Ruby Cramer: The Power of MAHA

**Tim Miller** (0:12)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. If you're looking for a bunch of politics, you can have that over on the Next Level feed. I just looked at our outline for today's Next Level show. We've got Trump madness, Hegseth madness, some new ads we're going to discuss. So come hang out there. So on today's show, it's RFK madness. So we're going to be talking about. I'm tickled to welcome. For a long overdue inaugural visit to the pod, an old friend, she's a staff writer at The New Yorker covering politics. She's at the Washington Post and Buzzfeed. She's got a new article out. The print edition is called The Scare.
Online, you can find it as a MAHA custody battle. It's Ruby Cramer.
What's up, Ruby?

**Ruby Cramer** (0:51)
Hi, Tim. Nothing, I'm so happy to be here.

**Tim Miller** (0:55)
Me too. You tell the story in this feature so elegantly as you do, and it's a story in West Virginia, my husband's home state, about a couple, Michael and Leah. But before we get to them, I just want to do a big picture here. You quoted a Democratic strategist that said about MAHA, it's two truths and a lie, and that's how people get sucked in. I just wanted to hear from you on the bigger picture, like what you discovered interviewing all these people and seems like spending a lot of time on MAHA message boards.

**Ruby Cramer** (1:27)
Yes. The last four months of my life, I've basically been endlessly doomscrolling on parenting Facebook groups.
It was a really interesting project. I had never written anything about MAHA.
Of course, I followed it with it closely and I've been really interested in it. It's a political movement that defies expectations and stereotypes and crosses really interesting partisan lines and isn't very easily defined because it's so wide-ranging and has so many different tenets, which also for Democrats makes it really hard to combat. I think that's what the strategist was part of what they were getting at with this quote, which was one of the best summaries I heard of the appeal of MAHA and the way that people become low-hanging fruit for the MAHA movement, this idea of it being two truths and a lie. So yes, it's true that chronic disease is an epidemic and is on the rise, one truth. It is true that ultra-processed foods are potentially harming our bodies and make up more than half of our daily caloric intake, which is crazy. But the lie that snuck in there is that vaccines that have been standard care for children for decades are something that we should be studying for a potential link to autism, which is the main crux of the anti-vax movement that's been disproven again and again. So these little suspicious claims about the medical authorities in our country lying to us, those are the things that get snuck in into the movement that come alongside these other arguably really good things that some of the MAHA has pointed our attention toward.

**Tim Miller** (3:20)
Did you find yourself being sucked in at all, reading the posts?
Did I get MAHA told? Yeah. Are you worried about beef tallow? No, we're not worried about beef tallow. We like beef tallow. Are you attracted to anything?

**Ruby Cramer** (3:31)
We like beef tallow and we don't like seed oils. I found it really compelling emotional atmosphere to live in for a while. Like I said, I was just existing in these online spaces for a really long time as part of my research for the story.
You can see really easily how you get sucked into this idea that basically something is poisoning our bodies. Big Pharma is out for profits, not just our well-being. All these things, this feeling that exists that undergirds all these online spaces, I understand and it's really true and it's easy to get sucked into that way of thinking. While I didn't get fully MAHA-pilled, I definitely found the anxiety and the fear of these parents that are just trying to do the best they can and navigate different online spaces specifically, really understandable and relatable. It was easy to see how it gets taken to an extreme really, really quickly.

**Tim Miller** (4:37)
RFK seems like such a unique figure in this as a catalyst. A lot of this stuff has been happening for a long time. It gets really brought together, like in a way kind of like based on his unique like weird various beliefs. I remember people coming to John McCain Town Halls in 2008 concerned about the autism link, right? Like that existed and there was like woo-woo stuff that's existed for a while now, like in its own orbit and concerns about processed foods, right? But it all has got blended together.