How Gen Z went MAHA | The Gray Area
Vox
0:00 There's long been this sort of funnel where people can get interested in sort
0:05 of wellness content on social media and some of that wellness content is
0:09 going to be just about yoga and just about like green juice or now
0:12 just about the all meat diet and it's not going to go beyond that.
0:15 But some of it is going to also say things that are more conspiracist.
0:22 So like not only you should eat all meat,
0:25 but this is something your government doesn't want you to know.
0:28 Like they want to keep you sick.
0:48 This is a gray area.
0:50 I am Sean Illing.
0:50 My guest today is Anna North.
0:53 She's a colleague of mine here at Vox
0:54 who covers American culture and family life.
0:57 She's also the author of the excellent newsletter Kids Today.
1:01 I invited Anna on the show to talk about MAHA,
1:04 that is Make America Healthy Again for the Uninitiated.
1:07 We talk about what this thing is, how it's evolving, and who it's appealing to.
1:12 This is one of those trends that on the surface might not seem important,
1:16 but this conversation with Anna is about why it is.
1:20 Hope you enjoy it.
1:22 Anna North, welcome back.
1:24 Hey, how's it going to show?
1:25 Thanks for having me.
1:26 Good to have you back.
1:27 You were very popular with the audience and um I'm glad
1:30 I guess uh I guess you have friend of the show status now.
1:33 So big congrats.
1:35 Thank you.
1:35 Your latest piece is sort of adjacent to some
1:38 of the issues we were talking about before.
1:40 It's the MA, the Make America Healthy Movement.
1:45 Um let's just start with the basics here.
1:47 Um, for people who don't know, what is MAHA?
1:53 That is a great question.
1:55 I think even people who like our leaders
1:58 in the Maha movement might have a hard time defining it.
2:01 And it's not their fault.
2:02 It's a complicated sort of collection of interests,
2:05 coalition of people that don't always agree and don't always get along.
2:08 Not unlike MAGA, which it sort of takes its name from.
2:12 So, MA stands for Make America Healthy Again.
2:15 Um, Robert F.
2:16 Kennedy Jr.
2:17 is sort of the de facto leader.
2:20 A number of people have started kind
2:21 of referring to him as the country's top health
2:24 influencer which feels very apt in terms of what
2:27 is his actual role in government and culture.
2:30 Um but Maha is bigger than RFK Jr.
2:33 Um it I would say it's a collection of people
2:37 who believe uh that America the United States um
2:44 has a lot of health problems and crucially
2:46 that those health problems are caused by diet uh ultrarocessed foods.
2:54 Many people though not all people in Maha believe that American
2:58 health problems are caused at least in part by vaccines.
3:01 That's where things get pretty controversial.
3:04 Um, and there's a strand too of sort of anti-establishment thinking within MA.
3:10 Sort of an idea that you should be taking your health into your own hands.
3:15 You should be managing things yourself.
3:17 You should be a little bit distrustful of doctors and hospitals
3:21 and researchers and scientists and sort
3:23 of the quote unquote medical establishment.
3:25 Uh, I think that's that's a piece for a lot of people too.
3:28 You know, not everything associated with maja is necessarily bad.
3:33 It certainly doesn't seem that way, right?
3:35 Like ultrarocessed food sucks and it's good if we eat less of it.
3:40 You know, caring about what you put in your body is good, right?
3:44 I don't there's nothing ostensibly wrong with that, right?
3:48 So, like at what point does this stop
3:51 being just fairly benal health messaging about, you know,
3:56 watch what you eat, you know, and sort of become something more weird
4:01 and ideological and just maybe even pathological.
4:06 Sure.
4:06 So, yeah, there's a lot of real stuff here.
4:09 Um I think uh one of the biggest things so I did a story a while back kind
4:14 of looking at some claims that Kennedy and others have
4:17 made around um like are American children sicker than ever?
4:21 Are Americans like doing really terribly in our health?
4:24 Do we need all these MA prescriptions?
4:27 Um and what I found was like complex.
4:29 I asked a bunch of researchers and scientists about the MA report
4:33 which is uh a big report that the US government put out.
4:37 RFK Jr.
4:38 spearheaded a lot of it.
4:40 Um, and what, you know, really top sort of epidemiologists and people that I
4:46 think are very trustworthy and very scientifically sound,
4:49 what they said was like, look, you know,
4:52 this report identifies certain things that are really bad for people.
4:55 Um, pesticides and water, you know, a lot of industrial chemicals.
5:00 Um, it is true that American industry
5:04 is allowed to pollute the environment in ways
5:06 that probably are quite harmful for us
5:08 and probably quite harmful for the food supply.
5:12 It would be great if we had tighter regulation to keep certain chemicals
5:15 out of the food we eat and out of the water we drink.
5:18 That would be amazing.
5:20 um around ultrarocessed food.
