'JFK' director Oliver Stone calls on Congress to reopen investigation into Kennedy assassination
Filmmaker Oliver Stone urged legislators in Washington, D.C., Tuesday to reopen the investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and reassess everything from the crime scene to the courtroom, including the rifle and bullets used, fingerprints and the autopsy.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order since returning to the Oval Office in January to release the long-concealed materials about the assassination of Kennedy and records on the assassinations of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The 80,000 pages of JFK files were released March 18, giving experts and conspiracy theorists a trove of material to prove or disprove how Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963.
In his opening statements Tuesday, Stone, whose 1991 film "JFK" examined the investigation into Kennedy's assassination, raised an issue with the CIA's handling of files he requested to see regarding the assassination.
Trump Announces He Will Release 80,000 Jfk Assassination Files On Tuesday, Going To Be 'Very Interesting'
"Although mandated by law from the Central Intelligence Agency, which operated and still operates as a taxpayer-funded intelligence agency that arrogantly considered itself outside our laws," Stone said, "they say things like, 'We will get back to you on that,' and they never do.
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"Nothing of importance has been revealed by the CIA in all these years," he continued, adding other records show illegal criminal activities in every facet of U.S. foreign policy in nearly every country on Earth. "Just to begin, Cuba, Vietnam, Indonesia, Egypt, South America, the Middle East. We could write a whole separate history of our country from the viewpoint of the countries, yet we do not know and are not allowed to know anything about the CIA's true history of the United States, which is almost, I believe, the real story."
He then called for the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., to reopen the investigation into Kennedy's assassination, picking up what the Warren Commission failed to do.
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The Warren Commission, after an investigation, found no evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald or Oswald's assassin, Jack Ruby, were part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to kill the president. It said at the time that one bullet that struck Kennedy passed through him and struck Texas Gov. John Connally, hitting his back, thigh, chest and wrist.
Critics of the commission's findings call it the "magic bullet theory."
"I ask the committee to reopen what the Warren Commission failed miserably to complete," Stone said. "I ask you in good faith, outside all political considerations, to reinvestigate the assassination of this President Kennedy, from the scene of the crime to the courtroom … which never happened, but which means the chain of custody on the rifle, the bullets, the fingerprints, the autopsy that defies belief, and that if it were a murder, we'd have given to the poorest man dying in a gutter.
"Let us reinvestigate the fingerprints of intelligence all over Lee Harvey Oswald, from 1959 to 1960 – his violent death in 1963 — and, most importantly, this CIA, whose muddy footprints are all over this case, a true interrogation."
Fbi Uncovers Thousands Of Undisclosed Records Connected To Jfk's Assassination
Stone spoke about Deputy CIA Director James Angleton, who, before he died, talked about Allen Dulles, Richard Helms and others he referred to as the "Grand Masters."
"He did say, 'If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell. I guess I will see them soon,'" Stone said. "This is our democracy. This is our presidency. It belongs to us. Treat us with respect."
Stone said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter in January that Trump deserved "praise" for the order to release the JFK assassination files.
Despite pleas to open the investigation, the FBI notes on its website that after conducting some 25,000 interviews and running down tens of thousands of investigative leads, "the FBI found that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone."
Oswald was killed shortly after the Kennedy assassination.
Fox News Digital's Alex Nitzberg contributed to this report.Original article source: 'JFK' director Oliver Stone calls on Congress to reopen investigation into Kennedy assassination
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Atlantic
9 hours ago
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The Senator Who Failed America on Vaccines
It's easy to forget that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s assault on vaccines—including, most recently, his gutting of the expert committee that guides American vaccine policy—might have been avoided. Four months ago, his nomination for health secretary was in serious jeopardy. The deciding vote seemed to be in the hands of one Republican senator: Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. A physician who gained prominence by vaccinating low-income kids in his home state, Cassidy was wary of the longtime vaccine conspiracist. 'I have been struggling with your nomination,' he told Kennedy during his confirmation hearings in January. Then Cassidy caved. In the speech he gave on the Senate floor explaining his decision, Cassidy said that he'd vote to confirm Kennedy only because he had extracted a number of concessions from the nominee—chief among them that he would preserve, 'without changes,' the very CDC committee Kennedy overhauled this week. Since then, Cassidy has continued to give Kennedy the benefit of the doubt. On Monday, after Kennedy dismissed all 17 members of the vaccine advisory committee, Cassidy posted on X that he was working with Kennedy to prevent the open roles from being filled with 'people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion.' The senator has failed, undeniably and spectacularly. One new appointee, Robert Malone, has repeatedly spread misinformation (or what he prefers to call 'scientific dissent') about vaccines. Another appointee, Vicky Pebsworth, is on the board of an anti-vax nonprofit, the National Vaccine Information Center. Cassidy may keep insisting that he is doing all he can to stand up for vaccines. But he already had his big chance to do so, and he blew it. Now, with the rest of America, he's watching the nation's vaccine future take a nosedive. So far, the senator hasn't appeared interested in any kind of mea culpa for his faith in Kennedy's promises. On Thursday, I caught Cassidy as he hurried out of a congressional hearing room. He was still reviewing the appointees, he told me and several other reporters who gathered around him. When I chased after him down the hallway to ask more questions, he told me, 'I'll be putting out statements, and I'll let those statements stand for themselves.' A member of his staff dismissed me with a curt 'Thank you, sir.' Cassidy's staff has declined repeated requests for an interview with the senator since the confirmation vote in January. With the exception of Mitch McConnell, every GOP senator voted to confirm Kennedy. They all have to own the health secretary's actions. But Cassidy seemed to be the Republican most concerned about Kennedy's nomination, and there was a good reason to think that the doctor would vote his conscience. In 2021, Cassidy was one of seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Donald Trump on an impeachment charge after the insurrection at the Capitol. But this time, the senator—who is up for reelection next year, facing a more MAGA-friendly challenger—ultimately fell in line. Cassidy tried to have it both ways: elevating Kennedy to his job while also vowing to constrain him. In casting his confirmation vote, Cassidy implied that the two would be in close communication, and that Kennedy had asked for his input on hiring decisions. The two reportedly had breakfast in March to discuss the health secretary's plan to dramatically reshape the department. 