MAHA Thinks New Moms Are Dumb

Earlier this month, UNASB listened to Calley Means' interview on Culture Apothecary and with each passing minute, the MAHA movement's blatant grift targeting new mothers became impossible to ignore.

This past week, at 38 weeks pregnant with my first child, I went to the hospital with high blood pressure. They were checking for preeclampsia - a condition that can quickly become life-threatening for both mother and baby - despite my otherwise normal and healthy pregnancy. I sat in a triage room, hooked up to monitors, watching numbers on a screen, waiting and nervous.

Thankfully, the tests came back negative, but this is what new motherhood is, before it even formally begins: It is a cascade of fears from rational to irrational, and everything in between. For many of us, they begin before we even get pregnant and don’t seem to let up. Fear that something is wrong with your baby. Fear that you’re not feeding them right. Fear that you can’t trust the information you’re getting. Fear that you’re not enough. Fear that the world your child is entering is not safe. According to one survey, new moms spend more than 1,400 hours worrying about their baby’s health in the first year alone. That’s eight straight weeks of nothing but worry.

These fears are universal and, in many cases, healthy! They’re the instinct that keeps us vigilant, the power that we could lift a car, the engine behind every late-night Google search and every call to the doctors. But in 2026, the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement and the Trump administration have turned those fears into a grift. They are not easing the anxieties of new mothers. Instead, they are identifying them, inflaming them, and converting them into supplement sales, podcast downloads, and ultimately, votes.

MAHA is taking our concerns and turning them into cons.

The Concern: “Is something wrong with my baby?”

Every new mom worries that something is wrong with her baby. It is biological. It is constant. It is the reason we lie awake listening for breathing.

The Con: Tylenol causes autism and the vaccine schedule is a hoax.

The same week I started getting pregnancy headaches - the kind where you’re already anxious because you know high blood pressure runs in your family, and you’re not quite out of the first trimester weeds - the White House went on Truth Social to tell parents not to give their children Tylenol “for virtually any reason,” linking acetaminophen to autism despite no causal evidence. A major JAMA study of 2.5 million children had already directly rebutted this claim. The American Academy of Pediatrics called the White House announcement “filled with dangerous claims and misleading information.” But the damage was already done. Personally, I had to spend an entire appointment navigating how to treat my headaches and worse, parents started showing up to ERs with infants running 103-degree fevers, too afraid to give them medicine.

Last week, I had to call my hospital with a question I didn’t think I’d need to ask: would they still be administering the hepatitis B vaccine after birth, given recent Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recommendations? And when RFK Jr.’s HHS removed the COVID vaccine from the recommended schedule for healthy children and pregnant women - a move that also affects insurance coverage - the question of what else might quietly disappear stopped being paranoid and started being practical.

They are taking the most primal fear a mother has - is my baby okay? - and exploiting it to sell distrust.

The Concern: “Am I feeding my baby right?”

Twenty-eight percent of new parents list “is my baby getting enough to eat?” as their number one fear. Before my baby has even arrived, I’ve already fielded unsolicited opinions about breastfeeding versus formula, about what I should and shouldn’t be eating while pregnant, about whether my prenatal vitamins are the right brand. The anxiety around feeding is relentless and for many mothers, it’s tied directly to the question of whether they’re doing enough.

The Con: Shame moms no matter what they do but tell them you have all the answers.

In said recent interview on Alex Clark’s TPUSA podcast, Calley Means, a former food and pharmaceutical industry lobbyist turned White House special government employee who by his own admission helped kill sugar taxes on behalf of Coca-Cola, lamented about “processed food as the first food a child eats.” That’s formula. He is talking about formula. The thing that keeps millions of newborns alive and healthy when breastfeeding isn’t possible or isn’t chosen. The MAHA movement claims to be the voice of American mothers and then shames them for how they feed their babies from day one - and the guy doing it used to lobby for soda companies. Meanwhile, RFK Jr.’s HHS has pushed to restrict what SNAP recipients can buy, because apparently the administration that can’t get its own dietary guidelines straight wants to police what low-income mothers put in their grocery carts.

The Concern: “Can I trust what I’m being told?”

At our hospital tour, another expectant parent asked about the vitamin K shot, not because they had a medical concern, but because they’d seen something on Instagram. The nurse paused. You could feel the room recalibrate. This is what happens when federal health policy gets filtered through wellness influencers: every routine question becomes a landmine, and healthcare providers are left doing cleanup for misinformation they didn’t create.

I’ve had to think carefully about how I talk about our decision to use a doula and midwives, because those choices now carry political coding they didn’t used to. The vaccine schedule conversation, which should be a routine part of prenatal care, has become loaded with suspicion from every direction. I chose these things based on the guidance of trusted medical experts not because some wellness influencer told me the answers to America’s health crisis are in the Bible, like Means does in the interview.

The Con: The people asking you to distrust the medical establishment? Consider who they are.

Casey Means, Trump’s nominee for Surgeon General, dropped out of her surgical residency, profits from wellness supplements and sponsored social media posts, runs a metabolic testing company that a Public Citizen report says has already benefited from RFK Jr.’s promotion of wearable health devices, and invested in tobacco giants Philip Morris and Altria while selling you supplements for metabolic health.

Her brother Calley helped kill sugar taxes (or so he claims) for the soda industry before rebranding as a health crusader. As Public Citizen put it: MAHA influencers “accurately identify that much of the US healthcare system is beholden to corporate interests,” then “sell consumers their own version of the grift.” They didn’t fix the corruption. They just swapped which industry gets to profit off your anxiety.

