The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement has been putting points on the board. Companies from Hershey’s to Starbucks are pledging to clean up their ingredients lists. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has dealt blows to the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. In less than two years, the acronym MAHA has gone from a niche slogan to a byword for anti-corporatism that even the New York Times can’t ignore.
But in order for the movement to keep momentum, it must adapt. Enter the MAHA Institute, Washington’s newest think tank. Co-presidents Mark Gorton and Tony Lyons (whom you may know from their associations with LimeWire and Skyhorse Publishing, respectively) announced the opening of the institute in May. Since then, it has done many typical think tank-y things—hosted roundtables, put out press releases—but the result has been unique: Who expected the Heritage Foundation to cosponsor an event headlined by the home birth guru Stuart Fischbein?
Although it has fewer than 10 employees, the MAHA Institute says it is “empowered by over 110,000 engaged citizens who have generated over 20,000 policy ideas to help Make America Healthy Again.” That’s a lot of people rallying around a slogan that didn’t exist two years ago. With so much change, it’s almost unsurprising to see infighting among MAHA leaders. One of the main concerns from MAHA influencers outside the federal government is data privacy, and the White House’s new “Make Tech Health Great Again” initiative—supported by Big Tech companies Apple and Google—is only adding fuel to the fire.
But if they can play their cards right, the “MAHA moms” et al. may have a real shot at changing the way Washington and maybe even the world work. The American Conservative spoke with Gorton about this and other topics in a recent interview.
What are some of the goals of the MAHA Institute?
We at the MAHA Institute are looking to support the MAHA movement that has grown up and coalesced around, originally, the presidential campaign of RFK Jr. and now has morphed with him in the leadership role at HHS. There are people all around the country who are real MAHA supporters, people who care deeply about health. A lot of times, it’s for very personal reasons. When you talk to people in the movement, probably the most common thing that brought them into the movement is a health issue with a family member or themselves. When you have people who experience these life-transforming things, damage due to health problems, and then they start to realize these health problems are caused by our medical system…. They’re caused by the whole kind of toxic society around us. Then you also have all of the government corruption.
It’s an almost historically unprecedented thing…. The secretary of HHS is an important person in any administration—but this is different. First of all, RFK Jr.’s coming in with a mandate to clean house, so that’s very different right there. But there is this public movement. We are at a point in time where the democratic potential of the American government has been realized, and the corrupt corporate interests are in the process of being thrown out. But those corporate interests are not gone. They are certainly well-funded, continuing to fight, determined. They’ve built this institutional structure of health corruption in states, in schools, in the federal government, and it needs to be dismantled. There are people all around the country who are looking to do this, and it will also take legislation at the state level, at the federal level. As much as RFK Jr. may have a mandate from the people and from Donald Trump—you look at Congress. Big Pharma has got a lot of allies even in the Republican Party…. What’s it going to take to get legislation passed like that? It’s going to take continued pressure by a social movement.
At the MAHA Institute, we are trying to literally institutionalize the potential of this movement. Now what does that mean? That is a very good question and that’s a question that we ask ourselves every day. We’re doing a number of things…. We have the power to convene, and that by itself is a useful power and tool. We intend to keep doing this on a number of different topics. Through these convenings, we’re also encouraging the building of relationships between people in the MAHA community and MAHA supporters within the federal government. We’re trying to foster that as much as we can. We’re trying to understand the problems that the MAHA leadership inside our health agencies is encountering and how the MAHA movement can be supportive, and we’re trying to develop that interface.
Over time, I think we have ambitions to be an enduring think tank in DC that continually is pushing for policies that make Americans healthy. This is not a short fight. This is an ongoing challenge. It would be great to see if there was a well-funded institution in DC that was really focused on making people healthy because the reason America is sick is because our government is sick. What’s the cure to a sick government? It’s civic action.
Every day there’s headlines about Medicaid, cutting it, saving it, and problems with our health care system in general. Republicans and Democrats are fighting over X number of dollars to provide health care for people. I feel like MAHA world pays attention to and cares about that, but you guys also have a separate message that doesn’t have to do with the government making sure you’re healthy.
