MAHA Should Be a Liberal Movement

Why have we ceded skepticism of Big Food to the right?

It’s hard to pick the very worst of Donald Trump’s cabinet picks, but RFK Jr. certainly makes any top-10 list. He’s been selected to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, despite being hostile to much of what the department actually does. He’s a self-identified “vaccine skeptic” in the sense that he refuses to accept the decades of scientific evidence showing that millions of lives saved by vaccines, and that vaccines do not cause diseases like autism or poison children with mercury. He has said that 5G may allow unsavory actors to control our behavior. He claims anti-depressants are harder to quit than heroin. He has done a lot of weird shit with animal carcasses.

Sweeping all of RFK Jr.’s views up as conspiratorial or false, though, poses nearly as big a threat as RFK Jr. himself. It threatens to further politicize human health (it will be very bad if the Trumpian right owns the idea that how you eat impacts your health). It further degrades trust in the people and institutions who claim the scientific, intellectual, and moral high ground — pushing people who aren’t conspiracy theorists over into conspiracy-land.

Some of what RFK Jr. believes is pretty squarely within the realm of “objectively true”: For example, that ultraprocessed foods are spectacularly bad for human health, causing obesity and a whole host of serious health issues, or that poisoning the environment around us poisons us, too. Some of his other beliefs are increasingly backed up by emerging science: Microplastics, for example, are probably bad for us and probably do disrupt our bodies’ natural functions, even though we don’t yet know just how bad they are, and so it probably makes sense to try to limit exposure to them (if only we had a government that would step in). And some are uncomfortable but should not be outside of the realm of reasonable debate: We really do fail to prevent health problems before they occur, too often opting instead for medications to treat preventable problems; Big Pharma really is exceptionally powerful, and while the drug industry has done tremendous good, it has also sometimes done tremendous harm; we really do seem to be an over-medicated society.

The worst possible things progressives can do in this moment are to lump all of RFK Jr.’s beliefs into a single “conspiracy” bucket; allow the right to own the conversation on health and food; or, perhaps worst of all, oppose exceedingly necessary health reforms because reactionary conservatives are suddenly signing up to MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) and too many liberals have, unfortunately, adopted a stunningly anti-science view when it comes to food and health.

One common argument on RFK Jr. is that we shouldn’t normalize him. And we shouldn’t; he is spectacularly abnormal and a spectacularly dangerous choice for the role he has been selected to fill. I’m not sure anything about RFK Jr. is anything but abnormal. He should not be HHS secretary. He is spectacularly unfit.

There are acres of difference, though, between normalizing him and meeting him with knee-jerk reaction, pinging in the opposite direction of whatever he says. There is a huge difference between normalizing him and sweeping up all of his views into a single category and deeming all of them conspiratorial or false. Going that way does the conspiracy theorist’s work for him. Because when normal people hear journalists compare RFK Jr'.’s views on vaccines to his views on ultraprocessed foods and opine that “it might be surprising that these views could be held by the future health secretary of the United States,” they may understandably think: Wait, ultraprocessed foods are obviously terrible for us; if the mainstream media is deeming that a conspiracy theory or a surprising thing to hear from a future health secretary, maybe RFK Jr. isn’t the crazy one.

A whole lot of people have come into the MAHA movement by way of Big Food skepticism, and a dawning realization that the way Americans eat is killing us. As recently as the Obama administration, this was a standard liberal belief, with Michelle Obama championing healthy school lunches and getting enormous conservative blowback. It was, back then, the right-wing position that children had an inalienable right to tater tots, while health food stores, whole-food diets, and plant-based eating were very much coded liberal, elitist, or at least suspiciously Californian.

But in the last decade, there’s been a strange shift in lefty-land.