'Senator Cassidy speaks regularly with secretary Kennedy and believes those conversations are much more productive when they're held in private, not through press headlines,' a spokesperson for Cassidy wrote in an email. (A spokesperson for HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) At times, it has appeared as though Cassidy's approach has had some effect on the health secretary. Amid the measles outbreak in Texas earlier this year, Kennedy baselessly questioned the safety of the MMR vaccine. In April, after two unvaccinated children died, Cassidy posted on X: 'Everyone should be vaccinated! There is no treatment for measles. No benefit to getting measles. Top health officials should say so unequivocally b/4 another child dies.' Cassidy didn't call out Kennedy by name, but the health secretary appeared to get the message. Later that day, Kennedy posted that the measles vaccine was the most effective way to stave off illness. ('Completely agree,' Cassidy responded.) All things considered, that's a small victory. Despite Kennedy's claims that he is not an anti-vaxxer, he has enacted a plainly anti-vaccine agenda. Since being confirmed, he has pushed out the FDA's top vaccine regulator, hired a fellow vaccine skeptic to investigate the purported link between autism and shots, and questioned the safety of childhood vaccinations currently recommended by the CDC. As my colleague Katherine J. Wu wrote this week, 'Whether he will admit to it or not, he is serving the most core goal of the anti-vaccine movement—eroding access to, and trust in, immunization.' The reality is that back channels can be only so effective. Cassidy's main power is to call Kennedy before the Senate health committee, which he chairs, and demand an explanation for Kennedy's new appointees to the CDC's vaccine-advisory committee. Cassidy might very well do that. In February, he said that Kennedy would 'come before the committee on a quarterly basis, if requested.' Kennedy did appear before Cassidy's committee last month to answer questions about his efforts to institute mass layoffs at his agency. Some Republicans (and many Democrats) pressed the secretary on those efforts, while others praised them. Cassidy, for his part, expressed concerns about Kennedy's indiscriminate cutting of research programs, but still, he was largely deferential. 'I agree with Secretary Kennedy that HHS needs reform,' Cassidy said. Even if he had disagreed, an angry exchange between a health secretary and a Senate committee doesn't guarantee any policy changes. Lawmakers may try to act like government bureaucrats report to them, but they have limited power once a nominee is already in their job. Technically, lawmakers can impeach Cabinet members, but in American history, a sitting Cabinet member has never been impeached and subsequently removed from office. The long and arduous confirmation process is supposed to be the bulwark against potentially dangerous nominees being put in positions of power. Cassidy and most of his Republican colleagues have already decided not to stop Kennedy from overseeing the largest department in the federal government by budget. Now Kennedy is free to do whatever he wants—senators be damned.
Politico
10 hours ago
- Politico
‘A Total Sham': Michelle Obama's Nutrition Adviser Lets Loose on MAHA
Before there was MAHA, there was Michelle. Anyone following the rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again movement can't help but recall former First Lady Michelle Obama's efforts to improve Americans' diets — and the vitriol she faced in response. Now, many of the same Republicans who skewered Michelle Obama as a 'nanny state' warrior have embraced the MAHA movement. To explore this head-spinning turn, I called up Sam Kass, the former White House chef under President Barack Obama and a food policy adviser who led the first lady's 'Let's Move' initiative. Kass said he was happy to find common ground with Kennedy and his MAHA brigade where possible. But he argued Kennedy's HHS has done little to actually improve the health of the public so far, and was instead mostly taking steps that would do real damage, including by undermining the use of vaccines. Kass also warned potentially MAHA-curious food advocates against legitimizing the Trump administration by offering support for Kennedy. 'Those who are lending their voice for the things that they support are going to ultimately help enable outcomes that are going to be quite devastating for this country and for our kids,' he said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine. At the same time, Kass is not surprised with MAHA's growing popularity. In the 10-plus years since Kass left the White House, the issues of diet-related chronic disease haven't abated and Americans are more anxious about their health than ever. Wellness is a trillion-dollar industry, and MAHA influencers have filled the gap left by Democrats. 'The Democratic Party has absolutely blundered this issue,' he said. 'We're getting what we deserve here in some ways.' This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. How do you square the earlier conservative criticism of the 'Let's Move' initiative with the rise of MAHA? Are you surprised by the seeming contradiction? I think most of that is because Republicans are fearful of President Trump. And therefore, if he is putting somebody in a position of great power and backing him, there's a huge part of the party that's going to go along with whatever that may be. I don't think this is actually about the Republican Party taking this up. This is actually about a Democrat, traditionally, who had built up a pretty strong following on these issues, and decided to join forces with President Trump. It's not like any of these ideas are coming from the GOP platform. This is an RFK-led effort that they're now supporting. So are they hypocrites for that? Certainly. But I welcome Republican support on trying to genuinely improve the health of the nation. Frankly, if we had had that for the last 20 years, I think that cultural retention would be far better. The reality, though, is what they're actually doing I don't think is going to have any positive impact, or very little. Even what they're saying is problematic on some levels, but what they're doing is a far cry from anything that's going to create the health outcomes this country needs. When you say that, do you mean banning soda from SNAP or the food dyes issue? Are there specific things that come to mind? It's a long list. There's the critique that MAHA brings at the highest level, that chronic disease has exploded in our country. Nobody can refute that, and what we're eating is a big driver of poor health outcomes on many different levels. That is absolutely true. What we grow, how we're growing it, and what's being made out of it is quite literally killing people. That is something that First Lady Michelle Obama said way back when. I've been saying it for a couple of decades. After that, everything falls apart in my mind. We can start with food dyes as the biggest announcement they made thus far. I'm all for getting food dyes out of food. There's just not a basis of evidence that most of the ones that are being used are actually the drivers of many of these health conditions. It was reported that they were banning food dyes. Sadly, what they did was a total sham. It was a farce of an event. There was no policy at all that was announced. There was no guidance, there was no regulatory proposal, there wasn't even a request for information. There was absolutely nothing put forward to revoke the approvals of these dyes. And the reason I believe is that to revoke an approval, you have to show that it's harming the public health. That's what we did for trans fats. Trans fats had been approved for consumption. There was plenty of evidence to show that that food was really driving death and disease in the country, and we banned it through a regulatory mechanism. I could not fathom making an announcement like that without actually having a real policy to put in place. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry about what they did. Also, you see a bunch of the influencers holding up bags of Fruit Loops and saying, 'In Europe or Canada, these have no [synthetic] food dyes and ours do.' But the fact of the matter is Fruit Loops aren't good for you either way. Part of the danger of RFK is he keeps talking about gold standard science and rebooting our public policy and science. The reality is he's doing the exact opposite. He's going to fast food restaurants, touting them on national television as the head of Health and Human Services, [saying that] a cheeseburger and french fries is good for you now because it's cooked in beef fat which is just the most insane thing on literally every single level. It has absolutely no basis in science. We're focusing on issues that are absolutely not going to make an iota of difference in public health. It's absolutely shocking. They have a platform that is fear-based on certain issues, like these food dyes or seed oils, which are absolutely not addressing the core of what we're eating and the core of what's really harming our health. The problem is the fries and the cheeseburger. It's not the oil that it's fried in. It's actually quite scary to me to see what's playing out. Why do you think the politics of food have changed in the years since you were in the White House, and why do you think MAHA ideas have such appeal? I don't exactly know for sure. In the age of social media, the thing that gets the algorithms the most activity is more extreme views. I think people are very vulnerable to very compelling, very scientifically sounding narratives that [MAHA influencers] all have, based on one study here or another study there, that can weave a narrative of fear. It's not like food dyes are good, I'm happy to see them go. But you get people scared of what they're eating to the point where people stop eating vegetables because they're worried about the pesticides, which is just not good for their health. This fear is definitely taking hold. I think it's because the mediums on which this information travels are exacerbating that fear. You already mentioned the food dye announcement and why that was concerning to you. What are some of the other actions that you think aren't necessarily achieving the stated goals? If you step back and start to look at what actions have actually been taken, what you're actually seeing is a full-on assault on science throughout HHS. You're seeing a complete gutting of NIH, which funds much of the research needed to understand what in hyper-processed foods is undermining people's health and how to actually identify those correlations so you can regulate it very aggressively. You're seeing the complete gutting or elimination of departments within CDC and FDA that oversee the safety of our food. Food toxicologists have been fired. There's a department in CDC that's in charge of assessing chronic health and environmental exposures to toxins. Those offices have been eliminated. The idea that somehow you're going to be more aggressively regulating based on the best science, while you're absolutely wholesale cutting scientific research and gutting the people who are in charge of overseeing the very industry that you're trying to clamp down on is a joke. Then look at the 'big, beautiful bill' that is being supported by this administration, and it's catastrophic to the public health of the United States of America. Eight million people are going to lose access to health care. Three million plus are going to lose SNAP assistance. Then we can get into USDA and EPA. Everybody's got to remember that the number one threat to the public health of the United States of America is climate change. If we continue on this path of pulling back every regulatory effort that's been made to try to transition our society to a much more sustainable, lower-carbon world, that's also preparing itself to deal with the volatility that's coming from the climate, we're not going to have food to eat. This idea that you're going to have big announcements about food dyes and Fruit Loops, while you completely roll back every effort to prepare our agricultural system and our food system to deal with climate change, you're gaslighting the American public. Have you spoken to the former first lady about MAHA at all? Not in any kind of depth. Have you ever been in touch with Kennedy? Have you ever talked to him about these issues? He's very close to a number of people I'm good friends with, but no, I have not. You noted Kennedy used to be a Democrat. His issues — his opposition to pesticides, his support for healthy nutrition, with all the caveats that we just discussed — these were Democratic issues. Now, this MAHA coalition helped Trump win the White House. Why do you think Democrats have ceded this terrain? The Democratic Party has absolutely blundered this issue. These are kitchen table issues. Our very well-being, our ability to eat food that's not harming ourselves and our kids, is fundamental to life on planet Earth and what it means to have a vibrant society. The fact that Democrats, much to my chagrin, definitely not because of lack of trying, have not taken this issue up with great effort over the last 15 years is shameful. We're getting what we deserve here in some ways. I'm deeply critical of Democrats, with some exceptions. Sen. Cory Booker has been amazing on these issues. [Former Sen.] Jon Tester is also great. But it was never part of the platform, and it absolutely always should have been. If there's some common ground to be found with Republicans, then great. We could get a lot done. But we can't just turn over the keys to this issue to people who are not serious. When you worked in the Obama White House, you pushed better nutrition labeling, active living, bans on unhealthy foods in school meals and trans fat. The recent MAHA report pointed the finger at similar programs for chronic illness. Is that a place where you and MAHA advocates are on the same page, and how do you balance that with the concerns you've raised? There's no clean answer to that. We largely, not entirely, share the same critique when it comes to food. Vaccines are another thing which are important to also talk about. People are trying to pick the issue that they like and can get around and pretend like the rest isn't happening. It would be great if we got food dyes out, but it would pale in comparison to if he continues down the path to undermine vaccines as the foundation of public