5:22 It gets kind of complicated because people don't
5:24 totally agree on what an ultrarocessed food is.
5:27 And then sometimes like things fall into that bucket
5:29 that like might not make sense to you or me.
5:32 Like sliced bread for example.
5:34 Like you know if I if I think of like I'm going
5:36 to make like you know a nice simple meal for my child.
5:40 I'm not thinking like oh man I got to avoid that like sliced whole wheat bread.
5:43 That seems seems odd.
5:44 I think that Maha a lot of the people who've become affiliated
5:48 with it became affiliated with it because
5:51 they were really concerned about like what
5:55 kids are eating and what they you know could feed their families
6:00 and how to be healthy in a society that can make that really difficult.
6:04 Yeah.
6:04 And then I think where some MAHA advocates go with that becomes this direction
6:11 of a lot of suspicion around you know
6:15 not just say the agencies of the federal government
6:18 that are refusing to regulate some of these chemicals
6:20 which exist like the EPA is not uh currently keeping the food and water
6:27 in the United States as safe as it probably could.
6:29 That's real.
6:30 But going from that concern to like now I don't trust doctors anymore.
6:36 If my doctor says you should vaccinate your child, I no longer trust that.
6:41 And instead I might choose to trust
6:43 these alternative sources who are telling me for example
6:47 things that are not backed up by science at all like that vaccines cause autism.
6:50 Vaccines just don't cause autism.
6:52 Um there's not evidence of that.
6:54 The evidence that existed at one time has been thoroughly thoroughly debunked.
6:58 Um, so I I think we start from this premise that's actually like a really shared
7:03 premise and then Maha goes in a direction
7:05 that is not shared with a lot of people.
7:08 The word conspiracy probably gets tossed around
7:12 a little too loosely these days, but this world, the Maha world online,
7:20 um does seem to be like a uniquely reliable path to conspiracism.
7:28 Is that your read of it?
7:30 Yes.
7:30 So, a lot of misinformation experts will identify I've I've
7:35 heard it like even before MA was a thing, right?
7:38 Because that is a phrase that sort of was coined when RFK Jr.
7:41 was was coming up into into his current uh public role.
7:45 Um, you know, MA doesn't exist without MAGA.
7:48 Um, but even before that term,
7:50 people would talk about like the wellness to QAnon pipeline.
7:53 So, there's long been this sort of funnel where people can get interested
7:58 in sort of wellness content on social media and some of that wellness content is
8:03 going to be just about yoga and just about like green juice or now
8:06 just about the all meat diet and it's not going to go beyond that.
8:10 But some of it is going to also say things that are more conspiracist.
8:16 So like not only you should eat all meat,
8:19 but this is something your government doesn't want you to know.
8:22 like they want to keep you sick.
8:23 Like a sort of often a shadowy them, like a cabal.
8:26 They don't want you to have this information.
8:28 This is like secret information that I'm giving to you.
8:31 And then that can shade from there into sort of more intense conspiracist
8:36 thinking where maybe you do believe in QAnon or maybe you just believe
8:39 that everybody who's trying to get you to vaccinate your child is part
8:43 of a a sort of a shadowy group that's trying to harm you.
8:46 But it is sort of this documented phenomenon that can happen.
8:49 you know, whatever maha is, it's definitely not a coherent ideology.
8:53 I I think of it like a almost like a a bucket of ideas and half-baked instincts,
8:59 some good, some bad.
9:01 Um, you know, like what for you are
9:02 the most relevant subcultures that make up that bucket?
9:06 Like if you were separating the movement into its various factions or whatever,
9:10 what would be the the central ones that people might know or should know?
9:15 Yeah, I think there's there's a couple buckets to think about.
9:17 So, um there's definitely sort of the mo like I
9:21 think for a lot of people if you think about Maha,
9:23 you would think about Maha Moms.
9:25 You would think about um you know these influencers
9:27 and activists who became allied with RFK Jr.
9:30 around 2024, but they had their own existing constituencies before that.
9:35 An influencer who goes by the food babe,
9:37 Vani Hari, is like a really good example of this.
9:39 She's a very successful influencer, millions of followers.
9:42 Um she expresses a lot of these sort of core maha beliefs.
9:47 Um, but then there are others with fewer followers who might be
9:50 a little bit more they might call
9:51 themselves crunchy or they might be homesteaders.
9:54 Um, some might identify as trades, certainly not all,
9:58 but there's sort of this collection of people where like
10:01 being a mom is like a big part of their appeal,
10:03 a big part of their identity.
10:04 That's one bucket.
10:05 Increasingly, like there's also maja guys.
10:08 I mean, obviously RFK Jr.
10:10 like plays into this, right,
10:11 when he does his like workouts where he wears jeans.
10:15 um you know like there's some constituency
10:18 out there that he's trying to appeal to.
10:20 I think it's men.
10:21 Um it's like maybe the same constituency
10:24 as like you'll hear people say like Huberman husbands.
