Episode Overview

Podcast: Conspirituality
Episode: Brief: Did MAHA Put MAGA In Power? (January 31, 2026)
Hosts: Derek Beres, Julian Walker
Guest: Jonathan Howard
Theme:
This episode examines the convergence of the New Age wellness influencer movement—specifically, RFK Jr.'s "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) coalition—with the far-right MAGA movement. The hosts and guest Jonathan Howard scrutinize how prominent doctors and wellness figures leveraged COVID-era paranoia and medical disinformation to legitimize anti-democratic power grabs, ultimately contributing to Trump’s return to the presidency. The discussion is structured around three “buckets” of enablers: media organizations, influencer circles, and new, pseudo-scientific journals, while calling for accountability and historical fidelity in documenting this confluence of cultic wellness and authoritarian politics.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The MAHA–MAGA Merger: Did Wellness Enable Authoritarianism?

• Opening Context ([00:57–03:20]):
  • Derek points out that while the wellness world claims “health isn't political,” their blatant support for RFK Jr. and silence around growing authoritarianism belies that mantra.
  • Jonathan’s essay is referenced as arguing that MAHA’s legitimacy, fueled by medical professionals from top institutions, gave Trump and RFK Jr. a powerful political boost.
  • Quote (Jonathan, 03:20):
    “We’ll never know…but it’s entirely possible that had that [the MAHA/MAGA merger] not happened, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”
• These “evidence-based medicine” professionals—Harvard, Stanford, UCSF, Hopkins—lent their credentials while promoting the narrative that COVID-19 public health actions were precursors to tyranny.

2. Irony and Hypocrisy in COVID Revisionism ([05:48–08:08])

• Julian:
  Notes the bizarre twist: figures who warned of left-wing “authoritarianism” via public health now tacitly approve or outright support actual authoritarian tactics under Trump.
  Quote (Julian, 05:49):
  “Now we have actual authoritarianism and nothing from them. Right. And they’re just going along with all of it because it gets them where they wanted to go.”
• Jonathan highlights how prominent doctors compared COVID measures to Nazi Germany, painting the left as the threat—while later supporting Trump as the pro-science, pro-freedom candidate.
• Quote (Jonathan, 07:27):
  “They claimed to be apolitical, neutral scientists…and they made it clear that the choice was between…fascist leftist takeover or freedom and democracy under Trump.”

3. Three Buckets of Enablers

a. Media Organizations & Opinion Laundering ([08:08–13:27])

• Derek bemoans the media's failure to distinguish between opinion and investigative journalism, noting how op-ed sections can launder misinformation under the guise of “legitimate debate.”
• Jonathan highlights a New York Times profile of Dr. Marty Makary as an example of whitewashing:
  Quote (Jonathan, 11:16):
  “Instead of saying the emperor has no clothes, which is the case with Marty Makary, The New York Times and all these organizations said…the emperor is dressed beautifully. Look at those fine garments.”
• Julian and Jonathan dissect the media’s attraction to “maverick” contrarians—even those from the establishment—whose claims, though fringe or even dangerous, get treated as valuable dissent.

b. Influencers & the Kennedy Circle ([16:36–25:25])

• Derek spotlights Kirk Milhone (now head of ASAP, replaced Kulldorf) advocating that the current measles outbreak be used as a “real world experiment” on unvaccinated children—a return to pre-vaccine era thinking. Quote (Derek, 17:48):
  “He actually said that I don’t like established science. Science is what I observe.”
• Jonathan: recounts the anti-vaccine tactics of Sayer Ji (and, by association, Kelly Brogan), and how their manipulative disinformation is now mainstream in the movement’s leadership.
  • He also discusses the false logic that it’s safer to let diseases run rampant than risk rare vaccine side effects—despite mountains of contrary historical evidence.
• Quote (Jonathan, 21:21):
  “What an unethical, you know, crazy, horrible thing to say…If I did this to my children…fed them spoiled milk on purpose…I would rightly be accused of child abuse.”
• The conversation exposes influencers like Cali Means (RFK’s circle) pivoting to “healthcare affordability,” which contradicts their previous anti-healthcare, supplement-pushing rhetoric—seen as classic wellness grifting tactics. Quote (Jonathan, 27:10):
  “Every accusation with these guys is a confession, right? …You can’t begin to trust anything they have to say ever on anything.”

c. Manufacturing Legitimacy: New Journals and Institutional Capture ([28:07–31:18])

• The movement’s creation of its own journals (e.g., “Journal of the Academy of Public Health”), populated by disinformation doctors, is described as one of the most dangerous evolutions.
• Jonathan:
  Quote (Jonathan, 29:31):
  “I wrote about this…Misinformation Doctors start a Misinformation Journal to spread misinformation…But none of this is new. This has all happened before with the tobacco industry and the fossil fuel industry…The only thing that’s changed is these people are now in charge.”

4. The Medical Community’s Role—and a Call to Document History ([31:18–36:35])

• Julian frames Jonathan’s essay (and this discussion) as a call to resist normalizing these new realities and urges the medical community (and listeners) to faithfully “write the history” and hold enablers accountable.
• Jonathan:
  • Acknowledges that while “very few doctors in 2026 can deny the reality,” many once treated the key architects of MAHA/MAGA disinformation as good-faith actors.
  • The medical establishment’s slow awakening is partly due to having too few outspoken, credible science advocates (e.g., Hotez, Offit) and a broader dismissiveness of such advocacy as a “quirky thing.”
• Quote (Jonathan, 31:55):
  “One of the things that I said the first time we spoke…was that Kelly Brogan won the pandemic. And little did I know how right I was at the time, now that all of her ideas have gone mainstream.”
• He urges individual doctors and institutions to look inward, recognize where skepticism and complacency enabled the rise of quackery, and avoid repeating those mistakes, calling for far more robust collective action to resist and rectify the spread of dangerous pseudoscience.

Notable Quotes

• On health and politics:
  Derek, 01:57 – “One thing that’s always pissed me off about wellness influencers is that they like to say health isn’t political, which it absolutely is and always has been.”
• On media complicity:
  Jonathan, 11:16 – “This is how the media laundered and whitewashed disinformation doctors simply because they had fancy titles.”
• On influencer logic:
  Julian, 22:52 – “The hypocrisy and the weird inversion of logic… Vaccines are incredibly dangerous because a tiny percentage of people may have an adverse reaction… But just letting measles run rampant is okay because we only have a small number of deaths, right?”
• On institutional capture:
  Jonathan, 29:31 – “The technique of using medical journals or scientific papers to launder pseudoscientific ideas is an old, tried and true technique. None of this is new.”
• On documenting history:
  Jonathan, 31:55 – “Don’t normalize any of this. Keep track of all of it. Let’s write the history faithfully. Which side are you on?”

Conclusion & Key Takeaways

• The “conspirituality” movement’s tie-up with MAGA was not a fringe phenomenon; it was facilitated by credentialed professionals, opportunistic influencers, and complicit media.
• This facilitated the normalization of anti-public-health, anti-democracy rhetoric, undermining trust in institutions and contributing to the current authoritarian climate.
• The hosts and guest underline the ongoing danger of new, “official”-seeming journals and influencer groups manufacturing legitimacy for disinformation.
• They close with a fervent call for accountability, vigilance, and truth-telling—within both the medical field and wider society—so that this fever dream of pseudoscience and paranoia does not become the new status quo.

This summary captures the main themes, structure, and spirit of the podcast discussion, integrating key quotes and timestamps for reference, while organizing the information for readers who did not hear the episode themselves.