The Free Press
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For most of her life, Zen Honeycutt, 51, ate store-bought food. And why wouldn’t she?
“I trusted what was in the grocery store to be regulated and safe,” said Honeycutt, a mother of three sons who lives in Alexander, North Carolina. “I thought I was eating healthy.”
It wasn’t until her first newborn son was covered head to toe in rashes that she thought there could be something wrong with his food—or hers, really, since she nursed him for all his meals. After a doctor diagnosed her son with a dairy allergy, Honeycutt went cold turkey on milk, cheese, and yogurt. But new problems developed for her child, including asthma, stomachaches, and facial swelling. Within a few years, she said he suffered from “more than 20 food intolerances”—to dairy, nuts, and even to a thing called carrageenan, a seaweed-based thickening agent.
“My doctor told me my son was going to die from a nut allergy, and it was only going to get worse,” she told me.
“It was unfathomable,” she added. “How does this happen to a kid?”
After switching her three children to an all-organic diet, she said “a miracle” occurred—they no longer broke out in rashes or cried for hours on end. And the deadly allergies that plagued her first-born, the doctor said, were no longer going to kill him.
“I have total peace of mind because my son will not die from food,” she said.
In 2013, Honeycutt started a nonprofit, Moms Across America, which commissioned research that found traces of glyphosate, a cancer-linked pesticide, in the breast milk of new mothers. Four years later, she heard that a member of the Kennedy family—RFK Jr., the son of the slain senator—had sued Monsanto, the agricultural giant that owns the patent on glyphosate. She says she sent Kennedy her research, and he immediately got in touch.
Back then, Honeycutt said she was a Democrat, just like Kennedy—but “once you start to question the food, you question everything.” And she did, especially the power of what she calls “Big Ag” and “Big Pharma.” The website of Moms Across America focuses on “toxic contaminants” in American food and farms—with ads for mineral supplements and nontoxic weed killers.
On Wednesday, Honeycutt sat in on the first day of Kennedy’s two-day hearing before the Senate, which is considering his nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. She was joined by a crew of RFK supporters—Megyn Kelly, Airbnb founder Joe Gebbia, blogger Jessica Reid Krauss, and Kennedy’s wife, actress Cheryl Hines.
RFK Jr.’s confirmation battle promises to be the toughest of all Trump’s appointees. Opposition comes from both sides of the aisle—on Wednesday, in a grilling session that spanned more than four hours, senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders ripped into his record on vaccines and lawsuits against drugmakers, and his thoughts on universal healthcare. Last month, after news broke that Kennedy might be gearing up to nix U.S. approval of the polio vaccine, Senator Mitch McConnell, a childhood polio survivor, released a statement that did not name Kennedy but stated, “efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed—they’re dangerous.” Other possible Republican holdouts could include Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who has said that Kennedy is “wrong” about vaccines, and Joni Ernst of Iowa, who has demanded the former Democrat clarify his stance on abortion.
Important conservative outlets, like The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and others have editorialized against Kennedy. The Post noted that even Donald Trump himself dubbed RFK Jr. “a radical left lunatic” as recently as April 2024.
Meanwhile, Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice president, is running ads against RFK’s nomination on the grounds that he promotes “abortion on demand.” And RFK Jr.’s cousin Caroline Kennedy wrote a long letter, which she read out in a video, urging senators to vote against his confirmation, calling him a “predator” who led family members to addiction.
But Honeycutt thinks all of them are missing the point entirely. “Anybody who votes no against Kennedy is clearly being persuaded by Big Pharma and Big Ag, because it just does not make any kind of sense to vote no against somebody who simply wants safer food and safer vaccines,” Honeycutt told me. “That’s all he wants. That’s his agenda.”
For that reason, she and thousands of other moms like her have been calling legislators over the last few days to send them a message: Appoint RFK Jr. to head the HHS—or face the wrath of moms across America.
Thirty years ago, “soccer moms” were the most powerful force in American politics. It was 1996—the year of the presidential race between Bill Clinton and Senator Bob Dole—and every cable news station buzzed about this group of middle-class, mostly white mothers in the suburbs who shuttled their kids around in minivans. These ’90s moms wanted the government to support education, get tough on crime, and improve healthcare—things that would directly impact the lives of their children. And they were credited for helping swing the election for Clinton.
