"I don't want to be told how many calories are in my Big Mac meal or my quarter pounder meal. I don't want the government telling me that I can't put salt on my food," Sean Hannity declared on Fox News in 2010. "I like junk food. I like McDonald's. I like Wendy's. I like Burger King. I love Kentucky Fried Chicken."

This was a common sentiment for conservatives of the era, a time when many on the right viewed attempts to promote health as left-wing and therefore suspect. Some of this Republican pushback was rooted in righteous opposition to intrusions on the free market and consumer choice, as when Democrats attempted to impose sin taxes on sodas or limit the size of sugary drinks stores could sell. But too often, it seemed more like oppositional defiance disorder.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, for example, conservatives spent multiple news cycles mocking Barack Obama's alleged arugula consumption. After her defeat, Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential hopeful, handed out sugar cookies at an elementary school and drank from a Big Gulp soda cup onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Republicans repeatedly mocked first lady Michelle Obama's healthy living campaign, Let's Move!, even when it proposed no mandates. The first lady's 2011 comment that babies "who are breast-fed longer have a lower tendency to be obese" unleashed a torrent of criticism, with right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin calling her "Big Mother." Rep. Michele Bachmann (R–Minn.) derided an IRS announcement that people could deduct the cost of breast pumps as "the new definition of a nanny state."

Flash forward to 2025. Now wellness consciousness is flourishing anew—on the right.

A Republican president is complaining about "the industrial food complex." State GOP lawmakers are leading the push to ban "toxic chemicals" in school lunches. "Food babe" Vani Hari—a delegate at Democrats' 2012 convention—attended a meeting at the White House. Rank-and-file Republicans rave against seed oils on social media. Questioning Big Pharma may well get you labeled right-wing.

Sounding suspiciously like Michelle Obama, Republican West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey recently introduced a new statewide health initiative that includes pillars such as "move your body, change your life" and a pledge to clean up school lunches. Not only did President Donald Trump appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a public health activist with long ties to the Democratic Party—to run the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), but Hannity interviewed Kennedy about how modern foods are acting as "poison," a word Kennedy has also used to describe sugar more generally.

The days of Republicans defending Big Macs and Big Gulps are over. The right has entered its MAHA era—a Kennedy riff on Trump's Make America Great Again acronym that demands we Make America Healthy Again.

The MAHA agenda is diverse and sometimes contradictory. It's tied together by an outsider's sensibility that questions traditional credentialed health experts and promotes a DIY approach to personal health. It encompasses everything from fighting childhood obesity to studying the alleged links between vaccines and autism.

Removing soda from food stamp benefits, taking psychedelics for depression, fostering early diagnoses, promoting raw milk, banning certain food dyes, and cleaning up "nuclear waste and toxins" have all been described as MAHA. So have scrutinizing farm subsidies, rejecting the fluoridation of water, ditching plastic containers, eschewing "ultra processed foods," building better infant formula, and investigating Kellogg's for calling its cereal "healthy."

Some of those issues—raw milk, welfare reform—might have fit right in with the GOP agenda of 2014, or 2004, or 1980. But others are ideas most associated with the likes of hippie health-store shoppers, colloidal silver–swilling yoginis, doula-promoting co-op moms, and big business–bashing Green voters—in other words, crunchy-left types traditionally more at home among Democrats than Republicans.

"The age of Big Gulp conservatism is over," says Breitbart writer John Carney. "Now we're into the protein- and blueberry-maxxing age." And Carney—who jokingly calls yogurt with pomegranate seeds and blueberries his "neofascist breakfast"—thinks this is great. "I'd rather be on the side that's healthy," he says.

This isn't just a story about MAGA going health nut; a lot of health nuts went MAGA too, partly as a rejection of the Democratic Party's centralized public health dogmas, especially during the pandemic. The story of how we got here involves fertility fears and lentil wars, dietary science and social justice, losing our religion and gaining Obamacare. Perhaps most of all it involves COVID-19.

MAHA can be at least partially understood as a populist response to expert failures and a rejection of top-down control when it comes to public and individual health. But it's also built on unfounded suspicions—an all-purpose skepticism that sometimes extends to actions proven to be beneficial—along with a lack of perspective about relative risk. Its relationship with Kennedy, who has a long history of pushing dubious health ideas and is now America's top health bureaucrat, fits uncomfortably with both the movement's DIY ethos and its claims to provide a better path to healthy living.

