Portside

The Trump administration’s recent announcement that the Environmental Protection Agency will roll back dozens of regulations protecting air and water quality has drawn praise from industry groups and condemnation from environmentalists. But one stakeholder has been conspicuously absent: the self-described health freedom movement known as MAHA.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement has built its platform around the dangers of toxic chemicals in food, water and medicine — concerns we share. Yet Kennedy and his allies have so far remained silent as the Trump administration clears the way for more pollution, more toxins and greater corporate impunity. This contradiction is not just hypocrisy; it reflects a deeper structural problem.

Many of the ambitions of MAHA and related movements for safer food, protection from harmful chemicals and autonomy-enhancing models for public health depend on a strong and consistent regulatory state. And yet, these ambitions have been channeled into support for an overwhelmingly deregulatory political project under President Donald Trump that is actively dismantling the very institutions necessary to achieve their stated goals.

This paradox is not unique to MAHA. It is a recurring pattern in the history of American politics, where populist concerns have been repeatedly co-opted into neoliberal or authoritarian frameworks that ultimately betray populist aims.

In the late 19th century, agrarian populists in the United States railed against monopolies and financial elites, calling for state intervention to break up railroad and banking cartels. Yet many within these movements also deeply distrusted government itself, seeing it as an extension of the same elites they opposed. This ambivalence left parts of the movement susceptible to co-optation by free-market ideologues who framed government as the true oppressor, offering deregulation as a solution. Of course, the deregulation only further entrenched corporate power and left farmers and workers even more vulnerable to exploitation.

A century later, the rise of Reagan-era neoliberalism followed a similar playbook. The conservative right tapped into public resentment against bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption, promising to liberate Americans from supposed government control. As Reagan famously put it, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

Reagan’s rhetoric resonated not only with corporate interests but also with many working-class people who felt alienated by elite technocracy. Yet the result was not greater freedom from government and corporate power, but instead their unchecked expansion via the coupling of dramatic growth in prisons and policing alongside predatory corporate practices. The deregulatory policies of the 1980s also led to industrial consolidation, environmental degradation, and a widening gap between the wealthy and the working class that has continued to grow up until the present. All of this has contributed to our current historical moment, which is characterized by unprecedented levels of economic inequality facilitating outright oligarchy, as exemplified by Elon Musk’s current power over the U.S. government.

A similar process is now unfolding with MAHA and related health freedom movements. They have identified very real problems — corporate capture of regulatory agencies, harmful environmental exposures and a medical system that prioritizes profit over care. But instead of demanding a state that better protects public health and democratic freedoms, they have embraced an agenda that systematically dismantles such protections and exposes the public to even more manipulation and exploitation by billionaires and corporate interests.

Figures associated with MAHA, including Kennedy, Jillian Michaels, Calley Means and various alternative health influencers, have built their platforms on the claim — often rooted in scientific evidence — that America’s food supply can be poisonous. They decry additives, dyes and pesticides in processed food. They support state-led regulatory measures to ban SNAP benefits for soda and candy (although, problematically, this is rarely paired with demands for higher SNAP benefits to assist in the purchase of healthy alternatives that typically cost substantially more). They point to Europe’s stricter standards around chemicals as a model worthy of emulation. They warn about the long-term consequences of endocrine disruptors, and they call for stricter regulations on what can be sold, consumed and injected into the body. And while some dismiss MAHA calls for a better food system as “woo-woo,” a growing scientific consensus backs up their core concerns as legitimate — and urgent for rebuilding failing U.S. public health systems.

Yet, the movement has aligned itself with an administration that is aggressively rolling back the very regulations that protect people from the harms MAHA advocates decry.

Under Trump, Lee Zeldin’s EPA has declared that it will no longer consider the social costs of pollution when crafting policy. It has eliminated restrictions on mercury emissions, soot and haze, all of which are pollutants with well-documented links to neurological damage and respiratory illness. As a result, mercury will now continue contaminating our water, air and food, and air pollutants will worsen asthma, weaken immune systems and increase rates of cancers, heart disease and stroke. The EPA has, in fact, moved to revoke the legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases altogether. These are precisely the kinds of environmental toxins that pose systemic threats to human health.

