. “Lawmakers who attended expressed serious concerns about diet quality, spiraling rates of diabetes and obesity, asked what needed to be done, and seemed pretty free of any food-industry talking points.”
MAHA’s skepticism of the modern era, with all its technological and chemical disruptions, spans the political spectrum. There is the strange, campy ecosystem of right-wing body builders and neo-agrarian online personalities like “Raw Egg Nationalist” who are concerned as much with ecological depredation as with declining fertility, issues they see as linked by the proliferation of microplastics or the endocrine-disrupting chemicals known as environmental estrogens — concerns shared by epidemiologists, reproductive-rights advocates, and mommy bloggers. Even setting aside the presumed political motives of Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, some of his online writings suggest a MAHA-like anxiety that the forces of contemporary life are messing with our biological rhythms and impeding “natural human interaction” in the areas of sex and physical fitness. “Evolutionary mismatch of homo sapiens and its 21st century living environment is unfathomably immense,” he wrote.
At their darkest, these concerns owe something to the Unabomber’s critique of industrial society — Mangione once wrote an online review of Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto — but they’re also shared by popular contemporary figures like Joe Rogan and RFK Jr. himself, exercise buffs and outdoors enthusiasts both, who argue big pharma and big agriculture aren’t eroding just our connection to the environment and the food supply but to ourselves by creating any number of chemical irregularities within our bodies. In his Arizona endorsement speech, RFK Jr. levied an attack against the remarkably effective weight-loss drug Ozempic, which he sees as a chief profiteer of America’s obesity epidemic, breeding dependency in its users and leaving root causes unaddressed.
Last year, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times highlighted a key element of the emerging RFK Jr. coalition, dubbed conspirituality by a trio of podcasters. According to the conspiritualists, “the pandemic was a ruse through which governments, big pharma, and amoral tech companies could execute ancient plans for world domination.” This corkboard theorizing gave way to a mystical critique: “The sacred circle of family and nature — from which health and fulfillment flow — was under attack.” In this way, the Alex Jones–like Plandemic crowd could find common cause with the woo-woo factions of the “vaccine safety” community in Malibu or Beverly Hills, each bloc equally concerned with its powerlessness against dehumanizing forces of one kind or another.
Kennedy may not be confirmed to Trump’s Cabinet. But he remains the figurehead of a movement that appears to have staying power. Unlike political appeals to more abstract values like civility or democracy, MAHA exists at the level of people’s bodies and the injuries they feel have been done to them by an indifferent health-industrial complex. MAHA is primal, personal, and open to any number of radical visions of a better way. — Simon van Zuylen-Wood
Part 2
The Intellectual Godparents
Nine thinkers who helped lay the movement’s foundation.
E. C. Harrington (active: 1910s–’20s). The attorney, labor activist, and suffragette became chair of San Francisco’s newly formed Anti-Mask League during the Spanish Flu epidemic. Harrington and the league decried the mayor’s mask mandate as lacking a scientific foundation and being unhygienic and unconstitutional. Soon after the league submitted its petition, the mayor ruled that masks were no longer required.
Linus Pauling (active: 1920s–’90s). In his later years, the Nobel Prize–winning chemist insisted that vitamin C could prevent up to 75 percent of cancers. The Mayo Clinic later investigated, using human patients, his claim that vitamins could cure cancer. The study did not corroborate Pauling’s results, but he repeated his belief in their veracity until his death.
Lord Northbourne (active: 1930s–’40s). The agriculturalist, often credited with coining the term organic farming, published Look to the Land, a seminal text of the organic movement in which he outlined his belief in organic and biodynamic farming and sourcing local foods and lamented “chemical farming.” He warned that the future of farming would value profit over nutritional quality and environmental responsibility.
Rachel Carson (active: 1930s–’60s). Her book Silent Spring launched the modern environmental movement by warning about the dangers of the pesticide DDT to the environment and health. Her fears extended to many synthetic chemicals, which, she wrote, “lie long in soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death.”
Paul Brodeur (active: 1960s–’90s). A science journalist who focused on sources of environmental harm to public health. Perhaps best known for his work exposing the dangers of asbestos, he also published, from the ’70s to the ’90s, a trio of books investigating the supposed harms of electromagnetic radiation and alleging massive conspiracies to keep those dangers hidden from the public.