10:27 Um and so Andrew Huberman like I don't know that that guy counts as Maha,
10:33 but he has some ideas around like protein
10:37 and workouts and um ways to be healthy.
10:41 And a lot of these are actually fine.
10:43 It's fine to lift weights, lift I lift weights.
10:46 That bucket is more around some
10:49 of these lifestyle things that are not that controversial,
10:53 although they can become controversial when
10:56 you add in stuff like injecting peptides,
10:58 which are these like compounds.
11:00 They're not necessarily very well regulated.
11:02 You could order them on the internet.
11:03 They're injectable.
11:04 In theory, they could like boost your strength or your energy or whatever,
11:07 but you don't necessarily know what you're getting.
11:10 But so all that kind of like performance enhancing
11:12 and strength and energy and maybe doing some slightly
11:15 questionable things to achieve that that's like a sort
11:18 of maha adjacent bucket that's like skews really male.
11:21 And then I think there's upand cominging influencers.
11:23 So the piece that I just wrote was about interviewing young women
11:28 and interviewing people about the sort
11:30 of sphere of influence of these young women.
11:32 And I think we are beginning to see what
11:35 sort of a new generation of Maha might look like.
11:38 And I think there's going to be a version of MA that's going to exist long
11:43 after RFK and after Trump in whatever
11:46 our new era looks like post 2026, post 2028.
11:50 Um, and I think if you look at some of these young influencers,
11:54 you get a little bit more of a clue around that.
11:56 You know, it's strange.
11:57 I unlike a lot of wellness movements,
12:00 again, I guess I'm using that term loosely.
12:03 Um, the maja thing seems to be much less
12:07 about pleasure or or well-being and more about vigilance.
12:13 You know, it seems very fear driven,
12:15 watching labels, avoiding toxins, obsessing over inputs.
12:20 I mean, is that something you've noticed?
12:22 Is that even really all that different as it seems?
12:25 Yeah, I was just reading a New York article uh right before
12:28 we talked that was about Maha and it talked about the level
12:32 of fear that you sort of have to maintain in order
12:34 to for example eat in the way that some Maha influencers would suggest.
12:39 So not only are you avoiding things that are processed,
12:41 but you're like seed oils are like a really
12:44 big uh bug bear of the Maha movement.
12:47 So that's like canola oil, some other vegetable oils.
12:50 I think there is a level of vigilance that's prescribed to some degree.
12:54 I think this is like a real hallmark of our era.
12:58 Like I did a story, it's like a year
13:00 and a half ago now about Zen and young people,
13:04 you know, popping a zen, like these these nicotine pouches.
13:07 And what struck me then is like this drug doesn't seem very fun.
13:11 Like it's about performance.
13:12 It's about like being really awake and like
13:15 active and grinding and getting your work done.
13:17 And like I do notice this larger kind of like typea culture.
13:24 Um and I think that exists within maja too.
13:27 I try not to judge people too much.
13:30 I think it's very easy to do that.
13:32 Um I'm guilty of it probably more than I'd like to be.
13:36 Um but I I I try to see the world through the eyes of people I'm talking about.
13:42 Yeah.
13:43 And
13:43 I mean I understand the appeal, right?
13:45 Like, and I'm curious how you read this, but for me,
13:47 I one way to see Maha is as a way for people to take this vague sense of dread
13:54 that people feel in this moment about their bodies
13:57 or the future or the world and then just,
14:00 you know, turn it into something concrete and actionable, right?
14:03 Like this is the one thing.
14:04 Everything else feels sort of like out of control or beyond your control,
14:08 but there's this one domain,
14:09 your body, that you can take control of that you have sovereignty over, right?
14:15 And that impulse might lead to some weird places.
14:18 It definitely does.
14:18 But I can understand how people end up on that path.
14:22 I really can.
14:23 Yeah.
14:23 No, I absolutely can too.
14:24 Um, and I think even like the sad thing is that like
14:29 we're not completely in control of what goes into our bodies, right?
14:32 Like that's such such a hard thing.
14:33 Like we're not in control of like the water.
14:36 We're not in control even like
14:38 you know something like microplastics for example.
14:41 And you'll see maha content that has
14:43 this very it can be a really soothing message.
14:45 Like a lot of times people will say like look I'm not asking you
14:48 to control everything but like control what you can control, do what you can do.
14:52 And like I think that makes a lot of sense, you know,
14:54 like as parenting advice, as life advice, like I get that.
14:58 Um, and then I think when it can become really hard
15:02 is when one when you're asking people to control to a level
15:07 that could like actually be detrimental to their mental health which
15:12 I think can happen especially with things like you know diet recommendations.
15:17 But I think when I get, you know,
15:20 as like a parent and a citizen and reporter get more concerned about
15:23 the messaging is when it takes that sort of like real like soothing thing
15:29 of like I'm giving you some individual control and goes to a place
15:33 of saying this is the only kind of control that anyone should ever expect.