This is not simply an oversight. It is the logical outcome of a MAHA movement that is cherry-picking its enemies — attacking public health institutions while often giving corporate polluters a free pass. MAHA advocates are, to be sure, calling for a few regulations and recognize some corporate actors as malign, but they are unwilling to grapple with the broader structural landscape feeding these chemical harms.

MAHA, like many libertarian-leaning health movements before it, is inconsistent: It sometimes calls for regulations, but then simultaneously frames the problem in terms of government overreach and consumer choice. This perspective makes it easy to support policies that gut regulatory agencies under the banner of “freedom,” even when those policies make the very problems they claim to care about dramatically worse. The consequences of MAHA’s inconsistencies are likely to be fatal, both for the movement’s ostensible goals and for vulnerable groups most affected by the Trump administration’s evolving policies, such as recent EPA rollbacks.

MAHA sits at an important moment of historical transition. In the past, the dominant justification for deregulation was neoliberalism — the idea that free markets, not government, should determine the distribution of goods and services. This framework, while disastrous for public health, environmental protection and equal rights to democratic participation, at least maintained the premise that the state should act as a neutral arbiter of corporate activity in the interest of public welfare and efficient markets.

The new wave of deregulation, however, is not about the ideology of free markets. It is part of a broader authoritarian project that seeks to dismantle public institutions entirely, not for market efficiency but simply to consolidate oligarchic power. Trump is openly pushing the interests of his billionaire allies, as is obvious from his decision to hold a Tesla sales event on the White House lawn, to threaten private businesses that do not conform to his personal racial ideology, and to ensure that government contracts go to his donors and allies. To facilitate this authoritarian melding of business and government, Trump’s second-term agenda is explicitly about undermining the legitimacy of regulatory and public health agencies, cutting their funding, firing scientists and ensuring that decision-making is no longer bound by scientific consensus. Zeldin’s EPA, by openly dismissing climate science as “the holy grail of the climate change religion,” provides a case in point, as does the ongoing destruction of NIH and CDC.

This distinction matters. Neoliberal deregulation, while a disaster that facilitated widespread profiteering and poisoning of our environment to set the stage for our present crisis, at least left room for technocratic arguments about efficiency and trade-offs. But as neoliberal policy intensified inequality over the last four decades, it has provided fertile soil for the rise of fascism now. The new authoritarian deregulation that is neoliberalism’s direct descendant does not bother with justifications for its decisions, nor does it allow for public feedback. It simply asserts that the state has no role in environmental protection, in regulating corporations, or in protecting the public from harm. And by aligning itself with this agenda, MAHA has made itself a tool for a movement that ultimately does not care about public health at all.

What would a genuinely populist health movement, one that actually makes good on the worthy promises of the MAHA agenda, look like? For starters, it would stop focusing on individual consumer choice — buying organic, avoiding vaccines, or switching to “clean” beauty products — while ignoring the broader political-economic determinants of health. It would recognize that protecting people from harmful chemicals requires systemic oversight, not the limited and patchy regulation MAHA advocates. It would demand a regulatory state that is not captured by industry but empowered to hold corporations accountable. It would see environmental policy, labor protections and public health infrastructure as fundamental to its mission, not as distractions from it.

Most importantly, it would break with the reactionary politics that have made today’s health freedom movement a Trojan horse for corporate deregulation. Instead of railing against the very institutions that could serve the public good, it would fight to make them more democratic, more responsive and more aligned with the needs of ordinary people.

If the past is any guide, there will always be movements that begin with legitimate grievances but are steered into supporting policies that make those grievances worse. The challenge now is to ensure that the fight for health does not become another example of this historical trap. If MAHA and its allies truly care about public health, they will stop aligning with those who would dismantle its last remaining protections. The alternative is not freedom. It is poisoning the well, literally and politically.

Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist of science, technology and media and the Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.

Eric Reinhart is a political anthropologist, social psychiatrist and psychoanalytic clinician.

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