SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
rfk jr
The MAHA Deception: What RFK Jr., Trump, and Company Are Really Doing to Our Food
People’s understandable distrust and discontent are being manipulated in service of a villainous power grab by some of the very same players that MAHA performs opposition to.
Mar 23, 2026
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kid Rock, and Mike Tyson are on the stage of American slopaganda telling us that “for the first time in our nation’s history, the federal government put REAL FOOD at the center of the American diet.” “Something” is finally being done about ultra-processed foods, harmful additives, environmental toxins, and corporate capture of the regulatory system to “Make America Healthy Again.”
I’ve spent much of my life in food justice movements that are fighting to address these very same problems. I’ve taught and written about the toxicity and corporate control of the food system (and was actually featured in a documentary alongside RFK Jr., who strangely had no connection with the grassroots Hawai‘i movement that the film was about). Of all the vile corporations and politicians I’ve studied and gone head-to-head with, the forces congealing at the top of MAHA are far and away the most spectacular threat I’ve ever seen to a healthier food system (and just about everything else).
Alongside shirtless RFK workouts, the MAHA performance opened with purported “wins” around synthetic dyes and whole foods. In reality, RFK did not ban artificial food dyes, but asked large companies to “voluntarily phase them out” (food companies have a long history of doing absolutely nothing “voluntarily”). And in reality, though whole foods are emphasized in new dietary guidelines, federal programs like school meals are having their budgets for whole foods sliced out.
Far more significantly, these exaggerated, largely symbolic gestures are masking a whole slew of far-reaching poisonous actions that are of grave danger to our health, and radically bolster the power of Big Ag, Big Chem, and all Big Capitalists (yes, including Big Pharma). It’s not just that rhetoric and actions don’t match. It’s that people’s understandable distrust and discontent are being manipulated in service of a villainous power grab by some of the very same players that MAHA performs opposition to.
The evil genius of MAHA elites has been the appropriation of elements of progressive movements that have struggled for decades to illuminate corporate control of the food system and forge a healthier and fairer food system for all. We cannot give our wicked Doppelgänger this win.
Part of the MAHA song and dance is to hyper-emphasize individual choice and responsibility for health, often in intensely patronizing, shaming, and classist ways. Telling people they can avoid chemicals and disease all via individual choices has provided a profitable opportunity for MAHA influencers to peddle their products.
But it’s a cruel illusion that consumers can avoid toxins they don’t even know are in their food (much less invisible in the wider environment), eat food that isn’t available, spend dollars they don’t have, and avoid corporate monopolies that are entirely ubiquitous in the food system. Of course individuals have some amount of agency, but the rules of the system are stacked. And it’s the very people that the rules are stacked in favor of who are working hardest to distract us from seeing those rules.
Here are just some of the food system “rules” that the Trump-MAHA-RFK regime is solidifying as they smoke and mirror us with illusions of “choice”:
- One of the primary, open goals of this regime is to destroy regulation. Extreme deregulation of the past decades is the reason we have massive corporate consolidation in the food system; the reason over half of American farmland is blanketed in ecologically destructive herbicide-GMO monocrops; the reason overproduction of these crops forms the basis of our highly-processed food system; the reason children are being manipulated via advertising to get hooked early on foods that sentence them to a life of chronic disease; the reason food is packed full of unpronounceable toxic additives; the reason a concentrated grocery sector has left sweeping food deserts across the country; the reason hunger rates are so high in spite of there being an abundance of food; and the reason workers all along the food chain are living on poverty wages while they labor in horrifically dangerous conditions. The MAHA-Trump-RFK regime is bringing us to a new apex in a deregulated food system. The regime has already reduced oversight of factory farms, increased factory farm slaughter speeds (175 chickens per minute), demolished food safety regulations, removed pesticide use reporting, gutted the agencies and workforce tasked with regulating Big Ag, and all while slanting an already monopolized market further toward Big Ag via subsidies (and forms of government intervention that big business does like).
- Farm bill policy and subsidies largely dictate what gets grown in the United States and what ends up on our plates. MAHA rhetoric pushes individual responsibility for “healthy,” “wholesome,” and “fresh” eating, while the Trump-MAHA regime is making those very choices impossible for people by systematically deepening an ultra-processed food system. One of President Donald Trump’s first actions in 2025 was to terminate $1 billion in funding for programs that helped schools and food banks buy fresh, local food from farmers, while increasing subsidies by many billions to the largest 5% of mega corn and soy monocrops. It’s not about the farmers getting rich—these subsidies directly bolster the profits of corporate agribusiness, such as food manufacturers who buy commodity crops far below production cost to make the ultra-processed foods we are instructed not to eat in the new Dietary Guidelines.
