The misogynist agenda of "MAHA moms"

Like the skilled propagandist he is, Robert Kennedy knows that nothing impresses a right-wing audience like surrounding himself with a fleet of fawning, mostly white women. Kennedy's version of a cheerleading squad is the "MAHA moms," a group whose name derives from the misleading "Make America Healthy Again" slogan Kennedy concocted as part of his successful bid to be Donald Trump's Health and Human Services Secretary. Kennedy is forever doing photoshoots with these women, a clutch of so-called "wellness" influencers who echo Kennedy's endless stream of false health claims, like that vaccines are dangerous, that getting the measles prevents cancer and that esoteric diet fads like frying food in beef tallow will prevent disease. It's all false. But Kennedy sells the lies with an appealing message that the homespun wisdom of "moms" should be trusted over what all those scientists and doctors have to say.

Kennedy gathered his "MAHA moms" earlier this month for a roundtable event where they marveled as he pretended he couldn't pronounce the ingredients listed on food packages. "Carrageenan, riboflavin, monosodium glutamate and 20 others that I can’t pronounce," he said, as one of the "MAHA moms" gravely intoned, "that stuff's really bad." No one mentioned the common names for these ingredients: seaweed, vitamin B2, and MSG, a common amino acid that has been demonized because it's popular in Asian food. None are linked to the chronic illnesses, like diabetes, Kennedy claims to be focused on. Some, like vitamin B, are necessary to survive. 

"MAHA moms" are sold with claims that they will empower women. Kristen Louelle Gaffney, a former Sports Illustrated model who has rebranded as a "MAHA mom" to sell her brand of snack foods told the Guardian that she sees it as a "feminist movement within households" because moms are on Instagram bragging about "this new cabbage soup I’m making" or how they cook without seed oil, one of the random ingredients MAHA has falsely declared is dangerous now. (Kennedy wants people to switch to high cholesterol alternatives like beef tallow — basically lard — which is very much the opposite of what actual nutrition scientists recommend.) If it's not clear how hyping shady supplements and sharing recipes contributes to the feminist project of fighting for gender equality, that's because it's not. On the contrary, the whole "MAHA mom" phenomenon is deeply sexist, and part of the larger MAGA agenda of getting women out of the workplace and back, quite literally, into the kitchen. 

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As Thomas Edsall of the New York Times reported Tuesday, despite Kennedy and Trump's rhetoric about keeping "our children healthy and strong," the administration's policies serve the opposite goal. The administration is rolling back decades of environmental protections that protect children from pollution exposure that is known to cause everything from asthma to cancer. As one expert told Edsall, "It is hard to imagine a more sweeping agenda to make Americans less healthy." 

This is where the "MAHA mom" concept kicks in. Despite all the talk about "toxins," there is not a whiff of energy in the "MAHA mom" movement towards fighting against the Trump administration's plans to dump increasing amounts of very real pollution into the environment. Instead, women are told to focus their energies on the domestic sphere, to shield their own children from threats, many of them imaginary. And wouldn't you know it, but the prescribed way to "protect" children just so happens to be giving up hopes of having a career or even much of a life outside of the home, so that women can dedicate themselves full-time to elaborate food preparation and home remedy routines for the inevitable old-timey diseases kids get when you refuse to vaccinate them. 

It's not for nothing that much of the content in the "wellness" influencer sphere that Kennedy is tapping into starts blurring into "tradwife" content that openly advocates for patriarchal gender roles, where women live in submission to men and allegedly have no ambitions outside of serving their families. (In reality, "tradwife" influencers are performing housewifery for money online, which makes them closer to paid actors than actual housewives.) MAHA propaganda paints the grocery store as a viper's nest of hidden poisons. Taken to an extreme — and social media is nothing, if not a place to take everything to its extreme — one is led to believe the only way to keep children safe is to make all your food from scratch. Even buying a loaf of bread instead of baking your own from sourdough is too big a risk. And maybe you should consider moving to a farm and growing your own food? Whatever you do, you no longer have time for a life outside the home, much less a job. 

The anti-vaccination rhetoric Kennedy engages in draws on more of the same. Getting your kid vaccinated is regarded as almost a cheat code for mothers, as if they're taking the easy way out by getting their kids a shot that prevents sickness to begin with. Instead, Kennedy and the MAHA moms romanticize the sick bed and the time-consuming maternal work of nursing a kid back to health. In response to the measles outbreak in West Texas, caused by the surge of vaccine refusals, Kennedy skated past the expert opinion to vaccinate to hype his view that the real solution is intensive mothering. He insisted that "we see a correlation between people who get hurt by measles and people who don’t have good nutrition or who don’t have a good exercise regimen," for which there is no evidence. While paying lip service to the vaccine, Kennedy preferred to focus on recommending that mothers wait until the child gets the measles, and then inundating the child with cod liver oil, vitamin A and other intensive treatments. 

You don't need to have kids to spot the mother-guilt going on. The implicit message is that kids with "good" mothers — defined as women who spend every waking moment preparing food and encouraging children to exercise — don't get sick. If your kid does get very ill from a disease like the measles, then it's probably because you were lazy, moms. Next time, scale back even more on having a life outside the home, and, I don't know, learn to churn butter or something. It's all nonsense, but it's nonsense that has a well-financed propaganda machine behind it, as evidenced by anti-vaccine and anti-feminist magazines like Evie or glossy "tradwive" accounts like Ballerina Farm. Now it's found the force of the federal government with Kennedy heading the HHS.

The allure of the "MAHA mom" pitch isn't hard to see. They sell an illusion of control to women, telling them that if they embrace this complex and confusing dietary plan, reject modern medicine and spend all their time tending to the "wellness" of their family, they can prevent anything bad from happening to them. It's a pitch based on a lie, as we see with the children suffering from the recent measles outbreak, one of whom has already died. Women are being told to give up their independence to Make America Healthy Again — and the promised reward isn't even real.