I created a wellness scam to prove MAHA is full of it
Health freedom is a long con
Welcome to a Tuesday night edition of Progress Report.
Tonight, I’m excited to finally present my deep dive on the rise of MAHA, the right-wing “health freedom” movement, and the money quietly powering it all. So without further ado…
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Donald Trump’s re-election prompted no shortage of existential despair about the American public’s memory and judgment, but it wasn’t exactly a shock or totally bewildering that he ended up back in the White House. More flummoxing, I think, is the fact that just four years after the emergence of Covid-19, a modern bubonic plague that remade society and killed more than a million Americans, the world’s most famous anti-vaxer is running the nation’s healthcare system.
Worse, not only is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sitting atop the Department of Health and Human Services, he’s the leader of his own movement, his pseudoscientific croaks followed like gospel by a broad cross-section of Americans, MAGA and beyond.
As closely as I follow politics — it’s literally my job — the pervasiveness of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement initially took me by surprise. It seemed that suddenly, there were influencers selling worthless powders and pills with false promises, freaks and scammers were getting their own streaming series, and my french fries were supposed to be cooked in beef drippings.
How the hell did this happen? The pandemic provided the impetus for the modern “health freedom” movement, but the fusion of junk science and libertarianism was the product of a long-running campaign by far-right organizations, corporate special interests, and savvy marketers.
The video above is my newest piece for More Perfect Union and the product of months deep research, interviews, reporting, and producing. I spoke with experts, doctors, and journalists to tell the story of what really caused this breakdown in public health. And to make a point about the lax FDA laws that have enabled this catastrophe, I tricked a big wellness company into designing and producing a scam supplement, then got right-wing influencers and podcasters to promote it.
The process was disturbingly frictionless, though I’m loathe to thank the alternative medicine industry, which spends millions of dollars per year to fight new regulations and even more money to spread disinformation and stoke distrust in science.
For more information on Deep State Detox, click over to its official website. I’m not actually selling the stuff, though we’ve had several inquiries from people who didn’t seem to pick up on the point we were making. The right-wing branding matches the politics of the moment as well as the paranoid worldview of the forerunners of this movement.
It began with the John Birch Society, which carried the flag early on for health freedom. The fringe-right group advocated heavily for the efficacy of apricot pits as a cure for cancer, which its members used a vehicle for their libertarian ideology. Around the time of the fight over laetrile, the apricot pit swill, a number of Birchers were outed as the financial benefactors of a group called Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy.
“This was part of a broader political effort to push the government out of all spheres of public life, which is an appealing argument if you're somebody who's trying to sell a product that's not safe for the public,” Matt Hongoltz-Hetling, the Pulitzer-nominated author of If It Sounds Like A Quack… told me in May.
Fittingly, the dietary supplement and alternative medicine industry cheered when RFK Jr. was nominated for HHS. While he’s systematically throttling medical research and expert advice panels, he’s likely to cut regulations on the unproven stuff, which should also benefit many of his friends.
Institutional stakeholders in our for-profit healthcare system also deserve some of the blame: experiencing its failures, from inaccessible doctors and nightmare bureaucracy to shabby care and crushing debt, has exhausted generations of Americans. Accordingly, wellness products, a few click as away on Instagram, offer a return to autonomy and a semblance of control over one’s health. For many people, that control equates to hope, a cycle that I understand intimately given my heart issues.
Whether they’re slaves to a stock price or operated by private equity pirates, the nation’s care facilities, pharmaceutical companies, and insurers are constantly caught prioritizing profit over patients. Why give those people the benefit of the doubt? People cheered on Luigi Mangione for a reason, and it wasn’t that he’s very handsome.
“I think the opiate crisis is a perfect example of corporate capture, where they captured decision makers at the FDA and captured doctors to publish papers that were absolutely wrong about the addictive nature of opiates, and as a consequence, thousands and thousands of people died unnecessarily,” Paul Offit, a renowned virologist and author, told me this spring.
And so RFK Jr. and his ilk are often correct when they diagnose the problems with the US healthcare system. But instead of offering real solutions, they use those problems as evidence of their deranged conspiracy theories, fortifying them enough to keep people on board. MAGA and MAHA are both built on a paranoid worldview that positions the government and deep state against renegade freedom fighters.
Public backlash to Covid safety protocols provided a perfect meeting point for medical conspiracies and conservative anti-government anger; the argument against wearing masks and social distancing is a lot more convincing when paired with the presumption that Covid isn’t real, anyway.
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Perfectly encapsulates why I, an RN, hated working in my profession at every place I was employed, with the exception of the abortion clinic where I work now, and have for the past 19 years. Caring for patients was not the problem...fighting administrations' short staffing and 'penny-pinching' was. I have always felt it should be illegal to profit from the healthcare of humans.
Love it! You should have kept the money and donated it to the most liberal causes 😂
The motivations for the grifters that profit from it are obvious, the problem is that too many fail to understand the motivations of the customers, they think it's random ignorance when it's fascism. You exercise power by telling other people what to do but also by refusing to be told what to do, no matter how dangerous what you do is for others. That explains antivax, MAHA, gun extremism, etc. as well as the correlation between voting preference and living in urban vs rural areas.