- These subsidies also go straight to the pockets of factory farms in the form of extraordinarily underpriced herbicide-resistant (GMO) corn and soy animal feed. MAHA influencers champion grass-fed, pasture-raised beef and dairy, but the Trump/MAHA regime has eliminated billions in funding for programs that supported regenerative grazing and fired more than a thousand Natural Resources Conservation Service staff that helped farmers transition to regenerative agriculture. An estimated 99% of animals used for food in the United States are raised on factory farms that are driving antibiotic-resistant infections, zoonotic diseases, foodborne illness, and massive water and air pollution (which together kill hundreds of thousands of people annually).
- As the Trump-MAHA regime pours lavish sums of public money into the bloated coffers of private agribusiness, it has made the biggest cuts in history to food assistance for poor people. Already, 20% of children in the United States were experiencing food insecurity amid skyrocketing food prices. Over the next decade 22.3 million families will loose support they rely upon to eat, credit of the Make American Healthy Again regime.
- MAHA’s rhetoric around dismantling the corporate stranglehold on government likely carries its greatest mass appeal; it is also the most significant inversion to reality. The regime has radically increased the power of big money over politics, and corporations are spending at historic, record-breaking levels to grab all that they can. Today’s most influential and highest-earning lobbying firm, Ballard Partners, transferred directly from the Trump campaign and is now representing the American Chemistry Council, Bayer-Monsanto, and multiple Big Ag (and Big Pharma) companies.
- The policy-change prizes being handed out to the highest corporate bidders in the food system are even more extreme than classic deregulation and corporate welfare subsidies. The draft new Farm Bill would actually shield pesticide companies Monsanto-Bayer, DuPont-Dow, Syngenta, and BASF from liability for deadly health impacts of their products that they have knowingly covered up for decades.
- Trump is also gifting special legal impunity to Bayer-Monsanto, makers of glyphosate (Roundup), as it faces over 177,000 lawsuits alleging that glyphosate causes cancer. Under the RFK-endorsed Trump+Monsanto executive order, domestic production of glyphosate will also ramp up, meaning more glyphosate in our food, water, soil, air, and bodies, especially those of farmworkers.
- While glyphosate has received the most surprise from MAHA moms, it is far from the only dangerous pesticide being shoved down the public’s wary throats. The regime has green-lit new PFAS pesticides, "forever chemicals" that never break down in the environment and are linked to thyroid tumors, liver damage, and reproductive harm. They have also gone around the courts and reapproved the twice-banned pesticide dicamba, linked to pancreatic and colon cancers. Dicamba (also made primarily by Bayer-Monsanto) can vaporize and move through the air for several days after application and is causing unprecedented damage to small farms and communities surrounding genetically engineered dicamba-resistant soy and cotton monocultures.
- Meanwhile, the new Farm Bill is attempting to eradicate state and local laws that currently protect people from pesticides, and preempt new ones from being passed. In sum, the Trump-MAHA regime is approving new forever pesticides, increasing pesticide production, wiping away laws that protect people from pesticides, and then blocking people’s ability to sue over the harms. It’s hard to see this as anything but rule by and for Monsanto-Bayer and friends.
- Poisons will also increase at other levels of the food chain. The MAHA regime is rolling back the Toxic Substances Control Act, shifting toward “chemical industry science,” reduced transparency, and severely weakened risk evaluations. They are going to court to defend the continued use of phthalates, extremely toxic “everywhere chemicals” added to things like food packaging that have been found in nearly all tested food and are known to cause reproductive issues, genital abnormalities, neurodevelopmental disorders, respiratory issues, diabetes, and heart disease. Across the board, the regime is gutting the already insufficient laws we had for regulating poisons.
- In order to push forward with this poisons-everywhere agenda, the Trump-MAHA regime is disassembling the science that has been revealing the links between chemicals and human health, slashing research funding, and sabotaging knowledge production (and thus the regulation that follows scientific discovery) on everything from microplastics to PFAS to the synergistic effects of pesticides. Federal workers who investigated toxic substances and pollutants have also been fired en masse. Toxic corporate totalitarianism relies on the destruction of truth (including the manipulation and weaponization of science, with haunting parallels to other authoritarian regimes).
- One type of “regulation” that a fascist-aspiring oligarchical regime actually relies upon is the type that distracts from the criminals at the top by demonizing and policing the people at the bottom. The people growing our food, who already faced intense exploitation and marginalization, are being especially scapegoated—abducted, detained, deported, separated from their families, “hunted like animals.”
The list could go on. And the full picture on the MAHA regime and health is even more sickening—unprecedented cuts to healthcare; massive increases in air, water, mercury, and PFAS pollution; dismantled gun violence prevention laws (guns are the leading cause of death for children and teens in the US); billions in handouts to big pharma; destroyed public health institutions; hastened apocalyptic climate breakdown… The aims and repercussions of the MAHA deception extend far beyond any particular policy or issue—it is a project that ultimately serves authoritarian oligarchical rule.