Artemis Simopoulos (active: 1980s–present). The physician and endocrinologist contributed to popularizing the fear that seed oils are harmful. In 1997, she co-wrote The Omega Plan, which argues, “Today when we forage for food at the local grocery store, we are likely to bring home food that contains from fourteen to twenty times more omega-6 than omega-3 fatty acids, upsetting a critical balance that has been maintained for millions of years.’”
Ken Cook (active: 1990s–present). Co-founded the Environmental Working Group, an influential nonprofit research and advocacy organization that has spread fear about “toxins” in everything from nonorganic blueberries to tap water. The group also releases a yearly “Dirty Dozen” report that highlights foods to avoid because of pesticide residue, though researchers have repeatedly analyzed the reports and found that they exaggerate the data. (Despite overlapping goals, Cook has unequivocally condemned RFK Jr.’s nomination.)
Andrew Wakefield (active: 1990s–present). The former gastroenterologist who, in 1998, proposed that the MMR vaccine (for measles, mumps, and rubella) was linked with autism. The study was repeatedly discredited by scientists, and a Sunday Times investigation later claimed Wakefield did not disclose that he was paid nearly half a million dollars by a personal-injury lawyer who had recruited parents to sue MMR-vaccine manufacturers.
Rod Dreher (active: 2000s–present). In 2006, the writer and former columnist for The American Conservative published Crunchy Cons, which posits political conservatism, physical health, and environmental stewardship as natural allies. Recently said, “In the end though, to care about our bodies, to treat our bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit is a godly act and I would say even a conservative act.”
Photo (heads): Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group (Pauling); Smith Archive /Alamy Stock Photo (Northbourne); CBS/Getty Images (Carson); Steve Liss/Getty Images (Brodeur); Zino.Life (Simopoulos); Tom Williams/Roll Call (Cook); Shaun Curry/AFP (Wakefield); Ludek Perina/AP Images (Dreher)
Part 3
Mapping the MAHA-verse
A non-exhaustive introduction to a sprawling new alliance, grouped by common enemy.
Photo: DrCateShanahan/Instagram (Shanahan); Calley Means/LinkedIn (Calley); DrCaseysKitchen/Instagram (Casey); Stefanie Spear/LinkedIn (Spear); charles_eisenstein/instagram (Eisenstein); thewillwitt/X (Witt); Gretchy/Instagram (Adler); Zen Honeycutt/Facebook (Honeycutt); TheWarriorCenter/Instagram (Meschuk); DrMercola/Instagram (Mercola); happyhourwithdrt/Instagram (Tenpenny); RealAlexClark/Instagram (Clark); Chrispalmermd/Instagram (Palmer); wellnessmama/Instagram (Wells); AP Images (Bigtree, Ladapo, Gold); Getty Images (Remaining). Getty Images (the rest)
Part 4
What Are They Afraid Of?
Toxins, toxins everywhere.
Fluoridated Water
RFK Jr. claims “fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.”
➨ The CDC says water fluoridation, which began in the 1950s, prevents cavities and tooth decay. High levels of fluoride exposure over long periods can potentially lead to skeletal fluorosis, but the levels in water are much, much lower.
Food Dyes
Some people affiliated with MAHA worry food dyes cause cancer and neurobehavioral problems in children, including ADHD and learning disorders.
➨ Their concern is supported by some studies, which have found an association with hyperactive behavior in some children. One study identified a particular gene that may moderate adverse reactions to food dyes. While there isn’t any evidence to suggest that food dyes cause cancer, research has shown that four dyes — yellows No. 5 and No. 6 and reds No. 3 and No. 40 — may have carcinogenic properties or contaminants. In 1990, the FDA, responding to studies that linked red No. 3 to thyroid cancer in rats, banned their use in cosmetics and certain drugs. The use of red No. 3 is restricted in Europe, and Governor Gavin Newsom banned it in California last year and recently signed a law banning six other artificial food dyes from school foods. The FDA is currently reviewing the safety of red No. 3.
Microplastics
Microplastics — microscopic plastic waste — and even smaller nanoplastics polluting our bodies and environment figure in to frequent MAHA talking points.
➨ It’s true microplastics exist at alarmingly high levels in the environment, particularly in the ocean. They’ve been detected in our air, food, drinking water, and soil. More recently, they’ve been found in human lungs, brains, and blood; studies are inconclusive about their direct effect on our health, though experts agree it probably isn’t good. RFK Jr. has also suggested that microplastics might have contributed to “gender confusion” among kids via endocrine disruptors, which scientists say is completely unfounded.
