“That was being totally blocked,” Means told Rogan. “Full directive from the top that we were going to slow that down and not do it.”

It was Rogan’s personal call to President Trump, Means said, that made the difference. The president decided to sign an executive order (EO) on psychedelics. A press conference was quickly arranged in the Oval Office, with the President seated at the Resolute Desk, Joe Rogan behind him. Kennedy stood on one side and several veterans on the other side – including some who have long advocated for the legalization of psychedelics like Ibogaine for treating PTSD and depression among veterans.

The EO, signed by the president that day – April 26, 2026 – expedited the FDA’s review of the substances and required the FDA and the Department of Veterans Affairs to share information about their usefulness.

“It’s somewhat outside of the box,” Trump said at the Oval Office signing.

It certainly was. It was like something lifted from the counterculture of the 1960s, from Ken Kesey and the Band of Merry Pranksters. And yet a Republican president was willing to do it, because an almost famous podcast host had asked him to do it. And because he knew the veterans wanted and needed it, since every year more than 6,000 veterans commit suicide, which averages out to 17 a day, often after spending years seeking mental health treatment and not finding anything that works.

At the press conference on psychedelics, Trump called attention to a previous executive order, signed in May of 2025, on most favored nation status for drug pricing, an aggressive move to correct the “egregious imbalance” achieved through what he called a “purposeful scheme” whereby drug companies deeply discount their drugs for access to foreign markets, and hike drug prices for Americans to pay for it. It had been going on for years, and Americans knew it. The website HHS set up, Trump RX, created an online market where American consumers can get prescription drugs at often lower prices than their local pharmacy.

In his extraordinary two-hour appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Means, his voice sometimes wavering, described in detail how White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and her three deputies blocked many of the most important MAHA initiatives, while enriching themselves on the side from relationships with food, agriculture and pharmaceutical companies. “The system of D.C. does not want any change to happen,” Means told Rogan.

He described how some people in the White House fought changes to the National School Lunch Program, to make school meals more nutritious, saying “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.”

Yet Trump and Kennedy pushed their new approach through, launching a Harvest to Hallways program, along with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. The program includes sweeping changes to connect schools to local farms, with $25 million in grants to schools that use locally produced food in school lunches and $70 million in grants to schools to install stoves and ovens so meals can be made from scratch onsite, rather than trucked in.

The system didn’t want it. But they managed to do it anyway.

The move to get hospitals to serve patients better food was similar. It wasn’t driven by polls or the sugar lobby — despite its close ties to Wiles and her deputy James Blair, both of whom were not consulted.

Similarly, the Make Hospital Food Healthier Pledge was launched in July, when HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz announced that hospitals should be “a place of healing” and, for this reason, they were going to push hospitals to commit to serving patients healthy food. More than 200 hospitals have already joined the effort – committing to putting good nutrition at the center of patient care.

The changes to the SNAP program also overrode the resistance of longtime political staffers who didn’t want to upset Big Food, which reaps enormous profits from SNAP sales of soda, candy and junk food, the very things Kennedy and team wanted to ban. Since Kennedy took over as secretary of HHS, 18 states have been granted waivers allowing them to prohibit the purchase of soda and candy using SNAP, or food stamps – with some states going further and also prohibiting purchase of prepared desserts and other items.

Also on food, Kennedy and HHS have achieved what few would have thought possible just a few years ago – flipping the food pyramid and getting some of the largest American food corporations to voluntarily stop using petroleum-based dyes to color their food, and switch over to natural dyes. For the Mars candy company, maker of M&Ms, the changeover is costing millions of dollars. But the company has promised to do it, saying all M&Ms will be made using natural coloring by 2028.

Food company giant Pepsico also promised to get all artificial dyes out of Cheetos and Gatorade.

But other huge changes have not gotten as much notice, including scaling back the childhood vaccine schedule.

For a more complete list of MAHA wins, please see the MAHA Action wins tracker.

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I asked a Politico reporter why they chose to investigate the organization trying to stop corporations from poisoning the American public, instead of those companies. She said she didn’t know.

I think I know. Politico has a conflict of interest. It is one of Washington’s main sources on health, food, chemical, and drug policy, and it sells those same industries privileged access to the policymakers who read it.

This isn’t ordinary advertising. Politico’s branded content has been described as a way for advertisers to reach “the Washington elite” in order to “shift policy.” The industries Politico covers pay for sponsored content, for events that put their people in the room with lawmakers, and for AgencyIQ, a Politico division that helps drug and food companies track and engage the regulators Politico writes about.

Look at who’s paying. PhRMA, the drug industry’s lobby, has sponsored Politico’s health newsletter, Pulse. The American Chemistry Council paid for “America’s Economy Runs on Chemistry,” where its CEO complained about “the enormous regulatory burden” on his industry. Gilead Sciences sponsored “Investing in America’s Future,” published as 2026 policy agendas took shape in Washington. Danone, a giant of ultra-processed food, paid Politico to tell readers that Americans are “rightfully looking at food as a critical part of the solution to many health challenges.”

And right now, Pulse is sponsored by the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease. Sounds like a MAHA ally. It isn’t. PhRMA helped launch it, it shared PhRMA’s address for nine years, and it listed PhRMA employees as key officials on its tax forms. When the MAHA Commission released its childhood chronic disease report, this group pushed back on its scrutiny of prescription drugs, vaccines, and mental health treatment.

Now look at the headlines Politico chooses.

“MAHA gets frustrated with Kennedy.”

“The groups backing RFK Jr. are running low on cash.”

“RFK Jr.’s movement is in disarray.”

“RFK Jr.’s alliance with Trump is on tenterhooks.”

And just days ago, “The Short, Unhappy Marriage of MAHA and the GOP.”

The story is always the same: MAHA is divided, broke, failing, or already over. That isn’t scrutiny of an industry. It’s a campaign to convince you that the movement challenging the industries that Politico represents has already lost.

As I said the day after the midterms, when Politico was part of the pile-on: “The reports of MAHA’s death are wishful thinking by all those who want to continue poisoning the American public for profit.”

We are not going anywhere.

There’s another fact that belongs in this picture. Politico is owned by a German company, Axel Springer, which is controlled by two German billionaires, Friede Springer and Mathias Döpfner. And some of the clients paying Politico to reach policymakers are German companies, too.

The clearest example is Bayer, the German drug and crop-science giant that bought Monsanto, the maker of Roundup. Politico ran a multi-year campaign for Bayer called “Drive Sustainable Progress.” In 2024, it was designed to reach “changing governments” and elected policymakers with “Bayer’s priorities as they prepared their 2025 agendas.” A Politico event opened with remarks from Bayer.

Here’s the double standard. Atrazine, still widely used on American farms, was banned in Germany in 1991 and across the European Union in 2004. Glyphosate, the chemical in Roundup, is restricted in Germany: it’s largely banned in private gardens, parks, playgrounds, and school grounds, and pre-harvest spraying is strictly banned. Here, it’s the most commonly used herbicide in the country. So a German company is helping other German companies poison Americans with products that are highly regulated or banned in Germany.

And these companies want more than access. They want immunity. Bayer pushed Congress for farm bill language that MAHA and a bipartisan group of lawmakers called a liability shield for glyphosate. In April, after a MAHA uprising, the House stripped it out. Two months later, Bayer got much of it from the Supreme Court.

A St. Louis jury had awarded John Durnell $1.25 million, finding Roundup’s label should have warned him about cancer. But in June, the Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 that federal pesticide law preempts his failure-to-warn claim. Justice Jackson, joined by Justice Gorsuch, warned that the ruling “unjustifiably closes the courthouse doors to state tort plaintiffs like Durnell.” That’s a liability shield by another route. And vaccine makers already have theirs, from the 1986 Act.

We are on the other side of every one of these fights. As we said many times, “If a vaccine, pesticide, or chemical company has to pay for the harm they cause, they’re going to make safer products. No product should be granted liability protection by our government.”

All of this makes MAHA a competitor for the thing Politico sells. If we succeed, the companies that pay Politico for access will stop paying. A German-owned publication that takes money from German chemical and drug companies has a straightforward commercial interest in seeing us fail.

Politico’s editorial standards say, “We are fair, objective and nonpartisan,” and promise to avoid conflicts of interest, “real and perceived.” A “sponsored content or discussion” label doesn’t make that conflict go away. Readers deserve to know who’s paying before they treat Politico’s obituaries for this movement as news.

The U.S. government paid $8.5 million in 2025 to bring Politico content to thousands of government employees. And the companies like Bayer and BASF paid millions to have access through Politico to government regulators. Politico was paid by the US government to deliver information to government officials to influence their policy decisions. Politico made millions, the companies they represent made millions and the American public consumed more toxic products. As a result, chronic disease goes up and then CMS pays more to treat the chronic disease. It’s great for Politico. Not so much for American children.

On today's show, we have incredible people who've had a front-row seat to the corruption of the mainstream media. We will be joined by Del Bigtree, Jeffrey Tucker, and Eric Berg.

But first, we’ll hear from Sharyl Attkisson. She’s an award-winning investigative journalist, a five-time Emmy Award winner, and a recipient of the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award. After more than two decades reporting for CBS News, CNN, and PBS, she now hosts Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson. She’s also a New York Times bestselling author who has consistently pursued the stories others are reluctant to tell. Welcome, Sharyl, it’s a pleasure to have you on!

