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Talkin’ MAHA and the Midterms · REAP/SOW

• Teresa Cotsirilos: You're listening to REAP/SOW: dispatches from the front lines of food, farming, and the environment. I'm your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Vani Hari: Let's be very clear, you cannot claim to care about health while protecting poison. Teresa: That's Vani Hari, though you probably know her as Food Babe. She's an activist, influencer, and leader in the Make America Healthy Again movement. Last April, she helped lead a pretty enraged protest in front of the Supreme Court. Protesters: People versus Poison. Vani Hari: You're not loud enough. Protesters: People versus Poison. Vani Hari: Let them hear you inside. Protesters: People versus Poison. Teresa: The Court was reviewing a case against Bayer, the corporation that manufactures the weed killer glyphosate. A few months later, the justices ruled in favor of the company and effectively blocked states' ability to sue Bayer over this pesticide, even though many experts believe it causes cancer. In 2024, the MAHA movement helped Trump take back the White House, but after suffering political defeats on glyphosate and other issues, some MAHA leaders are getting fed up. They might jump ship on their MAGA allies. In this midterm season, that makes them a force to be reckoned with. We just published a whole series on this with our partners over at Mother Jones. Our Editor-in-Chief, Theodore Ross, recently sat down with me and the other two awesome reporters on this series, Jill Filipovic and Jane Black, to talk about what this MAHA-MAGA crackup could look like, how it could influence certain midterm races, and how all this political drama actually impacts food policy. I'll let Ted take it from here. Theodore Ross: Welcome. I just want to say hi to everyone. I'm going to do a little introduction. Then we're going to get into the substance of the issue at hand. Let me start with Teresa Cotsirilos, who is a staff writer and producer at FERN. Welcome, Teresa. Teresa: Thank you. Theodore: Next up is Jane Black. Jane is the co-founder of Consumed, a Substack newsletter that explains the forces shaping our food system. I will point out that is also what FERN does, but that's okay. There's plenty of room in the space. Then finally, we have Jill Filipovic. I will give her a proper introduction, but I am first going to read her Instagram bio, which I find very amusing. It is, "Full-time eater, most-of-the-time writer, recovering lawyer, occasional yoga teacher. Hashtag cats." I like that. Hi, Jill. Jill Filipovic: Thank you. Hi. Theodore: Let me get the rest of your bio in. You're also working on a book about how American patriarchy shapes women's rights worldwide. You write a newsletter as well called Throughline.com. Welcome all three of you. I'm very happy to have you here. All right. I'm going to jump right in, and I'm going to start with Jill. Jill, the MAHA movement, politically, is in my imagination really associated with women, the MAHA moms, but you're arguing in your piece that they've been pushed aside in terms of genuine political power. How did that happen? Jill: Yes, it's a very strange dynamic in the Trump administration that MAHA is so associated with women, and for good reason. Women really powered the movement. They're its foot soldiers. They're its social media advocates. They're often the public face of the movement. Within the Trump administration, the people that have been elevated to positions of power, RFK Jr., many members of his HHS, the former leader of the FDA have almost universally been men. Those men, in their positions of power, are not really prioritizing the issues that the MAHA moms most care about. They're bizarrely taking on a lot of the issues that actually the health-adjacent men of the manosphere really focus on. Theodore: The protein. The protein dudes. Jill: Things like protein, testosterone, sperm count. The issues that the MAHA women have really been pushing for many years now, things like glyphosate, things like ultra-processed foods, things like getting healthier foods onto children's plates and on grocery store shelves have been either pushed to the side or even directly opposed by this administration. Theodore: That's a pretty good distillation, both of your article and the situation. I want to ask you a follow-up. Teresa and Jane, feel free to jump in on this one too. Do you think that this political shift, this shift within MAHA with the women being pushed to the side and the men being left in control of the policy and the politics, do you think that was inevitable? Did that have to happen? Jill: No, it absolutely was not inevitable. I do think it is reflective of a broader problem within conservative movements, where the Republican Party is hugely disproportionately male in terms of not just its voters, but certainly in terms of its makeup. There