Pasteurized Milk
RFK Jr. has said he drinks only raw milk and that it “advances human health.” Raw-milk advocates claim it contains beneficial enzymes and probiotics lost in the pasteurization process.
➨ Most experts urge against ingesting raw milk, warning it could contain pathogens like campylobacter, E. coli, salmonella, and listeria. They point out the enzymes found in raw milk are not helpful to human digestion and the bacteria is unlikely to benefit gut health. The CDC has also warned that raw milk could carry bird flu.
Seed Oil
MAHA says seed oils, such as canola, soybean, and sunflower, lead to inflammation and have contributed to chronic diseases including heart disease and diabetes. RFK Jr. has suggested people should fry their food in beef tallow instead.
➨ Most research has shown the opposite: The unsaturated fat commonly found in seed oils has been linked to lower risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer. Beef tallow, on the other hand, is primarily made up of saturated fat, which studies have shown increases the risk of cardiovascular disease.
Pesticides
RFK Jr. has long railed against pesticides, claiming they’re “destroying the soil” and poisoning our food. In particular, he’s come out against glyphosate, an ingredient in weed killer.
➨ In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as a likely carcinogen, but a year later, the Environmental Protection Agency contested that claim, labeling it “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” Researchers have pointed out the EPA was mainly testing for exposure through food residue and not the potential impact of much higher levels through farming or gardening. The EPA says pesticide residue on food is closely monitored and regulated and does not pose a health risk. Earlier this year, the USDA’s pesticide-data program found that in 2022 “99 percent of the samples tested had pesticide residues below benchmark levels.”
Pollutants and PFAs
RFK Jr. claims neurotoxins — toxins that affect the body’s nervous system — found in air pollution, pesticides, lead, and mercury are causing autism in children. He’s also said the toxic “forever chemicals” known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are in our food and drinking water in addition to many household products.
➨ A recent meta-analysis found exposure to moderate levels of air pollution increased the risk of autism in children, particularly if it occurred during pregnancy or before the age of 5. Other studies have shown air pollution slows cognitive development. RFK Jr. is right that PFAS have been found in everything from our food and water to clothes, cleaning products, and dental floss. There are thousands of different kinds of PFAS, which make them difficult to study, but to date they’ve been associated with dozens of health conditions and diseases, including cancer and a weakened immune system. He has also, however, expressed concerns about chemicals that are safe to consume in the tiny amounts they appear, like aspartame in Diet Coke.
Ultraprocessed Foods
MAHA says ultraprocessed foods are key drivers of obesity and diabetes, particularly in children.
➨ Ultraprocessed foods compose over half the U.S. food supply and are made up primarily of chemically modified food and additives. They’ve been associated with obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and depression. Nutrition experts warn against being overly wary of all processed foods, which include frozen fruits and vegetables preserved at the peak of freshness. Other processes, like fermentation, can actually enhance nutritional value.
Vaccines
Vaccine skeptics, particularly those against vaccinating children, are a cornerstone of the MAHA coalition. Among their most frequent claims: that there is a correlation between the rise of vaccines and the rise of chronic diseases, especially in children; that vaccines cause autism and seizure disorder; that SIDS deaths often occur soon after the administration of vaccines at the 2- and 4-month well-child visits; that there are toxins like aluminum and mercury in vaccines that exceed federal safety guidelines and that those toxins are linked to autoimmune diseases. MAHA affiliates have also alleged the polio vaccine is causing polio infections worldwide. In 2022, RFK Jr.’s lawyer, Aaron Siri, petitioned to ban the vaccine.