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“I asked a Politico reporter why they chose to investigate the organization trying to stop corporations from poisoning the American public, instead of those companies,” said Lyons. “She said she didn’t know. I think I know. Politico has a conflict of interest. It is one of Washington’s main sources on health, food, chemical, and drug policy, and it sells those same industries privileged access to the policymakers who read it.”

Lyons focused the week’s podcast on media conflicts of interest that he and his guests say are preventing Americans from getting real news.

His first guest was Sharyl Attkisson, a five-time Emmy Award winner and recipient of the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Prize, whom Lyons called “one of the last investigative journalists in the country” because she consistently pursues stories others won’t touch.

Attkisson, who for more than two decades worked at such news outlets as CBS, CNN and PBS, said she began to notice a shift in how journalism was being practiced.

“It wasn’t impacting me on a daily basis until I began covering the untouchable subjects assigned by CBS News, to look into pharmaceutical products and vaccine safety,” she said. “And at the time, we’re talking early 2000s, everybody was doing that, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, ABC. And we were unearthing some incredible information about risks and misleading information and corruption inside the industry and government. But then in, I would say, five or so years of covering that and Congress holding hearings, which they’ll never do today, honest hearings on these issues, the industry figured out how to get its nose under the tent in newsrooms through advertising and through editorial placement of people in a way that would stop the coverage. And they effectively did so.”

Continued Attkisson, “I see it better in hindsight when looking back than I did when I was in the moment. But the company, CBS, went from encouraging and assigning me to covering these stories, and considering them some of the most important things we could do considering how many people are on prescription medicine and how many take vaccines” to, she said, shaping how such stories were told and later to trying to discredit her.

Attkisson said she couldn’t identify who, within CBS, didn’t want the type of investigative pieces she had done previously, but that she felt the resistance.

“When I see what they’re doing or trying to do to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” Attkisson said, “the way to decode that, again, I think people are learning this, is to understand that they are propagandists and that means they consider Robert F. Kennedy Jr. highly effective and a huge threat to the things that they want to protect. So, in a way, it’s a backhanded compliment, although it’s not pleasant. And I think we should just keep pointing that out.”

Attkisson, who now hosts her own syndicated show Full Measure, said news organizations should not quote Politico without pointing out the publication’s conflicts of interest, and that they’ve been wrong about many things.

Below is more from Lyons’ exchange with Attkisson, edited for clarity.

Lyons: Bobby Kennedy tells this story that he was at a restaurant once and he ran into the head of one of the big TV news shows and he asked the guy, “Why don’t you ever cover Big Pharma corruption or really investigate some of their practices? And the guy said, “Oh Bobby, you know, I’m really sorry, but you know, almost all of our advertising comes from those companies and we would just be out of business if we started doing that.”

This has been going on for a very, very long time. Watching Bobby on CNN with Dana Bash, where she says there are 200 studies that prove that the kinds of things you’ve been saying aren’t true . . . If there really are 200 studies, why not just post them on cnn.com? I mean, that isn’t hard to do. So, this is not real news. They’re not looking for real science. What do you think we can do to counter the fact that Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Ag money is controlling all of the news. How do we get past that?”

Attkisson: “It’s not only controlling the news, but as you know, it largely controls the nonprofit universe such as cancer causing chemical industries, funding the American Cancer Society, which will then make public policy statements as if these things can’t or don’t cause cancer or will deflect from the science that shows that they do. It has really been a wholesale takeover of our information landscape. And my approach has been always just to call it out constantly. When I report on something, I point out when a conflicted interest makes a statement or puts out a supposed news article, I point out who they are and that they’re propagandists or funded by industry. And too often the media doesn’t do that basic job because they’re kind of in on it. But if you just keep reporting it – Dr. Paul Offit, who’s a propagandist for the vaccine industry – but was long held out at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia as if he were an independent vaccine expert. I think my reporting every time I spoke to him when I discovered this, I think I was the first one to constantly call him a vaccine inventor and to acknowledge his conflict of interest and not treat him like an independent safety expert. And lo and behold, for a time period, a lot of other media, I guess, was embarrassed into at least acknowledging his proprietary role in the vaccine industry, which they had not done previously. So I think just continuing to call it out and help people become even more savvy at recognizing to look at the opposite when these interests or coordinated interests are attacking the same person using the same language frequently, always taking the same issue and being very one-sided, you should consider that possibly the other side is true and that there are well-funded interests behind getting this message out in a concerted way.”

Lyons: You’ve done a spectacular job and I’m grateful for all the work that you’ve done. And thanks for coming on. We’re going to do a whole series of these kinds of shows in the coming months to push back and try to get out, as broadly as possible, the real stories rather than be defensive . . . just make sure that the world learns how this whole system works. So, I hope to have you on many, many times.

Attkisson: That’s great. Thanks, Tony.

The full MAHA Media Hub, from November 11, can be viewed here.

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I drive by them and think about the lives these brave men and women lived. Many gave up years of their lives to the services.

Many gave up their lives.

Many have come home from war with ghosts in their eyes. As one veteran recently told me, “I can’t unsee what I saw. I never will.”

“What do you want for your life?” I asked him.

“Some peace. A night without the visions. A day without thinking about everything that happened.”

There is no making America healthy again without making our warriors healthy again.

One of the things we might have neglected to highlight in what has been a difficult period for health freedom is that Secretary Kennedy and President Trump were able to get the ball rolling on the use of Ibogaine, a psychedelic drug to help veterans and others struggling with addiction and depression. As we learned from Calley Means’ interview with podcaster Joe Rogan last week, it took some doing to get the issue around the blockers in front of the president.

To Rogan’s and Means’ credit, they pushed the ball forward.

On April 18, President Trump signed the Accelerating Medical Treatments for Serious Mental Illness Executive Order.

Like I said, it has been a difficult time for health freedom. Many of us have been at this for over twenty years and sometimes it feels like we have been through a war.

But we have had the freedom to fight our battle because of brave men and women who have given us a country to fight for.

I had an uncle named Samuel, who passed away some time ago. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.

My uncle lost his leg in that freezing hellish battle in the woods of Ardennes. He endured pain and suffering that I cannot even begin to comprehend.

I never saw him complain. He never told me what he went through. Sam went to work and took care of his family until the day he passed away.

When I was a kid, Sam took me fishing. He taught me how to bait a hook. He taught me to look for sea birds and watch the surface of the water. He taught me how to loosen the drag on the reel.

Sometimes, you had to let a stripper run a little line out.

Fishing is an act of faith, really. You cast your line upon the water and hope.

I still remember that lesson.

I named one of my sons, Sam.

Today is Veterans Day.

Have hope.

Remember.

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Both, she believes, reflect a calling that began to take shape when she majored in Russian and Soviet Studies as an undergraduate at Radcliffe College, Harvard University. During a semester in Moscow in 1980, she learned first-hand about human rights violations impacting dissidents who were censored, harassed, marginalized, and surveilled.

“That time prepared me for what I’ve seen in the fight for medical freedom,” Holland said during a recent interview with The MAHA Report. “Who has the power to make decisions, and what recourse do people have when they believe those decisions have harmed them?”

Holland, the co-author of two books on vaccines, Vaccine Epidemic and The HPV Vaccine on Trial, is president of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), a non-profit founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 2018 to better understand and address the rise in autism.

Holland said CHD became essential during Covid, challenging government mandates and pushing for all medical decisions to remain with individuals and families.

“If we do not have full autonomy to make our medical decisions, especially for our children, we are not free,” she said.

Holland explained that CHD’s work centers on four connected pillars: education, advocacy, litigation, and science. The organization focuses on environmental and other exposures affecting children’s health, along with issues including vaccines, electromagnetic radiation, pesticides, and fluoride.

CHD produces peer-reviewed science and pursues litigation to hold government and corporations accountable. During Covid the organization sued the CDC, FDA, HHS, NIH, Department of Defense, Merck, the state of New York, and the District of Columbia.

“This movement needs both grassroots and legal dimensions,” Holland said. “The corrupting influence of money has made it almost impossible to win over state and federal executives, legislators, regulators, media, and organized medical groups.”

She added, “The place where we have a fighting chance still is in the courts of public opinion and the rule of law. Precedents like Jacobson v. Massachusetts and the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act don’t make this easy, but it’s possible.”

After completing her undergraduate degree at Harvard, Holland earned master’s and Juris Doctor degrees at Columbia University. She later served as a professor at the New York University School of Law, where she was director of the Graduate Lawyering program for 15 years. She was also a lecturer on international human rights advocacy at Columbia Law School.

Holland’s parents were physicians – mainstream MDs who worked in hospitals and academic medicine and were members of major medical societies. Three of her siblings work in medicine or the pharmaceutical industry.

“I didn’t have a skeptical background towards mainstream medicine. It was quite the opposite. I contemplated going into medicine and saw it as a noble profession,” Holland said.

Her perspective changed when she had her first child at 38.

Like many advocates in the health freedom movement, she learned about vaccine injury from her son’s experience.

“I was aware that vaccine injury was possible – 1 in a million, or so I thought.”