Just as those soccer moms worried about the fate and future of their children, so do the MAHA moms lining up behind Kennedy. You probably know one of them—they’re PTA members, nurses, and yogis. They’re also influencers with millions of followers, wellness entrepreneurs, and Silicon Valley titans. They’re the mothers of children with autism, allergies, and ADHD. Many are former Democrats, but they feel like their cause transcends party lines—shouldn’t everyone want clean water, fresh air, and healthy foods? As Moms Across America puts it, “poison isn’t partisan.”
At first the MAHA moms backed Kennedy for president last year, first as a Democrat and then as an independent candidate. At one point, polls showed him on track to win as much as 15 percent of the electorate. Then, in late August, just as his campaign started tanking in the polls and bleeding cash, Kennedy bowed out of the race and announced he’d be endorsing Trump, asking a roaring crowd, “Don’t you want a president that’s going to make America healthy again?”
Many MAHA moms told me they voted Republican for the first time simply because of Kennedy. Indeed, among the dozen subjects I spoke to for this piece, only two told me they had ever voted Republican before.
Calley Means, a health entrepreneur who reportedly brokered the first meeting between Kennedy and Trump, told me that RFK is a “new articulation of MAGA” for health-conscious mothers.
“The MAGA movement is about a general feeling that something’s not right,” said Means. “And what they were able to do to bring women and moms into the fold was to tie that MAGA anxiety to why kids are getting sick.”
He added that MAHA moms are a “diverse coalition in every respect,” including race, age, and voting history.
“Every mom in the country is feeling anxiety about the fact that you go into a classroom and something clearly isn’t right,” he added, noting the skyrocketing rates of autism, obesity, and ADHD among children. “But it wasn’t a widely discussed political issue until RFK Jr.”
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Karlie Reinsma, a 35-year-old nurse and mother of a toddler, agrees. She says the Trump administration gives her “hope” and she’s “extremely excited” that RFK Jr. plans to take on the pharmaceutical giants, the FDA, and the food industry, which “are all in bed together.”
She blames them for the sickness our country is seeing, and which turns up every day in the hospital where she works in Sacramento, California. “Most patients have a ton of comorbidities,” she said. “The chronic illness is insane.”
“Since Covid, everything has felt so dark and negative,” she added. But now, with Kennedy poised to lead the HHS, “it makes me feel like, okay, now there’s hope.”
Even if Kennedy doesn’t get confirmed—and to do so, he can afford only three Republican no votes, assuming every Democrat votes against him—there are signs that the MAHA movement has already penetrated Washington. This past September, Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, hosted a roundtable on nutrition featuring Kennedy, Calley Means, exercise guru Jillian Michaels, and Vani Hari, a nutritional blogger better known as “the Food Babe.” Hari, who runs a plant-based protein company and has cultivated a following based on what she feeds her two young kids, called the event “groundbreaking.”
“That was a moment I’d been waiting for my whole life, to look government officials in the eyes and say, ‘Hey, why aren’t you doing your job?’ ” said Hari, 45, who has been leading the charge to remove artificial food dyes from cereal for at least a decade. “I mean, it was four hours of beautiful discussion and insights on how to save the children and undo this mess we’re in.”
She paused for a moment, then added: “We’re in a new era.”
Hari, who wore a hot pink pantsuit and sat two rows behind Kennedy during his hearing on Wednesday, is helping lead it.
For at least a decade, she has been crusading against big food makers. She recently gathered more than 400,000 signatures for a petition demanding that Kellogg’s, one of the largest cereal manufacturers in America, uphold its 2015 promise to remove artificial food dyes by 2018—a pledge it failed to meet. A few weeks ago, when she showed up at the company’s headquarters in rural Michigan to finally deliver the petition, she said more than a thousand supporters stood alongside her—and a Kellogg’s executive simply responded by holding up a whiteboard with the message: Get Off Our Lawn.
“It was a big F-U to every mom in America,” said Hari. “We think it’s immoral and unethical that these companies are selling American companies more poisonous, toxic ingredients. We see it in black and white.”