health and people start dying, like they are, with measles. That is not even close to a trade. For all of my food friends who read this, or everybody in policy who are like, 'Oh yeah, I can work with him on this issue, but I'm going to turn a blind eye to that,' that doesn't work. That's going to lead to devastating outcomes. On the report, I share the general critique of the problem. I spent my life saying those things and working on these issues. That's the easy part. What matters is what you do about it. How do you actually change what people are eating, and what is it going to take to really put the country on a different trajectory when it comes to health? So far, I've seen absolutely no indication that the issues that they're focused on are going to have any meaningful or measurable impact on public health. Frankly, there's many other things that I think are going to be extremely detrimental. We will see. We're only a few months in. I could, depending on what happens, have a different perspective in six months or 12 months. RFK has blamed the food industry for Americans' poor health. He's argued that government institutions are overwrought with corporate influence. Do you think he's right? And what do you think about RFK's approach to trying to curb corporate influence? I'm all for curbing corporate influence. I had some big fights with industry. I won some of them, and sometimes I got my ass kicked. It's the nature of Washington when you're threatening the basic interests of an industry. What's stunning to me is that the food industry so far has been silent. They haven't done anything to fight back, which says to me that they're not feeling threatened yet. I think they're waiting to see what's going to happen. I'm sure they're doing some stuff in the background, but this is nothing like what we were dealing with. I agree that we should put the public's best interest first, not succumb to industry influence. I think the way that RFK talks about it is a real overstatement down a very dark conspiracy theory. The idea that JAMA and the American Medical Association and the New England Journal are just like corporate journals that just put corporate, completely distorted research out for the sake of making profits, it's just not serious. He starts to discredit the very institutions, like HHS, that you actually need to do the work to rein in industry. The way that industry does make inroads is that they fund a lot of research. If you want to reduce industry influence, you should dramatically increase [government] investment in funding of scientific research on agriculture and climate change, on food and nutrition. One of the biggest fights in the Obama era was over stricter nutrition standards for school lunches. The administration won some of those battles, but quite a few children still have obesity, according to the latest data. Is there anything you wish the Obama administration had done differently? Are there things policymakers should be doing differently? School nutrition is just one part of a young person's diet. You're not going to solve kids' health issues just through school nutrition, but obviously it's a huge lever to pull. If we really want to make progress, you have to look much more holistically at the food environment that people are living in. This is generational work. It's going to take literally decades of work to shift, not just the policies, but our culture, our businesses, to change how people are eating. I think the one thing we missed would have been a much stricter restriction on sugar across the board. We had it for drinks,, but we didn't [apply it across the board], and that was a miss. We should have pushed harder on sugar. I think the policy was a really important start. It can always be improved and strengthened. Both the first Trump administration and this one are looking to roll back some of that. The thing that we have to not forget — and this is true for schools, and certainly true for SNAP and WIC — is the biggest problem is not enough money for these programs. I started doing a lot of work on finding ways to restrict sugary drinks as an example from the SNAP program. But if you want to do that and actually get the health outcomes you need, you need to also increase the total dollar amount that people have so they can purchase healthier food. Part of the reason why people are drinking these things is they're the cheapest available drink. Coke is cheaper than water sometimes. RFK recently called sugar 'poison.' Do you agree with that? One of their tactics to obfuscate truth in science is dosage, right? The amount that we're consuming matters. If you had a birthday cake on your birthday and you have a cookie — my kids eat a cookie, they're not dying, they're not being poisoned to death. They're fine. I think the problem is the amount of sugar we're consuming and the sizes of the portions we have. It's the cumulative amount of sugar. It's probably technically not exactly the right word, poison. But I don't take issue with that. I think the levels of sugar consumption for young people are deeply alarming and are absolutely going to drive preventable death and disease for millions and millions of people. It already is and will continue to do so. It is a very serious problem. But what do you do? I can't wait to see the policy proposals here. It's a tough problem to solve. It is not a problem that can be solved overnight, and it's going to take a very comprehensive effort to really shift the amount of sugar we're consuming, but it should be the goal of this administration. They should work very hard at it in a very serious and science-based way. Thus far, I have not seen that.
Yahoo
14 hours ago
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Trad Wives and Tallow Fries: How the Wellness Wars Flipped Health and Food Politics Upside Down
"I don't want to be told how many calories are in my Big Mac meal or my quarter pounder meal. I don't want the government telling me that I can't put salt on my food," Sean Hannity declared on Fox News in 2010. "I like junk food. I like McDonald's. I like Wendy's. I like Burger King. I love Kentucky Fried Chicken." This was a common sentiment for conservatives of the era, a time when many on the right viewed attempts to promote health as left-wing and therefore suspect. Some of this Republican pushback was rooted in righteous opposition to intrusions on the free market and consumer choice,as when Democrats attempted to impose sin taxes on sodas or limit the size of sugary drinks stores could sell. But too often, it seemed more like oppositional defiance disorder. During the 2008 presidential campaign, for example, conservatives spent multiple news cycles mocking Barack Obama's alleged arugula consumption. After her defeat, Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential hopeful, handed out sugar cookies at an elementary school and drank from a Big Gulp soda cup onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Republicans repeatedly mocked first lady Michelle Obama's healthy living campaign, Let's Move!, even when it proposed no mandates. The first lady's 2011 comment that babies "who are breast-fed longer have a lower tendency to be obese" unleashed a torrent of criticism, with right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin calling her "Big Mother." Rep. Michele Bachmann (R–Minn.) derided an IRS announcement that people could deduct the cost of breast pumps as "the new definition of a nanny state." Flash forward to 2025. Now wellness consciousness is flourishing anew—on the right. A