In his endorsement of Donald Trump, Robert Kennedy Jr. continued to insist he remains "independent" and not a full-blown MAGA crank, laughably claiming that he has meaningful political disagreements with Trump. Kennedy argued that he was making a strategic alliance with the GOP against the Democratic Party, which he accused of being "the party of war, corruption, censorship, [and] big pharma." All nonsense, of course. Trump doesn't hide his support for Russia's war on Ukraine, routinely calls for the imprisonment of his critics, and wishes to repeal legislation that has allowed Democrats to lower drug prices. Mere days before endorsing Trump, Kennedy showcased his opposition to corruption by begging Vice President Kamala Harris for a job in exchange for not backing Trump. The "corrupt" Democratic candidate refused to bribe Kennedy.
On Monday, Kennedy offered another example of how his claims to "independence" are nonsense when he joined a Capitol roundtable hosted by the far-right Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc. titled — don't laugh! — "American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion." As Elaine Godfrey of the Atlantic wrote, "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." Funny but Godfrey is missing the mark by invoking the "left." The panel was replete with reactionaries whose alleged "liberal" pasts are asserted or assumed, yet not in evidence.
There's Jordan Peterson, a psychologist whose very public history of transphobia and misogyny had led to court battles over losing his license to practice. Peterson's last conversation with Kennedy was yanked off YouTube for promoting vaccine misinformation. The two are also scheduled to appear later this week alongside Johnson at a right-wing gathering in Washington, D.C.
Next Sunday. pic.twitter.com/b941kcXAIb
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) September 23, 2024
Then there is Jillian Michaels, a reality TV "fitness" host whose efforts to hide her MAGA leanings fall flat when she hints at beliefs in far-right conspiracy theories. Or Tucker Carlson-favorite "alternative medicine" peddlers Casey and Calley Means. This roundtable was less an illustration of "horseshoe theory" and more evidence that the anti-science and anti-progress woo-woo peddlers are settling into their natural home: the MAGA movement.
In her deep dive into the weird world of the alt-right, "Doppelganger," journalist Naomi Klein documented how the Republican rejection of COVID-19 vaccines cemented a marriage of what she called "the far-right" and "the far-out." In the process, she discovered that the left-leaning credentials of so many in the so-called wellness world were a centimeter deep, more about aesthetics than values. The pandemic didn't convert people to the right, so much as it revealed the reactionary and even fascistic leaning of so many people who insisted they offer "natural" alternatives to "medicalized" health care.
As readers will no doubt remember, much of the anti-vaccine rhetoric was centered on the notion that "fit" people don't "need" vaccines, because their exercise and diet routines were medicine enough. This built on years, even decades of "wellness" rhetoric that is openly hostile to the idea that health is a communal concern, instead framing good health as a status symbol signaling one's superiority to the hoi polloi. As Klein discovered, a lot of self-proclaimed advocates of "wellness" saw health as strictly an individual concern, often to the point of employing genocidal rhetoric implying the pandemic was cleansing the human race of the less worthy. Despite surface rhetoric decrying "Big Pharma," the alt-medicine industry is, if anything, a bigger fan of predatory capitalism. The whole world is awash in scammy supplements and overpriced, ineffective diet plans, none of which is subject to the regulation or research requirements that hem in, however imperfectly, the pharmaceutical industry.
Klein doesn't touch on this much in her book but it's worth also noting another commonality between the alt-medicine world and fascism: a shared reliance on a fantasy of a glorious past that is allegedly being stolen from us by modern progress. In both tellings, the past was better — utopian, even — because people stuck to the "natural" order. For a fascist, this rhetoric is about justifying injustices and hierarchical social orders, arguing that people were better off under white supremacy, monarchy, or male domination. For the reactionary wellness crowd, it's about rejecting the scientific advances of modern medicine for their imagined past when people used "natural" remedies and were, in their dream world, healthier and happier for it.
In both cases, of course, they're objectively wrong. Modern life has drawbacks, but on the whole, people in the U.S. are healthier, freer, and safer than they have been throughout most of history. And what problems we do have aren't ignored by science at all. Kennedy and his fellow panelists are flat-out lying when they claim the modern medical establishment doesn't promote exercise and good nutrition. Front page articles at the Centers for Disease Control are full of standard-issue language about how "a healthy, balanced diet" and "regular exercise" are key to preventing chronic illness. Yet Trump's former CDC Director Robert Redfield endorsed Kennedy's pro-Trump plan. "Kennedy is right," Redfield wrote in an op-ed this week. "All three of the principal health agencies suffer from agency capture."
Pushing paranoia is quite profitable for the alt-medicine folks that Kennedy and Sen. Johnson brought together. Most of them run businesses selling expensive supplements, diet plans, and other "wellness" products that range from useless to actively dangerous. For instance, Peterson and his daughter hype an all-meat diet, which would sicken any person who actually tried to follow it.
The far-right has learned how to leverage the woo-woo world's tendency to romanticize the past and demonize the present for the MAGA culture war agenda. The anti-feminist movement, for instance, borrows paranoid language about "chemicals" to portray both birth control and abortion as dangerous, while implying that pregnancy, because it's "natural," is perfectly safe. The reality is the inverse. Birth control and competently performed abortion are both exponentially safer than pregnancy, a condition that requires regular medical monitoring even under the healthiest conditions. It also shows the level of self-delusion that informs the "glorious past" fantasies of MAGA and their alt-med collaborators, as the high death rate in childbirth before the modern era isn't exactly a hidden part of history.
It's surprising there wasn't a "tradwife" at Kennedy's Senate stop of his so-called "Make American Healthy Again" tour, as these online influencers may be the purest manifestation yet of how the rhetoric of "natural" and "wellness" has been wholly cannibalized by a far-right movement that longs to return to an era of white supremacy and overt patriarchy. Most of the discourse about tradwives has focused on how their content is both sexist and unrealistic, selling a false story that domestic bliss is achievable if women give up ambitions to bake bread all day. What's less discussed is how this lie is constructed on top of decades of "wellness" content making similarly false promises of having elite health status through expensive "natural" products. Most of these tradwife accounts are rife with scientific disinformation and paranoia. Tradwives often argue that the only escape from a world supposedly drowning in toxic chemicals is to retreat to a homestead where a woman devotes her entire life to the unpaid labor of making food from scratch. Most offer this argument while wearing a full face of make-up, no doubt purchased from Sephora instead of being handmade in their kitchens.
People like Kennedy and his compatriots in the alt-medicine world often invoke words or phrases like "pollution" or "Big Pharma," which allow people to assume a progressive, if misguided, motive for their anti-science delusions. These things should be understood more as fig leaves covering up a reactionary agenda. First, using leftist-sounding language helps them rope in gullible people, both to take their money and, in many cases, to radicalize them. But it also helps reactionaries hide in plain sight. Sadly, a few progressive-sounding terms are enough to distract and confuse journalists, who credulously report that they're witnessing "horseshoe theory" or a "left-right alliance." What they're seeing rather is a predatory, anti-science movement flowering into its final form, the face that was always lurking underneath: MAGA.