are many, many more Republican men in Congress than there are Republican women. That's true on the Democratic side as well, but the proportions are not nearly as extreme. I will say, the MAHA women, they're mad about this. They feel like they're being taken for granted by the Republican Party. They're really putting, I don't want to say threat, but they're putting it out there that they are loyal to their movement and to their ideology, and not necessarily to Trump and Trumpism. Theodore: Yes, go ahead Jane. Yes, sorry. Go ahead. Jane Black: I was just going to say, I think that that has made a big impact. I think the fact that many of these women, Vani Hari, Kelly Ryerson, who goes by Glyphosate Girl, they were Democrats before they were Republicans. It's very clear that they hitched their wagon to this because they saw somebody who was willing to do something. When it seems like they're not willing to do something, they've been very clear that they will take their vote elsewhere. We will see whether they're able to move voters that are very loyal to Donald Trump and came to MAHA through Trump rather than the other way around, but I think they have clocked a couple of wins in stopping certain things from happening by making that threat very clear. Theodore: Yes, I think that's a good point. Jill: Also, the bigger question is whether Democrats harness their power, right? Theodore: Yes. Jane: Yes. Jill: A lot of these women are looking for somewhere to go. Most of the MAHA women I talk to, they continue to be pretty loyal to RFK Jr. They have not turned on him. They really do see him as a rightful figurehead. Theodore: Let's talk about RFK Jr. for a second, though, in this context. We talk about whether or not it was always going to go this way with women being betrayed and the men getting the spoils. Jill, you said, no, you don't think that's inevitable, but I think that the gymnastics that you see some of the MAHA moms having to go through not to criticize RFK Jr. after he has essentially, well, I don't know if sold them out is the right term, but certainly hasn't delivered exactly what he promised. I don't know how they get back into it, meaning the women, unless they criticize RFK Jr., and I don't see how they criticize RFK Jr. Jill: Yes, there is not a lot of criticism of RFK Jr. within this movement. My sense of what one of them would say if they were here right now is that he is doing his best under really difficult circumstances. Again, that's their words, not mine. Theodore: I understand. Jill: I think their perception is that his heart is in the right place. He is still an advocate for their movement within the White House. That there are all these different factions within the White House that are competing, and that he doesn't always win, but that on balance, he is a net good for their movement rather than a net negative. I also think they see Trump as someone who is persuadable, someone who is unpredictable and because of that unpredictability, may go their way more than a Democratic president, for example, who might signal that they are kind of in the pocket or at least sympathetic to big food, big pharma, and big polluter. Theodore: That's probably the right political calculation to make, that you never know where Trump is going to go, so you might as well stay on his good side. All right. I'm going to switch gears a little bit. Teresa, I want to talk to you about your article and your interest in Zach Lahn. You wrote a profile of Lahn, who is pronounced interestingly. It's spelled L-A-H-N, but pronounced "Lane." Teresa: Lahn likes private plane. Theodore: I know. It really was a revelation for me when I figured that out. He's running for governor in Iowa, and he was the first candidate endorsed by the MAHA pack. He's a darling of the movement, really. He even defeated a Trump-endorsed candidate in the primaries. What you write about, and I'd like you to talk a little bit about, is the political transformation that he's undergone, which suggests that he's not as committed to MAHA issues as he might seem. Let's talk about that. Who was Zach Lahn before he became who he now is? Teresa: Squash also has extremely strong opinions about this, and that's why he's entered the chat. He'll probably be here intermittently throughout this conversation. Theodore: That's okay. Teresa: [laughs] The question was, who is he? Theodore: Well, tell me who he was, right? Teresa: Who he was. Theodore: Who was Zach Lahn? Teresa: Zach Lahn is fascinating. Zach Lahn started his career in kind of right-wing, libertarian, Tea Party-esque, conservative politics, and then got his big break in his 20s when he was hired to be the director of the Montana branch of Americans for Prosperity. While he worked for Americans for Prosperity, this was in the 2010s, the organization was obviously waging a war of attrition against Obamacare. Zach Lahn, specifically, was implicated in some