What started out as a movement to oppose Covid shot mandates has grown into a full-blown movement to restore health and medical autonomy to all Americans. In short, “Make America Healthy Again.”
Voters from both sides of the political aisle have found common ground in resisting everything from mandated childhood vaccination schedules to food additives. Indeed “MAHA” seems to pull participants from the natural remedy-seeking, tree-hugging, “crunchy granola moms” contingency typically associated with the left as well as the “don’t tread on me” types often identified as right-leaning.
That’s because food and drug safety is not exclusively a left or right issue. Poor health and addiction, whether it be to food or drugs, don’t care what kind of political garb one wears. Yet leave it to Democrat corporate media to tag health unity as “fringe” and “Republican.”
Media Backlash to MAHA
Just read how one recent New York Times article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg began: “Resistance to public health, relegated to the fringes of the American right and left before Covid vaccine mandates became a cultural flashpoint and a symbol of government overreach, now has a firm foothold in Republican politics — and a chance to wield real power in Washington.”
People speaking up against what many like to call America’s “sick care system” — referring to the endless cycle of poor nutrition, disease, and pharmaceuticals — are not on the fringe. They include a large swath of everyday Americans who are tired of being lied to and misled by an elite cohort of bureaucratic “experts” who promulgate a singular narrative with no room for debate, not unlike other issues that have been barred from open and honest discussions by Big Tech and corrupt media.
But like transgenderism, funding for foreign wars, and immigration, the only party giving this large faction of concerned citizens a platform to air their concerns seems to be the new, more populist-oriented Republican Party.
In September, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., hosted a roundtable discussion entitled “American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion” in which top medical experts and health influencers, such as Dr. Marty Makary and Jillian Michaels, testified on the state of our nation’s well-being. (Hint: It’s not good.)
The response from left-captured media outlets was strong and swift. The day after the roundtable discussion, columnist Elaine Godfrey of The Atlantic titled the event a “Woo Woo Caucus” with the words “health and nutrition” in quotes, as if they are figments of the imagination.
A board-certified oncology and gastrointestinal laparoscopic surgical doctor from Johns Hopkins doesn’t really strike me as woo-woo. Nor does wanting to know more about what’s in our medicine or food supply.
Godfrey’s article was reminiscent of the propaganda press’s Covid reporting, which vilified curious people who wanted to know more about the shots before injecting their bodies with foreign substances, commenting that the roundtable “had a very do-your-own-research vibe.”
The irony is that leftists and the Democrat Party used to embrace those who promoted “doing research” into alternative health options and woo-woo healing modalities such as herbal remedies, acupuncture, and utilizing food and nutrition as medicine. After all, most of these health concepts flourished in the bluest state, which is responsible for everything woo-woo: California. Many who offered comments at Johnson’s panel either live in or spent much of their professional lives in California.
Somewhere along the way, the left — along with California — lost its way. Now it embraces bureaucratic alliances with powerful private entities that used to be a hallmark of the right. The health movement is emblematic of the larger swell of people who oppose the corporate capture of executive branch agencies and an authoritarian media that rejects opposition and diversity of thought and opinion.
Donald Trump and RFK Jr. may be the current faces of this new Republican force, but newly formed health PACs ensure the momentum they have garnered will live well beyond November.
Carrying the Torch
At least two PACs have popped up to mobilize the unified MAGA-MAHA force. One recently announced PAC, the MAHA Alliance, is explicit about its goal to deliver Donald Trump a victory in November, which in turn would give a prominent seat at the table to RFK Jr., who represents more of the independent vote.
The other PAC simply identifies itself as Make America Healthy Again and aims to “dismantle the corporate stranglehold on our government agencies that has led to widespread chronic disease, environmental degradation, and rampant public distrust.”
“The idea of what political party you were before never crossed our minds,” Jeff Hutt, a former Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign staffer and now the advocacy and outreach director for the MAHA PAC, told me. “It was this menagerie of the populist political spectrum. It was great to see people who maybe in the past had been divided into team red and team blue — now they were just on team America.”
Hutt’s comments support the idea that the upcoming election is centered less around the traditional dividing line of Republicans versus Democrats. The battle is between those who oppose a country ruled by a federal bureaucracy of biased “experts” and those who want to maintain control of them for their own political and financial gain. This includes some of the biggest agencies that dictate health and nutrition in the country such as the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Agriculture.
“The idea of a political movement that rejects expertise and prioritizes personal choice in an epidemic is deeply troubling to public health experts, who worry that public health powers will be curtailed if Mr. Trump wins in November,” wrote Stolberg in The New York Times.
But the new health movement doesn’t reject expertise. It rejects one-sided health opinion and the demonization of well-credentialed experts who don’t adhere to the Democrat regime’s official narrative. These include experts such as Dr. Casey Means, a Stanford-trained head and neck surgeon; Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the most prolific public health experts with more than 1,000 published peer-reviewed papers and 660 citations in the National Library of Medicine; and Dr. Robert Redfield, former head of the CDC.
The New York Times is right about one thing: This new coordinated effort to overhaul how Americans approach health does have a firm foothold in Republican politics and a chance to wield real power in Washington. And the country will be better off for it.
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