The Concern: “Is my child safe?”

This is the fear that haunts every parent and the one this administration has the least credibility to address. The Harvard Center on the Developing Child has documented how childhood adversity such as abuse, family separation, and witnessing violence triggers toxic stress that disrupts developing brain architecture, weakens immune function, and drives chronic inflammation. The research on childhood sexual abuse (CSA) specifically is devastating: a Lancet Psychiatry umbrella review covering 559 studies and over four million participants found that CSA is associated with virtually every adult health outcome studied: elevated rates of cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, chronic pain, and a 39% increase in type 2 diabetes. At the cellular level, childhood sexual abuse accelerates telomere erosion - literally aging survivors from the inside out.

This is the actual childhood health crisis. Not sugary cereal. Not Red Dye 40. Not the measles vaccine, whose most common side effects are a mild fever and a sore arm, and which prevents a disease that hospitalizes one in five and kills one to three per thousand who catch it.

The Con: They are actively endangering children.

In the same interview, Calley Means repeatedly says that President Trump is going to be “the voice of American children and the voice of American mothers.” I listened to this episode just days after the latest Epstein files dropped. Let’s sit with what “the voice of American children” actually looks like.

The 3 million pages of Epstein files released by the DOJ include an FBI report detailing an allegation that Trump raped a 13-year-old girl. They include a victim’s account of Ghislaine Maxwell “presenting” her to Trump at a party, telling her he “liked” her and suggesting she was “available.” They include a description of a 14-year-old being brought to Mar-a-Lago, where Epstein elbowed Trump, gestured at the child, and asked, “This is a good one, right?” Trump smiled and nodded.

And MAHA isn’t clean from the files either: Dr. Peter Attia - the longevity guru whose *Outlive* was a bestseller, whose podcast is gospel in the “optimize your health” world - appears over 1,700 times in the Epstein files. Three years of correspondence after Epstein had spent time in prison for soliciting minors. Medical advice for a convicted sex trafficker. CBS pulled his 60 Minutes segment after finding that one of the wellness industry’s most trusted doctors was pen pals with a pedophile.

And just a reminder: TPUSA is the same Turning Point that hosted the Super Bowl Halftime Show alternative - billed as a celebration of “American faith, family, and freedom” - headlined by Kid Rock. Whose song “Cool, Daddy Cool” includes the lyric “young ladies, I like ‘em underage / see some say that’s statutory / but I say it’s mandatory.”

The Concern: “Am I enough?”

Underneath all the specific fears - the feeding, the vaccines, the safety - is the one that runs deepest: Am I a good enough mother? Researchers have found that this question haunts parents across demographics. One qualitative study found that expectant mothers’ anxieties distilled down to a single devastating question, “Can one of my small choices ruin the entire life of my child?”

The Con: The MAHA movement has built its entire appeal on the answer being you’re not enough.

Yes, the wrong food will poison your child. Yes, the wrong medication will give them autism. Yes, formula will set them up for failure. Yes, the vaccine schedule is the thing that’s making kids sick. And the only way to be a good mother is to reject the establishment entirely, do your own research, buy the supplements, follow the right influencers, and achieve a kind of maternal purity that, conveniently, requires a subscription and discount code. This is how they actively work to erode public trust in medical professionals, making mothers feel like they can’t rely on doctors and instead must turn to MAHA for guidance.

This is the funnel. And at the bottom of it are not healthier kids. It’s a voter base.

Calley Means says the quiet part out loud in that same Alex Clark conversation when he shares that Charlie Kirk told him behind the scenes that he was excited about the MAHA movement because of “the electoral implications of MAHA and how new voters could be brought into the fold.” Not changing vaccine regulations. Not finding root causes of disease. Not healthier kids. Power. And Means says this in the same breath as he says that the answers to our health crisis are in the Bible.

So what do we do?

Well, the rugged individualism baked into new parenthood cuts across political lines. It makes sense, we all want agency. From the ingredients in our food to what kind of education our kids receive, it is part of our responsibility to navigate the world on behalf of our children. These fears? They’re not weaknesses. They’re what make us pay attention.

But the Alex Clarks, the Calley Means, the Trump advisors, and the MAHA influencer class are not respecting those fears. They are mapping them, monetizing them, and weaponizing them all while Mar-a-Lago membership hits $1 million and the man they call “the voice of American children” smiles at fourteen-year-olds in his own club, and while a former soda lobbyist tells you the real problem is your baby’s formula.

More and more people are waking up to the fact that the Trump administration thinks Americans, specifically moms, are absolute idiots. From the brazen lies out of DHS after Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street, a nurse and a U.S. citizen, whom Kristi Noem immediately labeled a “domestic terrorist” despite video evidence showing otherwise, to the abduction of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from his home in a Minneapolis suburb where federal agents using the boy as bait to get his mother to open the door. And we can’t forget the constant denial of the president’s well-documented social calendar with the most prolific child sex trafficker in modern history, even as 3 million pages of Epstein files now sit on a DOJ server with Trump’s name appearing thousands of times throughout.

It is abundantly clear: they think we’ll keep eating the bullshit they’re serving.

But they’re wrong. And here’s one simple thing we can do: talk to each other. Share our stories, our fears, our questions. Build communities of trust and support that don’t depend on influencers or politicians, but on our communities. When we hear a friend repeating MAHA talking points, engage with empathy and facts because they are likely coming from the simple desire to be a good parent. The antidote to their grift is our solidarity. They can’t exploit our fears if we face them together.