➨ The idea that vaccines remain in our bodies long enough to cause chronic health issues is at odds with how they work; bacterial and viral vaccines are processed and responded to by the body’s immune system within a couple of weeks, often just a few days. The two studies that claimed the MMR vaccine was tied to autism were later found to have critical errors, and several studies have since disproved their findings entirely. Many studies have shown that the incidence of SIDS is the same in children who do or do not receive vaccines. Most scientists agree that the amount of aluminum in vaccines is too small (only slightly more than the amount naturally found in breast milk) to cause any direct effect; mercury is not contained in any childhood vaccine with the exception of the influenza vaccine, and the kind of mercury it contains does not accumulate in humans. An oral version of the polio vaccine that uses a still-active version of the virus can potentially spread polio in places with low vaccination rates. (Since 2000, children in the U.S. have only been given a vaccine with an inactive version of the virus.) In 2022, an unvaccinated man in Rockland County, where only 60 percent of people are vaccinated against polio, contracted the virus from someone who had received the oral vaccine, but epidemiologists argue it’s low vaccination rates that cause the virus to spread. With the exception of the COVID-19 vaccine, before vaccines are licensed in the U.S., they undergo over a decade of scientific testing that involves many thousands of study participants. If vaccines have contributed to other diseases, they’ve done so at a minuscule level — such as the one or two cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome that occur per million flu-vaccine doses.
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And What Are They Peddling?
Many figures in MAHA have something to sell, and the products are as varied as the movement itself: dietary supplements claiming to correct for nutritional deficiencies, cookbooks and nutrition guides that prescribe everything from keto to carnivore to “all natural.” And while some products are simply capitalizing on a vague sheen of health, there are others that one should be wary of. The supplements industry, for example, is underregulated; manufacturers are required to submit only a single scientific article to support health-benefit claims. And many well-known ingredients — like ashwagandha and green-tea extract — can be liver toxins in large amounts. Here, a small sampling of goods sold by members of the movement.
• Agent Nateur
A line of luxury “clean” skin care and supplements founded by Jena Covello, a Los Angeles–based natural-medicine enthusiast.
• Ilana Housewares
Plates and bowls designed for “mindful consumption” by TikTok nutrition influencer Ilana Muhlstein.
• Hu Kitchen
The chocolate brand was co-founded by Jason Karp, a former hedge-fund manager turned health-and-wellness entrepreneur with a line of other products, including frozen pizza bites.
• Wellnesse
The natural-living blog Wellness Mama sells a line of toiletries, including fluoride- and glycerin-free toothpaste.
• Onnit Fitness Gear
A line of kettlebells, barbells, and steel maces founded by the New Agey optimizer brofluencer Aubrey Marcus.
• Levels
Casey Means’s start-up makes continuous glucose monitors, which send users real-time blood-sugar data to track their “metabolic health.”
• Mercola Market
The osteopathic physician Joseph Mercola sells a range of products from keto snack bars to dog food. He is also a proponent of tanning (which he claimed, backed by discredited studies, prevents cancer) and once marketed and sold tanning beds but stopped after the FTC banned them.
• Young Living Essential Oils
Naturopath Jodie Meschuk is a “diamond”-level member of this company. Has claimed that essential oils help heal autism.
Part 5
The Wellness-to-MAHA Pipeline
Toxins, toxins everywhere.
The Crunchy Mom: Shiva Rose
Became Mysteriously Sick
Following the birth of her first daughter, she was diagnosed with lupus, scleroderma, and rheumatoid arthritis.
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Found Alternative Medicine
After her rheumatologist told her she had only a year to live, she switched to a doctor who practiced holistic medicine and claimed he could get her better within a year. She adopted a lifestyle with all-organic foods and products. Eventually, she says, her body healed.
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Launched an All-Natural Beauty Brand
Her “toxic and chemical free” face oils and moisturizers were praised by Goop.
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MAHA’D
During the pandemic, she compared vaccine mandates to McCarthyism, slavery, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Holocaust, all in one Instagram post. Later, she moved to Texas, where she made a presentation at RFK Jr.’s “American Wellness Summit,” along with Aubrey Marcus, in March.
The Influencer: Vani Hari
Created a Food Blog
In 2011, she was working as a management consultant for Accenture. After a bout of appendicitis, she began looking into nutrition issues and started her blog, Food Babe.
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Went Viral for Investigating Ingredients
There, she published “investigations” into “questionable ingredients” — for instance, accusing beer-makers of using propylene glycol, an antifreeze. (Actually, they use propylene glycol alginate, derived from kelp.) She gained thousands of followers. Her typical response when criticized for publishing misinformation: “I never claimed to be a nutritionist. I’m an investigator.”
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Started a ‘Real Food’ Company
She wrote a series of best-selling books and started a company called Truvani, through which she sells pea-powder protein, snack bars, and various supplements.
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MAHA’D
She has recently been an outspoken supporter of RFK Jr.’s, posting about him on Instagram, where she now has 2 million followers.
