The MAHA wing of MAGA

Is organic farming now a cause of the right?

Does RFK Jr. look a little forced here to you?

And now for a little politics on the Farmer’s Table newsletter. Who can resist, when everyone is still buzzing about what happened to our south on November 5?

If you haven’t heard the acronym MAHA before, can you guess it? Here’s a hint: it was recently popularized by Robert F. Kennedy Junior.

Make America...something...Again. Could it be...Healthy? You got it!

So what is the MAHA agenda? Here’s RFK Jr. himself to tell you about it, in a one and a half minute video with a cute kid. If, like me, you prefer words to video, here’s my summary:

• The MAHA agenda aims to change the US federal government’s approach to “fitness”, “air”, “water”, “medicine”, and, most pertinently to this newsletter, “food” and “soil” (i.e. agriculture); basically, some of the areas that most impact people’s health (although you could certainly argue that everything impacts our health). You could sum it up as a reform of pharmaceuticals, pollution, and agriculture. (Notably, it doesn’t touch the fraught debate in the US over how people actually afford health care.)

• Based on the premise that federal agencies have been captured by industry, it seeks to get business influence out of agencies like the CDC, FDA, NIH, and USDA.

• Discover the root causes to chronic diseases and “eliminate exposure” to them – the assumption being that there are a number of toxins (chemicals? vaccines? ultra-processed foods?) that, if identified, can be banned and disease burdens lifted.

• Get toxic additives and pesticide residues out of food (see above).

• Support people choosing alternative and complimentary medicine.

Working backwards, you can discern the main problem that these initiatives aim to solve, namely that “Big Pharma” and “Big Food” (terms favoured by MAHA’s) control associated federal government regulatory agencies, tipping the scales in their favour, and harming the health of Americans as a result. RFK Jr. wants to replace these bureaucrats with people not beholden to industry. (This meshes with Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” and replace thousands of civil servants – although in his case he probably just wants to replace them with people beholden to him.)

I’m broadly in agreement with RFK Jr. that much of government (in the US and Canada) is too influenced by business interests, often to the detriment of the common good. But wait, isn’t RFK Jr. that anti-vax nut job who admits to a worm eating part of his brain? How can you take anything he says seriously?

Here’s Kennedy on his vaccine position: “People who advocate for safer vaccines should not be marginalized or denounced as anti-vaccine. I am pro-vaccine. I had all six of my children vaccinated. I believe that vaccines have saved the lives of hundreds of millions of humans over the past century and that broad vaccine coverage is critical to public health. But I want our vaccines to be as safe as possible.”

Dr. Robert Redfield, a former director of the US Centre for Disease Control, backs him up: “I know for a fact that Kennedy's not an anti-vaxxer. What he wants is transparency about vaccines and to have an honest dialogue about it.”

Yet the liberal media doesn’t like anyone who questions vaccines, and, in this presidential race even more than others, they don’t like third party candidates who might steal votes from Democrats. Hence the smear job.

Whatever one thinks of his statements around vaccines (and many are more controversial than the one above), one must admit RFK Jr. has an impressive resume. From suing Monsanto over exposure to the herbicide glyphosate, winning $11 billion in damages for farmers and farm workers; to getting arrested protesting the Keystone pipeline; to authoring a dozen books; to winning Time Magazine’s “Hero of the Planet”; to helping indigenous nations fight logging in Clayoquot Sound; to being declared a persona non grata by then Alberta premier Ralph Klein due to his activism against the province’s large scale hog production facilities; to going on a hunger strike with the United Farm Workers and being a pall bearer at Caesar Chavez’s funeral; he has consistently fought powerful interests in common cause with the disadvantaged. He was revered by the left for most of his career; only recently have his statements on vaccines run him afoul.

Should we throw out this long and distinguished history because we disagree with his views on vaccines? That’s the sort of cancellation the left is fond of these days. But I like to look at the whole picture. (I’m actually sympathetic to his vaccine views, but have a much larger problem with his blind support for Israel. But that’s a topic for another essay...)

The front page of his website claims he is fighting against “Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Food and the War Machine”.

So, having established that RFK Jr. might have some decent ideas after all, let’s look at how the MAHA agenda applies to food and farming in particular (because that’s what this newsletter is supposed to be about, right? — focus, Sean, focus!).

Four days after the election, Kennedy stood outside the US Department of Agriculture building in Washington, DC, and recorded this video, with stirring background music. In it, he outlines the agriculture policy he’ll be pushing as soon as Trump hands him the keys to the building. Again, for those who like to read, here it is:

• Give farmers an “off ramp” from the current destructive food system.

