If there was one single idea uniting the misnamed “Make America Healthy Again” movement, it’s that health is a matter of personal responsibility, and government is in the way. This is presumably why Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. abandoned his family’s long allegiance to the Democratic Party to support a Republican for president, Donald Trump, and serve in his administration. He and his army of affluent, white female supporters — dubbed “MAHA moms” — pride themselves in rejecting the federal government’s reliance on medical and scientific expertise to set healthcare policy. They characterize these authorities as an oppressive force, denying individuals the freedom to make their own choices, however unscientific, about healthcare.
“I’m a freedom-of-choice person,” the secretary insisted to Fox News’ Sean Hannity in 2025. In Kennedy’s view, ordinary people, working on the advice of shady online influencers, are just as qualified as medical experts to understand the risks of refusing vaccines, rejecting contraception, drinking raw milk, consuming unregulated supplements or eating saturated fats.
Backed by his MAHA movement, Kennedy has worked at HHS to shift responsibility for health away from public health systems and onto individuals. In his opening statement at his Senate confirmation hearing, Kennedy argued that government healthcare spending has not improved public health. He has since focused on scolding Americans to exercise more and “eat real food,” and criticizing people who use government-funded health services for allegedly not doing enough to take care of themselves. As MAHA influencer Zen Honeycutt argued in 2024, “we won’t even need healthcare” under Kennedy’s leadership, because his and the movement’s recommendations — like consuming foods cooked in beef tallow and rejecting vaccines — will render Americans so healthy “we won’t be going to the doctor’s because we won’t be sick.”
So it was frustrating to see so many of the MAHA movement’s thought-leaders protest in front of the Supreme Court on Monday, angry that the Trump administration is embracing this very “freedom of choice” and “do your own research” approach to the issue of pesticides. The Court was hearing oral arguments in Monsanto Company v. Durnell, a case centered on whether individuals can sue the pesticide manufacturer over claims that glyphosate, the main ingredient in the popular weed killer Roundup, causes cancer. Under former President Joe Biden, federal lawyers sided with the plaintiff John Durnell, who believes he developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after years of spraying Roundup on the grass in parks near his home in St. Louis, Missouri. The Trump administration is siding with Monsanto, arguing they should not be held liable for consumer health outcomes.
The protest was led by pretty white female influencers who spent 2024 persuading their audiences across media platforms to vote for Trump on the grounds that Kennedy would protect public health by rolling back federal regulations that had created a standardized healthcare system. They believed, once unleashed as HHS secretary, he would mainstream the bespoke health practices they favored — treatments cobbled together from pseudo-science and wellness influencer chatter about “vibrations” — and promote their faith that organic food, along with a sense of purity, puts them above the grubby healthcare practices of the less fortunate, like vaccination. Now those women are angry that the administration views pesticides through the same lens of freedom of choice and personal responsibility.
“You cannot tell Americans to eat real food while protecting the cancer-causing chemicals sprayed on it,” said Vani Hari, an influencer who goes by the name “Food Babe.”
Say what you will about the Trump administration, but it has been consistent in the belief that health outcomes aren’t about corporate accountability, medical systems or collective responsibility. That’s why the MAHA moms lined up behind Trump and Kennedy in the first place.
Most progressives would agree, but coming from Hari, this makes no sense. She campaigned for Trump in 2024, so she can’t be surprised that he’s making good on the MAHA promise to remove federal oversight, and leave nutrition and healthcare to personal choice. Say what you will about the Trump administration, but it has been consistent in the belief that health outcomes aren’t about corporate accountability, medical systems or collective responsibility. That’s why the MAHA moms lined up behind Trump and Kennedy in the first place. They liked the campaign’s view that if your family has poor health outcomes, it must be a matter of individual failure, whether it’s taking Tylenol or failing to feed kids organic food.
One would certainly think that the personal decision to use Roundup would fall firmly into the “individual choice” matrix advocated by the MAHA movement. No one is forcing anyone to buy food grown with pesticides. Hari certainly understands this; she regularly posts content on how to avoid eating food grown with Roundup, dishing out advice like “buy local & ask about pesticides” and “grow your own food.” One can also wash food before cooking with it, which may not be a complicated and expensive enough a solution for the MAHA moms, but it certainly helps.
What the movement is struggling with is that the challenge to Roundup is rooted in collective action and responsibility; it can’t be easily solved by advocating personal choice. Despite all the chatter about food, most of the allegations linking the pesticide to cancer aren’t from people who ate food grown with it but from workers who used the product, such as farmers and groundskeepers. While washing food can remove most of the chemicals, direct exposure from inhaling Roundup while it’s sprayed on crops likely carries a much higher risk. Government action, whether through regulation or lawsuits, that results in the product being removed from the marketplace is the only way to confront the issue. But the move cuts against the MAHA ethos of “freedom of choice.”
Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is the incoherence at the heart of the MAHA movement. The argument for banning carcinogenic chemicals is no different than the argument for mandating vaccines. In both cases, an individual is inconvenienced to improve the overall environment, making it healthier for everyone. One could argue that it’s entirely a person’s choice to spray Roundup on your crops or to refuse vaccination. But that ignores the fact that both choices affect the people around you who are being forced to inhale the viruses or the chemicals being sprayed due to so-called personal choice.
In their crusade against pesticides, MAHA moms are sympathetic, and some have even resorted to language about collective responsibility that sounds downright progressive. But in this they reveal the contradictions that are starting to become unavoidable. MAHA created the illusion, if only for a brief moment, that women alone can keep their families safe by rejecting government dictates and forging an individualist path. The movement cast health as a luxury commodity to be achieved through class signifiers like organic food and expensive supplements peddled by wellness influencers, instead of as a collective project that cuts across class, race and other identities.
Pesticides expose the lie behind that fantasy. You can shop organic food and grow your own tomatoes, but a stiff breeze can blow the Roundup your neighbor sprayed on his lawn directly into your face. These contradictions were easy to paper over when MAHA was simply a campaign slogan in 2024. Now that people have to live with the consequences of Trump and Kennedy’s “freedom of choice” paradigm, the MAHA movement is losing its mojo.
The power of the coalition is fading rapidly, even as Kennedy — with his famous name — is in no danger of being fired by Trump. On Thursday, the White House withdrew the nomination of Kennedy’s buddy, Casey Means, as surgeon general. Means does not have an active medical license and was famous mostly for being a wellness influencer embedded deep within the MAHA world. It’s unlikely her departure has much to do with her long history of irresponsibly pushing false health information, as there continues to be no evidence that the Trump White House actually cares about the well-being of the American people. But it does suggest that the movement is crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions.
Read more
about this topic