extremely underhanded political maneuverings to punish and push out Republican representatives in Montana who were hesitant to fully support Americans for Prosperity's agenda. Theodore: Let me just cut in for a second here, Teresa. For people who don't know Americans for Prosperity, it's an advocacy group that is largely funded and was founded by the Koch family network. The Koch brothers, one of them is now dead. They are a very libertarian Republican group, very well-funded. Interestingly enough, and I'm thinking you're going to probably get to it, they made a lot of their money in the business world on chemicals for agriculture. That's going to be a big part of this transformation. Teresa: The TLDR here is that he spent a lot of his career very closely affiliated with a family that made a lot of its money in the exact same industrial agricultural practices that MAHA is now against, and that have, arguably, I think it's been argued persuasively, poisoned much of the state of Iowa, which is where Zach Lahn is from. Theodore: Poisoned the water in Iowa. Teresa: Poisoned the water. Arguably, also, the people and the land. We can get into that. It might be across the board at this point, very sadly and disturbingly. He's affiliated himself very closely with them. Also, the Kochs are famous. These are people who are known for political machinations behind the scenes to push things in certain directions, and that is where Zach Lahn came up. They're also known for advocating for policies that are diametrically opposed to many of the policies that MAHA advocates want, and that Zach Lahn is currently advocating for. One of the things that I wrestled with in my piece that was really interesting to think about was, did Zach Lahn have some sort of ideological awakening where he changed, or is he hitching his wagon to the most convenient spot and is, in fact, still a libertarian connected to the Kochs who will not actually do any of the things that his MAHA supporters want him to do? Theodore: I guess we'll see, if he wins. Teresa: Zach Lahn did not agree to an interview with me and has not taken power yet. I have my suspicions, but we don't really know. Theodore: All right. I'm going to turn to you, Jane, and we'll talk a little bit about your story. Jesse Gabriel, he's a lesser-known figure. He's a Democrat. He's from California. He's been pushing for a lot of issues that the MAHA folks might like. From the other side of the aisle, for people out there who don't really know who Gabriel is, tell us a little bit about him in the context of food issues. Jane: Well, that's exactly why I wanted to profile Jesse Gabriel, because nobody has heard of him. I really believe that he is, at this point, America's de facto food safety chief. He has passed bill after bill in the state of California that remove dyes and chemical additives from foods. One of the things that RFK has said he wanted to do since day one was define what ultra-processed foods are. State of California, with a bill written by Jesse Gabriel, has already done that. They have directed the state to identify ultra-processed foods of concern and remove them from children's school lunches. These are exactly the things that the MAHA movement says it wants to do, being done by a centrist, pragmatic, incrementalist Democrat. It's absolutely amazing. One of the other things I find really interesting about him is that he's everything Republicans would hate. He went to Berkeley. He studied constitutional law at Harvard. He defended the Dreamers. He was on the team that defended the Dreamers at the Supreme Court. Yet, he is absolutely laser-focused on bipartisanship and making this issue, which he thinks is very important, something that everybody can buy into. When he started doing this, he could have rammed something through the California state legislature. Democrats do that all the time. He actually made changes to bills to bring Republicans in because that's the way he thinks things should get done. What I find so fascinating about him is that he's very clearly not MAHA. He does not identify as MAHA. He does everything in every way that people say does not work in the Trump era, and he somehow made it work. I just think those are the people that we should be putting the spotlight on because I feel like people in America, on the right and the left, say they're sick of polarization, and yet who gets all the headlines? Theodore: And yet, yes. Polarization does sell, I think, along with other things, but yes, that's a very good point. I want to try to understand Lahn and Gabriel in the context of each other. Teresa, you nicely point out in your piece, how some of Lahn's positions wouldn't be shocking if they came from Elizabeth Warren. It suggests a thing about MAHA that's really important. These Democratic coded issues on food have at least for now jumped to the right, but no one knows if that's permanent. This is for all