• Rewrite regulations to give smaller operators a “break”.

• Encourage sustainable regenerative farming.

• Ban the worst agricultural chemicals.

• Remove conflicts of interest from the USDA dietary panels and commissions.

As policy, it’s light on details, but I like the outlines. But then again, nobody yet knows, probably not even RFK Jr., how long a leash Trump will give him in the new administration. There has been talk of creating an unofficial “Health Czar” position for him, putting him in charge of an alphabet soup of agencies.

At Trump’s now infamous Madison Square Garden rally in the waning days of the campaign, he indicated he would let RFK Jr. “go wild on health. I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on the medicines. The only thing I don’t think I’m going to let him even get near,” he added, “is the liquid gold that we have under our feet.”

It could be that Trump doesn’t much care about health, food, and medicine, and is happy to let the MAHA’s have his their way with them. But if health comes up against the extraction of natural resources – something RFK Jr. has fought in the past – it’s clear what will get trumped.

In 2020, Kennedy said, "Right now, we have a market that is governed by rules that were written by the carbon incumbents to reward the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous, most toxic, most war-mongering fields from hell, rather than the cheap, clean, green, wholesome and patriotic fields from heaven." He’ll have to set aside that particular fight between good and evil as a subordinate to Trump.

In any case, he’s not sitting around waiting for the man he once said was “probably a sociopath” to decide his fate. In the kind of populist move you only find in the US, he’s started a website where citizens can nominate and vote on who they think should be among the roughly 4,000 government appointments the Trump administration needs to make across a range of different departments before Inauguration Day. The Food and Agriculture section of the website states that they are looking for “those who will prioritize the health of our soil and our citizens as the foundation of our economic prosperity and resilience. These leaders will help revive family farms, support local, sustainable and regenerative agriculture, empower local producers and processors...”.

The leading nominee in this section is self-described “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer” Joel Salatin, who first came to national attention when Michael Pollan featured him in his 2006 bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has since appeared in many films, including Food, Inc., has written over a dozen books, and is a revered figure within the regenerative agriculture movement. The day after the election, Salatin posted to his blog that he’d “been contacted by the Trump transition team to hold some sort of position within the USDA and have accepted one of the six "Advisor to the Secretary" spots.” He claimed that Republican Congressman Thomas Massie had agreed to become the Secretary of Agriculture, but later had to walk that back as premature (Massie is considered a candidate, but a long-shot).

Obviously, much remains to be seen as to how far the MAGA’s will accept the MAHA’s into their fold. In a saner political system, America would have more than two viable parties, Trump and Kennedy would each head their own, and coalitions would or would not be formed after the electorate cast their votes. But as it stands, they’ll have to try to work together – with full knowledge that Don could fire Bob at any moment.

It didn’t have to be this way. RFK Jr. offered an alliance with the Harris campaign, but they declined to even meet with him. Trump, on the other hand, accepted the MAHA’s into his coalition, thus displaying once again how the left’s ideological purity around certain sacred cows results in a continual chipping away of their coalition, while the right is only to happy to hoover up the disaffected into their cauldron of discontent towards the status quo.

Kennedy has a campaign video in which he describes his alienation from the Democratic Party and his journey to Trump (a man he once said had positions that “could not be further apart” from his own), in which he says the most depolarizing thing I’ve heard a US politician say in recent memory: “The only thing that will save our country, and our children, is if we choose to love our kids more than we hate each other.”

In it’s aftermath, everyone seems to have their own hot take on how Trump won the election. Here’s one I haven’t heard before: maybe it was RFK Jr. supporters who made the difference. Kennedy was polling at 4.6% nationally when he pulled out of the race; with almost 148 million people casting votes for the president this election, that equates to 6.8 million votes he could have potentially received. Trump beat Harris by a little over 3 million votes, so you can see how RFK Jr.’s supporters – the majority of whom may have gone to Trump – could have made the difference. I know this is a gross oversimplification, but I also think it’s a possibility that’s been willfully ignored by Democrats.

In a commentary by Jay W. Richards, a philosopher at the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, he describes the anger and growing distrust of a public – many of them moms – over the advice handed down from health authorities, and how “so far...neither political party has taken up this topic. The Left has tended to give the administrative state the benefit of the doubt. The Right has tended to do the same for corporations.” Trump, in his welcoming of Kennedy into his tent, has taken the first step in responding to this constituency; only time will tell if he follows through on allowing RFK Jr. to “run wild” on food, farming, and his larger health agenda — and what that will mean for the rest of us.