There are core tenets to the health freedom movement which say that every person has the absolute freedom to make decisions about their own health and that it’s not up to the government, and it’s not up to schools, and it’s not up to other institutions. That is foundational in all of this. Even with that, even if you have the absolute freedom, it would be nice to live in a country where you didn’t feel like every aspect of the health system has been optimized for profit and not the health of the American people. The amount of skepticism that Americans need to face their health system with is crazy. It’s horrible. You talk to a doctor you’re like, “Well, have they been trained by Big Pharma to parrot this? Are there regulations to keep them from not prescribing this drug?” … There are a lot of crappy doctors who are just happy to revenue-maximize…. It’s a bad system.
You were talking about how big of a grassroots movement the MAHA movement is. The New York Times has published stories about MAHA moms and “crunchy” moms. Do you view MAHA as becoming a kingmaker in some ways? Do you think both Republicans and Democrats are going to end up courting them and listening to their needs?
Absolutely. It’s hard to know what fraction of the country are truly MAHA-aligned and view themselves that way…. The thing about MAHA is it’s Democrats and Republicans. It’s really both… There are so many Democrats who have been cast out of the Democratic Party because they wouldn’t go along with idiotic orthodoxies and health authoritarianism. If you had the temerity to say it’s a dumb idea to wear a mask—oh my God, you’re a horrible Trump supporter and you’re cancelled…. A majority of MAHA people 10 years ago were Democrats. Because if you just go back, traditionally, who was anti–corporate capture? You go back to the Bush Republicans like, sure, however bad the Democrats were, they weren’t more bought off. Literally Donald Rumsfeld is a pharma executive. No joke. The roots of this deep state/biosecurity/pharma stuff, they all go back right through those guys. How it ended up in the Democratic Party is a fascinating story, but nonetheless it ended up there.
MAHA is a diverse crew. You were talking about how a lot of people find MAHA through a personal story.
There is a certain magic around MAHA. A lot of people are real believers. This is the fascinating thing. These vaccine injuries and abuse by the medical system—it gets you whether you’re rich or poor, Democrat or Republican, and creates these fascinating people. Nicole Shanahan, you know, she’s Sergey Brin’s wife [at the time], she’s Mrs. Google, and then the hand of God taps her and says you’re gonna get a vaccine-injured child and… that changes the trajectory of her life.
You brought up RFK Jr.’s former running mate Nicole Shanahan—she has said some things about the Means siblings [Casey and Calley], that she’s not super happy with their appointment. Naomi Wolf went on Steve Bannon’s War Room and said she’s not happy with the direction of the MAHA movement. Do you think people focusing on talking heads being unhappy with the direction of the MAHA movement or talking about Silicon Valley influence, is it much ado about nothing? What’s your reaction to that?
People in the MAHA movement, many of them are dedicated truth fighters. They speak truth to power. They’re uncompromising. They’re willing to take unpopular stands. They’ve been fighting from the outside for years. Some people have a temperamentally hard time being on the inside because it does require compromise and patience and things like that. I personally would love to see things going faster, reforming the system, but I also know that these guys just took over. I don’t think people fully realize that important people are still not confirmed.
Even when you start staffing people up, you’ve got to go through a whole government interview process, you need to bring people on board, you have to figure out what the new plan is—the whole time while the existing system is trying to foil you. It’s enormously challenging. I have a ton of respect for the people at the top of these organizations. I think the world of RFK Jr., and I think he’s put together an A-team there. I am really confident that the system is going to be reformed, even if there are certain policies that I would like to see overthrown overnight, but I understand we’re living in a real political world. [They’re] being smart and strategic and also just getting going—give the guys a chance… There’s so many signs of progress, and I know people are in there and working super hard.
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At the end of four years, what do you view as success for the MAHA movement?
I really think that they can stop the mass poisoning of the American public or at least greatly reduce it and significantly improve health outcomes just by that. I think that they can put our country on a course toward a true critical scientific overview of our medical system. The actual fixing of medicine—you’re talking about changing the way every doctor practices medicine and deep, deep things. I’m really hoping there is an enduring political force, because we know corporate corruption is never beaten. You never win. You maybe win battles. I am sure the giant corporate interests will continue to try to corrupt the health system, so we need to fight to ensure that that system is safe and protected from those interests. That’s an enduring fight that we’ll be fighting for the rest of our lives, I’m sure.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