As a first-time mother, she acknowledged that she didn’t know the signs of probable aluminum and mercury toxicity before her son received the MMR shot.

He was born in the late 1990s in the former Soviet Union when she and her husband ventured there.

“I delayed in getting him vaccines,” she recalled. “I wanted to be sure I got the shots in the United States, not Russia, so he didn’t get his MMR until he was over 2.”

The young boy’s health declined. He lost all language, couldn’t sleep, and frequently drooled. His hair became very coarse, and he showed clear signs of developmental issues, Holland explained.

“Like so many parents, we started this odyssey of going to see neurologists, psychologists and other medical professionals that included an occupational therapist, a physical therapist, and a speech therapist,” Holland said.

The occupational therapist gave her a book called Unraveling the Mystery of Autism by Karen Seroussi, and Holland learned about an association of scientists, doctors, and parents called Defeat Autism Now.

“When my child suffered a precipitous developmental regression, ending in an autism diagnosis, my appreciation of vaccine injury risk changed fundamentally,” she said. “I pieced together that there was no other plausible explanation for my child’s developmental regression.”

Holland added, “Once I learned about the extreme liability protection that industry and healthcare providers enjoy, and the suppression of accurate science and information about vaccine risks and injury, I understood the need for immediate, radical systemic change. I have been devoted to that change ever since.”

Holland was invited to join the CHD board when the organization launched in 2018. The following year she became general counsel.

Led by Kennedy, CHD was outspoken about a plethora of issues, including the injuries that afflict children because of the childhood vaccine schedule.

The organization’s online presence grew rapidly until President Joe Biden was elected and censorship became widespread. Kennedy and CHD were removed from multiple social media platforms. “We brought cases against censorship,” recalls Holland. “We brought cases related to the PREP Act. We brought cases on religious exemptions, on medical exemptions, and on antitrust for the media censoring us for financial reasons, not just for ideological reasons.”

When then CHD president Lyn Redwood retired in 2021, she and the board asked Holland to fill the top leadership role.

Holland spent a few months in 2023 as a strategist, fundraiser, and organizer for Kennedy’s presidential campaign before returning as president of CHD that fall. She has remained president since.

“My work for health freedom has been my driving force for more than 25 years, addressing the crisis of children’s health, holding those responsible for chronic health epidemics accountable, and preserving fundamental human rights. CHD’s work in this area is unparalleled and urgent,” Holland said.

In addition to the books she has co-authored, Holland has also co-edited or contributed to works such as the English edition of Turtles All the Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth, and published articles on vaccine law and policy, including a review of compensated cases of vaccine-induced brain injury, “Unanswered Questions from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program,” published in the Pace Environmental Law Review.

Holland calls the childhood vaccine schedule a “cash cow” for the pharmaceutical industry, saying that loading infants with vaccines is “insane” and the bad health of so many Americans is proof of this.

More than 40 percent of America’s children have some kind of chronic health condition. The “explosion” in these conditions coincides with the “expansion of the vaccine schedule,” Holland noted.

Childhood vaccine injuries, she says, are “the saddest and most horrifying dimension of the pharmaceutical industry.”

“Big Pharma profits from vaccines and the chronic diseases that often result from them,” she said, emphasizing the importance of educating the public about injuries and their connection to vaccines.

The notion that the link between vaccines and autism has been debunked is “profoundly ridiculous,” Holland added. “Even with all the attention this topic has received over the last year, many people remain unaware of the story behind these claims. Making truthful information public will help people make informed decisions about whether to vaccinate their children or which vaccines to choose.”

“Over time,” she says, “I think most people will come to the view through truthful information that their children are better off not getting vaccines at least in the early years of their lives.”

CHD is also a resource and advocate for helping parents learn about vaccine exemptions for religious or philosophical reasons available in most states.

“We believe that people should have a choice whether they give their children vaccines or not, and the manner in which that is happening in 45 states today is through religious exemptions and medical exemptions,” Holland said.

“I am horrified that New York State is arbitrarily removing medical exemptions from medically fragile children,” she said. “It is literally putting their lives on the line. We have emergency litigation right now on behalf of a 17-year-old girl who received a medical exemption last year, and the same judge and the same doctors refused the medical exemption this year.”

Holland is encouraged about the progress made on children’s health in Washington D.C. through Kennedy, President Donald Trump, and Congress.

At CHD’s inaugural Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill, the organization praised Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) for courageously amplifying the truth about what happened during Covid, despite tremendous pressure not to do so.

Significant change isn’t accomplished overnight, or even over the course of one presidential term, Holland acknowledges. She remains motivated by the children’s health crisis and the need for parents to have the freedom to make decisions they deem best for their children.

“Medical freedom is foundational to a free society,” Holland said. “This cause is the hill I’m going to die on.”

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On November 5, 2026, a jury at Southwark Crown Court in London convicted British comedian, actor, and broadcaster Russell Brand of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault, following a four-week criminal trial.

Brand was acquitted of two additional rape charges and one charge of attempted indecent assault. Sentencing is scheduled for November 9, and Brand faces a potentially lengthy prison sentence.

Brand denied all charges. He acknowledged having been promiscuous during the period in question, but he insisted that his sexual encounters were consensual.

The following are the offenses for which he was convicted and the circumstances in which they are alleged to have occurred.

Rape: The complainant stated that she met Brand backstage at a stand-up comedy show in early 2009 and then visited him in his townhouse in Hampstead, North London. She claimed the sexual encounter began as consensual but became nonconsensual when he forced anal sex.

Sexual Assault: The complainant claimed that, in the summer of 2004, at a bar in Soho, Central London, during her birthday celebration, Brand groped her breasts.

Sexual Assault: The complainant stated that in the summer of 2004 or 2005, at the Capital Radio building (Choice FM corridor) in London, Brand violently kissed and groped her (a Choice FM worker) in front of his entourage while she was at work.

Sexual Assault: The complainant stated that on a Channel 4 recording set, members of Brand’s entourage told her he would not film the production unless she massaged him. She claimed that she consented to giving the massage, but while performing it, he lunged at her groin.

Brand’s defense argued that the allegations had been reconstructed or reinterpreted many years after the events, following damaging media reporting in September 2023.

The task for the prosecution was to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Brand had committed criminal sexual acts. This was no easy task, given the passage of up to two decades and the limited amount of physical and contemporaneous evidence that could be presented that could verify the claims of the accusers.

The accusers were granted anonymity and shielded from view from Brand and the jury by a large blue screen, though Brand and his attorneys were informed of their identities, and Brand’s attorneys were given the opportunity to cross examine them.

The prosecution portrayed the incidents as examples of a recurring pattern: Brand allegedly exploited his charm, professional standing, and increasingly powerful celebrity status to obtain sexual gratification without the women’s consent.

All six women came forward to police after a September 2023 television documentary and newspaper investigation publicized other allegations against Brand. The complainants in the criminal trial were not the same as the complainants whose stories were told in media reporting.

What Evidence Was Presented in Court?

The most significant question at trial was if evidence could be presented to prove Brand’s guilt.

The Metropolitan Police acknowledged that there was no available CCTV or forensic evidence, and that the passage of time had severely limited the availability of digital records. The prosecution therefore based its case on the following.

• The detailed, graphic, and lurid nature of the alleged rape victim’s testimony. She told the jury that, although the encounter began with consensual sex, this ended when Brand flipped her over and anally raped her so violently that she struggled to breathe. She told the jury she begged him to stop but he refused, telling her, “I want you to feel my come.” She further testified that he chastised her for getting blood on his sheets and ordered her to clean up the mess before casually turning on the TV and instructing an assistant to escort her out.

• To support her testimony, the woman claimed that she confronted Brand in a text exchange approximately six months later. According to the woman, the text exchange read as follows:

  • Brand: “Because you are dirty and I want to push you further.”

  • Complainant: “I think you pushed me far enough; you treated me like an animal.”

  • Brand: “I’m sorry.”

  • NOTE: It is not clear from conflicting reports as to whether this text exchange was presented to the jury as original messages or screenshots that were authenticated and admitted as exhibits, or whether the exchange is a reconstruction from the woman’s memory of the exchange.

• Brand’s former flatmate, Mark Pinheiro, testified that Brand had told him he might have gone too far with a woman during the 1999 Labour Party conference. This concerned an allegation on which Brand was ultimately acquitted.

• Other acquaintances testified about his extraordinary sexual appetite and methods of persuading women to have sex. Such testimony portrayed his attitudes and behavior—but did not independently establish that a particular assault occurred.

• One complainant also testified that she reported the 2009 workplace incident to her manager. Such evidence could help establish circumstances and corroborate reporting, without necessarily proving the sexual misconduct itself.

• Inconsistencies in Brand’s accounts. According to police, Brand initially maintained that he did not recognize several complainants, but his recollections changed as the trial approached. Prosecutors argued that these changes undermined his credibility. Brand claimed the accusations prompted him to meditate on the period in question, which prompted him to recall the women.

• Prosecutors claimed that the women—who did not know one another—described broadly similar patterns of behavior, including abrupt sexual advances, disregard for objections, and apparently indifferent conduct afterward.

