MAGA and MAHA: Movements for Freedom and Unity

A Realignment in American Politics

We’re hearing a lot these days about a new realignment in American politics, as former establishment and neocon Republicans endorse Kamala Harris and estranged Democrats like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., climb aboard the Trump bandwagon.

Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson has called the repositioning on the right the birth of a new political party. It might not be quite that, but clearly a realignment of the political stars is underway, and has been for some time, and during this election season it is indeed playing out before our eyes.

What it is is no less than the growth of a constitutional movement to save and restore the American republic.

I say growth and not birth because the push for constitutional fidelity has been underway within the conservative movement for a long, long time. Conservatives still play the lead role in this new coalition, and arguably represent the foundational base of its political principles, but daily they are being joined by hordes of more moderate independents and refugees from American liberalism who are seeking shelter from the progressive storm.

They seek safe harbor within the confines of the good, old, sturdy, reliable U.S. constitution.

As such, the surging movement is not purely conservative (unless you want to argue that fidelity to the constitution is itself conservative, in which case you can make a good argument). But, politically speaking, the emerging coalition is diverse.

The resistance movement is somewhat like a hurricane. It started out as a mere disturbance in the calm seas of the administrative state, swirling about and upsetting the narrative here and there, say, in the Tea Party uprising in 2010 and again with Trump’s election in 2016, before gathering steam in the warm authoritarian waters of the pandemic to become a more serious tropical storm.

Now, in a critical presidential election year, it has organized into a full-fledged political cyclone, taking aim at the heart of the bureaucratic state.

The eye of the storm is of course the Trump campaign, joined by smaller groundswells as civil liberties Democrats and independents flee the grasp of a party committed to carrying water for, and singing the praises of, a titanic censorship-medical-war industrial complex. There was Tulsi Gabbard’s endorsement of Trump. Then there was Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump. And don’t forget former Democratic supporter Elon Musk joining the Trump train, too.

Make America Healthy Again

Those are all consequential, but the growing realignment is not all built around Trump’s campaign. Out in the neighborhood, otherwise known as the grassroots, there’s lots of movement, so to speak, and Wisconsin’s own Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson is in the middle of that rapidly strengthening tempest.

Just last week, the grassroots came together at a Johnson roundtable on the serious problem of chronic illness and America’s poor health in general, entitled “American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion.” Exposing the “medical industrial complex,” as Johnson has called it, has become one of the most critical issues around which this movement is coalescing. It is a hurricane’s warm water, and it is the signature issue of the Make America Healthy Again movement that is intersecting rapidly with the Make America Great Again movement.

RFK, Jr., was at the roundtable, as was a basketful of the Democratic Party’s most notorious deplorables, hardly any of them Republicans, at least they weren’t in the past: Dr. Casey Means, whom Tucker Carlson has said “will change the world,” a medical doctor who explained how exploitive our health care system has become; her brother Calley Means, a former Big Pharma rep who now uses his time and abilities to expose how Big Pharma and Big Food weaponize the government; Alex Clark, a food activist who warns of the dangers of food additives; Grace Price, a teen advocate (far more sophisticated than Greta Thunberg) who works to expose the corruption within food and pharmaceutical conglomerates; and Dr. Marty Makary, the New York Times bestselling author who has been an outspoken opponent of vaccine mandates and Covid restrictions at schools, among others.

There were supportive Republicans, too, among them Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, the latter posting on X an apt summation of the roundtable’s message: “End the corporate-government corruption pumping our kids with processed food, mandating shots, and enriching insurance companies mandated by government that deny you choice and thus access to doctors.”

Following on the heels of this important gathering, this past Sunday, Johnson appeared at a “National Rally to Save the Republic” on the Washington mall, sponsored by Rescue the Republic, a grassroots organization close to the center of this ongoing realignment. The political cross-section of luminaries was there, too, among them the left’s Jimmy Dore, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn, as well as the right’s Lara Logan, Eric Bolling, and Jack Posobiec, not to mention Covidian resisters such as Dr. Jordan Peterson and Dr. Robert Malone.

Medical Prescription Professionals

This Washington rally and, more relevantly, the Johnson roundtable last week, served three vital functions as we head down the stretch to the election.