Republican president is complaining about "the industrial food complex." State GOP lawmakers are leading the push to ban "toxic chemicals" in school lunches. "Food babe" Vani Hari—a delegate at Democrats' 2012 convention—attended a meeting at the White House. Rank-and-file Republicans rave against seed oils on social media. Questioning Big Pharma may well get you labeled right-wing. Sounding suspiciously like Michelle Obama, Republican West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey recently introduced a new statewide health initiative that includes pillars such as "move your body, change your life" and a pledge to clean up school lunches. Not only did President Donald Trump appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a public health activist with long ties to the Democratic Party—to run the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), but Hannity interviewed Kennedy about how modern foods are acting as "poison," a word Kennedy has also used to describe sugar more generally. The days of Republicans defending Big Macs and Big Gulps are over. The right has entered its MAHA era—a Kennedy riff on Trump's Make America Great Again acronym that demands we Make America Healthy Again. The MAHA agenda is diverse and sometimes contradictory. It's tied together by an outsider's sensibility that questions traditional credentialed health experts and promotes a DIY approach to personal health. It encompasses everything from fighting childhood obesity to studying the alleged links between vaccines and autism. Removing soda from food stamp benefits, taking psychedelics for depression, fostering early diagnoses, promoting raw milk, banning certain food dyes, and cleaning up "nuclear waste and toxins" have all been described as MAHA. So have scrutinizing farm subsidies, rejecting the fluoridation of water, ditching plastic containers, eschewing "ultra processed foods," building better infant formula, and investigating Kellogg's for calling its cereal "healthy." Some of those issues—raw milk, welfare reform—might have fit right in with the GOP agenda of 2014, or 2004, or 1980. But others are ideas most associated with the likes of hippie health-store shoppers, colloidal silver–swilling yoginis, doula-promoting co-op moms, and big business–bashing Green voters—in other words, crunchy-left types traditionally more at home among Democrats than Republicans. "The age of Big Gulp conservatism is over," says Breitbart writer John Carney. "Now we're into the protein- and blueberry-maxxing age." And Carney—who jokingly calls yogurt with pomegranate seeds and blueberries his "neofascist breakfast"—thinks this is great. "I'd rather be on the side that's healthy," he says. This isn't just a story about MAGA going health nut; a lot of health nuts went MAGA too, partly as a rejection of the Democratic Party's centralized public health dogmas, especially during the pandemic. The story of how we got here involves fertility fears and lentil wars, dietary science and social justice, losing our religion and gaining Obamacare. Perhaps most of all it involves COVID-19. MAHA can be at least partially understood as a populist response to expert failures and a rejection of top-down control when it comes to public and individual health. But it's also built on unfounded suspicions—an all-purpose skepticism that sometimes extends to actions proven to be beneficial—along with a lack of perspective about relative risk. Its relationship with Kennedy, who has a long history of pushing dubious health ideas and is now America's top health bureaucrat, fits uncomfortably with both the movement's DIY ethos and its claims to provide a better path to healthy living. Where it's going remains unclear. Toward dismantling dangerous health orthodoxies, or toward creating new ones? Toward more medical and food freedom, or toward more government control—this time with more saturated fat? In 2002, the right-wing pundit Rod Dreher started writing about "crunchy cons," a cohort that combined conservative politics and traditionalist sensibilities with a penchant for organic vegetables, composting, and free-range livestock. Crunchy cons rejected the idea that "suburban architecture, lousy food, chain restaurants, bad beer, and scorn for the arts" were necessarily part of the conservative project, Dreher wrote. That crunchiness had a long lineage: As far back as the 1970s, groups like the John Birch Society were promoting alternative medicine. So the conservative-hippie convergence isn't new. But today's MAHAcons have gone far beyond the niche that Dreher observed a few decades ago. Now mainstream Republican politicians and pundits are on board. Kennedy, who presides over HHS' vast budget and sprawling bureaucracy, is their avatar. He's not exactly who you'd expect as a right-wing leader. Kennedy spent most of his career as an environmental lawyer, suing private and public entities over pollution. President Barack Obama reportedly considered him to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. But like many of the people Dreher wrote about, Kennedy is deeply suspicious of industrially processed food, pharmaceutical corporations, and the threat of supposedly dangerous toxins in modern products of all kinds. Over the years, he started to become known for his conspiracy theories and warnings about vaccines. Until recently, he seemed content to fight his fights through the courts and public opinion. That changed in 2023, when Kennedy announced his bid for the presidency, first as a Democrat and then as an independent. In summer 2024, Kennedy suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump. In his first months atop HHS, Kennedy presided over thousands of cuts to the agency's work force and toured the country to tout the MAHA message. Influenced by him, Republican states have been seeking permission to remove soda from the list of things that can be purchased with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits (a.k.a. food stamps), and reconsidering school lunches. "I urge every governor to champion legislation that bans ultraprocessed foods and dyes in public schools, and submit a waiver to the [Department of Agriculture] to remove soda from SNAP," Kennedy said in April. But Kennedy is a cultural figure as much as he is a bureaucrat—a movement figurehead whose name has become a marketable meme. In February, the diner chain Steak 'n Shake promised that by March 1, fries at all locations would "be RFK'd!" It followed up on the promise in April, announcing that its french fries would henceforth be cooked in "100% all-natural beef tallow" rather than the seed oils that are among Kennedy's biggest targets. Kennedy isn't the only alt-wellness figure with Trump's ear. In May, Trump nominated for surgeon general Casey Means, a functional medicine doctor who co-founded the DIY-focused health tracking company Levels and co-wrote—with brother and MAHA influencer Calley Means—Good Energy, about unhealthy lifestyles leading to mitochondrial problems that fuel chronic disease. The change in the way the right talks about these issues seems like it "happened overnight, and it happened without a mea culpa, without an apology. It's the craziest thing," says Robb Wolf, a biochemist and best-selling health writer who co-founded the electrolyte drink company LMNT. "I think there was this collective realization by a bunch of people on the right like, 'OK, the left is crazy on food'"—and with Kennedy, "there's an opportunity to stick it to the left." One reason MAHA made inroads in a space once dominated by the left is