MAHA moms are mad

0:01Noel King:Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has not had an easy time in Washington. Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon? I probably did say that. Like, as unbelievable as it is, I loved him. He still has what he needs, though, a very active and activated Maha base and an enormous amount of power in the Trump administration. In fact, the president's nominee for Surgeon General is a Maha-affiliated MD and influencer. Oh, my gosh. Get the cereal out of the house. We should need those. Who served as an advisor to RFK Jr. But President Trump recently issued an order in the interest of national security that is posing a real threat to the unity of the Maha movement that serves as Kennedy's base of support.

0:47Noel King:That's coming up on Today Explained from Vox.

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2:01Okay, let's see here.

2:03Noel King:Today. Today. Explained. Explained. Jessica Winter, staff writer at The New Yorker. Tell me about President Trump's nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Casey Means. Casey Means is a graduate of Stanford Medical School. She did not finish her residency in otolaryngology, which is head and neck surgery. When I kind of put some of these pieces together and realized that my training had totally, essentially incapacitated me from really understanding why patients are sick and how to actually help them thrive, I actually had to walk away from the surgical world. There are sharply differing accounts of why she didn't finish her residency, But she went into what is known as functional medicine, which is more or less holistic or alternative medicine.

2:51She co-founded a medical technology company called Levels, which offers continuous glucose monitoring and other wearable technology. With Levels, you get access to things like powerful tools, food logging, macro tracking, and even continuous glucose monitors that you can use to proactively optimize your health. She started up a popular newsletter and an Instagram account called Dr. Casey's Kitchen with recipes and nutrition advice. And she really got into the game of sponsorships and promotions as an influencer. She would promote things like wellness teas and prenatal vitamins and all kinds of supplements.

3:27And she had pretty amazing timing because in 2024, she published a book co-written with her brother Callie Means called Good Energy about ending what they call the chronic disease epidemic. And this book emerged into the world just as the Maha movement and RFK Jr.'s presidential campaign were really gaining momentum and visibility. And pretty soon, the mean siblings were appearing on Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson, and all of a sudden, she was a Maha superstar. I honestly think you're going to change the world. I mean that. I mean that.

3:59Noel King:I read Good Energy because I interviewed her brother, Callie Means. It's a really genuinely interesting book. Give us some insight into what this book tells us about how we should be living our lives. So Good Energy is kind of their manifesto. It's partly a memoir about Casey Means' journey out of conventional medicine and into the influencer space. She talks about the death of her mother. It's a diet and nutrition and lifestyle guide. You know, it talks about the dangers of ultra-processed foods and the importance of eating organic and keeping your blood sugar steady. Highly addictive substances are being pushed on every person in the United States from birth.

4:44And these substances are causing well over one million deaths per year. These substances are ultra-processed foods. And I would say that it has three main pillars of argument that align perfectly with Maha. The first is that the food and pharmaceutical companies, industries are incentivized to make you sick and keep you sick. Number two is most conventional medical interventions do not help you and may harm you. Patients are being crushed by the devil's bargain between the$6 trillion food industry, which wants to make food cheap and addictive, and the$4 trillion healthcare industry, which profits off interventions on sick patients and stays silent about the reasons they're getting sick.

5:30And there's a laundry list of things in the book that they tell you to beware against, you know, antibiotics, chemotherapy drugs, antiretroviral drugs, beta blockers, on and on and on. And then the number three pillar is that most illnesses can be prevented or treated through diet and lifestyle choices.

5:53Noel King:How much of this book is based in sort of scientific evidence? As with a lot with Maha, they do have a point now and again about ultra-processed foods. And it's great to buy organic and it's great to cook from scratch and it's great to exercise. But there are plenty of people out there who can give you that kind of advice. they take it to extremes in terms of, you know, when I wrote about good energy, I talked about going into my local supermarket and suddenly feeling as though, you know, you're surrounded by enemies or something, right? I mean, it's box cereal, it's bread in a bag, it's any non-organic produce.

6:36And so I think another thing to keep in mind is that Casey Means has not trained in this space. She has no formal expertise in this space. I mean, again, she trained in otolaryngology. I think some in Maha would not see that as a disadvantage because she's not coming out of the medical establishment. But at the same time, you know, the advice that they're giving, the fears that they're trying to stoke in people are really extreme and not necessarily helpful, I would say.