three of you. Jill, you can feel free to weigh on this too. How do you see that playing out on the midterms? Will it stay where it is right now? Teresa: There's one thing I want to add to that quickly, just because you brought up the Elizabeth Warren stuff, which is, I think that the implications for Democrats about the power of certain types of messaging in the midterms is actually even bigger than that. Because Zach Lahn has not just co-opted food safety messaging and messaging around organics, regenerative farming, the lack of certain things around pesticides that have become a big part of MAHA. Theodore: Antitrust too. Teresa: That's where I'm going with this. His antitrust rhetoric is not just MAHA-esque. His antitrust rhetoric could very easily be a speech that Bernie would make in Iowa. In the Mother Jones video version of this story, there is a compare and contrast between what Zach Lahn is saying and then a speech that Bernie made in Iowa, and it is extremely similar. In terms of messaging that could appeal in a bipartisan manner, Zach Lahn is betting that it extends beyond the classic MAHA messaging and extends to the AOC, Warren, Sanders branch of the party. I just wanted to put a finer point on that. I think it's fascinating. Theodore: No, I think that's a really, really good point. I think it was Jill who was saying this, that these are swingy voters. These are voters that went from one direction to the other. Where do you think they're going to stick, Jane? Looking at Jesse Gabriel, he's not exactly the idea of a Democrat co-opting MAHA issues. He was doing this before MAHA. He's been doing this for a while. Is anybody going to follow his lead? Jane: Yes, and I've written about this before. I think the Democrats are just dropping the ball on this. It is just gobsmacking to me. Teresa: It's what they specialize in. Jane: Yes, it was their issue. They totally let the Republicans run away from it. Poll after poll shows that this is a bipartisan issue. This is not a Republican issue. This is not a Democratic issue. It's popular with Democrats, it's popular with Republicans, and it's particularly popular with independents, which is who both sides need. You would be silly, that's the nicest word I can come up with, not to jump on the ball. I have talked to people who have said, "Oh, yes, we know, but we're really focused on affordability." I just think it is a big mess. There are not enough people who really know and care about food to understand how essential this is. There's a recent poll that showed that 84% of Americans say that it's the government's responsibility to keep food safe from harmful ingredients and pesticides, and fewer than half of Americans think that the government is doing a good job. What more do you need? Theodore: That's a very weird outcome. It makes sense in the current political context, but the fact is that, yes, the lettuce problems we're having this summer to the side, the US does a pretty good job of keeping our food safe. However, people currently don't think of it that way. Am I wrong? Do you disagree with that, Jane? Jane: I think that part of it has been built up. The definition of what food safety means has expanded. It's not just cyclospora. People now think that it is a food safety issue that there is blue dye in Cool Ranch Doritos. You could ask why there's blue dye in Cool Ranch Doritos. That's a legitimate question, but now people think that they're unsafe because of it. I think that's part of it. One of the things I just want to put a finer point on with those numbers, it says people want the government to take action. I can't think of very many things that the lion's share of Americans are like, "You know what? The government is really the best person to do this." That's what they're saying here. That's what is just mind-boggling to me that more people have not seen what Jesse Gabriel has done, and there aren't more Zach Lahns out there, basically. Theodore: I know, Jill, you wanted to say this, but I want to just point out before, Jill, you say something. Gobsmacked is not a term you hear in spoken speech that often. I credit you for that. That's a great term. I think we should all be using gobsmacked. Jill, what were you going to say? Jill: I think Jane is exactly right that it is totally shocking that Democrats haven't jumped on this. Look, yes, we had Michelle Obama and Let's Move, and her vegetable garden, and healthy school lunches that Republicans threw absolute fits about. I feel like maybe Democrats are still lightly traumatized by that and think that that's still the moment we're in. Obviously, they're wrong. The women that are powering the MAHA movement are the same women that have powered Democratic movements. Not literally the same women, but large numbers of mothers, women who are really connected with their communities, women who care about a handful of specific issues. Those women, we see different