because the left became both too strident and too compromised to hold onto the space. Consider what happened to the "Slow Food" or "Real Food" movement. A central figure was author Michael Pollan, whose maxim was "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." Unified by "the recognition that industrial food production is in need of reform," the movement, Pollan wrote in 2010, was also "about community, identity, pleasure, and, most notably, about carving out a new social and economic space removed from the influence of big corporations on the one side and government on the other." The movement was left-leaning—most associated with coastal foodies and urban hipsters—but it crossed partisan boundaries. "More and more, the concept of returning to traditional foodways is pulling people in," noted The Washington Post in a 2008 article about the Weston A. Price Foundation, a nutrition nonprofit preaching "unorthodox ideas" about healthy foods. "New members include the expected 'back to the land' types, for whom the foundation's message provides yet another reason to support small organic farms, and those who oppose the government's attempt to limit the availability of foods such as raw milk." The food movement wasn't without its flaws. "There was built into the food movement this nostalgia from when mom made things from scratch," says Phoebe Maltz Bovy, the Canada-based author of The Perils of "Privilege." And there was a "purity politics" to it—an obsession with food provenance and transparency that may not have been racist but "wasn't trying very hard not to be." The idea, she says, was that "if you were going to a Chinese restaurant, you should go to the one run by the white guy in the flannel shirt because he's into farms and sustainability." But as the Great Awokening swept the left and Democrats became more stringently identitarian, reasonable criticism gave way to overcorrection. Concerns about privilege and cultural appropriation became a purity politics of their own. The white cookbook author and food columnist Alison Roman was excoriated for not sufficiently crediting ethnic influences in a chickpea stew recipe. There were earnest conversations about whether it's OK to cook "other people's food," meaning cuisine from a foreign culture or most associated with a race other than one's own. Commenters on the feminist blog Jezebel "had these wars about lentils," says Maltz Bovy. Some would offer lentils as proof that healthy home cooking needn't be expensive. Others would scoff that not everyone has access to stores with lentils, time to cook lentils, or even a kitchen to cook them in. The food movement also ran up against the body positivity and fat acceptance movements. Theoretically, these movements shouldn't be at odds. But promoting "real food" was often talked about as a way to counter obesity—and that could be cast as fat shaming. "Telling people that they can be healthy at any size is just a lie," says Wolf. As the left embraced the idea, he adds, it has seriously limited the ways progressive circles can talk about food. "That locavore, organic food scene used to be so much a part of the center-left, and, man, you'll get hung out to dry talking about that stuff these days," he says. Touting specialized diets—even for health conditions like autoimmune disorders—will yield accusations of privilege or promoting disordered eating. As they embraced bigger bodies, many liberals also fell in with Big Pharma and Big Medicine, thanks in large part to Barack Obama's signature law: the Affordable Care Act of 2010. Obama-care wed the Democrats to a very particular kind of thinking about health, one intimately tied to insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and corporate health care systems. The relationship between those businesses and the government is often antagonistic, with politicians forcing private companies to cover more and more medicines and services or to cap out-of-pocket costs for certain drugs. But it seems to leave room for only two goals: insuring more people and mandating what insurance must cover. There's little room for proactive wellness efforts, nontraditional care, or imagining alternatives to a system that Americans of all stripes increasingly distrust. For decades, NORC at the University of Chicago has been asking people how much confidence they have in "the people running" medicine. In the mid 1970s, most people—between 54 percent and 61 percent—had a lot of confidence. In 2021, just 38 percent of surveyed Americans did. For most of this span, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to have confidence, even as trust on both sides declined. In the early 2010s, Republicans dropped below Democrats on this question for the first time. Answers really diverged around 2017, as GOP confidence continued to drop and Democrats' confidence spiked. Rising Republican populism brought with it a fresh skepticism of corporate power, fueled by the perception that corporations had joined with the extreme left. "We've seen a flip in who considers themselves the establishment," says Carney. "The left used to very much think of themselves as antiestablishment, and they were very suspicious of the medical establishment and they liked alternative medicine and homegrown health remedies. And that flipped. Maybe it originally started with Obama-care, but it definitely picked up speed during the COVID lockdowns." Meanwhile, "the right has gone the other way, where they see themselves as the antiestablishment." Another early radicalizing development—and not just among conservatives—was how much nutrition and health institutions got wrong about fat and cholesterol. After decades of demonization of eggs, butter, and fats, the message that this push was misguided—and may, indeed, have contributed to health issues—gained ground with the popularization of the Atkins, paleo, and keto diets. "People are far more aware today of the dangers of excessive carbohydrates and seed oils, the healthfulness of saturated fats and a higher-fat diet generally, as well as the role that the ketogenic diet can play in reversing chronic diseases," says Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, and founder of The Nutrition Coalition. She credits this in part to a grassroots movement spurred by observable positive effects in people who eschewed conventional dietary advice. "As people get healthier by eating a diet that is nearly the direct opposite from what the government recommends, they've come to realize that the government, top experts, and the media have not been providing reliable information on diet and health," Teicholz says. Independent media, powered by new technology, have filled that gap. Today there is a huge heterodox digital media ecosystem—podcasts, YouTube videos, social media, Substack newsletters—capable of raising the profile of crunchy cons, New Agers, biohackers, gym bros, crystal girlies, carnivore dieters, and various alternative wellness types. This has led to more mingling between worlds that were less likely to intersect in earlier eras—homeschooling rural Christian moms and big-city birth freedom advocates bonding over their shared skepticism around vaccines, lefty tech types aligning with the manosphere over nootropics. "Everyone is their own medical adviser these days, so it's not surprising how political things have become or that the loudest voices are the ones being heard," says Susan Allport, author of The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed From the Western Diet and What We Can Do to Replace Them. As better and