Health Paranoia and the Politics of MAHA
The Make America Healthy Again movement reflects legitimate anxieties about illness, modernity, and the long-term effects of capitalist development. But its response — self-optimization and deregulation — deflects that fear rather than challenging its cause.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr attends a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, on February 26, 2025. (Al Drago / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The first few weeks of Donald J. Trump’s second term in office have provided no shortage of weirdness, but the choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr as secretary of health and human services was high on the list. Part of this strangeness stems from Kennedy himself — his descent from American royalty, his erratic and ever-shifting politics, his bizarre entanglements with the animal kingdom. He and Trump make for strange bedfellows, at least on the surface: one is a monomaniacal “health” crusader, the other a McDonald’s fanatic. Their contrast was starkly illustrated last year when Kennedy endured a Trump Force One hazing ritual.
The reality, of course, is that Kennedy’s amorphous libertarianism and interest in deregulation are right at home in the second Trump administration. He wasted no time applying the Department of Government Efficiency playbook to his new domain, reportedly firing 10 percent of the Center for Disease Control’s workforce and 1,500 employees at the National Institute of Health upon taking office. During his Senate confirmation hearings, Kennedy suggested replacing human nurses with artificial intelligence and made clear that his concern for Americans’ health does not extend to the right to access health care. Moreover, Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) program taps into a pervasive and obsessive preoccupation with health and environmental risks that has assumed a distinctly right-wing political character.
From Juice Cleanses to Collapse Prep
One faction within the MAHA movement is preoccupied with the imperiled human body — believing, not unreasonably, that Big Pharma’s synthetic quick fixes, industrial diets, environmental toxins, and sedentary lifestyles have systematically degraded human health. In response, they pursue a regimen of optimization and life extension through diet hacks, nootropics, exercise regimens, and high-tech treatments. These are the MAHA enthusiasts who instantly recognized the mysterious blue liquid RFK Jr was captured dosing himself with on a plane (methylene blue, for his mitochondria). Neophytes may venture down this path in search of simple health and lifestyle advice but find themselves drawn into a panicked internet demiworld, where some become consumed by obsessive, purity-focused diets and supplement regimens. Small-time disaster capitalists exploit those anxieties with entrepreneurial wellness ventures. While these anxieties do foster a sense of community, it is one largely mediated through online forums and subreddits, where endless discussion of supplement stacks, elimination diets, and off-label pharmaceutical use serve to reinforce shared fixations rather than deeper social or political engagement.
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