15:37 Can we talk about a character that's in the piece maybe to make
15:41 this sort of concrete um and give people like a sense of the the actual faces?
15:49 Yeah.
15:48 Behind this movement.
15:49 And Lexi Lexi Bales, who is she?
15:53 What kind of content is she doing?
15:55 Why did she stand out to you as someone to engage with for this story?
16:01 Yeah, so Lexi Palis is an interesting person.
16:03 um she's someone that's actually gotten a lot
16:05 of media attention within sort of center-left media.
16:09 So, she's not just she's not just um kind of an upand cominging maha influencer,
16:14 but she's like someone that like the New York Times is like really watching.
16:17 She's been on CNN.
16:19 Um you know, she's like becoming, you know,
16:21 she's getting a lot of mainstream attention.
16:24 Um she's 20.
16:26 Um and she she's very um she's a very self-avoued maha influencer.
16:32 So, her personal account is her personal
16:35 Instagram account is her most successful brand,
16:37 but then she also has an account called,
16:39 I believe, Maja Girls with another young influencer.
16:42 She's done a video with RFK.
16:44 Um, she's appeared with him.
16:46 Um, you know, so she definitely like thinks of herself
16:49 as Maha or at least publicly presents herself as Maha.
16:52 But it's interesting because if you look at her content,
16:54 a lot of it is, I think, more approachable.
16:58 um like you would not necessarily go into some
17:00 of her videos thinking this is particularly ideological.
17:03 She does not talk about vaccines that much.
17:05 She's mostly talking about diet and grocery shopping and food
17:09 and working out and like she'll talk about like what are
17:14 kind of clean swaps at the grocery store like what
17:17 can you buy at the grocery store that in her view
17:19 is like more healthy or how could you make
17:22 this is a very popular actually this is a very popular
17:24 just genre of video generally on Instagram Tik Tok is
17:27 like making something from scratch that is also a processed food.
17:31 So like she made Peeps from scratch.
17:33 Um you know she has other examples of making stuff from scratch.
17:36 Um so it's really like a lot of it is it feels like just a food account.
17:41 There's all these worlds online that I don't really have
17:43 any contact with and don't understand but I am continually astonished.
17:46 They'll have massive followings and I don't know how that happens.
17:50 Um but but how large is her her following?
17:54 Lexi has about 170,000 followers on Instagram.
17:57 So it's not huge.
17:58 just not like as many as someone like Bonnie Hari or as like,
18:02 you know, celebrities that have in the millions, but that's big.
18:04 Like I have 4,000 followers on Instagram, you know.
18:07 Um you can get verified with like less than that.
18:10 So it's she's reaching a lot of people.
18:12 Um was interesting to talk to her because she I think she
18:16 views herself as primarily reaching like women in their maybe 20s and 30s,
18:22 but there's a significant number of younger
18:23 people also who are engaging with her.
18:26 And you know she she had this experience with anorexia
18:29 when she was a kid and she was told you know
18:32 to eat certain foods to recover and she rejected
18:35 that and then you know moved toward this real food heals framework.
18:41 I mean is that how central is that personal story to her appeal online?
18:48 How common is that kind of story online?
18:51 Yeah.
18:51 So what she told me and she told this to the times
18:53 also is that um when she was 13 she had anorexia um she
18:58 was really uncomfortable with um sort of what a dietitian advised her which
19:03 was um in her telling like to eat a lot of junk food.
19:07 She kind of took a more religiously inflected angle where she read the Bible
19:13 and sort of took what she understood
19:16 of her religion to determine what she should eat.
19:20 And so today her diet, she walked me through like what she eats in a day.
19:25 It's like a lot of eggs, it's a lot of meat or fish,
19:28 a lot of fruit, you know, it's whole foods.
19:30 It's nothing it's nothing wild.
19:32 Um, but to her, I think it had this very religious framework.
19:36 Um, and I think that experience also sort of, I guess I could say,
19:43 radicalized her a little bit.
19:45 And it is a really common story.
19:47 So, um, both the young people that I talked with um,
19:51 had a story around sort of like being or feeling failed by doctors.
19:55 Another young woman I spoke with like had IBS
19:58 and she felt like doctors really weren't helping her.
20:01 I think that's a super super common pathway just
20:04 to becoming interested in sort of alternative wellness generally.
20:08 That's kind of what I was getting at, you know,
20:10 the um the emotional logic of that story and the appeal, right?
20:15 And if you dig deep, that seems to be what you find, right?
20:18 Like some version, maybe not a particular eating disorder,
20:21 but some version of the system failed me.
20:25 Yeah.
20:25 or the system deceived me and I found another way,
20:28 another path outside of that system and here's how
20:32 I did it and here's how you can do it.
20:33 But again, there could be a lot of wisdom in that.
