MAHA Moms Built a Movement. MAGA Bros Have Taken It Over

MAHA Moms Built a Movement. MAGA Bros Have Taken It Over Forget regulating food—manly MAHA cares about meat, testosterone, and erectile disfunction This article was produced in collaboration with Mother Jones. It may not be reproduced without express permission from FERN. If you are interested in republishing or reposting this article, please contact [email protected]. This this past February, as Super Bowl viewers chowed down on Buffalo wings and loaded nachos, they found themselves unexpectedly admonished. On their TV screens, in a black-and-white close-up, was former heavyweight champion and convicted rapist Mike Tyson, ripping his teeth through a carrot as though it were Evander Holyfield’s ear. “We’re the most powerful country in the world,” Tyson said. “And we have the most obese, fudgy people.” As he tore into an apple, white block script was superimposed over his face: “Processed Food Kills. Eat Real Food.” The ad directed viewers to RealFood.gov, a website laying out the new food pyramid, a pet project of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that literally flipped the previous model on its head: Now, whole grains are at the pointy bottom and protein, dairy, and fats get top billing. The ad was sponsored by the nonprofit MAHA Center, whose leader, publisher Tony Lyons, also co-founded MAHA pac. And it signaled a telling shift. This wasn’t your mother’s Make America Healthy Again (or Gwyneth Paltrow’s, for that matter). This was manly MAHA. Much attention has been paid to the MAHA moms, and rightly so. Women have powered the movement, evangelizing for whole foods and raw milk on Instagram, urging President Donald Trump to appoint Kennedy to lead HHS, and protesting against food additives and agricultural chemicals, in particular glyphosate, found in the weed killer Roundup. But it’s the movement’s men who have ascended to the highest levels of power. RFK Jr. is the most prominent, but the list also includes Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is running the National Institutes of Health; and Dr. Marty Makary, who was commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration until he resigned earlier this year. And it’s not just in government. Health entrepreneur turned MAHA stalwart Calley Means is the man who suggested that Kennedy forge an alliance with Trump and remains an influential adviser to Kennedy at HHS. His sister, Casey, meanwhile, was a vaccine-skeptical doctor nominated for surgeon general—only to watch her prospects die in the Senate. With the midterm elections approaching and MAHA voters increasingly dissatisfied with Trump, it’s worth asking: How exactly did a cause powered by women turn into one run by men? And will the women who built the MAHA movement ever revolt? MAHA is often characterized by its most scientifically questionable positions—opposition to vaccines and fluoride, a fondness for raw milk and beef tallow—but the truth is that it is a complex coalition. Surveys conducted by Politico suggest that the movement’s core priorities are what you might hear from any athleisure-clad shopper circling the outer perimeter of Whole Foods: fewer ultraprocessed foods, food dyes, forever chemicals, microplastics, and pesticides, and more physical movement. Kennedy speaks all of these languages. His anti-vaccine activism gets the most press, but he has rallied against polluters and frequently inveighs against ultraprocessed Frankenfoods pushed on the public by corporations. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, food journalist Mark Bittman asked in The New York Times why Americans were hearing more about food from Trump than they were from Kamala Harris. The intersection of food, chemicals, chronic illness, and corporate power may not have been central for most voters. But it was a topic with significant social media reach, especially to the young, female, and politically disengaged—and that pulled many who might otherwise share a Democrat’s politics into Trump’s orbit. Kelly Ryerson, a prominent MAHA leader who writes under the name “Glyphosate Girl,” came to the movement the way many women do: because of personal health problems that traditional medicine couldn’t solve. Attending a gluten sensitivity conference, she heard it suggested that the issue might not be the gluten itself, but rather the chemicals sprayed on American wheat. That started her down a glyphosate research rabbit hole and eventually, in 2018, to the San Francisco courtroom where Monsanto, the manufacturer of glyphosate, was being sued by a man claiming the herbicide caused his cancer. One of the lawyers on the case was RFK Jr. “I’m politically independent,” Ryerson told me. “I feel that I really represent this massive group of women who have either