7:04Noel King:Casey Means had her Senate nomination hearing last week. What did we learn from that? We learned that she is trying to modify her public persona a little bit. And she's trying to present a more moderate, more palatable version of herself. And, you know, we've seen this with a lot of nominees for Trump's cabinet. I mean, to take the vaccines point, there's a very interesting moment in that hearing where she really emphasized that messaging on vaccines has never been part, a major part of her platform as an influencer. So just to be very clear, vaccines, vaccine advocacy has never, or any anti-vaccine rhetoric has never been a part of my message.

7:49I don't mention the word vaccine in my book. This is not a part of my core message. I am not here to complicate the issue on vaccines. But at the same time, you know, she won't come out and say that she thinks, you know, all children should follow the regular vaccine schedule or anything like that. I'm supportive of vaccination. I do believe that each patient, mother, parent needs to have a conversation with their pediatrician about any medication they're putting in their body. Looking at Casey Means, I mean, there's a lot of ways that she contrasts with other Surgeon General nominees. I mean, she never finished her residency.

8:24She has not had an active medical license for some time now. As I mentioned, she has mainly offered advice in a space where she has no training. She has no background in public health. She has no background in epidemiology. It's funny. A refrain in her answers was, I can't give individual advice, right? People should have a conversation with their doctor. I'm not an individual's doctor. Shared clinical decision making with their doctor is about specific vaccines. All patients need to have a thorough conversation with their doctor and have true informed consent before taking any medication. Make sure that patients are encouraged to have informed consent with their doctor before getting any medication.

9:04But, you know, vaccination is something that we think of as a collective good, that we're not necessarily tailoring that to every individual person. It's not necessarily a bespoke kind of process, right? And she is auditioning to be a person who can be America's doctor, who can actually issue pretty close to blanket recommendations to people about things like diet, nutrition, vaccinations, chronic illness, and so forth. And so a way that I think she tried to tack to the center and moderate her position was to constantly come back to the subjective place of people should talk to their doctor. But at the same time, a lot of her presence, a lot of her persona is to distrust your doctor.

9:55I mean, Good Energy says straight up not to trust your doctor and do your own research and make the individual decisions that are best for you and your family. So it's a very mixed message. But I think it's a message that she's trying to kind of moderate her image in ways that I don't think were particularly convincing to the set of senators. Do you think she's going to be confirmed? Assuming all of the Democrats on the committee vote against, which I think is a fair assumption, it's not a guarantee, she only needs one Republican to wobble for it not to make it out of committee. And I would say that the three wobbly Republicans are Collins, Murkowski, and Cassidy.

10:39And all three of them had, you know, cordial but tough questions for her in the hearing. So I'm not sure she makes it out of committee. We'll have to see.

10:50Noel King:It's now been about a year of Maha people in leading roles in American public health. Do you get the sense that there is more skepticism of the Maha movement among lawmakers now? Or do you think we should expect more of them? I do think that skepticism toward Maha has become more acceptable. And I think there is more skepticism toward Maha within Maha. Yeah. Because I would say that it's extremely difficult for anyone in Maha not to admit that this administration has not gone the way they'd hoped when it came to issues they care deeply about, particularly forever chemicals in soil and water. The EPA has done absolutely the opposite of anything Maha would have wished for since this administration came in.

11:47And so I think Maha is really trying to figure itself out right now and figure out what its place in our politics and culture is. And I don't know that Casey Means and her confirmation is necessarily top of mind in that process.

12:11Noel King:That was The New Yorker's Jessica Winter. Coming up, an executive order turns the Maha Moms against RFK.

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15:18Noel King:You can get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready-to-use templates. Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand's style. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com. Go to shopify.com. What's that? That's shopify.com. This is Today Explained. President Trump issued the executive order on February 18th, promoting the national defense by ensuring an adequate supply of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides. In short, we need to be making more glyphosate in the U.S.

16:02Noel King:Glyphosate is a pesticide, and making it here is a national security issue, per Trump, because we need it for our food supply. Glyphosate is particularly hated by those in the Maha movement. Glyphosate can cross the blood testes barrier and end up in semen. Oh. Weed killer could be in your baby gravy right now. Oatmeal is heavily sprayed with glyphosate these days. It's also being found in our rain and our drinking water. Lisa Held, reporter at Civil Eats. The Maha response came fast and furious, and it was mostly trained on RFKJR, in part because he's their man in Washington, and in part because he's got a long history with pesticides, yeah?