The Locavore Agrarian: Joel Salatin
Grew Up on an Organic Farm
His family bought a Virginia farm in the ’60s and used organic methods from the jump.
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Went Super-Natural
After he took over the farm, he adopted a philosophy that emphasizes healthy grass on which animals can thrive in a symbiotic cycle of feeding. He describes his meat as “beyond organic” and himself as a “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer.”
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Chafed at USDA and FDA Regulations
Over time, he concluded that USDA regulations are stacked against small farms. In 2023 testimony before Congress, he said smaller farmers could be shut down for not producing fast enough and regulations make it more difficult for consenting adults to buy directly from farmers in their own communities.
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MAHA’D
RFK Jr. featured him on his website, saying his “decades of experience in sustainable agriculture reveal how small-scale farming can revolutionize our food systems.”
The Optimizer: Aubrey Marcus
Took Psychedelics
Feeling lost after high school, and at the urging of his father, he decided to go on a vision quest with a mushroom shaman who gave him psychedelic tea.
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Started a Supplements Business
Eventually, he’d launch a lifestyle brand based on a holistic-health philosophy he calls “Total Human Optimization.” This began with hangover supplements and grew to include nutritional products, fitness equipment, and gyms.
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Went on Joe Rogan
Afterward, he launched his own podcast (and a cognitive enhancer, which Rogan had suggested). He used it to discuss such subjects as spirituality, open relationships, and optimization. By his late 30s, he had a multimillion-dollar wellness empire and a book called Own the Day, Own Your Life, which promises to help his bevy of male fans optimize their lives.
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MAHA’D
He invited RFK Jr. onto his show, where they connected over spiritual wellness.
The Food Journalist: Nina Teicholz
Got a PH.D in Nutrition
After earning a doctorate focused on nutrition policy, she went to work as a reporter, eventually freelancing for Gourmet, where she was assigned a story investigating trans fats.
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Quested Everything
Her research made her suspicious of U.S. diet guidelines; in her book, The Big Fat Surprise, she interrogated their emphasis on avoiding saturated fats. Afterward, she published an article in The BMJ claiming the “Dietary Guidelines for Americans” show bias against fat and meat and that their creators have undisclosed conflicts of interest.
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Fought With the Department of Health and Human Services
HHS was not pleased; it harshly criticized her claims and called for The BMJ to retract the article. (It decided not to.)
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MAHA’D
She thanked RFK Jr. for calling out the nation’s chronic-disease epidemics, tweeting, “We finally have a leader willing to create change.”
Part 6
The Siblings With RFK Jr.’s Ear
Meet best-selling authors Calley and Casey Means.
In spring 2024, Calley Means had a vision inside a sweat tent in Austin. The food and pharma lobbyist turned health-start-up entrepreneur, who, along with his sister, Casey, wrote the best-selling book Good Energy, about the rise of chronic disease, was at a campaign event supporting RFK Jr., then a third-party presidential candidate. The two sat beside each other, dripping with perspiration and praying over the future of the country. That’s when Calley, who once identified as a Never Trumper, saw in his mind’s eye the candidate standing side by side with his rival, Donald Trump.
As he later recounted on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Calley was struck by a realization: “What RFK represents is actually what Trump represents, and actually what almost every American’s feeling,” a sense that “something doesn’t quite feel right.” A few months later, he called RFK Jr., asking if he would be willing to get on a call with Trump to discuss combining forces. RFK Jr. agreed. Continue reading …
Part 7
What Can Secretary Kennedy Actually Do in Office?
And will Trump let him?
Stripping fluoride from drinking water, ending milk pasteurization, and undermining our vaccination regimen is an ominous to-do list for a country that has recently emerged from the worst pandemic in a century. But RFK Jr. won’t be able to shake up the $1.7 trillion Health and Human Services Department by decree. HHS officials who served in the first Trump administration describe the department as a maze of red tape where buy-in from agencies across the government is required to push through any changes. “When we were there, we got stuff thrown back at us to say, ‘That’s not good enough’” because it didn’t meet the president’s objectives, says Paul Mango, the deputy chief of staff at HHS under Trump.
Even basic policy changes required input from other executive departments like the National Economic Council and the Office of Budget and Management. “It’s not quite as loose as you would imagine,” Mango adds. Continue reading …