iterations of them in the history of Democratic politics. They are the Black women who run Souls to the Polls drives and are part of the reason why Black women are the backbone of the Democratic Party. They are the suburban wine moms who the leftist podcasters love to make fun of, but who are also people who really do fuel this party. This, to me, just strikes me as such a missed opportunity for Democrats to talk about the issues that the MAHA moms care about, to harness their energy, to harness their rage, to harness their anxiety, which is where I think a lot of this comes from. I have a small child, and it is really mind-boggling what goes into food that is advertised to children and aimed at children. I joke that I am like MAHA-lite, even though I vaccinate my kid, and obviously I'm not, I don't know, mainlining beef tallow. When it comes to the food stuff, and frankly, when it comes to the issues that MAHA voters themselves tell pollsters they care about the most, ultra-processed foods, I guess they say less about pollution, but they talk a lot about pesticides, they talk a lot about food safety, broadly defined, as Jane said. Those are really the top issues that they care about, healthy food and school lunches. They're pretty normie stuff. They're the same stuff that you would hear any parent on a playground in Berkeley or Brooklyn talking about. I think Democrats can shave off the anti-vax stuff. That gets a lot of billing and for good reason. It's scary. It's dangerous. It's wrong. It should get a lot of press. The beef tallow stuff, whatever, gets a lot of press because it's weird and that's interesting. Actually, the issues that most of these voters prioritize are the same issues that a lot of liberals care about. I do think that we don't have to take every single MAHA crazy in order to get a critical mass of the MAHA movement to support Democratic politicians. I think, as it stands, they're really focusing on the really divisive and not super helpful stuff like the vaccines, and missing the opportunity to capture voters who are otherwise politically unengaged, but don't want their kids eating blue dye, whatever, in their Cool Ranch Doritos or eating Cool Ranch Doritos at all. Theodore: I just want to say I really like Cool Ranch Doritos, but if RFK Jr. wants to take them away from me, I will do that. That will be my sacrifice to the health of the United States is that I will forego Cool Ranch Doritos. I just also want to point out that I agree with everything you both are saying about this. I will give a little credit to, at least from a rhetorical perspective, and maybe if the Democrats take back the House and/or Senate, they'll change things here too. Cory Booker and Chellie Pingree. There is some movement. There are some Democrats who are acting or at least talking about these issues in a way that seems to make sense. Jane: Yes, but those are the same two people who have been talking about it my whole life, and Rosa DeLauro, when Jim McGovern has the Hunger. They each have their own thing, but that's it. If you look at, again, Jesse Gabriel, he has passed more influential legislation on food than any of those people. It's in California, so it matters. Theodore: Yes, that's a good point. All right. I'm going to shift gears a little bit to a broader question. We do a lot of coverage at FERN. The MAHA movement, we talk about it, we think about it. We're so invested in the things that are happening with it within the flow of events that we don't always pull back and ask ourselves, do we think, do all three of you think that the emergence of the MAHA movement is a good thing for American politics? We can decide if that's a net good thing minus the clearly bad vaccine thing. I'm talking about the food thing. I'm not trying to balance the scales here, but is it a good thing? Teresa, why don't you go first? Teresa: I think that one of the issues with the MAHA movement is that these two branches, including the anti-vax branch, these are inextricable from each other and a package deal in many issues and in many cases, and therein lies the issue. I think that framing of the question is challenging. Theodore: No, it's a really fair point to make, Teresa. I just want to point out that a lot of the MAHA figures that we've been able to talk to directly, it's a Republican movement. They won't always talk to anyone who's not Republican. FERN is independent and nonpartisan, but that doesn't mean they'll talk to us. They want to split the vaccine issue away from the food issue. They seem to have no problem with the cognitive dissonance of saying, "Well, look, I don't care about vaccines. I can vaccinate my kids. Whatever RFK Jr., who is my messianic leader, is up to, that's none of my business." Yes, I think that's a really good point. Teresa: I do have problems with that. Putting the framing of the question aside and looking at the things they're advocating for