their family member, their child, or they themselves have been struggling with some kind of chronic illness and are just fed up with the toxicity.” Ryerson, like other MAHA devotees, stuck with Kennedy even as he switched parties. That came in the summer of 2024, as Kennedy’s own presidential campaign was lagging. When Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Calley Means reportedly called Kennedy and “suggested that it might be a moment for unity—Mr. Trump had just narrowly escaped the same fate that had befallen Mr. Kennedy’s father and uncle,” according to The New York Times. By the end of August, Kennedy was out of the race and in Trump’s camp, and MAHA was an emergent force in American politics. Ryerson, “Food Babe” Vani Hari, and other MAHA influencers supported the McDonald’s-eating Trump in large part because of his association with Kennedy. And, Ryerson says, while much of the MAHA movement’s true devotion was and is with Kennedy, its followers were smart enough to see that Trump’s idiosyncratic and unpredictable politics were a potential asset. “The thought behind Trump,” Ryerson said, “was that it was the only way forward with getting Kennedy into a role.” And she also believed that “the chemical industry has its grips so tightly on both parties that it’s like, well, we need someone that we might have a chance of him saying, ‘No, we’re done with that.’ And Trump is so volatile in many different ways, you don’t know which way he’s going to go.” Maybe, she thought, he would go hers. Spoiler alert: He hasn’t. Rather than forcing food and chemical companies to clean up their acts, the Trump administration’s senior health officials seem to be more preoccupied with the priorities of the manosphere. MAHA, says Monika McDermott, a professor of political science at Fordham University, “fits with the MAGA movement’s vision of the role that men play and the roles that women play. And so, yeah, women are figureheads and can do things about the family, but the experts are still the masculine figures.” For expertise, they’ve turned to a smattering of “functional medicine” doctors (health-care providers who focus on “root causes” of disease, like diet, exercise, and sleep), researchers, and activists, most of whom have podcasts or large social media followings, such as Dr. Mark Hyman and Calley Means. Before becoming an adviser to RFK Jr., Means co-founded a company called Truemed that helps consumers use tax-advantaged medical savings accounts, like HSAS and FSAS, to buy things like red-light therapy boxes, Meta glasses, and supplements. (Hyman is an investor in the company, which also sells his recommended supplements.) The administration’s MAHA-adjacent decisions also have prioritized the interests of men. Take protein. Like anxieties about testosterone and “soy boys”—weak men supposedly feminized by eating too much tofu instead of red meat—the protein craze is as much about a robust male identity as it is nutrition. “There’s been a steady drumroll of protein boosterism by characters in the manosphere who trade in ideas that masculinity is in decline and under attack,” says Samantha King, a professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University in Canada and co-author of Protein: The Making of a Nutritional Superstar. Joe Rogan, the mega-popular podcaster whose endorsement of Trump was widely seen as boosting his support among young men, has complained that masculinity is unfairly vilified, while hawking protein supplements and talking about his own penchant for eating wild game. He went on a fully carnivore diet for a 30-day challenge, which resulted in “hellacious projectile doo-doo.” Popular manosphere figure Andrew Tate, who with his brother was fighting extradition to the United Kingdom for alleged rape and sex trafficking as of this writing, told Tucker Carlson in 2023 that “80 percent of my calories come from meat. I have 10 cups of coffee a day and three or four large cigars.” “Smoking is fantastic for your testosterone level,” he added. (The Tates have denied all charges filed against them.) No one seems more dedicated to protein than RFK Jr. When he announced the inverted food pyramid earlier this year, he framed it as a triumphal end to the war on protein—a dog whistle, King said, for the war on men, and especially on the male manual worker. RFK Jr. claims to sub- sist almost exclusively on meat and fermented foods, a diet that has, according to The Wall Street Journal, been embraced by Vice President J.D. Vance, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, to no doubt pungent results. And let’s not forget the weird video that RFK Jr. made with Kid Rock, in which they both exercised shirt-less in a sauna (Kennedy in jeans), before pounding milk in a hot tub. Meanwhile, in the first year of Kennedy’s tenure, HHS announced the appointment of “five new agency leaders to advance MAHA goals.” Four of the five were men. The most prominent was Admiral Brian Christine, an “internationally recognized leader in men’s health” and the new assistant secretary for health at HHS. As part of his mandate, Christine, a staunch anti-abortion Catholic, was responsible for overseeing the agency administering Title X, the federal family planning program that has traditionally funded contraception access for poor women across America. Earlier this year, HHS released radically revamped guidance for organizations applying for Title X grants. “Chronic disease” gets 14 mentions in the document; contraception gets one. Relatively little attention is given to helping women prevent unwanted pregnancy, the reason the Title X program was created in the first place. Much more is spent on male fertility concerns: testosterone levels, sperm counts and motility, erectile dysfunction, avoiding pornography, and so on. In recent months, testosterone therapy has also become a new general HHS priority. At the same time, the administration has been mostly unwilling to regulate Big Food and Big Ag—the MAHA moms’ main priority. After Trump appointed industry-friendly Lee Zeldin to run the Environmental Protection Agency, Zeldin immediately went on a deregulation spree, staffed the agency with former Big Ag and industry lobbyists, and appointed former industry representatives to oversee pesticide regulation. The EPA office once charged with research on toxic chemicals has been dismantled. And then there is the administration’s actions related to glyphosate, long one of MAHA’s top targets. Earlier this year, Trump issued an executive order calling glyphosate critical for national security and urging production increases. In June, the Supreme Court sided with chemical giant Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, in a case related to its weed killer Roundup. Trump’s DOJ had advocated for the court to take on the case. On Forked, a food politics podcast, Ryerson called the administration’s role in the case “deeply, deeply devastating.” So where does all this leave the MAHA moms? Ryerson says that while MAHA men are largely the ones in the most powerful roles in government, women “are still dictating it from the grassroots,” and “if what we want isn’t happening, then they won’t win reelection.” She, podcaster Alex Clark, and others have been warning Republicans that if they don’t show up for the women of MAHA, the women of MAHA may stop showing up for them. At the Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit over the summer, Clark told a conservative interviewer, “I believe that we won 2024 because of these women; I believe if these women are ignored, we’re going to lose the midterms, and I believe we will lose 2028.” Ryerson, for her part, said she’s still stunned that most Democrats in Congress haven’t jumped on these issues. One exception is Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree, who told The 19th: “I really don’t think that these are necessarily left or right. The questions around toxins in our food and food is medicine, and the opposition to Big Ag and big chemical companies is very universal.” This dynamic—of women as foot soldiers while men take up command posts—is not unique to MAHA. The “wine moms” who powered Democratic victories in the suburbs for the last several election cycles, and the Black women who took on the lion’s share of the legwork of “souls to the polls” turnout machines, did most of the labor—and were often mocked instead of being credited. But they eventually translated that preparation into power: 43 percent of congressional Democrats are now female (for Republicans, it’s 15 percent); women account for nearly half of state Democratic legislators. Will MAHA’s largely female organizers and leaders take a similar path within the GOP—or will the Democratic Party convince them to defect? Ryerson says that she continues to support Kennedy and that anecdotally, many MAHA women in her orbit believe he’s often hamstrung by the White House but still a force for good. And many Democrats are understandably hesitant to court followers of a movement they see as rife with dangerous quackery. But most of MAHA’s core issues—additives in food, microplastics, pesticides—used to be clearly Democratic issues. If Democrats were to back away from them now, Ryerson says, they’re leaving votes on the table. MAHA voters, she says, are “up for grabs, and [politicians] should be battling it out to see who can propose the best exit out of this toxic world that we’re living in.” Help us keep digging! FERN is a nonprofit and relies on the generosity of our readers. Please consider making a donation to support our work. Cancel monthly donations anytime.