Defense Arguments

Brand’s barrister, Ian Winter KC, argued that sexual promiscuity, however distasteful, is not evidence of criminality. He challenged the complainants’ recollections, their failure to report the incidents for many years, and the possibility that the 2023 media investigation had influenced their subsequent interpretation of events.

The defense also questioned why some complainants had not physically resisted or immediately protested. The prosecution countered that victims respond to sexual assault in different ways and that the absence of resistance does not establish consent.

The jury’s verdict was mixed. It accepted four allegations beyond reasonable doubt but acquitted Brand of three others. It convicted him of sexually assaulting a woman at a birthday celebration in a London (Soho) bar in 2004 while acquitting him of raping the same woman during the same occasion.

Evaluating What Passed for Evidence

In my twenty years of investigating true crimes, I have consulted with many forensic scientists, prosecutors, and criminal defense attorneys. When trying to determine if an accused man is indeed guilty of grave crimes, it all comes down to the evidence. No matter how suspicious and unsympathetic we may find someone, we must remain focused on the proof of his guilt, and not our subjective perceptions and feelings about the accused.

My goal in writing this essay is not to proclaim Russell Brand’s innocence, but to point out what strikes me as grave deficiencies in the so-called evidence that was presented against him, the likelihood that the jury was prejudiced against him, and the likelihood that the jury felt considerable social and psychological pressure to find him guilty.

A central pillar of the Anglo-American criminal justice system is that accusations and denunciations are, by themselves, not sufficient to convict a man of grave crimes. The great English jurist, Sir William Blackstone (1723–1780), specifically addressed the danger of false accusations, malicious prosecutions, and wrongful convictions in his monumental Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in four volumes between 1765 and 1769.

Blackstone regarded the possibility of an innocent person being falsely accused and punished as a fundamental danger against which English criminal law must provide safeguards. He articulated the presumption of innocence and the principle that the state must establish guilt rather than require an accused person to prove innocence.

In Book IV, Chapter 27, “Of Trial, and Conviction,” Blackstone wrote:

For the law holds, that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

This became known as Blackstone’s ratio, one of the most influential formulations of the principle that the criminal justice system should err on the side of protecting the innocent. Blackstone’s formulation expresses the conviction that the consequences of wrongful punishment are so serious that the law must impose a substantial burden of proof upon the prosecution.

At the time he wrote his monumental work, he reflected on the dark days of Europe’s religious wars and witch trials in the 16th and 17th centuries, when tens of thousands of people were persecuted for the crime of heresy on the basis of denunciations.

At the height of the witch hysteria, thousands of men and women were burned at the stake on the basis of lurid accusations with zero accompanying evidence that the accused were practicing witchcraft. Score settling, revenge, resentment, elimination of rivals, and scapegoating were common motives for denunciation.

I’m sure that Russell Brand was an aggressively promiscuous man during the period in question. He himself has admitted it. Thus, if he had been tried for being—at this earlier stage in his life—a selfish, sleazy, and arrogant jerk, it would probably be easy to adduce sufficient evidence to find him guilty as charged.

However, it strikes me as impossible to draw conclusions—beyond a reasonable doubt—about allegedly criminal sexual behavior that took place decades ago, with no supporting physical evidence such as medically documented injuries, no eyewitness testimony of the alleged acts, and only hearsay testimony from the victims’ friends and colleagues that is ambiguous and fragmentary.

Regarding the accusation of rape—by far the most serious charge for which Brand was convicted—the “reported” text message from his accuser in which she stated, “you treated me like an animal,” may be plausibly evaluated as evidence that Brand made her feel like a cheap article of consumption and discarded her as soon as his lust was sated. However, this is not evidence that he raped her. If he did rape her, she missed an opportunity to document it by not stating it in the text, not reporting it to the police, and not having a medical professional document her injury. No medical documentation of the alleged injury was presented at trial.

Brand’s “assistant” to whom she referred as escorting her out of the townhouse did not testify at the trial, and nor were any statements from him presented to the jury. One wonders why not, given that this assistant was—according to the woman—a witness of the immediate aftermath of the alleged crime and extreme trauma it inflicted on her.

The same can be said of Brand’s driver, whom the woman claimed drove her to a nearby Tube station and handed her tissue paper when he saw she was upset. Given that the driver could have served as a key witness of the woman’s mental state in the immediate aftermath of the alleged crime, one wonders why the jury heard no testimony or statements from him.

Were the police unable to find the assistant and the driver, or had they died in the intervening seventeen years? If so, it is an example of the difficulty of investigating and adjudicating an alleged crime after the passage of almost two decades.

One wonders why Brand was apparently so confident that he needn’t worry about the woman telling his assistant and his driver about the shocking crime that he had allegedly just committed against her. It’s a logical inference that, for all Brand knew, the woman would demand that his driver take her to the nearest police station.

The woman’s mother stated that the woman told her and her father about the rape and expressed fear that she may have contracted HIV from the incident, and therefore got tested for it. However, for some reason, the woman’s parents also chose not to report the incident to the police. That the woman’s father did not report the crime seems especially puzzling.

A former boyfriend of the woman stated in a 2025 police interview that the woman had told him about her anal intercourse with Brand, had been deeply upset by it, but that she had ultimately “come round,” suggesting that she had allowed herself to be talked into it. One of the woman’s female friends recalled the complainant saying she did not want anal sex but that Brand had assured her he would be gentle.

These witness statements added another element of ambiguity to what exactly happened in Brand’s bedroom seventeen years ago. The difficulty of evaluating the complainant’s testimony is further amplified by substantial scientific evidence that memory of events in the distant past tends to be reconstructive, heavily influenced by subsequent events and perceptions, and not a literal recording.

Another example of the extreme difficulty of evaluating the accusations made against Russell Brand is revealed in how the jury regarded the charge that he had sexually assaulted a woman in a Soho bar and subsequently “orally raped her” in the bar’s bathroom. The jury found Brand guilty of sexually assaulting her in the bar, but not guilty of “orally raping” her in the bathroom.

Given that the jury concluded that her claim that Brand “orally raped her” in the bathroom was insufficient to establish guilt, one wonders why it regarded her claim that he sexually assaulted her in the bar as sufficient to establish his guilt.

Brand claimed they went into the bathroom together to fool around; she claimed that he forced her into the bathroom. Brand’s defense attorney pointed out that she didn’t yell for help and that she got into Brand’s car after the alleged incident.

The woman acknowledged that she got into Brand’s car after the incident, but claimed she didn’t do so voluntarily, but was “shepherded along” and into the car without realizing it was Brand’s until she got into it. Nevertheless, she acknowledged that they went to another bar in Camden together. She claimed that, during the drive to the other bar, he again tried to force her to give him oral sex.

Brand’s defense attorney asked the jury how it was conceivable that a woman who had just been orally raped would get into her alleged assailant’s car. The jury apparently concluded this was a good point, but still found Brand guilty of sexually assaulting her in the bar.

No eyewitnesses of the alleged sexual assault in the bar testified at the trial. The only testimony presented was that of hearsay witnesses whom the woman subsequently told about the incident. A man who attended the party testified that he recalled seeing Brand emerge from the bathroom, followed by a woman. He said Brand looked straight through him with a blank expression. He could not remember the woman’s demeanor.

In the case of the alleged assault at the Capitol Radio Studio, none of the alleged eyewitnesses of the incident testified at the trial, and nor was any mention made at trial of any statements they may have made to the police.

The prosecutor’s claim—with respect to the sexual assault cases—that the absence of resistance or protest does not establish consent is perhaps true in the sense that some victims may be paralyzed by shock and fear. However, this raises the question of how precisely—in the absence of resistance or protest—a man can know that a woman does not consent to a sexual act.

By longstanding convention, men are usually expected to make the first move in sexual matters, but the conviction of Russell Brand suggests that any bold move to initiate sexual contact could be interpreted as a form of sexual assault if the advance is unwelcome.

This touches on our society’s schizophrenic attitude towards sex, vacillating between “hook-up culture” (in which celebrated men have access to innumerable eager partners) on the one hand, and outrage at male effrontery on the other.

The Timing of the Investigation and Accusations

According to the journalists who ultimately published the September 2023 report, they began their investigation in 2019 by seeking women who could and would relate their experiences of being sexually abused by Brand. This raises the following questions:

• What motivated these journalists in 2019 to investigate a period in Brand’s distant past? It strikes me as notable that journalists began to investigate Brand two years after he married his current spouse, split from his agent, and was working as an independent broadcaster. Why didn’t the British press investigate him during the much earlier period in question, when Brand had a current reputation for being a promiscuous cad?

• Upon finding women who claimed to have been abused by Brand, why didn’t the journalists encourage them to report the incidents to the police so that Brand would be officially investigated and judicially punished for his crimes? Reports indicate that the women they found did not want to endure the trouble of participating in a police investigation against a powerful man. While no one wants to participate in a police investigation, it’s extremely difficult to evaluate the veracity of accusations if they aren’t reported to criminal justice authorities.

• Why didn’t the Metropolitan police consider the accusations made in the media as sufficiently credible to serve as grounds for prosecution? According to published accounts, the Crown Prosecution concluded that the accusations made in the media could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. In other words, the accusations wouldn’t pass muster in court, but were sufficient for conditioning the British public, including potential jury members, to regard him as guilty.