20:35 But you could see how quickly that turns into can't trust doctors,
20:39 can't trust data, can't trust science, you can trust me,
20:44 right?
20:44 And you can trust, you know, your your your algos to, you know, point the way.
20:48 And boy, yeah, that doesn't seem good.
20:51 It's really complicated.
20:52 I talked to um a therapist who specializes in eating disorders and something
20:56 that she pointed out to me is that it's there's a lot
21:00 of diagnoses that you can get that are really frustrating and they
21:04 are real and doctors might not be able to help you very much.
21:07 So IBS, irritable bowel syndrome,
21:09 like a lot of like digestive diagnoses like there might not be that much
21:13 that doctors will recommend for you
21:15 to do or the recommendations might be frustrating.
21:17 Your symptoms might come and go in frustrating
21:19 ways that it's really hard to predict.
21:21 Other diagnoses are like that too.
21:23 Um like eczema is like that.
21:25 A lot of people will talk about getting into wellness
21:27 and or getting into maja because of skin issues.
21:30 Um eczema can flare and go back down
21:32 for reasons that are like really hard to know.
21:34 I have eczema.
21:35 I know this.
21:36 Um so there's really a lot of bodily conditions that like
21:41 we don't fully understand yet and the treatments are unsatisfying.
21:45 I think for girls and young women that's especially true.
21:48 Um there's a lot of sexism still in medicine.
21:51 Girls and young women are not necessarily getting, you know,
21:54 the kind of treatment that would be equitable for them.
21:58 So it's never surprising to me from when I hear from someone like,
22:02 you know, I was in pain and my doctor couldn't necessarily help me.
22:07 I think that's a really common story.
22:09 Um, and it is also becoming increasingly common
22:14 for that story to go from like I was in pain, my doctor couldn't help me.
22:18 These are some things I did that helped.
22:21 You should also do the things and then don't listen to doctors.
22:25 like that's a becoming and I'm not necessarily saying that this is
22:29 that this onetoone is something that the young influencers that I spoke
22:32 with really talk about exactly on their channels because again a lot
22:35 of times they're a little pulled back and a little more approachable
22:39 but it is something you'll hear a lot from maha influencers you
22:43 mention you mentioned with Lexi it's becoming like her feeds are becoming
22:48 increasingly religiously infused what's the religious
22:52 dimension of this it doesn't seem
22:53 to be that at all it seems to be a very secular thing.
22:57 Um what what what what is it what is the connection there?
23:00 And is that like is that becoming a more
23:02 of a thing or this is sort of becoming conventionally religious
23:05 or maybe religious in some you know other weird postmodern
23:09 sense but um yeah what's the religious part of this?
23:13 Um no she's interesting because she is
23:15 very self-avouedly Christian and she'll talk about
23:18 like eating the foods that God designed us to eat um and has Bible references.
23:23 That's not as common within the larger Maha movement.
23:25 You'll definitely find people who are religious,
23:27 but like it's not something RFK Jr.
23:29 has led with um you know that like Maha has
23:34 a lot of people talk about the horseshoe theory of like left
23:37 and right sort of coming together more and more commonly in sort
23:41 of today's politics and culture and Maha is one example of this.
23:44 And so there's lots of Maha folks that are like California hippies who
23:47 might subscribe to all kinds of spiritualities
23:49 that are not Christian and not mainstream.
23:52 um you know and they have found a home within
23:54 this movement that's a lot about sort of like alternative medicine,
23:58 alternative spirituality, alternative everything.
24:01 So it's not a superchristian movement.
24:03 Um there but there are Christian strands like
24:06 you'll and and you'll see kind of like connections.
24:10 So people that post tradife content or sort of tradal aligned content,
24:16 homesteaders and homeschoolers, they often are Christian,
24:19 will talk about Christianity,
24:20 talk about religion, and they often are doing sort of Maha style cooking,
24:24 but it's definitely not like Maha as a whole.
24:27 I would not describe as like a Christianled movement.
24:31 That's partly why I asked.
24:32 I mean, I you know, you you report a lot on gender and, you know,
24:38 as a a white guy just north of 40 who's interested in fitness,
24:42 like my my algorithms are feeding me a lot
24:46 of like the dude side of of this online.
24:49 I mean, I cannot go on I God help me.
24:51 I I watched a couple of workout accounts on Instagram and now like I'm
24:56 just getting pummeled with these like vaguely
24:59 maha coded but more like personal optimization,
25:03 you know, get jacked and you know, conquer the world,
25:05 that kind of And it's like it's aggressively not religious in any way.
25:11 And I was just curious if on like the young women's side
25:15 um if there was just maybe like ideologically in the same sphere,
25:20 but if it was taking on a more religious tone,
25:23 which would be very different from what's
25:25 happening like on the male side of this.
25:27 And I don't know what I would make of that difference if it was a difference,
25:29 but it seems instructive somehow, but maybe I'm I'm overreading it.