There’s a tendency among some progressives and leftists to simply dismiss anything that touches the MAHA matrix as innately conspiratorial, unscientific, and reactionary—at times even inadvertently positioning themselves on the side of Big Ag so as to seem in opposition to MAHA and Trump (an all around win-win for Big Ag). While the power at the top of MAHA is deeply reactionary and using conspiracy to pull ordinary people further right, the evil genius of MAHA elites has been the appropriation of elements of progressive movements that have struggled for decades to illuminate corporate control of the food system and forge a healthier and fairer food system for all. We cannot give our wicked Doppelgänger this win. Instead of abandoning everything RFK Jr. touches, we need to spin it back at them with the missing elements of truth and justice.
Truth: We have a food system designed around maximization of profit at every level, intensified by decades of bipartisan policy that has unleashed corporate power to the severe detriment of health, safety, workers, local economies, the Earth, the 99.9%. The biggest conspiracy is plain before our eyes: a system doing exactly what it is supposed to do, capitalism (which yes, the overlords of do all sorts of perverse things to preserve and extend). Justice demands getting to the roots of that system and challenging the 0.1% who are benefiting from it—many of whom happen to be puppet-mastering MAHA.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Judge Blocks RFK Jr. From Implementing 'Arbitrary and Capricious' Vaccine Overhaul
One physician and public health expert called the ruling "a much-needed victory for a sane approach to federal vaccine policy that relies on science, not misinformation and conspiracy theories."
Mar 16, 2026
In what advocates called a major victory for public health, a federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from implementing a series of moves that critics have warned would weaken childhood immunization efforts and increase the likelihood of serious disease outbreaks.
US District Judge Brian E. Murphy of Massachusetts, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, invalidated Kennedy's reorganized Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) panel, which was set to meet later this week.
Kennedy—who was confirmed by the Senate last year over the objections of tens of thousands experts and despite being a purveyor of vaccine misinformation—replaced ACIP members with several people with ties to the anti-vaccine movement.
Murphy also blocked the committee's unprecedented changes to US immunization recommendations, writing that the "arbitrary and capricious" move stands in stark contrast with the long established decision-making process he called "a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements."
“Unfortunately, the government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions," the judge said.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under Kennedy revised the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) childhood immunization schedule so that fewer vaccines are now universally recommended for all children. The agency also reclassified vaccines that were previously endorsed for all children into categories in which vaccination depends on designated risk groups and consultations with medical professionals, among other changes.
Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have announced that they would not follow the new CDC immunization recommendations.
Lookie Here! As of now, 29 states + DC, have announced that they are no longer going to follow CDC's recommendations for some or all childhood vaccines.Kennedy is not restoring public trust in science as he said he would. 🧪 www.kff.org/other-health...
[image or embed]
— Princess Vimentin PhD | Cancer Biologist (@princess-vimentin.bsky.social) March 12, 2026 at 11:47 AM
Plaintiffs' attorney Richard Huges IV said in a statement that "this ruling is a momentous step toward restoring science-based vaccine policymaking."
"The judge recognized that the actions of Secretary Kennedy and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices are not grounded in science and that they are destructive," he added. "We are thrilled that the court has discarded the baseless vaccine schedule changes made by Secretary Kennedy and is blocking the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices from doing further damage to vaccine policy."
Dr. Robert Steinbrook, Health Research Group director at Public Citizen, said in response to the ruling that "Judge Murphy’s decision is a much-needed victory for a sane approach to federal vaccine policy that relies on science, not misinformation and conspiracy theories."
"Kennedy’s hand-picked ACIP has been a national embarrassment, thoroughly lacking in the ability to make careful fact-based decisions," he added. "The judge’s ruling offers a responsible path forward for public health and evidence-based federal vaccine policy.”
RFK Jr. fired all of the legitimate scientific experts on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and replaced them with unqualified political appointees.A judge just ruled that the new members were not appropriately appointed, so ACIP cannot meet this week to spread more misinformation.
— Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD (@elizabethjacobs.bsky.social) March 16, 2026 at 1:38 PM
Anthony Wright, executive director of the advocacy group Families USA, said in a statement: "When politics override science, our children pay the price. Today’s decision helps ensure that medical evidence—not ideology—guides how we protect kids from preventable diseases."
Wright continued:
Secretary Kennedy’s attempt to remove universal recommendations for routine vaccinations only increased confusion among medical providers and families. The routine vaccines being questioned by HHS are the product of centuries of rigorous science and medicine and are why children today don’t die from measles or suffer the lifelong consequences of diseases we long ago learned to prevent. For a country as large, diverse, and mobile as ours, universal vaccine recommendations are the safest and most effective way to stop outbreaks before they start.