• Before Brand’s trial, much of the British press had a field day with the lurid accusations against him, publishing little if any cautionary language about the presumption of innocence and the critical importance of supporting evidence. The marked slant of newspaper reporting conveyed the impression that the accusations are self-evidently true and that any questioning of their veracity is immoral and disrespectful of the alleged victims, as though expressing outrage for accusers is more important than observing due process for the accused. Reviewing these reports reminds me of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s famous remark in his 1830 review, “Moore’s Life of Lord Byron”—that is, “We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.”

• Given the media blitz of accusations against Brand in September 2023, how did the Crown Prosecution service conclude it could assemble an impartial jury in Britain?

• The probability that the jury was prejudiced against Brand was amplified by testimony about his generally promiscuous conduct that did not directly pertain to the crimes for which he was charged. The sexual assault charges such as breast groping with no eyewitness testimony also likely had a prejudicial effect on the minds of the jurors when it came to evaluating the testimony of the alleged rape victim.

The prosecution attributed significance to the fact that the complainants came forward independently from one another after viewing these media reports in 2023—as distinct from conspiring with each other to come forward.

Multiple media outlets reported the accusations in a coordinated fashion. One wonders if the accusers got the impression that someone with influence and resources—perhaps a senior media or public relations executive—welcomed their accusations.

A Concerning Timeline

• January 16, 2018: Channel 4 News’s Cathy Newman interviews Jordan Peterson in which he challenges numerous British establishment pieties and orthodoxies. Cathy Newman comports herself in a way that is widely perceived as self-righteous, hostile, rude, and ineffectual. The video goes viral, thereby greatly elevating Peterson’s international profile and embarrassing Newman.

• February 14, 2018: Russell Brand interviews Jordon Peterson. Their collegial, serious, and thoughtful conversation is published on Brand’s podcast Under the Skin. As an independent media personality, Brand increasingly espouses views that many in Britain regard as “right wing” and challenging of British establishment pieties.

• 2019: Investigative journalists purportedly begin digging into Brand’s past.

• May, 13, 2020: Brand publicly questions Britain’s lockdown policies. In a YouTube video titled “Stay Alert! The Beginning of the End of Covid?” he asks whether the lockdown is justified and whether it should continue.

• 2021: Brand increasingly challenges vaccine mandates, government authority, and pharmaceutical-industry influence.

• November 25, 2021: Brand publishes Vaccine Mandates: THIS Is What History WARNS Us, criticizing governments’ response to protests against mandates.

• February 2022: In the lead-up to the delayed release of Disney’s Death on the Nile, in which Brand plays Dr. Windlesham, Brand intensifies his anti-establishment political activism on YouTube. He posts videos speaking out against vaccine mandates and questioning mainstream pandemic narratives. This clashes with Disney’s strict corporate stance and rigorous on-set safety mandates, creating substantial friction between the actor and the studio.

• May 12, 2023: Brand publishes his interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. titled RFK Jr. (Fauci, CIA Secrets & Running for President).

• September 16, 2023: Channel 4’s Dispatches documentary and accompanying Times and Sunday Times investigation are published—a coordinated media action that resembles what propagandists call “flooding the zone.”

• September 25, 2023: The Metropolitan Police announces its criminal investigation of Russell Brand.

Why were British media outlets—and later the Metropolitan Police—so keen to investigate unsubstantiated allegations of Brand’s sexual misconduct in the distant past?

We know from the grooming gang scandal that British law enforcement has a record of being highly selective about investigating rape allegations. What motivated them to pursue such a vigorous investigation and prosecution of Brand, despite the paucity of evidence to support the accusations?

We also know from what happened to Julian Assange that high profile public figures who challenge powerful state agencies and political factions may be targeted for persecution. Accusations of sexual misconduct are a documented method for punishing and eliminating politically unpopular figures.

Is seems likely that all the media reporting about Russell Brand’s alleged sexual crimes and his trial for these alleged crimes has been a welcome distraction for innumerable powerful men—including multiple British media executives— mentioned in the Epstein Files. Russell Brand is not among this large cohort.

If accusations and denunciations—with little to no supporting evidence—are deemed sufficient for sending a man to prison, then any man may be subjected to such accusations, even if they are baseless.

From the experience of millions who lived under the great totalitarian regimes of the 20th century—in which men and women could be thrown into a Gulag or concentration camp on the basis of a denunciation—we know the British people will ultimately be very sorry if their hard-won legal safeguards against possible false accusations are disregarded.

“This is a formal request for Susie Wiles and James Blair to stop harassing me with texts and calls,” Means wrote. “If there is a factual inaccuracy in what I said, send it to me in writing and I will vigorously correct and apologize for any misstatements. I will note that everything I said is substantiated by other senior officials.”

He continued, “If you want to file a lawsuit and get into discovery of whether it’s provably true that Ballard and Continental had an undue influence on the White House policy process, do it. I believe we are in an existential moment for the country, and Americans were owed an honest accounting of the past two years so we identify the problems we need to move on from.”

Also on Saturday, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna defended Blair, writing on X, “When everyone in DC (to include the then minority leader) was against me in my first campaign and in the primary on my second, @JamesBlairUSA helped me take on a pharma funded shill and beat one of their lobbyists who ran against me. She was handpicked at the time BY THE PARTY.”

Continued Luna, “He defended me when members of the conference were trying to get me thrown off my committees because I proposed the amendment to remove the pesticide liability shield out of the FARM BILL . . . . The idea that he works against or isn’t MAHA is just not true.”

Luna, one of the most vocal and successful MAHA legislators in Congress, who was endorsed by MAHA Action, found common ground with Means in a subsequent exchange on X.

Means: Completely agree James thought the glyphosate stuff was a terrible idea . . . I think you and I both agree we are in an existential time where we need to rid corruption and corporate capture from the party. I have no ill intent towards James and am sharing stories that are factual. If there are any inaccuracies, please inform me and I will apologize and correct.”

Luna: Agreed on the corporate interests etc @calleymeans. I no longer take corporate PAC money and do you think that there needs to be an overhaul of corporate lobbying and special interest in campaigns as a whole but people like us are a small minority. I’m just saying that @JamesBlairUSA is not in my opinion part of the problem. In fact, had it not been for him I would have lost multiple elections to the people that are part of the problem. Food for thought.”

Means’ accusation against Wiles and Blair followed his explosive appearance on the podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. On Friday, November 6, Means delivered a blistering, two-hour-plus account of his time at HHS, telling podcast host Rogan about a tight cabal of lobbyist-connected aides working with former Chief of Staff Wiles. He said this group, among the most powerful in the country, systematically sabotaged Make America Healthy Again priorities while bowing to special-interest groups.

On Sunday, Means went on CBS’s Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan, repeating key points he made on Rogan. Asked by Brennan whether his intention by speaking out on Rogan was to get Wiles removed, he answered “yes.”

The Rogan interview dropped the same day President Trump announced he was replacing Wiles with longtime aide Stephen Miller, effective on Monday, November 9, with Wiles shifting to the Trump political operation.

Means, who resigned in late October after serving as a key architect of the MAHA effort under Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., described the early days of the Trump administration as “absolutely electric,” with staff convinced they would deliver on the health, food, and anti-corruption promises that helped elect the president for a second term.

But that energy, Means said, collided with what he called the most centralized White House power structure in modern history. No significant policy proposals advanced without approval from Wiles’s office, and cabinet secretaries spent meetings managing access to her and the small group that served her.

Means portrayed these figures as products of the lobbying and consulting world with recent or ongoing ties to the very industries MAHA targeted. And he piercingly described a culture in which top Trump administration officials like Wiles were paid handsomely by industry to do their bidding. He resigned, he told Rogan, because he said this corrupt group was not working for the American people but rather to enrich themselves and their families.

Means told Rogan that similar dynamics applied to networks and connected firms. Further, he said the midterm strategy prioritized fundraising from special interests and gerrymandering over energizing the broader coalition that had backed Trump and Kennedy, quoting Wiles telling him repeatedly that the administration needed “money for the midterms,” including from sugar interests.

The consequences, according to Means, played out across multiple high-profile health issues – from glyphosate to processed foods to vaccines – that Kennedy and the MAHA movement most wanted to implement.

Means described how Wiles protected corporate interests over the people’s interests, all in an effort to garner corporate dollars to fuel a “failed” midterm strategy. Means said Wiles told him to lay off Big Food companies – part of Secretary Kennedy’s proposed reforms – “because we need sugar money to win the midterms.”

Means said, “It is absolutely true that his administration has been infiltrated by the very people that [President Trump] energized voters to say he would get out of DC.”

He added, “It’s impossible to describe to you how demonic this culture is.”

The former HHS advisor also told Rogan that intense industry pressure blocked even mentioning the word ‘glyphosate’ in an early draft of the government’s MAHA report. An executive order (EO) later framed glyphosate supply as a national-security issue, which Means called out as blatantly “fake.”

Means recalls how he learned of the EO. He was taken in a room where “Susie’s person . . . puts an executive order down on the desk and says ‘please review.’”

Means added, “It was not up for discussion.”