Where it's going remains unclear. Toward dismantling dangerous health orthodoxies, or toward creating new ones? Toward more medical and food freedom, or toward more government control—this time with more saturated fat?

Right-Wing Hippies

In 2002, the right-wing pundit Rod Dreher started writing about "crunchy cons," a cohort that combined conservative politics and traditionalist sensibilities with a penchant for organic vegetables, composting, and free-range livestock. Crunchy cons rejected the idea that "suburban architecture, lousy food, chain restaurants, bad beer, and scorn for the arts" were necessarily part of the conservative project, Dreher wrote. That crunchiness had a long lineage: As far back as the 1970s, groups like the John Birch Society were promoting alternative medicine.

So the conservative-hippie convergence isn't new. But today's MAHAcons have gone far beyond the niche that Dreher observed a few decades ago. Now mainstream Republican politicians and pundits are on board. Kennedy, who presides over HHS' vast budget and sprawling bureaucracy, is their avatar.

He's not exactly who you'd expect as a right-wing leader. Kennedy spent most of his career as an environmental lawyer, suing private and public entities over pollution. President Barack Obama reportedly considered him to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. But like many of the people Dreher wrote about, Kennedy is deeply suspicious of industrially processed food, pharmaceutical corporations, and the threat of supposedly dangerous toxins in modern products of all kinds. Over the years, he started to become known for his conspiracy theories and warnings about vaccines.

Until recently, he seemed content to fight his fights through the courts and public opinion. That changed in 2023, when Kennedy announced his bid for the presidency, first as a Democrat and then as an independent. In summer 2024, Kennedy suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump.

In his first months atop HHS, Kennedy presided over thousands of cuts to the agency's work force and toured the country to tout the MAHA message. Influenced by him, Republican states have been seeking permission to remove soda from the list of things that can be purchased with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits (a.k.a. food stamps), and reconsidering school lunches. "I urge every governor to champion legislation that bans ultraprocessed foods and dyes in public schools, and submit a waiver to the [Department of Agriculture] to remove soda from SNAP," Kennedy said in April.

But Kennedy is a cultural figure as much as he is a bureaucrat—a movement figurehead whose name has become a marketable meme. In February, the diner chain Steak 'n Shake promised that by March 1, fries at all locations would "be RFK'd!" It followed up on the promise in April, announcing that its french fries would henceforth be cooked in "100% all-natural beef tallow" rather than the seed oils that are among Kennedy's biggest targets.

Kennedy isn't the only alt-wellness figure with Trump's ear. In May, Trump nominated for surgeon general Casey Means, a functional medicine doctor who co-founded the DIY-focused health tracking company Levels and co-wrote—with brother and MAHA influencer Calley Means—Good Energy, about unhealthy lifestyles leading to mitochondrial problems that fuel chronic disease.

The change in the way the right talks about these issues seems like it "happened overnight, and it happened without a mea culpa, without an apology. It's the craziest thing," says Robb Wolf, a biochemist and best-selling health writer who co-founded the electrolyte drink company LMNT. "I think there was this collective realization by a bunch of people on the right like, 'OK, the left is crazy on food'"—and with Kennedy, "there's an opportunity to stick it to the left."

The Left's Lentil Wars

One reason MAHA made inroads in a space once dominated by the left is because the left became both too strident and too compromised to hold onto the space.

Consider what happened to the "Slow Food" or "Real Food" movement. A central figure was author Michael Pollan, whose maxim was "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." Unified by "the recognition that industrial food production is in need of reform," the movement, Pollan wrote in 2010, was also "about community, identity, pleasure, and, most notably, about carving out a new social and economic space removed from the influence of big corporations on the one side and government on the other."

The movement was left-leaning—most associated with coastal foodies and urban hipsters—but it crossed partisan boundaries. "More and more, the concept of returning to traditional foodways is pulling people in," noted The Washington Post in a 2008 article about the Weston A. Price Foundation, a nutrition nonprofit preaching "unorthodox ideas" about healthy foods. "New members include the expected 'back to the land' types, for whom the foundation's message provides yet another reason to support small organic farms, and those who oppose the government's attempt to limit the availability of foods such as raw milk."

