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So we are a year into Trump's second term and I truly believe that in many ways make America healthy again, or MAHA will be what Trump 2.0 is remembered for. Because in one year we have banned petroleum based dyes for food. We have increased testing for heavy metals and infant formula. We have the nation's first ban on adding fluoride to public drinking water. We banned certain dyes of chemical additives in public school meals. Take that, Michelle Obama. There are now restrictions on using SNAP benefits to purchase soda and processed foods. We are now using AI models instead of animal testing, lowering the prices of prescription. We have safety reviews of fluorides, upending the food pyramid, talking about the benefits of ketogenic diets with schizophrenia, which obviously is very close and personal to my heart, and reducing the number of recommended childhood vaccines. That's a lot. The government usually doesn't get a lot done, but they certainly did in the last year. So I reflect on this list and my mind is blown. And a lot of this happened because of pressure from everyday Americans. But I wanna let you know that the work is not done yet. And unfortunately we are still getting started because it looks like MAHA might have been compromised by Big Chemical. So what you need to know is, is that in every level of government, Big Chemical is basically strong, arming MAHA out of the way and fighting to strip Americans of their rights. And like all bad laws, because we have experience with this, Congress tried to sneak one of these in during the 11th hour of a 20,000 page bill that had nothing to do with MAHA or big chemical. Section 453 was a provision in the House Interior Environment Appropriations Bill, AKA the latest funding bill was proposed to limit state or local authority to regulate pesticides and protect manufacturers from failure to warn lawsuits fraud from everyday Americans. One article on this reads that a new federal proposal could tie the hands of regulators, leaving children and communities exposed to proven toxins for decades. Section 453 is buried in the U.S. house appropriations bill for fiscal year 2026, which begins on October 1. It is a short clause in a very, very large bill that would prevent the Environmental Production Agency, the epa, from updating pesticide warnings in a timely fashion. The EPA conducts a full review of the safety of individual chemicals only once every 15 years. Section 453 would lock pesticide safety standards in place between even if strong new evidence of harm emerges. So essentially this is prioritizing huge chemical corporations over Americans. And I just have to say there's nothing that infuriates me more than things like this being snuck into funding bills. They are expecting that Americans are not going to pay attention. They are expecting that Americans are not gonna care about a funding bill that happens every year. They're not gonna care. They're not gonna know. It is shady, it is gross, it is completely dishonest. But we did catch on. Now, what is worse is that it was Republicans that stabbed us in the back with this provision. Just watch this clip from, from Alex Clark's podcast, Culture Apothecary. Not so much President Trump, but the Republicans in Congress are working very hard right now to give immunity to chemical manufacturers to provide them with this shield so that if when we get sick from their chemicals that they produce, we will not be able to sue for damages. And this is exactly what happened with the vaccine companies, correct? This is exactly the same thing that happened and we saw how that worked out for vaccines. And it's something that we have been fighting against for years. And at this point now, earlier this year, back in January, I went on Fox and I was talking about this because Maha was basically, you know, celebrating the fact that they were banning paper straws in different states and they were, you know, flipping the food pyramid. And I was like, yeah, okay, that's great. Good wins. But we have a much bigger issue here. I don't want you talking out of two sides of your mouth. I don't really care about the paper straws. When you are giving immunity to chemical companies that are poisoning Americans, when you are prioritizing foreign corporate interests over Americans health and our rights. Republicans, you are supposed to be the party that is about states and individual rights, about getting the government off of our backs and out of our homes, about protecting American families, about being America first. And Republicans in Congress voted to take away our state's rights to regulate pesticides and our right to sue when companies mislead us and possibly poison us. So obviously, this provision being included, it being pushed by Republicans was a major slap in the face to much of Maha. But thanks to outrage from Americans and big advocates, the