The first is that, since the pandemic, the medical deep state and its corporate partners without question pose the gravest, most immediate threat to liberty. The use and abuse of oppressive power by public health agencies during the pandemic should have already made that obvious, but Johnson’s roundtable put them squarely in the headlights.

To be sure, the infrastructure of these local, national, and international agencies is inextricably connected to the security state’s surveillance and censorship complex, and all are bundled with the military-industrial complex. But as those who attended Johnson’s roundtable intoned time and again, the rubber meets the road with the medical establishment, which today functions as an all-powerful, all-knowing government cartel, brazen in its authority and unabashed in its authoritarian declarations. It is the beating heart of the federal administrative state.

The roundtable offered up the simplest, most straightforward demonstration of “the corrupt merger of corporate and state power” that both populist conservatives and populist liberals decry, and it also offered an opportunity to view the distinction between how each side views that merger. Simply put, conservatives see the government as the controlling partner in the collusion; liberals tend to talk about the corporate capture of government agencies.

The conservatives are correct—though it’s beside the immediate point—and that transformation of government into an all-powerful bureaucratic cartel that harnesses corporate money and power for its bureaucratic means will be explored in the second article in this series. The medical-industrial complex will be the quintessential example, but it translates across the federal government. What the movement needs to grasp is that there is no such thing as the corporate capture of agencies; it is in fact the other way around.

The third article will use the roundtable as a springboard to look beyond the immediate agenda of Big Food to demonstrate with local examples not only what the panelists were saying—that the federal government and its corporate partners are poisoning America, and especially children, with their nutrition “standards”—but outline how they do so with a powerful vertical integration of agencies and industry associations at the local, state, and national level. Using the medical industrial complex as an example, we can see how all the interlocking pieces of the anti-liberty machine work together for the rich and powerful.

To begin with, though, in this piece I want to put the broader issues aside to spotlight the speakers at Johnson’s hearing and focus on the actual topic they came to talk about, namely, the dire picture they painted of America’s failing health and bad nutrition, and of the government and its corporate partners who sponsor it. They are at the top of the pyramid of power.

No one was more powerful or persuasive than Dr. Casey Means. To begin with, Means pointed out that the whole point of academic medical schools is NOT to teach the things doctors need to know.

“It’s not an overstatement to say that I learned virtually nothing at Stanford medical school about the tens of thousands of scientific papers that elucidate these root causes of why American health is plummeting and how environmental factors are causing it,” Means testified. “For instance in medical school I did not learn that for each additional serving of ultra-processed food we eat, early mortality increases by 18 percent. This now makes up 67 percent of the foods our kids are eating.”

Means said she took no nutrition course in medical school.

“I didn’t learn that 82 percent of independently funded studies show harm from processed food while 93 percent of industry sponsored-studies reflect no harm,” she said.

And then there was this about the cross-pollination between government agencies and corporate interests: “In medical school I didn’t learn that 95 percent of the people who created the recent USDA food guidelines for America had significant conflicts of interest with the food industry,” she said. “I did not learn that 1 billion synthetic pesticides are being sprayed on our food every single year or that 99 percent of the farmland in the United States is sprayed with synthetic pesticides, many from China and Germany, and these invisible, tasteless chemicals are strongly linked to autism, ADHD, sex hormone disruption, thyroid disease, sperm dysfunction, Alzheimer’s, dementia, birth defects, cancer, obesity, liver dysfunction, female infertility and more all by hurting our metabolic health.”

Means said she did not learn in school that the 8 billion tons of plastic that have been produced just in the last 100 years are being broken down into microplastics that fill our food, our water, or that we are now inhaling them and that recent research tells us that about 0.5 percent of our brains are now plastic.

“I didn’t learn that there are more than 880,000 toxins that have entered our food, water, air, and homes by industry, many of which are banned in Europe and they are known to alter our gene expression, alter our microbiome, composition and the lining of our gut and disrupt our hormones,” she said.

Means said she didn’t learn that the average American walks a paltry 3,500 steps per day, even though simply walking 7,000 steps a day slashes by 40 to 60 percent the risk of Alzheimer’s, dementia, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and obesity.

In medical school, Means said she certainly did not hear about the massive government-industrial food and pharmaceutical complex.

“I didn’t learn that professional organizations that we get our practice guidelines from, like the American Diabetes Association and American Academy of Pediatrics, have taken tens of millions of dollars from Coke, Cadbury, processed food companies, and vaccine manufacturers like Moderna,” she said.