25:34 So yeah, I I wouldn't say that there's
25:37 a ton more religion in stuff aimed at young women.
25:41 I do think there is a particular brand of content.
25:44 I mean, first of all, like some of these principles that are aligned
25:48 with Maha are also just totally mainstream now, right?
25:50 Like protein maxing just totally mainstream.
25:53 Like everybody's into protein, everybody's into lifting.
25:55 That is just like culturally mainstream.
25:57 One of the young influencers I talked to, um, this young woman named Ava,
26:01 who her, um, her Instagram is Clean Living with Ava.
26:04 Um, and she's posted a lot of like kind of winking TD wife content.
26:10 Um, it's like a little bit of a joke like she'll be wearing like a bonnet
26:14 and like a TD wifey dress and but then
26:16 it's like she's cooking for her siblings, you know?
26:18 But she I've noticed she has more and more
26:20 videos where she'll like be making jokes about like, "Oh,
26:25 I'm just like a tread wife, but where's my husband?" So,
26:27 I do think like there's sort of like content that is aimed at women.
26:36 You're just never very very far from like being a good wife and mother
26:40 when you're watching videos on the internet as a woman or a girl.
26:44 Whereas, like, if you're watching videos on the internet as a man or a boy,
26:47 like you're not getting content about how to be
26:50 a good husband or father, I don't think.
26:52 Um, nope.
26:53 But like the trades are just never far away online if you're female.
26:56 I think they'll enact a version of like what they see as traditional wifehood.
27:04 um which usually includes like saying some
27:07 stuff about being submissive to your husband,
27:09 doing a lot of scratch cooking in your house if you have children,
27:14 also like homeschooling them.
27:16 Like they'll be holding a baby while they stir something.
27:19 Um and it can be very aspirational, I think,
27:21 even for people that don't want to like submit
27:24 to their husband that don't necessarily agree with any of this politically.
27:27 Um so this got real big leading up to 2024.
27:31 And what's interesting is that I thought I was a little bit dead.
27:34 I thought like trwives are over.
27:35 So it was interesting for me to see this young woman
27:38 kind of like cosplaying a trwife in like a winky way.
27:41 It made me wonder like if that ideology
27:44 is going to have more legs than I thought.
27:46 Well, it makes sense that that that would be either part
27:49 of the Maha Coalition or at least adjacent because again it's anti-system.
27:55 Yes.
27:55 Right.
27:55 It's anti- where the culture is and where it's going.
27:57 And it's like so much of this seems
27:59 to begin with that like fundamental rejection.
28:02 Like treadwife culture and like homesteading are also like really linked.
28:06 Um and people who are really hardcore homesteaders are like uh
28:10 you know we don't uh like we don't have municipal water.
28:13 Like we filter our own water.
28:15 We have a well.
28:16 We live completely away from these systems.
28:18 Like we're completely self-sufficient.
28:19 That's the goal of like your really hardcore homesteaders.
28:22 And I think that has a lot of a lot of confluence with Maha as well.
28:26 So the the tradife homesteader maha ven diagram is like a lot of overlap there.
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29:41 I don't want to overstate the youth vote angle because I
29:44 don't even think young people are like the main maha constituency yet.
29:51 But just you know projecting out a little bit like what
29:55 do you what do you see as the political implications of this?
29:58 Do you think like this that the the the younger people,
30:02 particularly younger women who are migrating to this coalition,
30:06 um do you think that's has long-term political implications?
30:10 How do you think that'll break down electorally?
30:13 Yeah, it's interesting.
30:14 A lot of I I spent a lot of time
30:16 for this story trying to figure out how like how maja are teens,
30:22 like how much is this content and this culture reaching young people?
30:26 And it's a little hard to measure.
30:28 Um, in part I don't know like in part there's not a lot of polling of teenagers.
30:32 For example, what I came up with is
30:36 there's at least some evidence that teenagers and young
30:39 people are consuming a fair amount of health
30:43 content online that has some conspiracy angles to it.
30:48 There's one survey in which um teenagers were saying
30:52 yes like we see a lot of a lot of sort of conspiracy theories online and health
30:58 conspiracy theories are one of the top ones.
31:00 Um and it's also the case that a lot of the characteristics of Gen Z of people
31:07 in their 20s and their late teens like make them
31:11 potentially a really ready audience for some of this stuff.
31:15 A lot of Gen Z Americans, not oddly,
31:17 have really low trust in a lot of institutions, including medical institutions.
31:22 Um, and again, you know,
31:24 it's not surprising like Gen Z has been let down by adults in a lot of ways.
31:27 Genzers have grown up in this world that's super unstable.
31:31 Like they were kids during the pandemic and the lockdowns.
31:34 Um, they've seen constant wars.
31:37 They've seen our sort of state of poly crisis.
31:39 They don't really remember a time when
31:42 um politics felt I think functional to them.
31:46 What that means is that young people are not
31:50 as trusting even of doctors as older people are.
31:54 They are not as trusting of mainstream media.
31:57 They're not trusting of like you know the kind
32:00 not that mainstream media is perfect but they
32:02 are not trusting of the kind of news
32:03 sources that do systematic fact checks of health claims.
32:07 So for this generation of young people, like anyone who comes and says,
32:12 "I'm going to help you do this yourself and take
32:15 this into your own hands," that person's going to be likely very appealing.
32:19 You know, it's just it's funny.
32:21 You know, I'm old enough to remember, I know you are, too,
32:24 when Republicans ruthlessly mocked Michelle
32:28 Obama's anti-obesity campaign and just
32:33 basically treated public health messaging as nanny state paternalism.
32:40 And now parts of the right are obsessed with toxins
32:43 and food purity and and all the rest of it.
32:46 I mean, what is that?
32:49 like how did we get from don't tell me
32:50 what to eat to basically a right-coded maha politics.
32:55 Yeah, it's so interesting.
32:57 One thing I would say about that is that you
32:58 still see that nanny state phobia within the Republican party.
33:02 So, as much as RFK says don't eat this, don't eat that, you know,
33:06 eat Whole Foods, whatever.
33:08 Here's your new food pyramid, actually the amount of stuff he's been able
33:11 to get done within the administration is low.
33:13 And you see the EPA,
33:14 they haven't done any of the things that Maha would want to do.
33:18 um you know and actually things like you know a big
33:21 part of Michelle Obama's uh push involved you know funding
33:25 for schools to have uh you know food from local farms
33:30 which would be very maja aligned that has been cut right
33:33 so like the Republican party still maintains those old line conservative values
33:38 of like don't tell people to what to eat you know we're not going
33:41 to regulate stuff don't mess with us and at the same time yes
33:45 there is a rightcoded like there's a rightcoded way to eat healthy now.
33:51 You see it all over the internet even if it's
33:53 not again like even if it's not in maha spaces.
33:57 Um it is really interesting.
33:59 I think again it gets back to this idea
34:01 of that this is also an anti-establishment way to be
34:04 healthy and you know Trump of course is the ultimate
34:08 like person who brought anti-establishment thinking into the right.
34:11 So I think that's a piece of this too.
34:14 You mentioned it.
34:15 I should at least ask.
34:16 I So RFK Jr.
34:19 hasn't gotten much done, I think is how you put it.
34:22 Has he gotten anything done?
34:23 Like, have they actually done anything concrete to make America healthy again?
34:29 Or is this just a an online political aesthetic movement,
34:36 you know, mostly about, you know, engagement farming and and clicks
34:39 and vibes than actually doing anything.
34:42 When you talk to epidemiologists and public health experts about MA and RFK Jr.,
34:49 sometimes they will say some version of we are happy that RFK Jr.
34:54 has brought attention to the need for Americans
34:58 to have better access to whole foods.
35:01 Um, you know, the problems of ultrarocessed foods.
35:04 Sometimes they'll say, again, that's a bit of a complicated phrase,
35:07 but like some public health experts are
35:09 glad to have more conversation around this.
35:11 Um, I would add to that, you know, um,
35:14 I think the MAHA movement talks about sort of toxins
35:17 in in what can feel like a fear-mongering way,
35:21 but, you know, real very serious public
35:23 health experts have real concerns about again pesticides,
35:28 um, industrial chemicals, and RFK Jr.
35:31 has sort of tried to bring attention to that.
35:34 So, those are the things that I have heard people give him credit for.
35:38 Um there's some concrete things that he's done
35:41 that have been quite negative for public health.
35:44 He has changed um vaccine recommendations to eliminate the recommendation
35:47 to vaccinate newborns against hepatitis B which a lot
35:50 of experts are worried could cause babies and children to get
35:54 hepatitis B that can be really dangerous for their health.
35:57 You know so at the margins he has had some concrete effect
36:01 on the vaccine schedule that almost every
36:04 public health expert would agree is negative.
36:07 Um, if you look at his work as sort
36:09 of an influencer and a leader of public health conversation,
36:13 his impact on measles vaccination rates,
36:15 I think every public health expert would say has been negative.
36:18 You know, we have measles outbreaks in this country that we don't need to have.
36:22 Um, and it is hard not to lay at least some of that on Kennedy's doorstep.
36:28 I haven't done any reporting on Maha,
36:30 but I've I've thought a lot about the basically the the the collapse of trust.
36:40 Yeah.
36:39 From the public in government, in science,
36:44 in journalism, in public institutions, just more generally.
36:48 And so many crises are downstream of that.
36:52 Is that how this slots for you?
36:54 Basically just symptomatic of that basic fundamental problem.
36:58 people do not trust authority of any kind
37:01 and so in that vacuum they turn to this.
