The Woo-Woo Caucus Meets. The Atlantic - Politics by Elaine Godfrey

Sep 25, 2024 at 6:36 AM//keep unread//hide

If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were president, this is the kind of Cabinet he might appoint: Vani Hari, a.k.a. the “Food Babe” influencer; The Biggest Loser’s Jillian Michaels; the conservative psychologist Jordan B. Peterson and his daughter, the raw-meat enthusiast Mikhaila Peterson Fuller; and 18-year-old Grace Price, a self-identified citizen scientist.

The former Democrat turned spoiler presidential candidate served as a headliner for a four-hour roundtable presentation yesterday on Capitol Hill. Moderated by Senator Ron Johnson, a hard-right Republican from Wisconsin, the event was titled American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion—an apt name, given that the whole thing had a very do-your-own-research vibe.

When Kennedy endorsed Donald Trump for president last month, the two forged an alliance that Kennedy has begun referring to as MAHA (Make America Healthy Again). The partnership has produced a super PAC; also, hats. The alliance was the natural culmination of a broader trend in American politics that has seen the Trumpian right meld with the vax-skeptical, anti-establishment left: Woo-woo meets MAGA, you could call it, or, perhaps, the crunch-ificiation of conservatism. Since dropping out of the presidential race, Kennedy has been angling for a role in Trump’s orbit, because he—like others in the room yesterday—is desperate for any vehicle toward relevance. And so far, allegiance to Trump has offered more of a spotlight than anything that came before.

“The U.S. health-care system is an existential threat to our country,” Kennedy told the crowd in the standing-room-only caucus room named for his uncle President John F. Kennedy. “If America fails, the chief reason will be because we let our country get sicker, more depressed, fatter, and more infertile, at an increasing rate.” Kennedy had gotten to know Johnson during the pandemic, when Johnson was undermining public confidence in vaccines and touting unproven treatments for COVID-19. “He was the only member of this body for some time who was willing to challenge the orthodoxy,” Kennedy said, describing Johnson as a “close personal friend.”

And so it went on, and on. From my seat in the audience, I listened to statement after statement decrying pharmaceutical firms, seed oils, and the lies of the food pyramid. Speakers cited the rates of obesity, cancer, and diabetes, and blamed them on “metabolic dysfunction.” They warned of the presence of microplastics in food and in the air, which can end up settling in the human brain. “The brain is about 0.5 percent microplastics,” Kennedy said, which a few recent studies have found; in Kennedy’s case, it also contains a percentage of worm. Four hours was a very long time.

The event felt intended to be subversive, as though the panelists were providing the truth that the media will never tell you—because, of course, Big Media is in cahoots with Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Tech, Big Everything. But the truth, you could say, is already out there. An entire media ecosystem of podcasts is devoted to telling you the sort of stuff laid out by the panel. Many of yesterday’s panelists have their own shows, and several of them have made an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, which is consistently the world’s most popular podcast.

Fuller, one such podcast host and the CEO of her father’s online education site, the Peterson Academy, explained that she had fixed her autoimmune and mood disorders by eating only meat. She now promotes the “Lion Diet,” which involves consuming nothing but ruminant meats, salt, and water. “I’m not suggesting the average person does this,” she said, but, she insisted, the government should definitely study the diet’s therapeutic effects.

Next went Peterson the elder. Prone to long diatribes delivered with the cadence of a congregational preacher, he offered a lesson about the scientific process and ketogenesis. Frankly, I had trouble following his point, and apparently I wasn’t the only one: Onstage next to Peterson, Kennedy was staring off into the middle distance, his mind somewhere else.

For her presentation, the Food Babe held up placards with ingredient lists for Gatorade and Doritos in America versus in Europe, calling for limits on additives and dyes in children’s cereal (Make Froot Loops Boring Again). Hari has built up a following of people, parents especially, who are legitimately concerned about what goes into highly processed foods, but she has also faced criticism for fearmongering with unfounded claims. Alex Clark, a commentator for the conservative group Turning Point USA and the host of the conservative Culture Apothecary podcast, railed against the vaccine schedule for children: Parents “did not sign up to co-parent with the government. We want a divorce!”

Somewhere during hour three, Kennedy advised against eating any food that comes in a package. Starving and bored, I unwrapped and scarfed down my chocolate-chip Kind bar. A few rows in front of me, Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz’s wife, Ginger Luckey Gaetz, was posting happily: “Truth bombs being dropped,” she wrote on X.

Why is America’s list of accepted chemicals so much longer than Europe’s, and why are the Europeans so much better at this than we are? Speaker after speaker wanted to know. The answer, of course, is that the regulations followed in the European Union are more stringent than ours. And some of the panelists demanding change have allied themselves with a party that—like Clark—does not exactly share their regulatory goals.

Which brings us to the strangeness of the alliance between Kennedy and Trump. Their partnership can be explained by their shared distrust in institutions. Their respective movements have bonded over a sneaking suspicion that the liberal elite is conspiring against them. But that may be where the similarities end. For all of his populist campaign bluster, during his first term, Trump was an ally to Big Business, appointing what ProPublica called a “staggering” number of lobbyists to positions of power, unraveling nutritional standards for school meals, and reversing bans on chemical and pesticide use in agriculture. If tougher, European-style regulation is desired by some of the panelists, he is the arch-deregulator. What’s more, Trump has demonstrated next to zero interest in seed oils and neurotoxins and metabolic ketosis. He has only “concepts” of a health-care plan for America. He is a big fan of the Big Mac—he is Mr. Filet-O-Fish.

Kennedy surely knows this. Only months ago, Trump called him a “Radical Left Lunatic” and the “dumbest member of the Kennedy Clan.” Yet Kennedy now bends the knee. But from Trump’s point of view at least, the MAGA-MAHA congruence seems tactical and temporary. If he becomes president again, Trump seems sure to disappoint the woo-woo caucus.