Means suggested to Rogan that neither President Trump nor Secretary Kennedy had been consulted when the Justice Department filed a brief supporting liability protections for manufacturers, which enabled the Supreme Court to take up the case. Once SCOTUS ruled not to hold industry responsible for the harms its products, especially glyphosate, cause, Means emphasized that Kennedy was put in a very bad place with his MAHA supporters. And when a regenerative farmer later raised the Supreme Court outcome with the president, Trump called it a “terrible idea” and expressed surprise.

Pointing to high cancer rates in heavy-use farm states such as Iowa and Kentucky, Means argued the administration should at least have stayed neutral on liability.

“This system does not want us to know the truth, and they don’t want us to talk about this stuff openly,” Means said of the glyphosate issue, which he also said industry pressures the government not to study.

Means claimed approval pathways for fruit-flavored vaping products became a top White House priority at HHS, framed as a midterm issue important to young male voters despite data showing high youth use rates tied to flavors. Initial strict concentration limits on kratom, an opioid-like compound often sold at gas stations, were relaxed under lobbying pressure.

Means also told Rogan that broader, food-policy efforts to change school meals and define “ultra-processed food” ran into repeated internal resistance framed around donor concerns or political risk calculations. Means stressed that Trump’s personal instincts, when issues actually reached him—including through external pressure such as Rogan’s earlier call on psychedelics—tended toward action, but most items never made it that far because of the centralized gatekeeping spearheaded by Wiles.

Means added, “Whenever there was an issue, which was on [the president’s] radar, he’s like, ‘let’s get it done, let’s go hard.’ He said, ‘We need to get this done, get this on my desk in the next week.’ And it busted through the system.”

Public shame and outside pressure, Means said, had been the only reliable way to move proposals into action, such as certain food-dye restrictions or dietary-guideline updates.

Means called Kennedy a “hero” with integrity and said Trump still had the time and the will to course-correct. He recommended that the president “clear his house” of the operatives he identified and expressed intuition that Trump was already moving in that direction. Means was right: on the same day as Means’ interview by Rogan was broadcast, the Wiles-to-Miller shift was announced.

Trump publicly praised Wiles’s service. The change followed Republican midterm losses that cost the party control of both chambers.

Looking ahead, Means argued the midterm setbacks stemmed in part from the administration appearing “discordant” from the 2024 campaign message on health, corruption, and the swamp. He maintained that popular, largely bipartisan issues—pesticide scrutiny, junk-food incentives in federal programs, and childhood metabolic disease rates such as 38 percent prediabetes among teens—remain politically potent if prioritized.

He also called for structural reform, limiting corporate money in politics – possibly through a simple constitutional amendment or a presidential mandate that withholds other legislation until Congress acts.

“Americans need to understand that if they’re being whipped and excited by policy promises through our existing structure, they are being duped and gaslighted and lied to,” Means said. “We need to have systemic reform.”

Means expressed cautious optimism that President Trump could still deliver a stronger second half of his second term by empowering reformers, confronting Congress, and aligning with anti-corruption voices across parties. “There’s still time for Trump to have a historic presidency,” Means said.

Kennedy has repeatedly reaffirmed his commitment to putting American health outcomes ahead of corporate influence and the MAHA movement retains a powerful cultural energy and has produced unprecedented policy shifts, shifts unheard of during any other administration.

Still, Means’ explosive, first-hand account of his time in the Trump administration underscores how institutional incentives and concentrated power can slow or redirect even high-priority agendas.

With Wiles out, and a post-midterm divided government, will MAHA priorities advance through executive action, state-level pressure, public accountability, or broader structural changes?

“I believe [the president] wants to empower Bobby more,” Means said. “I think he wants to empower the change makers in the administration more. That’s just my intuition . . . and I think that it would be a good thing.”

For his part, Kennedy wrote on X, he’s excited to work with the newly appointed chief of staff. “Next to me, Stephen Miller is the strongest MAHA supporter in the administration. It’s time to unleash the Kraken.”

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Readers of The MAHA Report are well aware of Kennedy’s record at HHS: many of his policies are already improving the health of Americans.

But Alsobrooks wants the good old days of public health imperialism back. And it should be obvious why: She’s a big (although quiet) benefactor of Big Pharma largesse and promotes their interests in the Senate.

One day after an impressive victory for her party in the midterms, Alsobrooks signaled what she intends to focus on. Not lowering the cost of living. Not forever wars overseas. You guessed it: increasing Big Pharma profits.

It turns out that Alsobrooks receives the largest share of her political contributions – 21% — from the ‘health and pharmaceutical sectors’ as shown here on U.S. Wealth Watcher, which noted, “that PFIZER INC. PAC is the largest named source on file at $10,000.”

Wealth Watcher also reports that Alsobrooks took $5,500 from the Johnson & Johnson’s PAC. But FEC receipts reveal a fuller picture:

$5,000 from AstraZeneca

$5,000 from Sanofi’s PAC

$1,000 from Bristol Meyers Squibb

$2,500 from McKesson

$3,500 from Gilead Sciences

$5,000 from AbbVie

$2,500 from Amgen

$2,500 from Novartis

$5,000 from Eli Lilly

$3,500 from Biotechnology Innovation

$2,000 from GlaxoSmithKlein

$2,000 from Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers

$1,000 from Pharmaceutical Care Management Association

Despite these blatant conflicts of interest, Alsobrooks took to X on Wednesday to attack Secretary Kennedy.

“The time is now,” she wrote. “RFK Jr. must resign or be fired. End of discussion.”

Comments on Alsobrooks’ X feed did not exactly garner the response she was looking for.

“So, you don’t want to Make Americans Healthy LOL you’re disgusting.”

“I just filled up my tank thinking “Man, if RFK Jr. wasn’t Sec of HHS, my gas would be so much cheaper.” You nailed the problem, Angela. Thanks.”

“How the f#&% is that supposed to address cost of living? What the f#&% is wrong with you?”

“So, you guys all ran on lowering taxes, lowering gas prices and food prices but all you got is let’s go after the opposing party because we don’t like them. You’re absolutely f#&%ing worthless.”

“Spoken like a true dictator! Well done.”

“That selfish BAST*ARD. How dare he want our kids to have healthy food and the military to have something decent to eat?”

“How DARE he (Kennedy) question Pfizer. They have never done anything in self-interest and have never been dishonest.”

“Pretty tough words coming from a corrupt Big Pharma recipient...I live in Maryland and despise your lying cheating corruption.”

The last comment is spot on. The above data only took me a few hours to find. Alsobrooks is Big Pharma’s lapdog.

And this is why Alsobrooks is targeting Kennedy.

In all, she’s received contributions from more than a dozen Pharma-funded PACs over the last few years; she ought to be called “Alsotooks.”

To be fair, I may have missed a few donors and several thousand dollars of Big Pharma contributions, but it’s pretty clear what is going on here. And this quick bit of research does not include the uncountable donations that came to Alsobrooks from ActBlue donations.

Act Blue has been under Congressional Investigation and has been referred to the Department of Justice for possible criminal offenses. Safe to say, anything goes with Act Blue donations. Act Blue money might be from a legit donor, it might be from a foreign donor, it might be from a dead donor.

That’s a story for another day, but we know that Alsobrooks is essentially a Big Pharma operative embedded in the U.S. Senate. She does the industry’s bidding.

Big Pharma wants Senator Alsobrooks to go after Kennedy. As we’ve seen, she announced it on the first day after the midterms. The MAHA Report respects the message that the voters sent on November 3 — but rebels, rigorously, against Big Pharma’s agenda and influence.

On the very first day of what could still become a new era of greater transparency and accountability, Big Pharma and their lap dog senator from Maryland couldn’t resist pissing all over it.

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“We’ve won the hearts and minds of the American people. We haven’t won politically yet, but we’re on our way there, and we’re going to get there.”

Eight candidates who were supported by MAHA Action won their races on Tuesday, including Julia Letlow of Louisiana; Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, who fended off a well-funded challenger and retired brigadier general in the U.S. Army; Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas; Rep. Mike Haridopolos of Florida; Jace Yarbrough of Texas; Michael Alfonso of Wisconsin; Anthony Constantino of New York; and Austin Rogers of Florida.

The biggest disappointment of the night for MAHA was the Iowa governor’s race, where first-time candidate Zach Lahn had championed regenerative farming and promised to investigate the state’s high cancer rates. More than 1,000 people had thronged to a convention hall outside of Des Moines just a week ago for a MAHA Action rally for Lahn, where HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a surprise appearance and gave a rousing speech. But the race was always seen as a difficult one, with Lahn daring to oppose the powerful agricultural interests in the state.

Still, the seeds have been sown and a “powerful revolution” is underway, said Lyons.

“People have seen a set of truths that they can never un-see. And these truths have changed the way they view the world, changed their perspective permanently.”

Lyons referred to an NBC poll showing that a third of voters in the state of Iowa now consider themselves MAHA supporters.

“So that’s a third of a couple of million voters. And that kind of knowledge transcends politics, and it stays, it stays permanently,” he said. “It moves to the cultural level. And that’s where it can become something that remains forever.”

Americans are now saying things out loud that they wouldn’t have said just a few years ago, Lyons said, like the words “vaccine injury” and “heart inflammation after mRNA shots.” People are talking about athletes who collapse after vaccination, Plum Island, Lyme disease, the Wuhan Lab and additives in food.