cheaper technology allowed for more direct-to-consumer health tests and services, the means to take prevention and wellness into one's own hands also opened up demand for health information, advice, and encouragement. Those using new communications tools have been all too happy to supply it, for better or worse. Call it the democratization of gurus. Health influencers proliferated, catering to every possible lifestyle niche and wellness concern. And within that health influencer space, there has been a proliferation of right-wing personalities taking up new careers. Men who in decades past promoted "pickup artistry" and men's rights have found new relevance hawking routines to optimize male health and virility. Women interested in promoting "traditional" femininity and ideas typically associated with social and religious conservatives could find broader audiences focusing on fertility maximizing, the benefits of breastfeeding, or the joys of natural living. Critics of promiscuity could minimize the movement's moralism and focus on birth control's unwelcome side effects. At a time when traditional religiosity has been in decline and the usual milestones of adulthood are being delayed or discarded for many, crunchy MAHA subcultures started serving as new vectors of connection and meaning. Protein-maxxing health bros, raw milk–drinking trad wives, toxin-fearing food babes, vaccine-critical Insta moms, tallow-promoting beauty vloggers, and all sorts of other body-as-temple types sell new solutions, provide new scapegoats, and offer conservatives, especially young ones, new ideas about what it means to live virtuously. The COVID era only accelerated these countercultural movements, technological trends, and political realignments that were percolating in the years leading up to it. Democrats grew more tied to health institutions and public health authorities. The sanctimonious set online found a new avenue for expressing moral superiority. Influencers gained more attention and power as people were stuck at home, seeking both escapism and new avatars of their discontent. Republicans grew more skeptical of government action around health and science, as public health bodies and government authorities closed schools and churches and gyms, made seemingly arbitrary decisions around what could be open, promoted vaccine mandates, and made missteps and misrepresentations around masks and the virus's origins. Of course, it wasn't just Republicans. It was all sorts of parents of school-age children, especially moms. It was yoga instructors and gym owners and anyone in the business of bodies. It was anyone already given to distrust the medical establishment or fear a growing surveillance state. A lot of people who thought of themselves as liberals or progressives suddenly found themselves making common cause with conservatives. Kiley Holliday, a yoga teacher and movement therapist based in San Francisco and New York, saw many people in her world become disillusioned with Democrats during the pandemic. "The Democratic Party didn't stand for bodily autonomy in the strictest sense anymore, and people could see that shift," she says. Combined with the closure of so many fitness businesses, this angered a lot of people in the industry who Holliday would have described as "leftists, or at least the Joe Rogan left, the gym bros that were into Bernie." Their livelihoods were wrecked, and they thought the authorities were "compelling people to be sedentary." But when those in the wellness world spoke up, Holliday says, they got dismissed as Trump supporters. Some of them just embraced it: "OK, if that makes me a right-winger, I guess I'll just be a right-winger." Holliday still considers herself a leftist, if a heterodox one, and she worries about what recent shifts mean for her side. "I grew up in California, raised by a crystal-swinging, bohemian, kundalini-practicing mom, and all of these things I grew up with—the critique of Big Food, the critique of Big Pharma—are now seen as right-wing. That's a huge loss for the left." Many of the new alliances and understandings forged during the pandemic have far outlasted it. The pandemic was "formative…in most people's experience of public health as an entity," says journalist James Hamblin, author of Clean: The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less. "How people felt about the pandemic and the response to it led people to feel strongly about science and public health, in ways that they might not have otherwise had strong feelings about." For some on the left, it served as a gateway to right-wing influencers, media, or politicians—for some on the right, as a gateway to broader skepticism about public health advice and dietary guidelines. "Conservatives were extremely trusting of food and pharma in the United States," says Alex Clark, host of Culture Apothecary, a podcast from the conservative group Turning Point USA. For her and many others, a pandemic-inspired distrust "of the medical industrial complex" led to "an aha moment" about diet and health more generally. "We already had a distrust of the government," she says, "so when we thought about it, it wasn't that big of a leap." That aha moment came at a time when there wasn't much to do but sit around and stew online. Stew—and fantasize. Enter the trad wives. Every generation seems to go through a rural romanticism era. The boomers had their hippie communes and lesbian separatist enclaves. In late-'00s Brooklyn, millennials dreamed of running upstate or out west to farms. A few actually did, while others took to farming on city rooftops and beekeeping in their backyards. Working outdoors and slow cooking and the DIY ethos were seen as an antidote to desk jobs, email, recession, anomie. It was all distinctly hipster-coded, which is to say left-leaning, yet there was nothing particularly left about it, except for the people who happened to be involved. During COVID, farm fantasies and domestic idylls, mediated through Instagram and TikTok, tended to take on a conservative valence, heavy with photogenic Mormon families. A lot of the activities (farming, gardening, slow cooking) and aesthetics (mason jars, wood beams) were identical to those of the hipsters and slow foodies of a decade or so earlier. So, too, were many motives: environmental sustainability, frustration with modern living and office work. But this time there were a lot more kids around, and a lot more captions touting the joys of motherhood and "traditional" femininity. It was content imbued, subtly or overtly, with a particular sort of meaning. To get sucked into it was to encounter not just pretty kitchens and home-butchered meat but messages about fertility, naturalness, women's place as keepers of home and health. If the idealized housewife of yore was a primped up suburban mom keen to show off cutesy cupcakes and Campbell's soup casseroles, the new ideal—the MAHA ideal—wore natural linen dresses and worried about BPA and phthalates. She's conservative, but not always obviously so at first glance, and not in a way that conservatives of decades past might recognize. Indeed, the MAHA movement stems in part from dissatisfaction with tired left/right categories. You can see that frustration at play in the work of wellness gurus like Nicole Daedone, co-founder of the orgasmic meditation company OneTaste and a major player in alternative wellness and sexual health circles. Daedone has written a "Purple Manifesto" detailing the ways she and many others grew disillusioned with Democrats. In it, she argues that there is "a coalition forming…the