Hanna Goldberg is a PhD candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Donald Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, has been cast as everything from guru to sellout. But behind the fanfare lies something more familiar: a health-tech entrepreneur selling wearables and wellness with antiestablishment rhetoric.
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.