in the food system specifically, I think that it is really important that this is coming up. I think that all my cards on the table, my framing on this, and my perspective on this has been very heavily framed by Jane, so I think we should bounce to her after you talk to me. I'm very grateful that we're talking about these issues openly. I think that it's about time. I'm relieved that it's bipartisan. The food branch of the movement has successfully brought up things that we should have started talking about in a bipartisan mainstream way a long time ago. The pesticide stuff in particular. Prior to MAHA, I at least always saw it personally, as someone who covers it, as a difficult thing to cover and talk about because the damage that pesticides do to a person is very incremental, which is one of the ways that many pesticide companies and manufacturers get away with spraying them. You get cancer 35 years later. Many people exposed to glyphosate. There are far worse ones on the market. Paraquat is one that comes up a lot as well. A lot of people exposed to these pesticides have been in the industry. They've been exposed to 10 other things. It's like some really nice cushioning for that corporation if they want to get out of being sued. As a journalist, I've always found it difficult to cover because it's hard to prove that it was actually that pesticide. This has always been a rather challenging issue because of its incremental damage, in many cases, and the fact that they have been able to package compelling messaging on this in a way that people really care about, I think, is very powerful. I think that branch of it is really beneficial, and I don't think you can actually untangle the two, which I think therein lies the problem. I'm curious, Jill and Jane, if you agree. Theodore: Who wants to go next? Jane: I'll go next because it's interesting. I've not taught you well, Teresa, because I disagree that you can't untangle them. I think that the media seems unable to untangle them. When you look at what is popular, it is the food stuff. The vaccine stuff is absolutely unpopular. The fact that people in the MAHA movement have decided to give RFK Jr. more space and forgiveness or whatever it is, that's a political calculation that they're making. If you look at what's popular and what the American people want, it is the food change, not the vaccine change. That's what I focus on. When I focus on that, I think he just nailed the framing. He just nailed it in a way that Michael Pollan and Michelle Obama could not. I covered her breaking ground on the garden and all of this stuff. It resonated with me. I wanted to go to the farmers' market. I wanted to cook. I wanted to do all of these things. Then when you went between the coasts, you saw that there were people who, the way that they heard it was, go do this. Oh, guess what? You can't do that. There is no farmers' market. You can't afford the farmers' market. You don't have time to cook. Nobody wants to be told that the right thing to do is something that they simply cannot do. What he's done is just changed the framing, which is, it's big corporations taking advantage of you. You should be mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Is this country ready for that message? A populist message? It is the exact same message that worked 100 years ago when they created the FDA. There is an exact parallel between the messaging and the creation of regulation. Of course, the problem now is that we've got the message and a complete refusal to regulate. I think that the messaging is great. I just want somebody to deliver on the regulation that needs to happen. Theodore: Yes, don't we all? Yes, go ahead. Teresa: I'm just so happy that you brought up the class messaging around how the Democrats have framed this historically and then how MAHA has hit on it, because this is something that has been driving me crazy and that I'm deeply fascinated by. It's something that in my story, watching Zach Lahn, a very experienced political operative, frame this, and watching what he has done with gender, race, and class and how he has transformed himself, has been really fascinating and such a clapback to what the Democrats have done historically and how they've talked about issues. How do you manage to alienate so many people from an issue that actually everyone cares about? [laughs] They managed it, occasionally. Anyway, to Jill. Sorry to jump in. Theodore: What are you thinking, Jill? Jill: I would say the biggest thing that has changed from the Obama era until now in American politics is algorithmic social media. Which did not exist the way that it exists now when Obama was president, and when Michelle Obama was building out her vegetable garden. When we talk about the interwovenness of the anti-vaccine movement and MAHA writ large and the food aspect of MAHA, I think they've become interwoven. They didn't start out that way. I