16:39Yeah, he was an environmental lawyer for a long time and even worked for the NRDC, for instance, a really big environmental organization in this country. He was part of a team of lawyers who brought the first big case against Monsanto, the company that makes glyphosate. They knew it was getting into our water, into our air, into our food, onto our landscapes where our children play. And yet they were telling people that it was safe as table salt at a time when they knew that it could cause cancer. That was on behalf of an individual who said that using glyphosate had caused his non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

17:24And they won. It was the first case that they won. A California jury ordered Monsanto to pay$289 million in damages to Duane Lee Johnson. Finding the company failed to warn Johnson and other consumers of the cancer risk. Americans should be encouraged by the verdict because it's an emblem that corporations are still subject to our democracy and to our system of justice in this country. And then, you know, he also had an organization that he ran for a long time called Children's Health Defense, and they do a lot of work on policy and advocacy on reducing pesticide use and pesticide exposures. All right.

18:10Noel King:So in the past, RFK has been critical of pesticides like glyphosate. Now we see him sort of changing his position. I support President Trump's executive order to bring agricultural chemical production back to the United States and to end our near total reliance on adversarial nations. His executive order protects two pillars of our national strength, our defense readiness and our food supply. Possibly the most interesting thing about RFK is his coalition, his Maha coalition. How does the Maha coalition react when they see him responding to President Trump on glyphosate? When this executive order was first released, there was a group within the Maha coalition that they were very angry.

18:57There's a few kind of prominent Maha supporters like Kelly Ryerson and Vani Hari who have been speaking out about the executive order and really saying that it goes against the principles of Maha. We shouldn't have to beg, hope, or pray for food and water that isn't poisoned. This country clearly has the money, so deliver it now. It cost the government zero dollars to tell the truth about glyphosate. Tell the people the truth about glyphosate, just like artificial dyes, and watch the market fix itself. They're angry, but they're also kind of, over time, it seems that they are trusting Secretary Kennedy's response, where he's saying, look, we're still working on this, but we need to do, you know, this executive order in the meantime is necessary.

19:50The Pentagon and others said this is an extreme national security vulnerability that China controls the U.S. food system. We can't afford to let that happen, but we all know we've got to transition off of glyphosate. And I think the interesting thing with the Maha coalition at this moment in time is this executive order is coming at a moment when glyphosate is already a really big issue for them. So there's a Supreme Court case that's going to be heard on April 27th that would give companies like Bayer immunity from future lawsuits related to cancer and other health risks. And they care a lot about that.

20:32And so they're already angry that the Trump administration is siding with Bayer in that Supreme Court case. There's another liability shield that is in a draft of the farm bill right now, which they're also fighting. So I think it's kind of part of this bigger picture where pesticide use and pesticide exposure is kind of emerging as the most kind of contentious issue when it comes to the Maha coalition and the relationship to the Trump administration.

21:05Noel King:Within the Maha coalition, there is a group of women called the, that are sometimes called the Maha Moms. Right. These are people who care a lot about what is going into our bodies. They care a lot about health. And often they will say they care because they are concerned about their children. My understanding is that the Maha Moms in particular were upset about this executive order. And they saw Kennedy's response as kind of a betrayal. Could you talk about this subgroup of women and how you saw them responding? Yeah. I did tune in to a meeting of one of the groups that makes up this Maha Moms coalition called Moms Across America about a week ago.

21:51And what I heard was that they're definitely upset and they care a lot about this and they're not happy about the executive order. They're not happy about really anything that's happening when it comes to pesticide policy within the Trump administration right now. But they're not kind of abandoning the administration in a wholehearted way because they still really trust Secretary Kennedy. And, you know, there's this kind of thinking around, well, we can't kind of ditch the administration over this because over here at HHS, Kennedy is doing things that we really care about and we really believe in.

22:34And we think that what we see as this progress over here is so valuable that we're going to stand by him. And, you know, there's this kind of understanding within those groups, like among the Maha Moms, that Kennedy has to kind of fight for these things within the administration itself. But they aren't abandoning the administration altogether. And I think that's really because this whole coalition came together around Kennedy and they just really care about him and trust him.

23:09Noel King:I wonder about the Maha moms and their level of organization and their level of political influence. Do they hold a lot of power in the Maha movement and do conservatives look at them and say, OK, this group might be small, but it is mighty and we need to not lose them? Definitely. I think they have real power in this moment. And I think the best example of that is how the EPA has been responding to their criticism. So over the last few months before this executive order in response to all different decisions the EPA made to approve new pesticides or re-approve pesticides that they were concerned about, like dicamba, the EPA has actually invited members of this movement, Maha Moms, into the agency to talk to them.

23:58They have, even when putting out press releases that seem to go directly against the Maha agenda, they have tried to message that it is aligned with Maha in some way. They're trying really hard to kind of appease and speak to and court the Maha moms. And the fact that the agency really feels that that's necessary seems to signal that they see them as having real power.