Amid several recent outbreaks, public health officials warned late last year that the United States is close to following Canada in losing its measles elimination status, a deadly and preventable setback many experts attribute to HHS' vaccine-averse policies and practices under Kennedy.
"We commend the court for this ruling, but families should not have to depend on litigation to ensure their child can receive a routine vaccine," Wright said. "Evidence-based medicine keeps children alive and in school. Preventing disease should be the foundation of any healthcare system serious about confronting the next disease outbreak or finding the next cure."
The group Protect Our Care called the decision "a major step in the right direction for children’s health after many setbacks under this administration."
“Most Americans, most states, and now a federal court have rejected the [President Donald] Trump-RFK Jr. scheme to make preventable disease great again among American children while exploding health costs across the country," Protect Our Care president Brad Woodhouse said. "While this ruling is a reprieve from harmful anti-vaccine policy based on nothing but junk science and discredited conspiracies, it’s clear the Trump administration is determined to resuscitate their agenda in a higher court because they care more about their anti-science agenda than keeping kids healthy.”
Indeed, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said the agency "looks forward to this judge’s decision being overturned just like his other attempts to keep the Trump administration from governing.”
Public health advocates noted the limitations of judicial rulings.
"The courts can only do so much without Congress, which must fulfill its oversight responsibility and rein in an executive branch that is taking an axe to core public health protections," Wright said. "Transparency and scientific integrity are not optional, especially when children’s lives are at stake. Families deserve vaccine policy grounded in evidence and expert guidance—not ideology or personal bias—with the goal of making sure every child in America can grow up healthy.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
RFK Jr Pressed on Whether He and Trump Will 'Cave to Big Pharma' on Medicare Drug Prices
"Will you defend the law in the Inflation Reduction Act which already is negotiating prescription drug prices?" Sen. Bernie Sanders asked Kennedy during his second confirmation hearing.
Jan 30, 2025
Senate Democrats and Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday pressed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump's pick to lead the Health and Human Services Department, to pledge that the new administration won't give in to the pharmaceutical industry's attacks on a popular Medicare drug price negotiation program that has already yielded significant results.
Sanders raised the matter during Kennedy's confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, on which the Vermont senator serves as the ranking member.
"Will you defend the law in the Inflation Reduction Act which already is negotiating prescription drug prices?" Sanders asked, referring to the Biden-era measure that empowered Medicare to negotiate the prices of a select number of prescription drugs directly with pharmaceutical companies.
Declining to provide a yes or no answer to Sanders' question, Kennedy replied that "President Trump wants us to negotiate drug prices" and added that, if confirmed as Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, he would "comply with the laws."
Watch:
The exchange came after the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency within HHS, issued a statement Wednesday declaring that "lowering the cost of prescription drugs for Americans is a top priority of President Trump and his administration" and expressing commitment to "incorporating lessons learned to date from the [Inflation Reduction Act] program and to considering opportunities to bring greater transparency in the negotiation program."
"CMS intends to provide opportunities for stakeholders to provide specific ideas to improve the negotiation program, consistent with the goals of achieving greater value for beneficiaries and taxpayers and continuing to foster innovation," the agency added.
While some advocates for lower drug prices cautiously welcomed the CMS statement, Senate Democrats warned Thursday that its choice of language "appeared to open the door to Big Pharma's requests."
"If confirmed as secretary, you will be under tremendous pressure to cave to Big Pharma and undermine Medicare drug price negotiation Republicans have worked in lock-step with Big Pharma by relentlessly attacking Medicare drug price negotiation at every turn," a group of 12 Senate Democrats and Sanders wrote in a letter to Kennedy. "Now, Republicans have unified control of the federal government. They will undoubtedly try to leverage this power to walk back the progress Democrats made to lower drug prices through this important new authority."
The letter pushes Kennedy to answer a number of questions related to the drug price negotiation program, including whether he would recommend that the Trump administration defend the program from the pharmaceutical industry's ongoing legal assault.
"On behalf of the tens of millions of Americans who count on Medicare," the new letter states, "Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee want to know whether the Trump administration will follow through on negotiating with Big Pharma to deliver the lower costs promised to the American people."
After Trump announced his intent to nominate Kennedy as HHS chief late last year, the pharmaceutical lobby made clear its plan to push the new administration to undercut the price negotiation program that is poised to deliver billions of dollars in savings by bringing down the prices of expensive and widely used medications.
Earlier this month, the CEO of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly said his company and other drugmakers would ask the Trump administration to pause the price-negotiation program, claiming that "they need to fix it" before proceeding to talks over the next slate of 15 drugs selected in the final days of the Biden administration.
In their letter on Thursday, the senators demanded that Kennedy "confirm in writing" that he "will follow the law and reject
Big Pharma's request to pause Medicare drug price negotiation."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular