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HOW MAHA IS HELPING POISON AMERICANS  
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Gabriella Coleman and Eric Reinhart
April 2, 2025
Politico
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_ The ambitions of MAHA for safer food and protection from harmful
chemicals are being diverted into dismantling the institutions and
regulations that protect public health. What would a genuinely
populist health movement look like? _

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The Trump administration’s recent announcement that the
Environmental Protection Agency will roll back dozens of regulations
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air and water quality has drawn praise from industry groups and
condemnation from environmentalists. But one stakeholder has been
conspicuously absent: the self-described health freedom movement known
as MAHA.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement
has built its platform around the dangers of toxic chemicals in food,
water and medicine — concerns we share. Yet Kennedy and his allies
have so far remained silent as the Trump administration clears the way
for more pollution, more toxins and greater corporate impunity. This
contradiction is not just hypocrisy; it reflects a deeper structural
problem.

Many of the ambitions of MAHA and related movements for safer food,
protection from harmful chemicals and autonomy-enhancing
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for public health
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on a strong and consistent regulatory state. And yet, these ambitions
have been channeled into support for an overwhelmingly deregulatory
political project under President Donald Trump that is actively
dismantling the very institutions necessary to achieve their stated
goals.

This paradox is not unique to MAHA. It is a recurring pattern in the
history of American politics, where populist concerns have been
repeatedly co-opted into neoliberal or authoritarian frameworks that
ultimately betray populist aims.

In the late 19th century, agrarian populists in the United States
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against monopolies and financial elites, calling for state
intervention to break up railroad and banking cartels. Yet many within
these movements also deeply distrusted government itself, seeing it as
an extension of the same elites they opposed. This ambivalence left
parts of the movement susceptible to co-optation by free-market
ideologues who framed government as the true oppressor, offering
deregulation as a solution. Of course, the deregulation only further
entrenched corporate power and left farmers and workers even more
vulnerable to exploitation.

A century later, the rise of Reagan-era neoliberalism followed a
similar playbook. The conservative right tapped into public resentment
against bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption, promising to
liberate Americans from supposed government control. As Reagan
famously put it, “The nine most terrifying words in the English
language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to
help.’”

Reagan’s rhetoric resonated not only with corporate interests but
also with many working-class people who felt alienated by elite
technocracy. Yet the result was not greater freedom from government
and corporate power, but instead their unchecked expansion via the
coupling
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dramatic growth in prisons and policing alongside predatory corporate
practices. The deregulatory policies of the 1980s also led to
industrial consolidation, environmental degradation, and a widening
gap between the wealthy and the working class that has continued to
grow up until the present. All of this has contributed to our current
historical moment, which is characterized by unprecedented levels of
economic inequality facilitating outright oligarchy, as exemplified by
Elon Musk’s current power over the U.S. government.

A similar process is now unfolding with MAHA and related health
freedom movements. They have identified very real problems —
corporate capture of regulatory agencies, harmful environmental
exposures and a medical system
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profit over care
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instead of demanding a state that better protects public health and
democratic freedoms, they have embraced an agenda that systematically
dismantles such protections and exposes the public to even more
manipulation and exploitation by billionaires and corporate interests.

Figures associated with MAHA, including Kennedy, Jillian Michaels,
Calley Means and various alternative health influencers, have built
their platforms on the claim — often rooted
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evidence [[link removed]] —
that America’s food supply can be poisonous. They decry additives,
dyes and pesticides in processed food. They support state-led
regulatory measures
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ban SNAP benefits for soda and candy (although, problematically, this
is rarely paired with demands for higher SNAP benefits to assist in
the purchase of healthy alternatives that typically cost substantially
more). They point to Europe’s stricter standards around chemicals as
a model worthy of emulation. They warn about the long-term
consequences of endocrine disruptors, and they call for stricter
regulations on what can be sold, consumed and injected into the body.
And while some dismiss MAHA calls for a better food system
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“woo-woo,” a growing scientific consensus
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up their core concerns
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— and urgent for rebuilding failing U.S. public health systems
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Yet, the movement has aligned itself with an administration that is
aggressively rolling back the very regulations that protect people
from the harms MAHA advocates decry.

Under Trump, Lee Zeldin’s EPA has declared that it will no longer
consider the social costs of pollution when crafting policy. It has
eliminated restrictions on mercury emissions, soot and haze, all of
which are pollutants with well-documented links
[[link removed](22)00090-0/fulltext] to
neurological damage and respiratory illness. As a result, mercury will
now continue contaminating our water, air and food, and air
pollutants will worsen
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immune systems and increase rates of cancers, heart disease and
stroke. The EPA has, in fact, moved to revoke the legal basis for
regulating greenhouse gases altogether. These are precisely the kinds
of environmental toxins that pose systemic threats to human health.