“So, last night was not a repudiation of any of that, not any of those things we’ve learned, not one word of it,” he said.

Going forward, Lyons said MAHA is willing to partner with everyone to make America healthy again.

“There are good people across the political spectrum who want to be part of this, and we’re going to find every one of them,...” he said. “Our goal was never one election. Our goal is to end the chronic disease epidemic in America.”

It doesn’t matter whether someone is a Democrat or Republican, Lyons said.

“It really doesn’t matter. Like Bobby Kennedy says, a healthy person has a thousand dreams. A sick person has only one dream, and that’s to get healthy.”

Mary Holland, president of Children’s Health Defense, joined Lyons on the Media Hub, and echoed a number of his comments on working with Democrats, pointing out that more Democrats than Republicans had voted for the Luna amendment to the Farm Bill to remove the liability protections for manufacturers of glyphosate – 207 Democrats, and 73 Republicans.

Holland urged all Democrats who are considering working against Secretary Kennedy to “sit down and talk with him” instead.

She said he’s doing “extraordinary” things, adding that if we can get glyphosate out of agriculture and harmful additives out of our food, those would be huge accomplishments.

To the members of the MAHA movement, she said that Kennedy has not lost his integrity or his convictions.

“He’s a champion of health for all of us,” she said. “He’s not bought. He’s just up against some huge circumstances, where he’s not able to do everything.”

Zen Honeycutt, founder of the Moms Across America Movement, joined Lyons, praising Lahn as one of the few willing and able to name POEA, a specific toxic Roundup-formulation chemical, and urged states to stop renewing Roundup licenses.

She argued MAHA has benefited both political parties by making health a national priority, and praised Florida’s food testing under Surgeon General Dr. Joe Ladapo as a model of transparency worth expanding across the country.

Honeycutt also mentioned Moms Across America’s Toxin Free Town initiative that helps families cut children’s exposure to pesticides in the places they live and play. Communities are working with city councils, park districts, and school boards to adopt organic land care in parks, playgrounds, and school fields. She invited everyone to volunteer to lead a Toxin Free Town team and bring the effort to your community. Get Involved.

MAHA at the Midterms

In the 2026 midterm elections, MAHA Action backed 24 candidates and worked to generate support for them with social media posts, Media Hub appearances and get-out-the-vote calls and text messages to voters in their states.

Here are the eight who won on Tuesday:

Julia Letlow - Louisiana - U.S. Senate

In Louisiana, Rep. Julia Letlow won the state’s open U.S. Senate seat, defeating Democrat Jamie Davis 51% to 49% and becoming the first Republican woman Louisiana has sent to the Senate. She replaces Sen. Bill Cassidy, who spent the past year at odds with Secretary Kennedy over vaccines and finished last in the May primary after President Trump and MAHA Action lined up behind Letlow.

Letlow calls herself a MAHA mom, and her fight against chronic disease starts at home, where she has raised two young children on her own since losing her husband, Congressman-elect Luke Letlow, to Covid-19 complications in 2020.

Nearly 4 in 10 Louisiana adults live with obesity, the third-highest rate in the nation, and more than 15% have diabetes, compared with 12% nationally. “In many rural communities, they don’t even have healthy choices at the grocery store,” Letlow said on MAHA Action’s April 8 Media Hub. “So when I talk about this epidemic, I’m talking about my neighbors. I’m talking about the families I represent and kids I know by name.”

Letlow credits President Trump and Secretary Kennedy for forcing the issue into the open. “That’s why this movement matters,” she said, adding of Kennedy, “That takes real courage, and I stand with him.”

Her FRESH Act would put Kennedy’s new dietary guidelines into federal law, so that “future bureaucrats can’t turn back the clock on the MAHA movement.”

Anna Paulina Luna - Florida - 13th CD

In Florida, Representative Anna Paulina Luna held the 13th District with 49.5% of the vote, less than a point ahead of Democrat Leela Gray. Luna is an Air Force veteran who was first elected to Congress in 2022. In the last two years, she has emerged as one of the leading lights of the MAHA movement in Congress, spearheading the effort to amend the Farm Bill to remove the liability shield for makers of glyphosate. She represents Florida’s 13^th Congressional District, which includes Clearwater and the north end of St. Petersburg, and she refuses to accept PAC money from pharmaceutical companies. Last year, she introduced a bill called the “Do or Dye Act of 2025” to eliminate petroleum-based dyes from food sold in the United States. The bill would expand Kennedy’s plan to phase out eight artificial dyes linked to serious health problems, particularly in children. It included a total ban on Citrus Red No. 2 and Orange B by Dec. 31, 2025 and a phase-out of Green No. 3, Red No. 40, Yellow No. 5, Yellow No. 6, Blue No. 1, and Blue No. 2 by Dec. 31, 2026.

When the Farm Bill came before the House with liability protection for makers of pesticides, she told House leaders: “This is dead on arrival, we’re not going to accept it.” House leaders scheduled the vote on her amendment to remove that liability protection at 2:30 in the morning, hoping she wouldn’t bother coming to the House floor. She did. “I pulled up the donation history of the people who were arguing against me, and I said, ‘We can do this the clean way or we can do this the hard way. And if you guys are going to be mean, I’m going to call you guys out for how much money you’re taking [from pesticide manufacturers].’”

On the MAHA Action Media Hub, she called her House colleagues who take money from pesticide manufacturers “tone deaf” to the fact that “the American people don’t want to be poisoned.”

Luna was targeted for defeat this year by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in their Red-to-Blue program, and held onto the seat in what will surely go down as one of the toughest years for Republicans.

Brandon Gill - Texas - 26th CD

Brandon Gill won re-election by 55 percent on Tuesday in this district north of Dallas and Fort Worth. As a first-term Congressman, Gill has been one of the strongest voices on MAHA issues. He voted ‘yes’ on the Luna amendment, putting people over pesticide companies. He also cosponsored a bill to ban Covid vaccine mandates at universities, and he recently introduced a bill to end restaurant purchases with SNAP, or food stamps, which is now allowed in several states. This fast-food SNAP loophole allowed over $500 million in food stamps to be used at restaurants like McDonald’s and Burger King in just two years.

Gill grew up on a cattle ranch in west Texas, near Abilene, and went to Dartmouth College, where he was the editor of The Dartmouth Review. After graduating he worked as an investment banker and founded the Washington, D.C.-based news site, D.C. Enquirer, which quickly became popular among supporters of the new Trump administration. Gill and his wife, Danielle D’Souza Gill, moved back to Texas with their young children in 2023 and Gill launched his campaign for Congress, running for an open seat. He won an 11-way primary and was elected in 2024 as the youngest member of Congress at the time.

Gill has been a strong ally of HHS Secretary Kennedy, posting on X a clip of Kennedy’s appearance on CNN with Dana Bash in August and writing: “The media can’t acknowledge that the narrative they sold to us about Covid was false because to do so would be to admit that their credibility is gone. Telling Americans to ‘trust the experts’ stopped working the moment we learned that the ‘experts’ were lying to us.”

Mike Haridopolos - Florida - 8th CD

Also in Florida, Rep. Mike Haridopolos held the 8th Congressional District against Democratic Party challenger Jennifer Jenkins, 53.4% to 46.6%. Haridopolos was a college history professor on the Space Coast who served in the Florida legislature. He was first elected to Congress in 2024 and has emerged as a top supporter of MAHA. His district includes the Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

Haridopolos voted for the Luna amendment to take the liability protection for pesticide manufacturers out of the Farm Bill, and consistently champions patient-first healthcare. His wife, Stephanie Haridopolos, is a physician now serving as the director of health communications in the Office of the Surgeon General, and fulfilling the duties of the Surgeon General until someone is confirmed to the position.

On a recent MAHA Media Hub, Mike Haridopolos said there are questions that are being asked in Congress that “have never been asked before” and that this is proof that MAHA is changing the dialogue in Washington, D.C.

He also brought up the GRAS loophole that lets food companies add unknown ingredients to their food without notifying the FDA.

“This is something before I was elected to Congress I had no idea what the GRAS loophole was,” he said. “And it is so eye-opening to see what that is and how it became the law of the land. And we’re looking at this particular loophole and see what we can do to at least modify it if not change it completely. Because it impacts what you eat every day and how you live your life every day.”

In the U.S. House, Haridopolos is the majority whip of the powerful Financial Services Committee, and on the Media Hub in October, he talked about the connection between a healthier America and the financial health of the nation.

“My wife and I went to go visit a family member [in the hospital],” he said, “and we could not believe she’s sitting there with a Sprite and all of this sugar as she’s facing a real ailment at the hospital. And it was just eye-opening to us. Here we are trying to get folks healthier and they’re only adding more sugar to their very diet…I don’t want to overstress budgets, but budgets drive our discussions, and if we could really just make even a small percentage of our population healthier, not only will people be happier, but we’ll actually be able to save money in the process.”

Jace Yarbrough - Texas - 32nd CD

Jace Yarbrough, a Texas attorney who fought vaccine mandates, won in a newly redrawn congressional district east of Dallas on Tuesday. During Covid, Yarbrough sued the city of San Francisco on behalf of first responders who’d been fired for refusing the Covid vaccine. He also challenged unconstitutional mandates for Texas first responders in state court, went up against the Air Force to defend his own rights to free speech, and personally turned down career advancement rather than comply with the U.S. military’s vaccine mandate.