But now, she said, she’s seeing an impact. General Mills, the main competitor of Kellogg’s, recently said it “will engage with federal regulators” over the possibility of removing artificial food dyes from its products. Both the Senate and the House have launched Make America Healthy Again caucuses with growing—and all-GOP—memberships. Hari says she’s “hopeful” about the upcoming administration but insists that the movement stretches beyond Washington. Regardless of who’s in power, she said she personally intends to keep up the fight her “entire life.”
“I hope that Make America Healthy Again isn’t a four-year project. I hope it’s Make America Healthy Again for the rest of time.”
Most Americans can get on board with the following: We are a sick country. A nation where one in five children aged 12 to 18 is prediabetic is clearly doing something wrong, and change is desperately needed. Because whatever this is, it clearly isn’t working.
To the extent that MAHA talks about health, cleaning up the environment, and exercising, it wins people over. But where the MAHA movement starts to lose support, including from doctors and parents inclined toward its general message, is its stance on vaccines.
For the past two decades, Kennedy has been on a crusade against inoculations, which he has said contain “extremely neurotoxic” ingredients that can sometimes cause autism, a loss of “toilet training,” and language delays. In a 2023 interview with Fox News, he was clear about his position: “I do believe that autism comes from vaccines,” he told host Jesse Watters.
But since his nomination, Kennedy has walked back that stance. In Wednesday’s hearing, he said: “News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry. I am neither. I am pro-safety.”
Dr. Sally Satel, a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, has watched Kennedy’s campaign and his confirmation hearing. Like him, she is worried about the extent of addiction and the rise of mental illness in America’s youth. But it is his stance on vaccines that “seriously concerns” her.
“If we demonize vaccines, or inhibit the funding of them, it could lead to outbreaks of horrible diseases we haven’t seen in decades, like polio, or the spread of infections that are now under control, like measles,” Satel said.
But she understands why skeptics link vaccines to autism. Signs of autism usually appear around the same time most children receive the bulk of their vaccinations—during the first three years of their life.
“So it’s not a crazy hypothesis,” she said. “But researchers have tested that hypothesis through large-scale epidemiological work. They have parsed correlation from causation many times—it’s well-replicated—and found that no causal relationship between vaccines and autism exists.”
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Dr. Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School, goes even further: “The most widely discussed research claiming a link of autism to vaccines was definitively shown to be a fraudulent paper, leading to its retraction and loss of licensure by the lead author. Despite this, RFK Jr. and people he associated with continued to quote it. This is profoundly unforgivable for anyone claiming to be interested in human health,” he said.
But many moms I spoke to saw it in just the opposite way—it was the experts and the public health authorities that had betrayed their trust. It was parents like them who were owed apologies. Above all, it was the experience of Covid that turned them into vaccine skeptics. Public-health experts insisted on lockdowns that turned out to be deeply detrimental to their children. Then, to return to school, they were forced to vaccinate their children—with a shot that didn’t even stop transmission of the virus.
It was a “real wake-up moment for a lot of moms across America,” said Tiffany Justice, a MAHA mom who is also the co-founder of education nonprofit Moms for Liberty. “They were very vocal, saying, ‘Hey, why is this vaccine being forced on my child?’ ” said Justice, who has four school-aged children.
“The majority of informed moms are going to say the same thing,” she added. “We’ve got a lot of questions.”
At least four MAHA moms I spoke with said they had refused some or all vaccinations for their children, but only one would tell me this on the record: Ceara Foley, the former Southeast regional field director for RFK Jr.’s campaign.
Foley told me that she believed a vaccine was responsible for causing her own rheumatoid arthritis at the age of two. “A lot of people say, ‘Well, I got the vaccine, and I’m fine,’ but are you? Or have we just normalized so much chronic illness?”
When she says her daughter began showing symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis at an even earlier age, she decided to opt her out of any vaccinations. “She was extremely healthy, way more healthy than the other children in my family that are young now, and other children in her school,” said Foley, who previously ran an herbalism school in Asheville, North Carolina, for more than two decades before selling the business in 2021. “I don’t believe that any one thing causes any one thing, just in the same way that I don’t believe any one thing heals any one thing. It’s never just one vaccine—it’s the vaccine, your genetics, what you’re eating at the time, your lifestyle.”
Kennedy’s vice-presidential pick, Nicole Shanahan, the Silicon Valley lawyer and former wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, also offers her own story of how her “beautiful baby girl” developed autism after getting inoculated.
