As I watched clips this week from RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearing to potentially become the next secretary of Health and Human Services, I could only slowly shake my head in disbelief.
This guy? This guy? This guy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is the one that is going to “make America healthy again”? The guy who spends his time, according to his cousin Caroline Kennedy, making smoothies out of mice and chickens? The guy with a worm in his brain? The guy who only drinks raw milk?
I’m not trying to be judgmental of my fellow moms here. I just can’t believe this is the person I have seen so many rally behind. During the hearing, Kennedy told a Black senator to her face that she should be on a different vaccine schedule than white people. He’s insisted for decades that completely disproven links between vaccines and autism are real, harming thousands of people. An Esquire reporter wrote this week that when he mentioned to Kennedy during a 2020 interview that his six-year-old son had battled leukemia, Kennedy asked him if his son had been vaccinated, implying the writer could have been responsible for his child’s cancer. He, allegedly, sexually assaulted a babysitter. And these are just a few examples of Kennedy’s unfitness to serve.
Despite everything, this is the guy who I have watched countless women and mothers on social media fawn over as the savior of the health of our nation and our precious, sweet little babies. These women have taken up his “make America healthy again” or “MAHA” mantle, proudly declaring Kennedy the hero who is going to put “kids’ safety first” and start a generational revolution. Sorry, but what is happening here?
Although it may feel like it, Kennedy’s ability to capture the hearts and minds of so many women, specifically mothers, is not something that came out of nowhere. It’s the latest development in a long-simmering obsession with wellness and conspiracy theories on social media, one that has ensnared thousands of women and continues to grow in prominence, as evidenced by Kennedy’s huge amounts of support online.
To back up: In 2020 during the first lockdowns of the pandemic, I first began to notice that many wellness influencer moms were sharing things that felt…off. They were making vague statements about not believing everything you read, about the COVID-19 pandemic being some sort of smokescreen, about praying for babies, and warning against “elites.”
Then, with terrifying speed, many of these “wellness mamas” went full QAnon. It kind of came out of nowhere, but also didn’t. The conspiracies grew in fertile ground. These were women who were holistic, earthy, and eschewed things like giving a kid with a fever a spoonful of Tylenol. They were into essential oils and probably weren’t thrilled about vaccines. This was a cohort who already had a vague mistrust of the government, were reading with alarm about things like ultra-processed foods, and were growing more and more convinced that chemicals and microplastics were seeping into their children’s skin and eyes and bone marrow and slowly sending them to an early grave. Most of all they were worried, as all mothers are perennially, that the choices they were making would hurt their children.
Of course, not everyone who had these concerns went down the Q rabbit hole. But for some of these women it was a slippery slope from making your own cough drops to believing, as one prominent influencer wrote at the time, that the naval hospital ships docked in Manhattan to treat COVID-19 patients were actually housing kidnapped children who were being smuggled through tunnels under Central Park and forced into slavery.
I spent the next few years covering this movement, from prominent moms turned “truth tellers” like Little Miss Patriot to the Wayfair conspiracy and “save our children.” Even as the conspiracists grew more and more fanciful, wellness was always a pivotal part of their message. Little Miss Patriot, for instance, sold a mouth spray that promised to cure those who had been vaccinated as children by removing “toxins like mercury and lead from your body at a cellular level to reveal your body’s full potential.”
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For this mom of a disabled child, the New Hampshire senator explained, Kennedy’s vaccine lies feel personal.
Then Joe Biden was elected president, the January 6 insurrection happened, and social media platforms’ efforts to permanently ban QAnon acolytes were largely successful. The movement splintered and faded from public consciousness.
Kennedy, though, is the perfect new champion for the simmering, wellness-obsessed, anti-vaccine-curious crowd, and he’s reactivated many who were dormant. He isn’t pushing QAnon-level, Pizzagate-level nonsense, and some of his positions are ones many of these women either already believed (no vaccines) or are primed to believe (drink raw milk). He rails against things like food dyes and seed oils, longtime bogeymen of self-described “crunchy moms,” who cheered him on as the savior they had long been waiting for.
“I just want what’s best for [my kids] so they can feel their best,” one of these mothers, now a fervent advocate for Kennedy, told USA Today. “The fact that he actually seems to care and want to make these changes is great.… You look at the ingredients of Lucky Charms here and Lucky Charms in Europe, and the ingredients they use here are different and more horrible, and have all the dyes.”
Once a few “MAHA moms” started spreading the word, support exploded. TikTok and Instagram are full of women practically prostrating themselves at Kennedy’s feet, saying they are shedding tears at RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearing watching him fight for the nation’s children.
“This made me cry,” said one proud MAHA mom. “Thank you RFK for putting our kids safety and the many generations after to be healthier.”
The most frustrating part of all of this? Many of the MAHA mom talking points are valid. The science isn’t definitive on the harms of food dyes, but the FDA just banned Red Dye No. 3 over concerns it could be a carcinogen. The American diet could use a shake-up and children should be encouraged to eat healthier, more unprocessed foods as a general rule.
This is a position several lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have held, including, most notably, Michelle Obama when she was first lady. Remember “Let’s Move” and the Task Force on Childhood Obesity and the new regulations regarding school lunches (which by the way, really helped kids)? Trump rolled back those regulations in 2020, which was met with cheers from Republicans, who had criticized the program as being part of the “liberal nanny state.”
Now the Trump administration, with Kennedy at its helm, is apparently leading a new MAHA army whose goal is to make our kids healthier. And I have to say, it remains befuddling to me why Kennedy has become their king. But it would be one thing if he was just a person with a lot of demons in his past who was pushing harmless and perhaps even positive changes to the American diet.
That’s not what’s happening though. Kennedy’s views, especially around vaccines, are extreme, and the alarming speed with which he’s gathered his army of acolytes is terrifying when you consider what else he may be able to convince them of.
It took only a few viral Instagram posts for some wellness influencers in 2020 to become completely swallowed up by extremists, and the same pattern seems to be repeating itself now. I’m bracing myself for what comes next. It saddens me that so many moms are throwing their support behind such a corrupt administration, especially when I believe that their intentions are pure.
I understand the anxiety of feeling like there’s no way to protect your children from all the ills that could befall them, the pressures to do every little thing right to put them on a good path, and the constant fear that they could one day get sick with an illness you can’t control. I understand the isolation that comes from motherhood as well, the days and nights spent sitting with a crying baby, scrolling TikTok for relatable content. What mothers want above all else is a way to control the uncontrollable, to grasp any reassurance that our kids will be okay. That we have done a good enough job.
I wish that these powers we have could be harnessed for good, that we could collectively fight injustice and advocate for our children without cheering on an administration that perpetuates it. But watching the MAHA moms content, I don’t feel optimistic. I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending.
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