Get in everyone, we're getting polio

How RFK Jr. conned American moms into thinking he'll clean up our food

RFK Jr., a rich anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and former coke dealer with a brain worm, was confirmed as our Secretary of Health and Human Services on Thursday by a Senate vote of 52-48. Every single Republican voted for him except Mitch McConnell, who had polio as a kid, proving that politicians can genuinely care about things that happened to themselves.

I know everyone’s already heard most of the damning or downright weird stories about RFK Jr. that make it difficult to stomach the fact that he is now in charge of our health care. Yes, he drove around with a dead bear cub and dumped it in Central Park to make it look like a cyclist killed it. Yes, he beheaded a whale with a chainsaw. Yes, his own cousin Caroline called him a “predator” who’s unfit for any public office and led some of their family members into addiction. Yes, his anti-vaccine grift led to a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people, most of whom were small children. And it’s that last bit, the massive grift and deception of it all, that I think people aren’t talking about enough.

In October I sat down with Jessica Reed Kraus, the kingpin of MAHA mom influencers and an RFK Jr. superfan, for a profile. And for the past couple months since, I’ve been interviewing other MAHA moms and studying their culture on social media for an upcoming magazine piece about how they all got seduced by Kennedy and his “Make America Healthy Again” hybrid movement that helped push hordes of white women voters toward Trump. Their general deal is that they’re crunchy; they have terms like “holistic health” and “natural health" in their profiles and talk a lot about artificial dyes and ultra-processed foods; they genuinely believe that they are health and nutrition renegades in a nation full of blind sheeple; and they became deeply skeptical of vaccines and the U.S. health care system in general during Covid, when RFK Jr. was getting paid millions of dollars to peddle anti-vax conspiracies and advocate instead for “alternative and natural medicines,” i.e. snake oil cures.

Kennedy would have us believe that he’s tapped into some health secrets that are the reason he’s able to post shirtless selfies at age 71—like eating beef tallow and drinking raw milk, rather than simply having good genes and a personal chef and trainer—and that he’s sharing those secrets with us at great personal risk because he cares deeply about public health and the environment. And a big army of American moms who had already been beating the drum about cleaning up America’s food and trying to take on junk food giants like Kellogg’s—which is a worthy mission on its face—were so thrilled to hear a major political candidate simply talking about those same concerns that they didn’t care much about the specifics of whether he would actually accomplish any of those things. MAHA promised to clean up our food, air, and water and to “take on big pharma,” and that’s all some people needed to hear to buy into the Trump + Kennedy alliance.

The thing is, if you scrutinize the two men’s policy plans even a little, the whole fantasy falls apart. MAHA moms were celebrating, for instance, when the Food and Drug Department banned Red Dye No. 3— and RFK Jr. quite literally wants to dismantle the FDA, which is in charge of restraining big food and pharma from putting toxins in everything. And why did a movement whose stated goal is to clean up our air and water align itself with a presidential candidate who rolled back over 100 rules governing clean air, water, wildlife and toxic chemicals, including removing protections from more than half the nation’s wetlands? Trump and Kennedy’s rabid thirst for deregulation flies in the face of basically all of the MAHA movement’s health priorities.

RFK Jr., much like Donald Trump, is a con man profiting greatly off of the things he tells people. He sold a dream of a healthier nation to the American people that he has absolutely no intention of fulfilling. In fact, his legitimizing of quacky health conspiracies and dismantling of the health department is undoubtedly going to kill people. And look at that—we already have a preventable measles outbreak in Texas.