“I swear to God I gave birth to a healthy baby girl,” Shanahan told Tucker Carlson this past September during a live taping of his show. “And then she got a shot at seven months of age and by ten months, she was a different kid.”
Jill Escher, the mother of two nonverbal children with autism, remembers when other parents raising autistic children began whispering about vaccines back in the early aughts, when her kids—now 24 and 17—were both young. She says some of them even invested in detoxification treatments to try to rid their children of any metals they might have absorbed through vaccines.
“I never really bought the theory because my son was autistic from day one,” she said. “He never developed normally—like out of the chute on day one, something was off with our son.”
Still, she said she understands why other parents cling to the vaccine narrative—“there’s such a vacuum of knowledge,” and it’s only natural that people “want an explanation.”
“But we have to stop beating a dead horse—we have to move on to new, more biologically plausible ideas about what might be causing these increasing rates of autism because no matter how you cut it, the evidence is just not there.”
Escher added that she’s hopeful about RFK Jr.’s possible tenure atop the nation’s federal health agencies, because “at least he takes the autism crisis seriously.”
“That is a very refreshing change,” she said. “But it would be a complete waste of time and exceedingly dangerous to continue down this vaccine path.”
Every time Carson Meyer, a natural birthing specialist, or doula, in North Carolina, hears Democrats call Kennedy “crazy,” she says it just backfires.
“When the Democrats disregard what he has to say, it’s not him who’s being disregarded—it’s the mothers that stand behind him,” said Meyer, 31. “That’s a loud and clear message that they’re not willing to hear what mothers have to say.”
She added that when the Democrats sued Kennedy to keep him off the ballot in key states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Nevada, it turned her off from the party she had voted for her whole life.
“When the Democratic Party saw Kennedy’s rise in popularity and refused to give him a seat at the table, they weren’t just villainizing and disregarding him,” she said. “They were saying F-U to millions of American mothers.”
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In November 2023, Meyer hosted a hike in Malibu for Kennedy—a kind of meet and greet for influencers, attended by the likes of actress Alicia Silverstone—along with her friend Nikki Bostwick. Like most of the mothers I spoke with, Bostwick told me she never could’ve imagined voting for a Republican a few years ago.
“I was a dedicated Democrat until I got deeper into wellness in college,” said Bostwick, 34, who runs a successful saffron-based supplement line. “Then I started asking things like, ‘Why is Bill Gates a big investor in Monsanto?’ and nobody could give me a good answer.”
In April, about a month after Kennedy named Shanahan as his VP pick, Bostwick hosted a fundraiser in Laguna Beach. She says the event brought in more than about $150,000 in donations and ultimately convinced at least four of her friends, two of whom were then Democrats, to vote for Trump.
“I got so many people to come to the event, and we’re in a town that’s predominantly liberal,” she said, adding that at least a hundred attendees turned up. “He woke up so many people.”
One of them is Kelly Ryerson, a board member of Moms Across America, who has been with Honeycutt in the halls of Congress knocking on doors. So far, she said, she’s spoken to staffers at 60 Senate offices. She said it’s been going “pretty well,” and that many staffers have said they will pass on her perspective to the senator. (She said Senator Elizabeth Warren’s office, however, told her they had “no time” to meet with her.)
She said she’s “really nervous” about Kennedy’s confirmation hearings but is watching “every second of it.”
“I just am really counting on the goodness of humankind to come shining through over corruption,” said Ryerson, a Stanford Business School graduate who quit her corporate career after becoming “very sick” nearly 20 years ago. When I ask her why she’s spent five days racing around the Capitol, and more than $1,200 on travel expenses just to rally support for RFK Jr., she clears her throat.
“The truth is, I have no idea whether me personally, going from place to place, makes any difference, but it makes me feel better because I’m desperate about the health situation in our country, and it’s like, what else can I do? Unfortunately, I’m not a huge corporation that can influence Congress. I’m just a mom. But millions of moms together make a movement.”
—Josh Code contributed to this report.
An unexpected coalition of nutritionists, moms, shamans, longevity experts, and Bobby Kennedy has changed American culture and politics. This week on Honestly, Bari Weiss explores the rise of the MAHA movement with Calley Means, Jillian Michaels, and Vani Hari. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts: