The slippery appeal of RFK Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement

Anybody can be a part of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again campaign. 

On his MAHA website, shoppers can buy shirts identifying themselves as a surfer, snowboarder, skier, sailor, marine, soldier, veteran, chiropractor, artist, fisherman, diver, nurse, doctor, pharmacist, paramedic, engineer, trucker, therapist, lawyer, teacher, millennial, Gen Z, Gen X, Boomer, mom, warrior mom, dog mom, or grandmother — who, like Kennedy, opposes the public health or factory farming or pharmaceutical corporate establishment.

Over the 16 months he campaigned for president, and ever since he quit to endorse President-elect Donald Trump in August, Kennedy has been making strange bedfellows in a divided nation. 

Voters across the partisan spectrum can find at least one thing he’s said or done that resonates with their values. Opponents of industrialized agriculture and people who want easier access to unpasteurized milk can convince themselves he’s an ally. Public health authorities and fact-based journalists may clash with Kennedy for his inaccurate representations of biomedical science, but many Americans sympathize with his comments on the drug industry, and a growing number share his negative views on vaccine mandates. 

Trump’s decision to pick Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services wasn’t a conventional choice. Kennedy represents a movement that has long been outside the mainstream but now finds itself in the halls of power. Soon after Kennedy traded his endorsement for an appointment by then-candidate Trump in August, his platform took on a more Trumpian branding: Make America Healthy Again, often shortened to MAHA.

But what does that really mean? What would the consequences be for people’s health?

By articulating a few big, noble goals in alluringly plain language — without getting into the weeds about how to achieve them — MAHA has drawn what were once distinct causes together under one banner. But it’s in between the lines where its dangers lie: MAHA’s calculated omissions allow people to project their own priorities onto the platform, without having to think too hard about the trade-offs.

The historical origins of Make America Healthy Again 

From the beginning, Kennedy’s career has blended a connection to the counterculture with his august surname and a professed commitment to noble goals. 

During court-ordered community service for a drug offense in the early ’80s, he wound up renovating a building owned by the Open Space Institute, a land preservation organization. The building was later taken over by Hudson Riverkeeper, a group dedicated to rehabilitating the befouled Hudson River, and he embraced the cause: After his admission to the bar in 1985, he took on multiple corporate polluters in high-profile cases over the next few decades as senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He styled himself as a crusader for the Earth, and so did the media; in 1999, Time magazine named him a Hero for the Planet. 

In the early 2000s, Kennedy got interested in thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative then often used to produce vaccines. A now-discredited 1998 publication by British scientist Andrew Wakefield had floated a hypothesis linking the ingredient with childhood autism — and while reams of much higher-quality science had already disproven it, doubts persisted among the general public.

Despite the weight of the evidence confirming vaccine safety and the immense global benefits of childhood vaccinations, it became Kennedy’s most important cause. He spent the next two decades at the helm of Children’s Health Defense, one of the leading organizations in spreading anti-vaccination messages.

It represented a break from his activism on behalf of a more conventional and scientifically sound cause to one on the biomedical fringes. Environmentalism “is a shockingly mainstream movement overall” rooted in a faith in science, expertise, and a belief in an active federal government that can implement solutions, says Brian Drake, a historian of environmental movements at the University of Georgia. 

In contrast, the anti-vaccination movement is grounded in a distrust of science and government, and relies on deliberate misreadings of scientific evidence to support its positions.

But there is a common thread: Both movements appeal to people with an intense distrust of authority, whether government, scientific, or corporate. People with these values have historically used environmental causes as a vehicle to express them, Drake says. For example, when anti-fluoridation advocates gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s, their most prominent leaders in the US were anti-communists and organic farmers. 

For those environmentalists who like Kennedy, there is similarly “a real emphasis on bodily integrity, fears of poisons getting into your body,” Drake says. “There’s a really strong individualistic strain to it.” 

Radical individualists come to environmentalism from a different place than other people who support the cause. For that reason, they also favor different solutions, says Holly Buck, a sociologist at the University of Buffalo, whose climate politics research involves assessing American public opinion about new technologies to address climate change.

The Kennedy supporters Buck has spoken with often tell her they’re “fed up” with mainstream approaches to climate action like carbon offsets and alternative energy sources. Rather than push for scalable big-government solutions like investments in renewable energy, she says, people in this subgroup favor more individualistic approaches that don’t restrict their freedom, like strengthening regenerative agriculture for small local farms. 

Kennedy has done the same. In the mid-2000s, he opposed an effort to build a wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod, framing the issue as a clash between corporations and local economies. 