The food movement wasn't without its flaws. "There was built into the food movement this nostalgia from when mom made things from scratch," says Phoebe Maltz Bovy, the Canada-based author of The Perils of "Privilege." And there was a "purity politics" to it—an obsession with food provenance and transparency that may not have been racist but "wasn't trying very hard not to be." The idea, she says, was that "if you were going to a Chinese restaurant, you should go to the one run by the white guy in the flannel shirt because he's into farms and sustainability."

But as the Great Awokening swept the left and Democrats became more stringently identitarian, reasonable criticism gave way to overcorrection. Concerns about privilege and cultural appropriation became a purity politics of their own. The white cookbook author and food columnist Alison Roman was excoriated for not sufficiently crediting ethnic influences in a chickpea stew recipe. There were earnest conversations about whether it's OK to cook "other people's food," meaning cuisine from a foreign culture or most associated with a race other than one's own.

Commenters on the feminist blog Jezebel "had these wars about lentils," says Maltz Bovy. Some would offer lentils as proof that healthy home cooking needn't be expensive. Others would scoff that not everyone has access to stores with lentils, time to cook lentils, or even a kitchen to cook them in.

The food movement also ran up against the body positivity and fat acceptance movements. Theoretically, these movements shouldn't be at odds. But promoting "real food" was often talked about as a way to counter obesity—and that could be cast as fat shaming.

"Telling people that they can be healthy at any size is just a lie," says Wolf. As the left embraced the idea, he adds, it has seriously limited the ways progressive circles can talk about food. "That locavore, organic food scene used to be so much a part of the center-left, and, man, you'll get hung out to dry talking about that stuff these days," he says. Touting specialized diets—even for health conditions like autoimmune disorders—will yield accusations of privilege or promoting disordered eating.

Big Health

As they embraced bigger bodies, many liberals also fell in with Big Pharma and Big Medicine, thanks in large part to Barack Obama's signature law: the Affordable Care Act of 2010. Obama-care wed the Democrats to a very particular kind of thinking about health, one intimately tied to insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and corporate health care systems.

The relationship between those businesses and the government is often antagonistic, with politicians forcing private companies to cover more and more medicines and services or to cap out-of-pocket costs for certain drugs. But it seems to leave room for only two goals: insuring more people and mandating what insurance must cover. There's little room for proactive wellness efforts, nontraditional care, or imagining alternatives to a system that Americans of all stripes increasingly distrust.

For decades, NORC at the University of Chicago has been asking people how much confidence they have in "the people running" medicine. In the mid 1970s, most people—between 54 percent and 61 percent—had a lot of confidence. In 2021, just 38 percent of surveyed Americans did.

For most of this span, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to have confidence, even as trust on both sides declined. In the early 2010s, Republicans dropped below Democrats on this question for the first time. Answers really diverged around 2017, as GOP confidence continued to drop and Democrats' confidence spiked.

Rising Republican populism brought with it a fresh skepticism of corporate power, fueled by the perception that corporations had joined with the extreme left. "We've seen a flip in who considers themselves the establishment," says Carney. "The left used to very much think of themselves as antiestablishment, and they were very suspicious of the medical establishment and they liked alternative medicine and homegrown health remedies. And that flipped. Maybe it originally started with Obama-care, but it definitely picked up speed during the COVID lockdowns." Meanwhile, "the right has gone the other way, where they see themselves as the antiestablishment."

The Democratization of Gurus

Another early radicalizing development—and not just among conservatives—was how much nutrition and health institutions got wrong about fat and cholesterol. After decades of demonization of eggs, butter, and fats, the message that this push was misguided—and may, indeed, have contributed to health issues—gained ground with the popularization of the Atkins, paleo, and keto diets.

"People are far more aware today of the dangers of excessive carbohydrates and seed oils, the healthfulness of saturated fats and a higher-fat diet generally, as well as the role that the ketogenic diet can play in reversing chronic diseases," says Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, and founder of The Nutrition Coalition.

She credits this in part to a grassroots movement spurred by observable positive effects in people who eschewed conventional dietary advice. "As people get healthier by eating a diet that is nearly the direct opposite from what the government recommends, they've come to realize that the government, top experts, and the media have not been providing reliable information on diet and health," Teicholz says.