provision was inevitably removed from the funding bill, which I was really happy to see. And you can see that here. This was published on January 5. Maha outrage kills contentious pesticide provision in funding bills. Now, unfortunately, this story and this fight did not end with that provision. And an important note for you guys to understand as we dive into this is that the primary lobby for legislation like this is Bayer Pharmaceuticals. This is a company that makes aspirin, cold medicine, allergy and heart medicine. They do cancer research drugs. Now, you might be asking, why is a company whose mission, according to their website, is advancing science for a better life and focusing on patient needs, why are they lobbying for this legislation? Well, that's because Bayer purchased a company called Monsanto back in 2018 for $63 billion. And Monsanto's claim to fame is the product roundup, the weed killer that almost everybody has used at some point in their life, whose active ingredient, glyphosate, has been linked to cancer in thousands upon thousands of lawsuits. And this is where it really gets sinister. Because a pharmaceutical company that makes cancer drugs that does cancer research bought a company whose main product is linked to cancer. All goes in a circle. Do you see the connection there? Do you see how allegedly it might benefit them for that product to be on the market for Americans not to be able to sue if they do get cancer? Just food for thought. Again, it is sinister. So again, the same company that is in the business of making us healthy is also in the business of making us sick. Unfortunately, in the medical world, that is often how it works. But thank God creatone is not in that business. And Creatone by Brickhouse nutrition is a creatine formula excluding exclusively made for women and made with pure creatine and patented ingredients that help reshape your body so that you look leaner, trimmer and more toned. And creatone, before you ask, is radically different from guys creatine. No water retention, no weight gain and no bulking up. Plus it boosts your metabolism to help you burn fat. So let's get you started. With 20% off your first order, visit tonedtoday.com and use my code Cooper for your discount. Again, use code Cooper to save 20% off at toned today.com that is t o n e today.com to try out creatone. And after that, the next step for a healthier lifestyle is downloading the Olive app. Now I used to think that I ate pretty clean until I actually started checking because the food industry is really good at one thing which is making ultra processed stuff look healthy. Screen washing. And when you are tired and busy and you're grabbing groceries fast, you don't have time to decode 27,000 ingredients on the back of one product. Which is why I am so obsessed with this app called Olive. All you have to do is pull out your phone and scan the barcode on your favorite foods and Olive gives you a simple health score based on what is actually inside the products. Things like seed oils and additives and dyes and sweeteners. Ultra processing all of the stuff that's sticking sneaks into organic and natural foods. And it's not just fear mongering because they actually offer solutions if the score isn't great, which a lot of stuff in my pantry was not. Olive shows you better options right away so that you can actually make the swap while you are standing in the grocery aisle. And also especially relevant as we talk about lobbyists, I want you to know that Olive is completely independent brands cannot pay to look healthier, which you cannot say about other apps out there. And they are also investing in independent lab testing to keep raising the bar, including testing baby and toddler foods for contaminants. So if you want one simple February reset savings, scan your pantry once and you will never shop the same way again. I can tell you from experience. So download Olive in the App Store today and my listeners will get an exclusive seven day free trial. Again, download Olive in the App Store today. So back to the point.
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Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with eggless a once monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema after an initial four month or longer dosing phase. About four in ten people taking ebglis achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks, and most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.
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Lebricizumab, a 250 mg per 2 ML injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. Ebglis can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with ebglis before starting ebglis. Tell your doctor if you have a pair of parasitic infection.
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Ask your doctor about evglis and visit evglis.lilly.com or call 1-800-lillyrx or 1-800-545-5979.