During the 2024 campaign, he said soil regeneration and clean water are higher on the list of his environmental priorities than, for example, investments in carbon capture technologies that literally suck carbon dioxide out of the air. (Kennedy left the Natural Resources Defense Council in 2014; his former colleagues there say his anti-science views became incompatible with the organization’s work.)

Vaccine deniers and RFK Jr.-style environmentalists are highly skeptical of corporate power and the scientists they perceive to be in collusion with those nefarious entities. By 2015, historically left-leaning anti-vaxxers were using social media to grow their movement across political and special interest lines. 

The pandemic further galvanized their efforts and brought in new adherents: Conservatives fearful of government overreach found common cause with vaccine deniers, says Sara Gorman, a public health researcher and author whose latest book is about medical distrust and conspiracy theories. A generation of right-wing politicians and media commentators had primed them to be deeply skeptical of the so-called liberal bias of conventional expertise and academia.

The pandemic wove together these previously disparate threads of distrust with shocking efficiency. To mobilize them even as the public health emergency faded, all someone had to do was show up and pull. 

What is MAHA, and who’s behind it? 

Kennedy has been articulating elements of what eventually became the MAHA platform for years. His agenda acquired shades of MAGA only recently, when he effectively dropped his doomed presidential bid in exchange for influence over Trump’s health care agenda and over the president-elect himself. 

The first murmurs of MAHA, the brand, started in early September with an op-ed Kennedy authored in the Wall Street Journal. The effort eventually articulated five key aims:

• Combat America’s chronic disease epidemic — especially cancer, diabetes, and heart disease — by tackling its root causes: poor diet, environmental toxins, and inadequate health care.
• Promote regenerative agriculture, an organic-style farming approach that promises to slash agricultural carbon emissions and conserve nature while reducing chemical use, with the aim of producing healthier food.
• Restore natural ecosystems to benefit human and animal health and mitigate the environmental harms of US industry and agriculture. 
• Reduce corporate influence in government, especially in its public health and environmental agencies.
• Remove chemicals and toxins from the country’s food, water, and air.

On the surface, these priorities don’t look that different from those of the American Public Health Association or the Center for Science in the Public Interest. They share elements of the One Health approach to ecosystem health embraced by leading health authorities worldwide. 

In fact, several of these priorities directly contradict elements of Trump’s platform. (In a campaign speech before the election, Trump said that when it comes to Kennedy’s climate priorities and their impact on oil and gas, “We’re not going to let him get involved.”)

Kennedy has fit seamlessly into Trumpworld because his disdain for expertise is shared by the president-elect, says Matthew Motta, a political scientist and health policy scholar at Boston University and author of Anti-Scientific Americans: The Prevalence, Origins, and Political Consequences of Anti-Intellectualism in the US. “They speak the same anti-intellectual language,” he says.

His platform has been shaped by several important staffers. New Age author Charles Eisenstein has described himself as Kennedy’s “campaign philosopher,” according to a New Yorker profile of the candidate. He sees the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as a deep wound still lodged in America’s collective psyche, and believes that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership could be profoundly healing to the country by providing it with a political realignment that defies the traditional two-party system.

Siblings Calley and Casey Means have also shaped the MAHA plan. Casey is a Stanford-educated surgeon turned wellness influencer, while Calley was at one point a political insider interning for John McCain’s presidential campaign and lobbying Congress on behalf of the food and pharmaceutical industries. Now authors of a bestselling book on metabolism and health, they bring a deep distrust of those industries and of the medical establishment to Kennedy’s coalition, as well as an insider’s understanding of how they work.  

Del Bigtree, founder of the Informed Consent Action Network, a prominent anti-vaccination organization, is the MAHA PAC’s CEO, and the group’s social media director previously worked closely with Aubrey Marcus, a podcaster and founder of the Joe Rogan-endorsed fitness and supplement brand Onnit.

Who is MAHA for?

Taken together, these apostles display impressive credentials. But they are also fluent in the right-leaning influencer-slash-podcaster subculture that has grown around “healthy” eating and exercising; Kennedy himself has gone viral for his weightlifting clips. 

This movement has one distinguishing feature that unites its disparate threads: People who go from curious to supportive of MAHA, whatever its specific draw to them is, also embrace an intense individualism combined with a “really knee-jerk, angry anti-elitism,” Drake says. 

After reciting a falsehood about abortion to a Washington Post reporter — that it’s “never medically necessary to save the life of the mother” — conservative wellness influencer and MAHA stan Alex Clark summarized the ethos: “I know you’ll cite experts who tell me I’m wrong about this, but this is my view.”