Means said she didn’t learn that if we address the root causes that all lead to metabolic dysfunction and health and lifestyle patterns with a united, strong voice, we could reverse the chronic disease crisis in America and save millions of lives and trillions of dollars in health care costs. 

“Instead doctors are learning that the body is 100 separate parts and we learn how to drug, we learn how to cut, and we learn how to bill,” she said.

The Food Pyramid Scheme

Dr. Marty Makary echoed Means, saying that special interests have shut down inquiry into the failing health of Americans.

“My group at Johns Hopkins does more pancreatic cancer surgery than any hospital in the United States,” Makary said. “But at no point in the last 20 years has anyone stopped to ask, why has pancreatic cancer doubled over those 20 years? Who’s working on that? Who’s looking into it?”

Makary said every stakeholder has a gigantic lobby in Washington D.C. and everybody’s making a lot of money except for one stakeholder, the American citizen.

“They are financing this giant expensive health care system through their paycheck deduction for health insurance and the Medicare excise tax as we go down this path of billing and coding and medicating,” he said.

Makary said chemical poisoning of our food supply permeates and drives so many of the chronic diseases that we didn’t even see half a century ago.

“We have the most over-medicated, sickest population in the world,” he said. “And no one is talking about the root causes.”

The doctor cited the Pima Indians, a group whose obesity diabetes rate was less than 1 percent.

“The land in New Mexico and Arizona had its river supply diverted by ranchers and settlers, and the land and the soil was destroyed,” he said. “The government, recognizing this tremendous injustice, started to send free government food, but it wasn’t organic kale and fruits and vegetables, it was processed junk food. Instantly, the Pima Indians developed an obesity and diabetes rate of 90 percent.”

And what did the United States government do? Makary asked.

“The NIH dispatches its researchers to draw the blood of the Pima Indians to look for a gene that predisposes them to obesity and diabetes,” he said. “What are our leaders doing?”

Makary was on point. In a 2018 meta-analysis by the Department of Health and Human Services Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, government researchers acknowledged that “[d]iabetes, specifically type 2 diabetes, is a serious illness in Indian Country that did not exist pre-contact and was rare until the middle of the 20th century. Since World War II, it has become one of the most common serious diseases among AI/ANs [American Indians/Alaska Natives].”

The researchers seemed to scratch their heads as to why, except that it might have had something to do with lifestyle: “Although the etiology of these high rates of type 2 diabetes are unclear and complex, high rates of type 2 diabetes have been observed in other populations of tribal people who have become westernized.”

Ya think? Still, that didn’t stop the government from attaching a genetic component, which it does every time it needs to distract attention from special interests spewing poisons of various types into the environment: “It is likely that both a genetic predisposition to type 2 diabetes and environmental factors have contributed to the dramatic increases in the AI/AN population.”

Perhaps, but any genetic component was benign except for the later addition of those “environmental factors.” And what were those environmental factors, besides the generic westernization?

Well, that 2018 review cited a 2006 study comparing two genetically linked Pima populations, one in Arizona and the other in northern Mexico. The U.S. Pima ate a traditional American diet and were more sedentary while the Mexican Pima maintained past agrarian practices, the review observed:

“Prevalence of diabetes for the Mexican Pima was 5 percent and 7 percent (for men and women respectively) and for the U.S. Pima 32 percent and 41 percent (for men and women respectively). The study implies that traditional diets which are lower in fat, lower in calories, and substantially higher in fiber have some benefit for tribal populations.”

As Makary pointed out, government assistance did not meet acceptable nutritional standards. As a 2016 study by Montana State University researchers, “Assessing foods offered in the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR) using the Healthy Eating Index 2010,” pointed out:

“The Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR) packages are not meeting the diet quality recommendations outlined by the 2010 DGA (Dietary Guidelines for Americans), as our analysis found significantly lower HEI (Healthy Eating Index)-2010 overall score compared with the maximum score.”

In fact, the score was only 66 out of 100.

What’s even sadder is that the 2010 standards were an update to the 2005 standards whose targets were easier to hit because they were less healthy—but to this day mandated reports to Congress about the adequacy of the FDPIR standards continue to compare current packages to the outdated 2005 measures.