37:08 Yes, absolutely.
37:08 I think um I think 100% sort of the rise
37:12 of maja has to do with a loss of trust in government,
37:16 loss of trust in public health, loss of trust in media, um all of it.
37:20 And we continue to see that snowball.
37:23 Um, not to get ahead of myself,
37:25 but I think for me the most interesting part of reporting
37:28 on this story was talking to folks who work on trust and work
37:32 on information and misinformation about how to teach young people to evaluate
37:38 information and to place their trust where it ought to be placed.
37:42 You know, there are lots of people now who
37:44 work on this and talking to them was really inspiring.
37:47 What's their answer?
37:48 if it's not hey trust government again what
37:50 what is their answer to to dealing with this?
37:53 So I talked with an expert named Melanie
37:54 Tres King um and her advice was really interesting.
37:58 So she she teaches classes on um
38:02 sort of misinformation um and evaluating information.
38:06 Um and one thing that she will do is start
38:10 with examples that students don't have any emotional um investment in.
38:15 So she'll start with like European witch trials.
38:18 She'll say um you know in6005 these women were accused of witchcraft.
38:25 This was the evidence.
38:26 This is what happened to them.
38:27 They were hanged or they were tortured.
38:29 You know let's evaluate this evidence.
38:31 What do you think about this?
38:32 How did how did this information permeate out into the society?
38:37 What effects did it have?
38:38 Like what would you say about this information now?
38:41 and sort of in that way give
38:42 students tools for evaluating like what was misinformation.
38:46 These women were not witches.
38:48 Um you know but it's not like they don't they don't personally
38:52 identify as a witch or feel you know a kinship with these women
38:57 in6005 and so they're able to sort of their their emotions aren't getting
39:01 into it and they're not trig they're
39:03 you know their identities are not being triggered.
39:06 Um, and so in this way,
39:08 she's able to give students these intellectual tools that they can use
39:12 hopefully in situations that might be a lot more fraught for them,
39:16 but she's not coming right at them and being like,
39:17 "Everything you believe is wrong or being like that influencer that you like,
39:22 like they're dumb, you know, or being like these are the things
39:24 that you have to believe." She's not being didactic,
39:26 so she's not inspiring that kind of push back.
39:30 Um, and I found that really inspiring because it's sort of a framework
39:33 rather than trying to like beat kids over the head with like,
39:37 "No, I'm a reporter.
39:38 You should trust me." Like, it's a framework for like teaching, you know,
39:44 teaching young people how to eval evaluate things in a smart way.
39:47 Part of the problem here, and I think someone you quote in the piece
39:51 says this, science is just not about 100% certainty.
39:56 It just isn't.
39:57 But unfortunately, people love people who sound certain
40:01 because we like certainty and so do the algorithms.
40:04 And so I think we're just stuck with a whole lot of in our society.
40:09 And this is just another example of that.
40:13 I watched a lot of videos for this story
40:15 and you can see the kinds of videos that, you know,
40:19 do do well on social media and it's
40:21 videos that have really bold claims that are like
40:23 really scary that grab your eyeballs and real
40:27 science just has a much harder time doing that.
40:30 Um, I talked to a bunch of science communicators for the story and I was
40:36 really inspired by them too and sort of how they try to get around this problem.
40:41 Um, a lot of it is just by they talk about being where people are.
40:45 Somebody pointed out to me like, you know,
40:48 young people like they like to look somebody in the eye.
40:50 Like they like to see a video where
40:52 someone's looking at them and talking to them.
40:53 And I was like, "Oh yeah, sure.
40:55 Of course." I also enjoy having conversation
40:57 with someone and looking them in the eye.
40:59 Like I get why that is a format that encourages trust.
41:04 And so I very much get why science communicators in a lot
41:07 of cases um are making videos and trying to distill
41:11 their insights into something that can be this more conversational
41:15 form because that's how they can reach young people right now.
41:18 I don't know how successful it'll be,
41:19 but I'm glad I'm glad there are people doing it.
41:23 Yeah.
41:23 Um Ann, is there anything else in this reporting more generally that you just
41:27 you think people are missing or that you
41:28 think is worth highlighting before we go?
41:31 I'm glad that we talked about um having empathy for a lot of the feelings
41:37 that push people towards Maha because I
41:40 think those feelings are just really common.
41:42 Um and I think a lot of people involved
41:46 with this are like very sincere in their beliefs.
41:49 Um and you know there's also cases where
41:54 those beliefs end up in dangerous directions.
41:57 I think that's a perfect note to end on.
42:00 Anna, thank you so much for coming back.
42:02 We love your reporting.
42:03 People should check out this piece as soon
42:06 as they're done listening to this episode,
42:08 and I'm sure we'll have you back again.
42:10 So, thanks.
42:11 Thanks so much.
42:12 This was great.
42:13 Thanks for watching.
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