Not all vaccine-hesitant people fit this description. But many of those who are suspicious of vaccines on ideological grounds do, and Kennedy’s work resonates with them. 

Moms are among those drawn to his promise to hold accountable American health care and the federal agencies that regulate it: American mothers’ skepticism about vaccinating their own children is associated with having their own negative experiences in health care, and more than half of Americans report encounters with health care providers bad enough to undermine their trust.

Kennedy’s anti-vaccine campaign has coincided with a rise in anti-vaccine attitudes among the US public over the last few decades. More parents are opting out of giving their children vaccinations recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Over the last decade, the percentage of kindergartners who hadn’t received routine immunizations increased by 2 to 3 percent. In more than three-quarters of states, measles immunization rates were below the 95 percent coverage threshold needed to prevent outbreaks in the event of a school-based exposure. 

Kennedy also appeals to people who broadly distrust government and to “double-haters” — those who think institutions and both mainstream political parties need to be dismantled and either rebuilt or replaced. Despite his lifetime affiliation with the Democratic Party, Kennedy styles himself as a bridger of partisan divides: An early graphic on his now-revamped website read, “Left isn’t better. Right isn’t better. Better is better.”

Some of his politically unaffiliated supporters see themselves as outsiders whose skepticism was underappreciated by big-party candidates, and whose perspectives are maligned by mainstream media. In an August Pew Research poll, three-quarters of his supporters identified with neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party. Others who’ve expressed enthusiasm about his prospective HHS nomination are insiders, like Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, whose crunchy constituents seem to gravitate to the language Kennedy uses about personal choice. 

People interested in environmental causes, healthy eating, and the humane treatment of animals may also be drawn to Kennedy’s statements on the toxicity of modern agriculture and factory farming. His enthusiasm for organically produced foods mirrors American consumers’: Demand for organic food has been on the rise for at least two decades. 

Kennedy’s prowess at the pullup bar, his embrace of social media-approved dietary recommendations, and the Goop-like wellness summit he convened in March have lent him credibility and popularity among wellness influencers and their followers. Increasingly, wellness professionals share online space with people who distrust mainstream narratives; both see an opportunity for legitimacy and profit in Kennedy’s ascent, says Stephanie Kelley-Romano, a professor of rhetoric at Bates College who studies conspiracy theories.

He has also partnered with another set of influencers: podcast bros. Kennedy appeared on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast in June 2023; podcaster Theo Von says he’s been a buddy for years. During Jake Paul’s recent bout with Mike Tyson, one of his cutmen sported a MAHA hat.

RFK Jr. and the culture that has embraced him have managed to make a version of environmentalism and clean living appetizing to male-dominated segments of the US population that would ordinarily scoff at tree huggers and health freaks. 

But as Kennedy assumes control of America’s health agencies, these ideas will transition from being fodder for Instagram influencers to the public policy of the United States. 

MAHA’s opacity is the heart of its appeal

MAHA is clear about its enemies: the corporate, industrial, and agricultural sectors that Kennedy says are corrupting American bodies, land, and government. 

It’s a lot less clear about how it plans to take those enemies down. 

That lack of clarity is not an accident. In a movement that vilifies experts and political elites, having a plan is suspect — perhaps, proof that you’re one of “them.” But having big ideas and just “a concept of a plan?” That’s inspired, baby.

Being fuzzy on the specifics also makes it much easier to recruit fans: You can support Kennedy without dwelling on how following through on one of your priorities might endanger other causes you hold dear. Love organic food, but don’t want to think too much about farmers going out of business, or bare supermarket shelves? Psyched to crack down on Big Pharma’s abuses without having to consider how cutting off supposedly spendthrift infectious disease researchers could lead to your loved one dying of an untreatable illness? MAHA’s got a cause — and the shirt — for you. 

The movement does feature some good ideas: Everybody’s in favor of eliminating government corruption; everybody wants clean air, water, and food. 

But some of MAHA’s worst ideas are in what it leaves unsaid. Who defines what toxins are, and what do we do if there are big disagreements about that definition? If we get Big Pharma’s influence out of the drug safety and approval process, what would be the costs of an alternate system for ensuring we have medicines we can trust?

MAHA’s lack of specifics might make it more popular — it is akin to “Better ingredients, better pizza, Papa John’s,” as one commentator quipped. But it also makes it wildly unclear how much Kennedy will actually try to move his good ideas forward, and how many of his bad ideas might become priorities instead.

It all makes sense — if you don’t think about it too much.