Independent media, powered by new technology, have filled that gap. Today there is a huge heterodox digital media ecosystem—podcasts, YouTube videos, social media, Substack newsletters—capable of raising the profile of crunchy cons, New Agers, biohackers, gym bros, crystal girlies, carnivore dieters, and various alternative wellness types.

This has led to more mingling between worlds that were less likely to intersect in earlier eras—homeschooling rural Christian moms and big-city birth freedom advocates bonding over their shared skepticism around vaccines, lefty tech types aligning with the manosphere over nootropics.

"Everyone is their own medical adviser these days, so it's not surprising how political things have become or that the loudest voices are the ones being heard," says Susan Allport, author of The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed From the Western Diet and What We Can Do to Replace Them.

As better and cheaper technology allowed for more direct-to-consumer health tests and services, the means to take prevention and wellness into one's own hands also opened up demand for health information, advice, and encouragement. Those using new communications tools have been all too happy to supply it, for better or worse. Call it the democratization of gurus. Health influencers proliferated, catering to every possible lifestyle niche and wellness concern. And within that health influencer space, there has been a proliferation of right-wing personalities taking up new careers.

Men who in decades past promoted "pickup artistry" and men's rights have found new relevance hawking routines to optimize male health and virility. Women interested in promoting "traditional" femininity and ideas typically associated with social and religious conservatives could find broader audiences focusing on fertility maximizing, the benefits of breastfeeding, or the joys of natural living. Critics of promiscuity could minimize the movement's moralism and focus on birth control's unwelcome side effects.

At a time when traditional religiosity has been in decline and the usual milestones of adulthood are being delayed or discarded for many, crunchy MAHA subcultures started serving as new vectors of connection and meaning. Protein-maxxing health bros, raw milk–drinking trad wives, toxin-fearing food babes, vaccine-critical Insta moms, tallow-promoting beauty vloggers, and all sorts of other body-as-temple types sell new solutions, provide new scapegoats, and offer conservatives, especially young ones, new ideas about what it means to live virtuously.

The Pandemic Shift

The COVID era only accelerated these countercultural movements, technological trends, and political realignments that were percolating in the years leading up to it.

Democrats grew more tied to health institutions and public health authorities. The sanctimonious set online found a new avenue for expressing moral superiority. Influencers gained more attention and power as people were stuck at home, seeking both escapism and new avatars of their discontent. Republicans grew more skeptical of government action around health and science, as public health bodies and government authorities closed schools and churches and gyms, made seemingly arbitrary decisions around what could be open, promoted vaccine mandates, and made missteps and misrepresentations around masks and the virus's origins.

Of course, it wasn't just Republicans. It was all sorts of parents of school-age children, especially moms. It was yoga instructors and gym owners and anyone in the business of bodies. It was anyone already given to distrust the medical establishment or fear a growing surveillance state. A lot of people who thought of themselves as liberals or progressives suddenly found themselves making common cause with conservatives.

Kiley Holliday, a yoga teacher and movement therapist based in San Francisco and New York, saw many people in her world become disillusioned with Democrats during the pandemic. "The Democratic Party didn't stand for bodily autonomy in the strictest sense anymore, and people could see that shift," she says. Combined with the closure of so many fitness businesses, this angered a lot of people in the industry who Holliday would have described as "leftists, or at least the Joe Rogan left, the gym bros that were into Bernie." Their livelihoods were wrecked, and they thought the authorities were "compelling people to be sedentary."

But when those in the wellness world spoke up, Holliday says, they got dismissed as Trump supporters. Some of them just embraced it: "OK, if that makes me a right-winger, I guess I'll just be a right-winger."

Holliday still considers herself a leftist, if a heterodox one, and she worries about what recent shifts mean for her side. "I grew up in California, raised by a crystal-swinging, bohemian, kundalini-practicing mom, and all of these things I grew up with—the critique of Big Food, the critique of Big Pharma—are now seen as right-wing. That's a huge loss for the left."

Many of the new alliances and understandings forged during the pandemic have far outlasted it.

The pandemic was "formative…in most people's experience of public health as an entity," says journalist James Hamblin, author of Clean: The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less. "How people felt about the pandemic and the response to it led people to feel strongly about science and public health, in ways that they might not have otherwise had strong feelings about."

