This is one of those essays I dread writing. It’s about a movement I cherish and about people whom I generally greatly admire.
Headline: MAHA leadership is risking a derailment; it risks losing President Trump and the Republicans the midterms.
The cause of this danger is an oddly adolescent, somewhat cult-y, and far too personalized approach to the challenges and rigors of national politics. I write this essay out of love and support for the MAGA/MAHA alliance, in the hope that MAHA can course-correct quickly. (MAGA, in my view, is doing more than fine).
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I need to paint the picture in snapshots. As you know from my last post, I was the coauthor and signatory, along with my colleague commentator Shannon Joy of The Shannon Joy Show; analyst Sasha Latypova of Due Diligence and Art; and physician Dr Mary Talley Bowden of AmerciansforHealthFreedom.org, of an open letter criticizing HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s misleading announcements about having revised the CDC recommendations for the mRNA injection.
Though the announcement purported to be a step in the right direction, and was being welcomed rapturously by MAHA-aligned influencers as a removal of the mRNA shot from the CDC recommendations, we pointed out that it was still targeted against sick kids, and against all pregnant women. Our letter also took issue with the fact that HHS has not pulled the mRNA platform from the market, and is failing to deliver on various key MAHA policy goals, which we itemized.
The response to this letter has been extremely supportive, with signatures from many grassroots citizens and health freedom activists. It generated a good deal of press, including stories in Yahoo.com, coverage in podcasts such as Dr Drew, and so on.
Some seemingly positive MAHA deliverables were set in motion the following week. Sec Kennedy fired the corrupt ACIP (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) committee, for instance, and appointed 8 replacements. These included the science/ freedom hero, Great Barrington Declaration signatory Dr Martin Kulldorff. The well-known critic of lockdown excesses Dr Retsef Levi of MIT was also appointed (a slightly baffling choice upon deeper scrutiny, as his field is food security, not vaccines. He also spent 12 years in the Israel Defense Forces’ Intelligence Wing, but no matter). Self-described inventor of the mRNA platform, Dr Robert Malone, was a pick as well.
So this dramatic gesture of Sec Kennedy’s turns out not to be black and white. Shannon Joy rightly pointed out, for instance, that eight replacements are just short of a majority.
There will surely be more MAHA “victories” to come, and more questions to be raised about those “victories,” step by step by step. In other words, HHS had a positive-to-messy week, following high-profile pressure from an outside group, along with other internal and external pressures of all kinds, no doubt.
My point is this: this is how politics works.
“Principals”, meaning people situated as Sec Kennedy or President Trump are, try to weave, every day, through the thicket of competing agendas that surrounds them, and to draw down from the opposition all around them, the least amount of damage. Everyone is trying to avoid rousing unnecessarily the ire of the biggest investors in both parties’ campaigns: in this case, Big Pharma. There are belligerent watchdogs over Sec Kennedy on the inside — reportedly, Sen Bill Cassidy has placed a rigid gatekeeper in the mix — advisor Calley Means is also tasked with keeping too much real MAHA momentum from taking place, it appears — and the whole operation is overseen by another stern gatekeeper, President Trump’s Chief of Staff, former lobbyist Susie Wiles.
In all of this complexity, the base yells and screams about its own issues. Some accommodation is made, for a compromise that is no one’s ideal. And things move haltingly forward.
Everyone who has ever done politics at a national level, understands this chaotic, tug-of-war dynamic; and knows that this is the reality of power, all day, every day. Grownup, experienced national politicians and their chiefs of staff know that it is very useful for them when their base yells and screams about an issue, especially publicly, because it gives them cover to deliver outcomes that their voters want, but that lobbyists and special interests do not want the voters to receive.
MAHA leadership and insiders really have to learn about and understand this dynamic.
I remember Vice President Al Gore, who is quite a decent person, explaining this dynamic to me. He said that citizens don’t usually have a seat at the table, and that this can be very frustrating for decent “principals”, since special interests do always have a seat at the table. The best message he could give to citizens who wanted a specific outcome from him was for them not simply to complain about what he was not delivering, but rather, as he put it, to “Make me.” That is to say, citizens needed to organize and create formal pressure groups, and publicly press on the Principal and his or her team.
The example the Vice President gave was AARP — the American Association of Retired Persons. Before this pressure group existed, the elderly had little power or voice; but after it was organized, no President or Congressperson on the right or left wanted to infuriate American elders’ numerically powerful public advocacy group.
I took that lesson to heart.
But it appears that many MAHA insiders, and certainly many among the satellites of (sorry, I have to say it) men who are now informally surrounding Sec Kennedy, really don’t seem to understand this, or to get, in general, how to play grown-up politics.
MAHA insiders and the satellite spokespeople and “Bobby” “helpers” seem to be resorting to middle-school mean-girl tactics, rather than waging serious adult national politics on behalf of Secretary Kennedy.
These men are resorting, for example, to adolescent personal attacks at the least provocation.