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While this provision being removed was a victory for Maha, the work is not over yet and I actually think that the work has just gotten tougher for us because I think we have now poked the bear. Big Chemical has seen Americans be outraged, be speaking out about this. And so in many ways that has caused the EPA and Big Chemical to tighten their grip on the MAHA movement. And a new substack piece dove into all of this. This article is titled Pesticide Industry infiltrates Maha to de reforms. CropLife America, the lobby group for Bayer and Syngetta, has all but wiped out any prospect for pesticide health and safety reforms. What a black pill. For this lovely Thursday afternoon, the author Lee Fang wrote, quote, we are going to ban the worst agricultural chemicals. We are going to remove conflicts of interest from top farm and food safety agencies. And he's talking about something that Kennedy pledged on the campaign trail and when he was appointed. He goes on and he says those promises have since fallen by the wayside. The administration has reapproved the cancer causing weed killer Dicamba, deleted references to pesticides from its Make America Healthy Again action plan and delayed enforcement of limits on so called forever chemicals in drinking water. There has been no meaningful action on controversial pesticides Kennedy previously warned about, including neonicotinoids. Hopefully I'm saying that correctly. Incesticides and glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, which he once called one of the likely culprits in America's chronic disease epidemic. I mean, they literally deleted references to this in the MAHA action plan. Leifeng goes on and says, meanwhile, representatives of pesticide and chemical companies have flooded into key regulatory roles. Former lobbyists Douglas Strautman, Nancy Beck, Lyn Ann Decleva. Hopefully I'm saying that correctly. Scott Hutchins, Kelsey Barnes and Kyle Kunkler now occupy senior positions overseeing agriculture and environmental policy. And guys, these lobbyists and people in the administration are now working overtime to get these liability shield laws passed at any level they can. They are literally going to state by state to try to get these shield laws passed. And in some states like North Dakota and Georgia, they have already been successful. Today on her stories, Alex Clark again, we watched a clip from her podcast earlier. She was posting specifically about Georgia and she was questioning why Big Chemical was so desperate to pass the first liability shield law there last month. And you can see this headline here. Georgia passes law shielding pesticide makers from liability over cancer risks. And that was passed in the spring of 2025. It went into effect on January 1st of this year. Now on her stories, Alex shared these articles. One from Atlanta Magazine. Why are so many people getting rare cancers in this small Georgia town? Then this one from 2024. Health experts agree that northeast Georgia is seeing exponentially high rates of thyroid cancer. Now, obviously, she was talking specifically about Georgia, but I also want to say it is not just Georgia because in terms of cancer rates, 10 of the top 20 states in America are in the southeastern United States. In politicians, they argue all day long that it is because of excess or poverty or the usual scapegoat. It's racism. That is why so many Americans in the south are getting cancer. But we have ask, could it be because people are living in rural, more agricultural areas near where farmers are spraying their crops with these chemicals? Or could it be things like this, which Alex also shared on her stories, how Georgia's carpet empire contaminated drinking water in east Alabama. I mean, in Louisiana, they even have an entire region that is called Cancer Alley, where due to industrial chemicals, the cancer rate is often 50 to 700 times higher than the average 50 to 700 times higher. And these lobbyists who work on behalf of those chemical corporations who are now embedded in the Trump administration in many ways, they are funding and pressuring our representatives to strip away some of the only ways that we have to hold those companies accountable. And based on Maha's shrinking and retreat on the issue and the attack on advocates who push the EPA and the lobbyists, it does seem like the movement has been compromised in a lot of ways. And this is why, you guys, it is so important to be involved in your local elections, to know what is going on in your own state. We talked about that in regards to Virginia and what happened there and the laws that are being pass, you know, almost instantaneously since the Democrats got into office. And so you should also pay attention because of things like this. And a great example of paying attention and getting involved in your states is that in Tennessee, my own state, they tried to pass one of these bills just a couple of weeks ago. And again, it was pushed by our own Republicans. But thanks to 20,000 emails, thousands of phone calls to representatives from people like you and me, that bill has been paused. It did not make it through the judiciary hearing. Florida and Nebraska, Kansas, they are all also considering similar laws. And so Florida testing everyday bread for glyphosate could not have come at a better time. And we have Casey DeSantis, who is an amazing Maha advocate, to thank for this. Just take a look at this headline, Florida testing finds triple digit levels of weed Killer chemicals in popular Bread brands. And you can see the results and the toxin levels. Here we are talking brands like Nature's Own and Dave's Killer Bread, Wonder Bread, Sara Lee and Pepperidge Farms. So the reason why I'm pointing this out and the reason why I think it's so amazing that Florida did this testing is because the risk of to Americans in regards to these chemicals, it is significant. Even if you do not live in a rural area, if you are not a farmer or a landscaper, if you don't live or work near industrial