For some on the left, it served as a gateway to right-wing influencers, media, or politicians—for some on the right, as a gateway to broader skepticism about public health advice and dietary guidelines.

"Conservatives were extremely trusting of food and pharma in the United States," says Alex Clark, host of Culture Apothecary, a podcast from the conservative group Turning Point USA. For her and many others, a pandemic-inspired distrust "​​of the medical industrial complex" led to "an aha moment" about diet and health more generally. "We already had a distrust of the government," she says, "so when we thought about it, it wasn't that big of a leap."

Trad Wives and MAHA Moms

That aha moment came at a time when there wasn't much to do but sit around and stew online. Stew—and fantasize.

Enter the trad wives.

Every generation seems to go through a rural romanticism era. The boomers had their hippie communes and lesbian separatist enclaves. In late-'00s Brooklyn, millennials dreamed of running upstate or out west to farms. A few actually did, while others took to farming on city rooftops and beekeeping in their backyards. Working outdoors and slow cooking and the DIY ethos were seen as an antidote to desk jobs, email, recession, anomie. It was all distinctly hipster-coded, which is to say left-leaning, yet there was nothing particularly left about it, except for the people who happened to be involved.

During COVID, farm fantasies and domestic idylls, mediated through Instagram and TikTok, tended to take on a conservative valence, heavy with photogenic Mormon families. A lot of the activities (farming, gardening, slow cooking) and aesthetics (mason jars, wood beams) were identical to those of the hipsters and slow foodies of a decade or so earlier. So, too, were many motives: environmental sustainability, frustration with modern living and office work. But this time there were a lot more kids around, and a lot more captions touting the joys of motherhood and "traditional" femininity.

It was content imbued, subtly or overtly, with a particular sort of meaning. To get sucked into it was to encounter not just pretty kitchens and home-butchered meat but messages about fertility, naturalness, women's place as keepers of home and health. If the idealized housewife of yore was a primped up suburban mom keen to show off cutesy cupcakes and Campbell's soup casseroles, the new ideal—the MAHA ideal—wore natural linen dresses and worried about BPA and phthalates. She's conservative, but not always obviously so at first glance, and not in a way that conservatives of decades past might recognize.

Indeed, the MAHA movement stems in part from dissatisfaction with tired left/right categories.

You can see that frustration at play in the work of wellness gurus like Nicole Daedone, co-founder of the orgasmic meditation company OneTaste and a major player in alternative wellness and sexual health circles. Daedone has written a "Purple Manifesto" detailing the ways she and many others grew disillusioned with Democrats. In it, she argues that there is "a coalition forming…the marriage of red and blue with a commitment to the shared benefit of all, even those we find challenging."

You can see it in the frustration of health-conscious women—some now accepting the "MAHA Moms" label, some being lumped in simply because they're concerned about things like food dyes—who don't understand how these issues got so politically charged. Worry about things like food dyes is "not political," one mom of three told Reason, "and it seems deranged that so much of the country is so set on telling us that it is."

When many of them look at the new health-conscious right, it's not the "right" part that matters. They're for whoever promises to make fertility treatments less expensive and grocery shopping less fraught, to validate their fears about microplastics and take autoimmune conditions seriously.

But while their concerns may not stem from politics or partisan identification, these concerns are being harnessed into a very political movement, one with major influence and power in the Trump administration.

Arbiters of Good?

The MAHA movement could do some good. If it does nothing but reverse the Republican habit of equating unhealthy diets with patriotism, anti-elitism, and masculinity, it will have done something valuable by making more space for people on the right to care about their personal health. Even better if it helps eliminate farm subsidies and burdensome regulations.

But MAHA has hitched itself to a star figure with a long history of promoting dubious and unreliable health claims. While the movement sometimes characterizes itself as a decentralized, DIY project, its most visible figure is a politician turned bureaucrat who wields tremendous coercive power.