Indeed, the food package nutritional quality report submitted to Congress this past July is dated November 2008. It’s a farce. Makary levels a finger straight at the bureaucracy.

“The H in NIH is supposed to stand for health,” he said. “Where are they spending their money? [Not] on food as medicine or looking at the estrogen-binding properties of pesticides that are driving our fertility rates down. They’re funding research in Wuhan, China, and they’re funding research on a new food compass to replace the misinformation they put out with the food pyramid, telling us Lucky Charms is healthier than steak. Somebody has got to speak up.”

A Return to Constitutionalism

Luckily, those at the center of this movement, including Johnson, did speak up loudly, and did so again at the Rescue Our Republic event on Sunday. At the roundtable, Johnson said unity for freedom was essential, no matter certain differences.

“I used to say that the greatest threat facing this nation was the fact that we’re mortgaging our children’s future,” Johnson said at the roundtable. “We’re not fixing that. We’re exacerbating that with $35 trillion in debt. But the last couple of years I’ve been saying the greatest threat to our nation is the fact that we are so horribly politically divided. It was Lincoln during the Civil War, according to scripture, said, a house divided against itself cannot stand. The good news, and here’s the hopeful news, we’re not a naturally divided people. On the major goals of life, raising our children, wanting the best for them, safety, security, having enough opportunity, prosperity so we can take care of ourselves. I mean, these are the major life goals that we all agree on.”

Johnson is right. The new movement emerging is both a movement for freedom and a movement for unity. Those within it are united against the threat posed by the medical deep state, the government’s sprawling censorship complex, the lack of food freedom, and the corruption of scientific integrity in science and health agencies, not to mention the desire to secure the border, end forever wars, and ensure election integrity.

No doubt many political disagreements abound, on foreign policy, on abortion, on economic issues such as welfare and the minimum wage, and on climate change, to name just four. Still, each side needs the other to preserve the structure of self-governance, if any debate among diverse constituencies is to be possible. That’s why this coalition exists in the the first place, to preserve freedom.

The makings of such a movement is there. Save the Republic, the group organizing last Sunday’s rally, lays out nine core principles in its mission: Freedom of speech, assembly and religion; the presumption of innocence; the right to privacy; the consent of the governed being the sole basis for governmental legitimacy; equal protection under the law; a color-blind society; the protection of property rights; the right to challenge evidence and confront witnesses; and the right to informed consent.

Sound familiar? What they are saying is that the U.S. constitution is their mission, and, as such, rescuing the republic means rescuing the constitution. That’s why this movement, whether in roundtables or rallies, whether in local Republican parties or independent political groups, whether in community groups or informal online networks, is important in all its formulations.

For the moment, it is enough to say that now is the time to focus our attention on constitutionalism—due process, true self-governance, free speech—as a foundational principle. For without it, no cause—liberal or conservative, libertarian or collectivist, statist or individualist—no cause at all can truly be authenticated and debated and decided in the public square, for the public square will not be in the arena of decision-making.

Important decisions will be made in dark government back alleys among the bureaucratic and corporate elites, the reasons for which will be elusive, barricaded as they are from public view and inquiry.

Once upon a time, the two major American parties represented real differences, debatable political differences, but within the left and right there was one constant: Most everyone believed in the United States constitution and civil liberties guarantees. With those assurances and protections, with each other’s political and civil liberties guaranteed, liberals and conservatives could debate policy and move forward toward national consensus and compromise.

That is no longer the case. The Democratic Party now forcefully and openly rejects the U.S. constitution. It forcefully and openly rejects free speech and civil liberties. It openly defies the constitution with its ongoing engagement in military imperialism abroad. It is anti-religious freedom; anti-law enforcement; anti-national identity and anti-national borders; and anti-worker.

It’s mostly anti-anything that does not help the party establishment accrue power and privilege, or that promotes the individual as an identifiable person with real feelings and authentic human desires and rights.

There is plenty enough time to engage in forceful, robust debate over policy differences—that’s what our democratic republic is all about—but first there must be a free stage upon which such debate can take place, and preserving that stage is the battle both the liberal and conservative sides of constitutional democracy must fight together to preserve.

The day that those voices for democracy go silent, the day vigorous debate vanishes, the day when dissent and protests are criminalized—that’s the day freedom is annihilated.