In 2020, I followed a lot of Covid-skeptical momfluencers on social media. I wanted to see how they voiced their concerns about mask-wearing and disease spread. I hoped that over time I could somehow reverse-engineer the information pathway that led some women from Covid skepticism to anti-vaccine activism and then, in some cases, to other fringe and conspiratorial beliefs. I thought if I understood their information diet, I could explain their motivations better, if only to myself.
The first thing I noticed was that some of these women — who looked like the “Christian girl autumn” meme, with wide-brimmed hats and beachy waves — tended to have a back story that led them to distrust mainstream medicine and the idea of medical expertise. They often had a scary medical problem during pregnancy or immediately postpartum and they felt unheard by their obstetrician or pediatrician, or mistreated by their hospital. That experience planted a seed of fear and suspicion. Online merchants peddling “natural” remedies and those who espouse debunked theories about the danger of vaccines were more than happy to validate their raw feelings when the medical system did not.
I have covered the anti-vaccine movement for over a decade and the political valence of vaccine skepticism has changed significantly. When I first started writing, pre-Covid, about the anti-vaccine crowd I didn’t find them to be especially associated with either the Democratic or Republican Party, though if pressed I probably would have said they were liberal-leaning hippie types. By 2020, every influencer who rose to the top of my algorithm was aggressively Republican and often a vocal supporter of Donald Trump (they seemed to pay no attention to his role in Operation Warp Speed).
I was thinking of the Covid-skeptical momfluencers when I watched a brief video advertisement for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement, which Kennedy describes as a partnership “with President Donald Trump to transform our nation’s food, fitness, air, water, soil and medicine.” The video was released this month, after Kennedy dropped out of the presidential race and his ex-staffers created the MAHA Alliance Super PAC, which is trying to persuade Kennedy’s supporters to vote for Trump.
Kennedy appears to be trying to salvage the public standing he enjoyed during his failed presidential run by circling back to the vaccine skepticism that has been central to his understanding of the way the world works — namely, as my newsroom colleague Anjali Huynh put it, “a conspiracy theory.”
The first thing that viewers can do to support his movement, Kennedy says, is buy a Make America Healthy Again hat and wear it everywhere. But Kennedy goes on to explain: “Our big priority will be to clean up the public health agencies like C.D.C., N.I.H., F.D.A., and U.S. Department of Agriculture. Those agencies have become sock puppets for the industries that they’re supposed to regulate. President Trump and I are going to replace the corrupt, industry-captured officials with honest public servants.”
It struck me that the accountability that the moms I first followed seemed to be seeking was being promised by Kennedy. He says all this and more against a backdrop of attractive white families eating salad and hiking, looking very much like the social media stars on my feed. The clip ends with an adorable towheaded preschooler holding a big stick and saying, “Make America Healthy Again!”
It would be easy to dismiss the Trump-Kennedy alliance as a mercenary one — Trump can vacuum up the small but vocal number of former Kennedy voters by appealing to their shared distrust of government, and Kennedy can get some sway over Trump’s policy if he wins. The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey thinks that Trump’s coziness with business interests and desire for deregulation is in conflict with what she calls “the crunch-ificiation of conservatism,” which yearns for European-style food regulation. “The MAGA-MAHA congruence seems tactical and temporary,” Godfrey concluded in late September.
I’m not so sure it’s temporary. On Oct. 18, The Wall Street Journal reported that “Kennedy has teamed up with Trump advisers to draft potential policies and lists of personnel,” and that “Trump has committed to considering Kennedy for any job in his administration, a person familiar with the matter said, including health and human services secretary. The post oversees more than 80,000 federal employees, a budget that tops $3 trillion and a swath of federal policy.” Dr. Robert Redfield, the head of the C.D.C. under Trump, expressed his full-throated support of Kennedy and MAHA’s mission in a Newsweek op-ed essay on Sept. 24, proposing a “Kennedy Commission…
Read More: Opinion | The Kind of Moms Who Fall for ‘Make America Healthy Again’