Women built the Make America Healthy Again movement, with Instagram-savvy “MAHA moms” railing against food dyes, pesticides and ultraprocessed snacks. But men now hold the reins, and their priorities look a lot more like the manosphere’s, as Jill Filipovic reports for Mother Jones.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. runs HHS. Mehmet Oz runs CMS, Jay Bhattacharya runs NIH, and Marty Makary led the FDA until his resignation in May. Adviser Calley Means, who urged Kennedy to ally with Trump, co-founded Truemed, which helps consumers buy supplements and red-light therapy boxes with HSA dollars.
Grassroots figures like Kelly Ryerson, who writes as “Glyphosate Girl,” still do the legwork. “I feel that I really represent this massive group of women who have either their family member, their child, or they themselves have been struggling with some kind of chronic illness and are just fed up with the toxicity,” she said.
Monika McDermott, a political science professor at Fordham University, says MAHA “fits with the MAGA movement’s vision of the role that men play and the roles that women play.” Kennedy’s inverted food pyramid puts protein, dairy and fats on top, and he pitched it as the end of a “war on protein.” Samantha King, a kinesiology professor at Queen’s University, describes “a steady drumroll of protein boosterism by characters in the manosphere who trade in ideas that masculinity is in decline and under attack.”
Policy has followed. HHS’s revamped Title X grant guidance mentions “chronic disease” 14 times and contraception once. It stresses testosterone levels and sperm counts instead.
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The moms’ top targets have fared worse. Trump issued an executive order declaring glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, critical to national security. His Justice Department also backed Bayer in a Supreme Court case that the company won in June, a result Ryerson called “deeply, deeply devastating.”
Podcaster Alex Clark warns that Republicans who ignore these women risk losing the midterms. Ryerson says MAHA voters are “up for grabs.”