Kennedy claims he's not against vaccines. But he chaired Children's Health Defense, a leading anti-vax group. That organization mixes worthy ideals, such as "health freedom," with toxic doses of misinformation—most prominently, the idea that vaccines are responsible for rising autism diagnoses. Before his recent political turn, Kennedy called autism a "holocaust" and accused federal officials of "work[ing] with the pharmaceutical industry to gin up" evidence that exculpates vaccines. He has continued to call autism a "preventable disease" with environmental causes, pledging in April that HHS would "look at all potential culprits" for this "epidemic" and rejecting the idea that the increase in cases stems from expanded diagnostic criteria and improved diagnoses. And HHS hired as a data analyst David Geier, who, according to The New York Times, "has published numerous articles in the medical literature attempting to tie mercury in vaccines to autism." Yes, in the midst of a measles outbreak that has caused two children's deaths, Kennedy posted, "The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine." But Kennedy has also promoted dubious alternative measles therapies. Some fear Kennedy's power and influence could contribute to burgeoning rates of vaccine hesitancy, with dire consequences.

Kennedy's controversies extend beyond vaccines. He has also crusaded against phones in schools by invoking discredited theories about cellphones causing cancer and floated unlikely ideas about endocrine-disrupting chemicals causing gender dysphoria.

Some nutrition experts—including Allport, who is skeptical of mainstream dietary wisdom around fats—worry that Kennedy unfairly tars all seed oils as equally unhealthy or overstates the positive health case for beef tallow. Maybe those RFK fries aren't so healthy after all?

There's a real risk that Kennedy will do exactly what he's long accused public health officials of doing—using questionable or unsettled science to promote policies that are harmful or unnecessary.

MAHA activists and their avatars in Washington sometimes can't seem to decide between a libertarian approach, which would loosen the government's grasp on matters of medicine, food, and wellness, and a more top-down approach that uses their new power to get what they want, ostensibly for the greater good.

Kennedy has said he is open to increasing liberty around psychedelics and that he doesn't want to take away people's choices when it comes to doughnuts and sodas. But Kennedy has also tried to influence corporate behavior through jawboning. In March, The New York Times described a meeting between Kennedy and food and drink company executives, in which Kennedy reportedly "said that it was an 'urgent priority' to eliminate artificial dyes from foods and drinks sold nationwide." Was this a request from a health advocate? Or a warning from a powerful bureaucrat? The next month, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced a plan to speed up an already-in-the-works phase-out of several synthetic dyes. Announcing the move, Kennedy described it not as a ban but as an "understanding" with food companies. When a member of a Cabinet asks the companies he regulates to do something, one suspects their compliance is not entirely voluntary.

Kennedy also seems to envision an expanded role for the FDA, telling CBS in April that the agency "needs to start regulating food again." HHS also recently started mulling a rule to keep companies from self-affirming new ingredients as safe.

To do the most good, MAHA must resist the urge to advance its goals through statist means. But is there political will to resist?

Even Wolf, who generally thinks "a market-based, non-interventionist approach" is the way to go, suggests that market failures might make limiting certain ingredients in foods a reasonable place for intervention. "I'm a little more open to things like food colorings getting some legislation," he says, though he also worries that lawmakers won't make such decisions informed by science, or that they could be too easily influenced by business interests.

Food dyes aside, there seems to be less interest among MAHA proponents in the sorts of junk food taxes and Big Gulp bans that liberals advocated in decades past. "I don't think conservatives are becoming health nannies. I don't think they want to force this on people," says Carney. "Generally it's a pretty libertarian or individualistic moment, people deciding they should make their own health decisions."

If the official health nannies do take a hands-off approach, we will end up left with the invisible hands of health influencers, wellness entrepreneurs, and countless individuals making decisions on their own.

Critics worry that this would be a dangerous world of unregulated, uncredentialed health hucksterism. Yet after decades of public health expert failures and ever-increasing government control over health, nutrition, and the communication around it, a freer environment could be just what we need.

At its best, which is not always what it achieves, the MAHA movement is about giving up on the idea that the government always knows best when it comes to our wellness. It's a reaction to negligence, error, arrogance, and overreach on the part of health experts and government authorities.

But thanks to Trump and Kennedy, that movement has now amassed considerable political power—power to shape or flatly determine decisions on everything from vaccines to pharmaceuticals to food labels for hundreds of millions of Americans. The temptation to wield that power will be hard to resist. Neofascist breakfast aside, Carney says, "I'm not dreaming of imposing blueberries on everybody else." The question is whether politically powerful figures like Trump and Kennedy agree.