think one thing that happened is that a lot of women who were concerned about their health, a lot of the MAHA women I talk to talk about experiencing chronic inflammation or some sort of ill health that traditional medicine is not able to solve for them. They get put on drugs, and they go the pharma traditional medicine route and they find it really unsatisfying. Then they change the way that they eat, they change the way that they approach the consumer choices that they're making, and then they see real differences. I think a lot of these women come into this movement through food because they want to feed their children healthy food. Just from personal experience. When I had a kid, the way that I approached a grocery store shelf, I've always been a pretty healthy eater. I'm not microwaving my black plastic. When I was thinking about what I'm putting into the body of this tiny brand-new person in the world, it ramped up my anxiety because I was so worried about what I was feeding him. B, it made me a lot more careful and a lot more cautious about what I was exposing him and then also, by extension, myself too. I think a lot of women, a lot of mothers, and a lot of parents have that experience. When you have algorithmic social media, and you feel like this kind of lite-crazy person for caring so much about how you're feeding yourself and your family, and you can't necessarily talk to other members of your community about it, you go on social media, and you wind up down these rabbit holes. When the only people that take you seriously are other people on the internet, and where those internet passages lead are eventually, not just the beef tallow people who, God bless, do your thing, but the raw milk people and eventually the anti-vaccine people, you feel like you found a community that finally takes you seriously, that finally understands. I'm trying to think of the best way to articulate this, but I have felt like a crazy person sometimes being like, how is everyone around me feeding their kids stuff with 96 unpronounceable chemicals on the label? I realize it makes me sound like a MAHA mom, and everything's a chemical, but it's not all terrible, whatever. I have started to feel, yes, it's very destabilizing. Feeling like you're the only person around that cares about something that feels major. Theodore: Well, it doesn't make you a MAHA mom necessarily. It may or may not make you a MAHA mom. Jill: It may or may not. Theodore: What it suggests is that you're looking for some agency, and people are finding agency in this political messaging and in this political movement, even if they don't agree on all of the stuff. Even if it's not the right messenger, say, for you, Jill, and I feel the same way about food. I think all of those things make a lot of sense if it wasn't wrapped up in, for me, RFK Jr. Jane: See, the agency is exactly the point because that was what went wrong with Michael Pollan and Michelle Obama, who I admire very much. It was, you were telling them to do something that you couldn't do, and so you were telling them that you're a failure, and you were saying, "I'm creating this alternative food system, I'm voting with my dollar, and you are failing." The point you make, Jill, about social media is you're much more easily able to connect with someone who will validate you. Then while they're validating you, they're also like, "Oh, and also you need this stack of peptides and you can buy them from me." Theodore: CDC is filled with fraud. Jane: Right, and so you end up there. It is that populist rage that someone is doing this to you is what makes it work. That's what makes it work. Teresa: Yes. Theodore: All right. I think that's a good point to stop it at. Populist rage is a good place for us to end this discussion. First, I'm going to thank you all. You had an amazing contribution to this conversation. I also want to point out to anybody who's watching this video or maybe listening to it as a podcast that these articles that they are based on are well worth your time. It is a series in partnership with Mother Jones. We also have a piece with Politico as well, MAHA & the Midterms. I heartily encourage you to go check it out at our website or wherever you can find it. I just want to say thanks again. Jane: Thank you, Ted. Jill: Thank you. Teresa: REAP/SOW is a production of the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Our executive producers are Theodore Ross, Tom Laskawy, and Brent Cunningham. Our sound engineer is Cody Nelson. Our audience lead is Dom Altomari, and our assistant engagement producer is Milla Douer. Our content creator intern is Carlin McCarthy. I'm your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. FERN News is our home on YouTube. Special thanks to Mother Jones for their incredible collaboration on this series. Find out more about FERN and donate to support our independent nonprofit reporting at www.thefern.org.