marriage of red and blue with a commitment to the shared benefit of all, even those we find challenging." You can see it in the frustration of health-conscious women—some now accepting the "MAHA Moms" label, some being lumped in simply because they're concerned about things like food dyes—who don't understand how these issues got so politically charged. Worry about things like food dyes is "not political," one mom of three told Reason, "and it seems deranged that so much of the country is so set on telling us that it is." When many of them look at the new health-conscious right, it's not the "right" part that matters. They're for whoever promises to make fertility treatments less expensive and grocery shopping less fraught, to validate their fears about microplastics and take autoimmune conditions seriously. But while their concerns may not stem from politics or partisan identification, these concerns are being harnessed into a very political movement, one with major influence and power in the Trump administration. The MAHA movement could do some good. If it does nothing but reverse the Republican habit of equating unhealthy diets with patriotism, anti-elitism, and masculinity, it will have done something valuable by making more space for people on the right to care about their personal health. Even better if it helps eliminate farm subsidies and burdensome regulations. But MAHA has hitched itself to a star figure with a long history of promoting dubious and unreliable health claims. While the movement sometimes characterizes itself as a decentralized, DIY project, its most visible figure is a politician turned bureaucrat who wields tremendous coercive power. Kennedy claims he's not against vaccines. But he chaired Children's Health Defense, a leading anti-vax group. That organization mixes worthy ideals, such as "health freedom," with toxic doses of misinformation—most prominently, the idea that vaccines are responsible for rising autism diagnoses. Before his recent political turn, Kennedy called autism a "holocaust" and accused federal officials of "work[ing] with the pharmaceutical industry to gin up" evidence that exculpates vaccines. He has continued to call autism a "preventable disease" with environmental causes, pledging in April that HHS would "look at all potential culprits" for this "epidemic" and rejecting the idea that the increase in cases stems from expanded diagnostic criteria and improved diagnoses. And HHS hired as a data analyst David Geier, who, according to The New York Times, "has published numerous articles in the medical literature attempting to tie mercury in vaccines to autism." Yes, in the midst of a measles outbreak that has caused two children's deaths, Kennedy posted, "The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine." But Kennedy has also promoted dubious alternative measles therapies. Some fear Kennedy's power and influence could contribute to burgeoning rates of vaccine hesitancy, with dire consequences. Kennedy's controversies extend beyond vaccines. He has also crusaded against phones in schools by invoking discredited theories about cellphones causing cancer and floated unlikely ideas about endocrine-disrupting chemicals causing gender dysphoria. Some nutrition experts—including Allport, who is skeptical of mainstream dietary wisdom around fats—worry that Kennedy unfairly tars all seed oils as equally unhealthy or overstates the positive health case for beef tallow. Maybe those RFK fries aren't so healthy after all? There's a real risk that Kennedy will do exactly what he's long accused public health officials of doing—using questionable or unsettled science to promote policies that are harmful or unnecessary. MAHA activists and their avatars in Washington sometimes can't seem to decide between a libertarian approach, which would loosen the government's grasp on matters of medicine, food, and wellness, and a more top-down approach that uses their new power to get what they want, ostensibly for the greater good. Kennedy has said he is open to increasing liberty around psychedelics and that he doesn't want to take away people's choices when it comes to doughnuts and sodas. But Kennedy has also tried to influence corporate behavior through jawboning. In March, The New York Times described a meeting between Kennedy and food and drink company executives, in which Kennedy reportedly "said that it was an 'urgent priority' to eliminate artificial dyes from foods and drinks sold nationwide." Was this a request from a health advocate? Or a warning from a powerful bureaucrat? The next month, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced a plan to speed up an already-in-the-works phase-out of several synthetic dyes. Announcing the move, Kennedy described it not as a ban but as an "understanding" with food companies. When a member of a Cabinet asks the companies he regulates to do something, one suspects their compliance is not entirely voluntary. Kennedy also seems to envision an expanded role for the FDA, telling CBS in April that the agency "needs to start regulating food again." HHS also recently started mulling a rule to keep companies from self-affirming new ingredients as safe. To do the most good, MAHA must resist the urge to advance its goals through statist means. But is there political will to resist? Even Wolf, who generally thinks "a market-based, non-interventionist approach" is the way to go, suggests that market failures might make limiting certain ingredients in foods a reasonable place for intervention. "I'm a little more open to things like food colorings getting some legislation," he says, though he also worries that lawmakers won't make such decisions informed by science, or that they could be too easily influenced by business interests. Food dyes aside, thereseems to be less interest among MAHA proponents in the sorts of junk food taxes and Big Gulp bans that liberals advocated in decades past. "I don't think conservatives are becoming health nannies. I don't think they want to force this on people," says Carney. "Generally it's a pretty libertarian or individualistic moment, people deciding they should make their own health decisions." If the official health nannies do take a hands-off approach, we will end up left with the invisible hands of health influencers, wellness entrepreneurs, and countless individuals making decisions on their own. Critics worry that this would be a dangerous world of unregulated, uncredentialed health hucksterism. Yet after decades of public health expert failures and ever-increasing government control over health, nutrition, and the communication around it, a freer environment could be just what we need. At its best, which is not always what it achieves, the MAHA movement is about giving up on the idea that the government always knows best when it comes to our wellness. It's a reaction to negligence, error, arrogance, and overreach on the part of health experts and government authorities. But thanks to Trump and Kennedy, that movement has now amassed considerable political power—power to shape or flatly determine decisions on everything from vaccines to pharmaceuticals to food labels for hundreds of millions of Americans. The temptation to wield that power will be hard to resist. Neofascist breakfast aside, Carney says, "I'm not dreaming of imposing blueberries on everybody else." The question is whether politically powerful figures like Trump and Kennedy agree. The post Trad Wives and Tallow Fries: How the Wellness Wars Flipped Health and Food Politics Upside Down appeared first on