This is not simply an oversight. It is the logical outcome of a MAHA
movement that is cherry-picking its enemies — attacking public
health institutions while often giving corporate polluters a free
pass. MAHA advocates are, to be sure, calling for a few regulations
and recognize some corporate actors as malign, but they are unwilling
to grapple with the broader structural landscape feeding these
chemical harms.

MAHA, like many libertarian-leaning health movements before it, is
inconsistent: It sometimes calls for regulations, but then
simultaneously frames the problem in terms of government overreach and
consumer choice. This perspective makes it easy to support policies
that gut regulatory agencies under the banner of “freedom,” even
when those policies make the very problems they claim to care about
dramatically worse. The consequences of MAHA’s inconsistencies are
likely to be fatal, both for the movement’s ostensible goals and for
vulnerable groups most affected by the Trump administration’s
evolving policies, such as recent EPA rollbacks.

MAHA sits at an important moment of historical transition. In the
past, the dominant justification for deregulation was neoliberalism
— the idea that free markets, not government, should determine the
distribution of goods and services. This framework, while disastrous
for public health, environmental protection and equal rights to
democratic participation, at least maintained the premise that the
state should act as a neutral arbiter of corporate activity in the
interest of public welfare and efficient markets.

The new wave of deregulation, however, is not about the ideology of
free markets. It is part of a broader authoritarian project that seeks
to dismantle public institutions entirely, not for market efficiency
but simply to consolidate oligarchic power. Trump is openly pushing
the interests of his billionaire allies, as is obvious from his
decision to hold a Tesla sales event on the White House lawn, to
threaten private businesses that do not conform to his personal racial
ideology, and to ensure that government contracts go to his donors and
allies. To facilitate this authoritarian melding of business and
government, Trump’s second-term agenda is explicitly about
undermining the legitimacy of regulatory and public health agencies,
cutting their funding, firing scientists and ensuring that
decision-making is no longer bound by scientific consensus. Zeldin’s
EPA, by openly dismissing climate science
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“the holy grail of the climate change religion,” provides a case
in point, as does the ongoing destruction of NIH and CDC.

This distinction matters. Neoliberal deregulation, while a disaster
that facilitated widespread profiteering and poisoning of our
environment to set the stage for our present crisis, at least left
room for technocratic arguments about efficiency and trade-offs. But
as neoliberal policy intensified inequality over the last four
decades, it has provided fertile soil
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the rise of fascism
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The new authoritarian deregulation that is neoliberalism’s direct
descendant does not bother with justifications for its decisions, nor
does it allow for public feedback. It simply asserts that the state
has no role in environmental protection, in regulating corporations,
or in protecting the public from harm. And by aligning itself with
this agenda, MAHA has made itself a tool for a movement that
ultimately does not care about public health at all.

What would a genuinely populist health movement
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one that actually makes good on the worthy promises of the MAHA
agenda, look like? For starters, it would stop focusing on individual
consumer choice — buying organic, avoiding vaccines, or switching to
“clean” beauty products — while ignoring the
broader political-economic determinants of health
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recognize that protecting people from harmful chemicals requires
systemic oversight, not the limited and patchy regulation MAHA
advocates. It would demand a regulatory state that is not captured by
industry but empowered to hold corporations accountable. It would see
environmental policy, labor protections and public health
infrastructure as fundamental to its mission, not as distractions from
it.

Most importantly, it would break with the reactionary politics that
have made today’s health freedom movement a Trojan horse for
corporate deregulation. Instead of railing against the very
institutions that could serve the public good, it would fight to make
them more democratic, more responsive and more aligned with the needs
of ordinary people.

If the past is any guide, there will always be movements that begin
with legitimate grievances but are steered into supporting policies
that make those grievances worse. The challenge now is to ensure that
the fight for health does not become another example of this
historical trap. If MAHA and its allies truly care about public
health, they will stop aligning with those who would dismantle its
last remaining protections. The alternative is not freedom. It is
poisoning the well, literally and politically.

_Gabriella Coleman
[[link removed]] is an
anthropologist of science, technology and media and the Ernest E.
Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University._

_Eric Reinhart [[link removed]] is a political
anthropologist, social psychiatrist and psychoanalytic clinician._

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