When I raised questions on social media about Calley Means’ company TrueMed’s biometrics harvesting business model, the HHS advisor called me “unhinged.” He declined to debate me or publicly to discuss the issue. I later wrote an essay revealing that his sister, Surgeon General nominee and Levels cofounder Casey Means, had a company with nearly flat growth and with problems with the visitor base, but with a valuation of $313 million dollars.
A grownup HHS press office would have made sure that Sec Kennedy appeared with Dr Means in multiple venues, and would have booked her a round of TV, print, radio and podcast interviews, in which such questions, and those from others, could have been addressed. Or, if it turned out that Dr Means was unready for such appearances and that the problems I and others raised were insurmountable, grownup politicos would cut bait, release a lovely statement about Dr Means having other projects to pursue, and move on to another nominee.
But that is not what happened. Dr Means has been kept in some off grid location somewhere (I am joking. I mean that she vanished from sight).
Instead of our witnessing a grownup media strategy, I received a call from a close advisor to RFK Jr and colleague now of Calley Means’. The caller told me to be nicer about the Means siblings, if I wished to “support” RFK Jr, and not to be “divisive” to the MAHA movement in criticizing the Means siblings.
That wasn’t the end of my punishment from the kids at the coolest lunchroom table. I later discovered that it was Calley Means who was gatekeeper for the seating at Sen Ron Johnson’s hearing based on my Pfizer Papers team’s uncredited work – a hearing that we were told was “too full” for us to attend.
Darn it all — Stacy didn’t invite me to her prom afterparty.
A week or two later, Shannon Joy, Sasha Latypova, Dr Mary Talley Bowden, and I ran our open letter critical of the deployment of the mRNA injection recommendations targeting sick kids and pregnant women.
After that, MAHA middle school got really weird and punitive. Over by the lockers, rumors were rampant that there would be a fight by the bleachers during lunch period.
Dr Robert Malone called our group of signatories, publicly, a “hate group.” He wrote on social media that the critics of MAHA, clearly referencing our letter and Nicole Shanahan’s recent, separate critiques, had nefarious motivations: “There is a clique of historically liberal women influencers, mostly from California or the Northeast” who are “actively seeking to divide the MAHA movement.”
Dr Malone’s whole comment on Nicole Shanahan’s criticisms of HHS and MAHA for not delivering on campaign agendas, is worth reproducing:
“It is no question in my mind that the two movements [MAHA and MAGA], although they have overlap, come from very different, ideological roots, political roots. And you can see that in— Well, Nicole Shanahan kind of embodies that. Nicole Shanahan is basically a Bay Area, Silicon Valley type attorney […]Who met, you know, met one of the founders of Google at Burning Man. You know, that’s just the way it is. And they became married, had a child, and then separated, because the child had, let’s say, I don’t want to put words in her mouth, let’s say developmental disabilities, that plausibly could have been associated with the pediatric vaccine schedule, that led to a very contentious, divorce, major settlement for Ms. Shanahan. And she now lives a life of luxury, with a new significant other, this challenged child, and has decided to become not just politically active, but potential candidate for governor of California. And has apparently made a significant commitment to let’s say becoming an influencer and to some extent a media celebrity. … Her words that she used recently on X, are very consistent with someone who is seeking attention as a media celebrity. …Now, that position that she’s taken has a pretty dark component to it in that what she’s functionally saying…When a donor to a political campaign seeks to gain promises from a political candidate in exchange for their contribution, this is commonly referred to as influence peddling or in more severe cases as a form of political corruption or bribery. When a powerful person withholds support from a candidate to extract specific promises, this is also influence peddling. If powerful people are doing this to kill or support MAHA or MAGA goals or objectives, it is still influence peddling… So, not politically astute, kind of, comes across as angry, unnecessarily.”
Dr Malone here depicted Ms Shanahan, without whose advocacy and funding Sec Kennedy and President Trump would not now be in power, as being motivated by a desire for attention, hungry for celebrity, and “angry” — all of these being sexist stereotypes traditionally used to undermine strong women leaders.
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He also tried subtly to smear Shanahan, noting that she met her husband-to-be “at Burning Man. You know, that’s just the way it is.” Men may miss the dog-whistle here, but every woman who reads this, understands what “You know, that’s just the way it is” and “Burning Man” mean, when used together within the lexicon of slut-shaming.
Finally he threateningly invoked a sometimes illegal act when describing the expectations that every major donor has, that his or her agenda will get serious consideration from the candidate whom he or she supported. “Influence-peddling” can be illegal, and is an offense close to bribery or coercion. The threat that Dr Malone made here, that Ms Shanahan’s expectations as a donor that her agenda be considered, could be recast by the Trump team as an illegal activity, is a serious threat.
Dr Malone also told an audience at Freedom Fest that he and I — “Naomi”, as he called me, though I always refer to him as “Dr Malone” — got into a “Twitter Twat”, a conflict that was spun up by “chaos agents.” In other words, he implied to this audience, one made up of my own community, that I was too stupid to figure out my own opposition to some of his views, and that my mind was being manipulated by some mysterious outside force.
As far as what a “Twitter Twat” is — I have no idea, but I want the T-shirt.