plants, it is in our bread. It is in the bread that everyday Americans are buying for their kids. Making peanut butter jelly sandwiches on. If you're not making, you know, homemade sourdough with your freshly ground wheat, like, this is what Americans are ingesting on a daily basis. And you might think, oh, well, I eat organic. It's totally fine. No. I also fear for those of us who eat almost exclusively organic, like, we are also not in the clear. Bringing Alex Clark back up again, again, who was one of the biggest mom advocates who truly walks the walk in terms of her diet and her lifestyle. She just tested how much glyphosate is in her body and the results are crazy. To piggyback off of yesterday's bombshell glyphosate hearing in Florida. Here is my recent lab work showing how much glyphosate is in my body. As somebody who eats all organic. This is a neurotoxin that Americans cannot escape from in our soil and our water. It does not wash off produce. It is a known carcinogen. And then here are her results, if you want to look at that. What she is showing and what Casey Desantis in the state of Florida is showing, those are the impacts of these chemicals that these corporations want to hide from. That is why they are so desperate to get these liability shields. And I mean, they are pouring money into local elections specifically to get Republicans elected who will toe the line and further their agenda. And what is so scary to me, and should be scary to you, is that despite all of this constant pushback and many of these bills being paused and thrown out, Bayer is taking this all the way to the supreme court. And on January 16, the Supreme Court announced that they will hear Monsanto v. Durnel. And this case involves a man, John Durnel, who is from Missouri, who was awarded $1.25 million after arguing that Roundup gave him cancer and that Monsanto failed to warn him of the risks. Now, Bayer appealed this decision, arguing that because the EPA approved Roundup's label, Missouri law cannot allow a failure to warn lawsuit such as that. So Bayer is now asking the highest court in the country to rule that federal pest pesticide law at EPA stamps of approval should bar state level failure to warrant lawsuits. But the problem is most of us do not trust the EPA to actually do their due diligence when it comes to approving these chemicals. I mean, as we talked about earlier, these approvals are only updated every 15 years. And these approvals are also based on data that is submitted by the chemical companies themselves. So obviously there is a conflict of interest here. That is the conflict of interest that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Was talking about that Maha seems to have forgotten about. Again, they deleted it from their website. But back to the point. There had been in situations where these corporations have been accused of lying or forging the data in order to get that stamp of approval. And now they are trying to argue that that allegedly forged stamp should be the baseline approval total liability shield. Americans cannot ask for accountability, cannot fight for accountability. And so that is why on every level, they are fighting to make the EPA label the end all be all. And they are getting Republicans to agree. And what I want to remind you of here is that they are not even fighting the fact that it causes cancer. They're not saying, you defamed us, you're discriminating. No, they're not saying any of that. They're just, we don't want you to sue us if you get cancer because we don't tell you that cancer is linked to our products. That is insane. They just want us to stop talking about it and stop holding them accountable. Let that sink in. They don't actually care about the health risks. They're not trying to innovate. They're not actually trying to make Americans healthier, to improve our food and help our farmers. They just want to protect their profits. And I think we can all agree, obviously that this is because they are tired of paying out settlements to people who have gotten sick. For example, Bayer, which is just one company, has already paid out more than $11 billion to settle claims over them, failing to warn about the risk of cancer, Parkinson's and more. And so if the Supreme Court sides with Bayer and Monsanto, it will shut out thousands of failure to warn cases in the US and it will supersede any state laws that require stronger warning labels or pathways for accountability. Meaning that just because we had that bill put on pause here in Tennessee, we actually won't be protected. And again, that should scare all of us. So all of this is to say that even looking at all of the accomplishments from Maha and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. We should not be deterred we should not be distracted from what still needs to be done. What Americans voted on, what they gave RFK Jr. A mandate for, that is what we are fighting for. We have not even scratched the surface on this issue, and we need to hold our elected officials accountable because they are facing massive pressure. Let's take it from the top. Where were you born? Kansas. Kansas? Yeah. The Pineapple state, right? Pretty sure that's Hawaii. Well, I did spend a summer there. And where were you raised? Texas. According to my sources, you were born in Brazil, frozen in Thailand, and trying to cross over the Mexican border when my boys caught you last week. I've got wanderlust. So you're a world traveling cow from Kansas, and your only documentation is a sticker that says proudly made in the usa. Smells like bull to me, pal. To support a company that is committed to honoring America's past, present and future, visit goodranchers.com today and if you subscribe to any of their boxes of 100% American meat, you will save up to $500 a year. Plus, if you use my code, Brett at checkout, you will get an additional $25 off your first order. That's Brett for an extra $25 off your first order on top of the $500 you'll save this year just for subscribing goodranchers. Com American meat delivered.
Date: February 13, 2026
Host: Brett Cooper
In this episode, Brett Cooper critically examines how "Big Chemical" interests are undermining the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement—one of the defining aspects of Trump’s second term. The discussion centers on legislative maneuvering by chemical companies and their lobbyists, particularly their attempts to secure legal immunity from lawsuits over harmful chemicals and pesticides. Brett exposes the erosion of state rights, the pervasiveness of chemical lobbyists within regulatory agencies, and the importance of public vigilance and activism to sustain MAHA’s original mission for healthier policies and accountability.
"We are a year into Trump’s second term and I truly believe that in many ways Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, will be what Trump 2.0 is remembered for."
— Brett Cooper [00:00]
"They are expecting that Americans are not going to pay attention... It is shady, it is gross, it is completely dishonest."
— Brett Cooper [02:31]
"Not so much President Trump, but the Republicans in Congress are working very hard right now to give immunity to chemical manufacturers... This is exactly what happened with vaccine companies, and we saw how that worked out."
— Alex Clark (paraphrased by Brett) [03:02]
"Thanks to outrage from Americans and big advocates, the provision was inevitably removed from the funding bill, which I was really happy to see."
— Brett Cooper [04:19]
"A pharmaceutical company that makes cancer drugs bought a company whose main product is linked to cancer... Do you see the connection there?"
— Brett Cooper [05:00]
"These lobbyists who work on behalf of those chemical corporations who are now embedded in the Trump administration... are funding and pressuring our representatives to strip away some of the only ways that we have to hold those companies accountable."
— Brett Cooper [11:30]
"Thanks to 20,000 emails, thousands of phone calls... that bill has been paused. It did not make it through the judiciary hearing."
— Brett Cooper [13:46]
"They’re not even fighting the fact that it causes cancer... They just want us to stop talking about it and stop holding them accountable. Let that sink in."
— Brett Cooper [17:42]
"We should not be deterred; we should not be distracted from what still needs to be done... We have not even scratched the surface on this issue, and we need to hold our elected officials accountable."
— Brett Cooper [21:16]
"It is shady, it is gross, it is completely dishonest. But we did catch on."
— Brett Cooper [02:48]
"You should also pay attention because of things like this."
— Brett Cooper [13:20]
"The same company that is in the business of making us healthy is also in the business of making us sick."
— Brett Cooper [05:25]
"We should not be deterred; we should not be distracted from what still needs to be done."
— Brett Cooper [21:16]
Brett Cooper’s episode is a clarion call for Americans to stay vigilant as the MAHA movement faces new and sophisticated attacks from the chemical lobby. The episode underscores the persistent influence of industry insiders, the vulnerability of both national and local protections, and the vital power of public action to push back against corporate overreach. Brett’s tone is urgent, passionate, and skeptical of official narratives, emphasizing that only persistent civic engagement can keep the promise of a healthier America alive.