Yarbrough earned a law degree from Stanford University and founded his own law firm in Cedar Hill, Texas. He and his wife have five children and started a Christian classical farm school near their home.

The newly redrawn 32^nd Congressional District includes part of east Dallas and Plano and from there, and stretches east to take in mostly rural areas and small towns. Yarbrough won it on Tuesday with 51.5 percent of the vote.

Michael Alfonso - Wisconsin - 7th CD

At 26, Michael Alfonso will be the youngest member of Congress. He’s the grandson of Cuban immigrants and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a student, he stood up to the university administration and refused to get the mandated Covid vaccine, even after getting emails threatening him with academic probation if he refused.

“We need elected officials who are not going to forget what happened during Covid and they are going to hold these elected officials, these agency heads and these private companies accountable for poisoning Americans,” he said on the MAHA Action Media Hub last spring.

Alfonso is the son-in-law of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy, and was previously a producer on Dan Bongino’s podcast in Florida. He and his wife, Evita, had their first child earlier this year.

The district he’ll represent in Congress is the northernmost district in Wisconsin, bordering Minnesota on one side, and Lake Superior and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the north. It was previously represented by Rep. Tom Tiffany, who gave up the seat to run for governor.

Alfonso boldly made MAHA one of his campaign platforms, pledging to cut burdensome restrictions, support local agriculture, and “make healthy food affordable so we can fight chronic illness and prevent childhood obesity.”

On the Media Hub, Alfonso talked about the rising cost of health care.

“That’s where making America healthy again comes in,” he said. “If we want to lower the cost of health care, what better way than focusing on prevention, rather than treatment?” He outlined three plans he has as a member of Congress: making sure kids in schools have healthy meal options, stopping subsidies for unhealthy food through the SNAP program and cutting red tape to allow local farmers to sell their food directly to the people in their communities.

Anthony Constantino - New York - 21st CD

Anthony Constantino was elected to Congress on Tuesday with 51 percent of the vote in this northern New York district. Constantino is the co-founder of the multimillion-dollar printing company called Sticker Mule, and self-funded his campaign. His motto is “Nobody’s Man But Yours.” The 21st Congressional District is now represented by Rep. Elise Stefanik, who decided not to run again.

Constantino ran on a promise to “secure a farm bill that helps all farmers equally” and “cut burdensome farming regulations.” He also campaigned on a promise to support family farms. Frequently over the last two years, Constantino has spoken out in opposition to vaccine mandates and has expressed support for medical freedom. In October, he was endorsed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and also by the medical freedom group Teachers for Choice.

Constantino promises to be one of the most outspoken and entertaining members of Congress, if his election is any clue. At his victory party on Tuesday night, he berated reporters and threw several of them out of the event, calling them the “Evil Media.” To those in the district who voted for his opponent, Blake Gendebien, he said: “You made a big mistake but it’s Ok. I’m gonna spend the next two years winning you over, making you fall in love with me just like my employees did, just like all these great people that came out to support me did.”

Austin Rogers – Florida - 2nd CD

Austin Rogers, a 31-year-old attorney, defeated Democrat Amanda Marie Green in Florida’s 2nd Congressional District on Tuesday.

The northern Florida district includes the state capital of Tallahassee and also Panama City. It’s now represented in Congress by Rep. Neal Dunn, a physician, who announced earlier this year that he wouldn’t seek reelection.

Rogers served as a legal counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2023 to 2025 and then worked briefly as Florida Sen. Rick Scott’s general counsel before launching his congressional campaign. He’s a native of Panama City.

“As a younger candidate for Congress, I understand the feelings of many young adults, and would represent them well. I also have three young children, so I have a stake in this nation’s future. That’s one of the reasons I threw my hat in the ring,” Rogers said earlier this year.

Rogers is a champion of MAHA issues, inspired by a personal health story.

“I had a chronic IBS issue when I was younger,” he said in an interview, referring to irritable bowel syndrome. “I was constantly sick, went to dozens of doctors, and had procedures. What eventually cured my condition was a healthy diet. I stopped with seed oils and anything inflammatory.”

On the campaign trail, Rogers told media outlets that parents, and not bureaucrats, should be the ultimate decision makers on children’s health care.

Rogers emerged from an eight-candidate Republican primary in August and now he’s headed for Congress.

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And so did a lot of other really good people. But MAHA was up against some of the most powerful and best-funded interests in the world. They backed the candidates running against us. And as I said on this call in September, the forces that had been lined up against us are just monstrous. These are such powerful forces with such powerful lobbyists and so much money. And they had help. They had The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Politico, and it just goes on and on.

In the run up to this election, they went after MAHA. Whether anyone planned it or not, it really felt coordinated with one goal. Make sure MAHA doesn’t succeed in the midterms. And when the blue wave comes, call it a repudiation of MAHA.

Well, that’s not the way that I see it, and that’s not the way any of you should see it. Because let me say this as plainly as I can: The reports of MAHA’s death are greatly exaggerated. In fact, it’s wishful thinking by all those who want to continue poisoning the American public for profit.

MAHA is here to stay.

What I see is that we’ve won the hearts and minds of the American people. We haven’t won politically yet, but we’re on our way there – and we’re gonna get there.

Think about the words that Americans now say out loud. Vaccine injury. Heart inflammation after mRNA shots. Young athletes collapsing on the field after vaccination. Families who believe that their children develop brain damage after vaccination, who deserve answers, help, and compensation. Ultra-processed food and chronic disease. All of these things are questions that are here to stay. Glyphosate and other pesticides, and the debilitating illnesses that so many people now link to them.

Hard questions about Plum Island and Lyme disease and about the Wuhan lab, or thousands of additives in our food, many of them banned or restricted in Europe and all over the world. Food engineered to be hyper-palatable and engineered to keep our kids eating long after they’re full, long after anybody ought to be full.

Last night was not a repudiation of any of that, of any of those things we’ve learned, not one word of it. What it was is the idea that what’s important and what you should take away from it is that people have seen a set of truths that they can never unsee. And these truths have changed the way they view the world, changed their perspectives permanently. In Iowa, in an NBC poll, about a third of voters called themselves MAHA supporters – a third of a couple of million voters. And that kind of knowledge transcends politics and it stays. It’s moved to the cultural level. And that’s where it can become something that remains forever. And that’s what we’re gonna build on.

The newspapers, the corporate lackeys wanted MAHA to die. And the big companies and the lobbyists, they wanted MAHA to die too. Big Food, Big Ag, Big Pharma: They sell products that have hurt millions of Americans, and they’ve partnered with some of the richest people in the world, with politicians, with lobbyists – with one agenda, to keep making as much money as they can possibly make, regardless of the consequences for the rest of us and for our children.

Remember – when people who have lied to you about everything for decades suddenly start telling you that your movement has failed – understand what you’re really hearing. You’re hearing their fear and their panic. We’ve reached a tipping point, and too many people have suffered, too many have been injured. And they know what happened to them, and they’re never going back. So there’s no failure here.

Look at who won. Julia Letlow, elected to the U.S. Senate from Louisiana, taking the place of our nemesis, the pharma friend, Bill Cassidy. Anna Paulina Luna, glyphosate warrior, re-elected in Florida’s 13th district. Jace Yarbrough in Texas’s 32nd, Michael Alfonso in Wisconsin’s seventh, Austin Rogers in Florida’s second.

Half of MAHA PAC-sponsored or endorsed candidates won in the middle of an unprecedented blue wave.

So... What do we do now? I say, we build. We partner with absolutely everyone who’s willing to partner with us – companies who will listen, politicians who will work with us from any party, activists, influencers, MAHA moms in every corner of the country.

There are good people across the political spectrum who want to be part of this, and we’re gonna find every last one of them and fight with them. This is yet another coalition of the willing, people from every walk of life, every age group, every kind of company and nonprofit, every part of the country. And as Secretary Kennedy reminds us, we have to love our children more than we hate each other. And that is the spirit of this new coalition, and it’s going to take back our health and take back this country. Because our goal was never one election. Our goal is to end the chronic disease epidemic in America. And we know that Americans want to heal, and we’re going to help them heal so we can achieve a better world, even if we can’t achieve a perfect one, and even if we can’t win on a particular night.

So, if you’re a Big Pharma company, a Big Food company, a Big Ag company, a lobbyist, a media company celebrating the death of MAHA, I have news for you: We’re not standing outside the gates anymore. We’re inside the arena, and we are ready to fight, and we’re just getting started.

We haven’t even really begun to fight, and today’s the day. Just today, right now, we’re starting with millions of Americans on our side and all kinds of polling – 80% to 90% of Americans are ready to go because they know that their lives and their children’s lives and the future of the country depend on it.

We’ve changed the conversation, and now we have the opportunity to change the lives of everybody in the country.

On today’s show, we’re joined by a few incredible voices who have been in this movement long before it was called MAHA.

They’ve been fighting for truth, for real science, for accountability, and so we’re going to be joined by Dr. Joe Ladapo, Mary Holland, and Zen Honeycutt.

This is not a celebration of last night because there’s nothing to really celebrate – but we can celebrate, I think, if anything, for what we know is possible. We’re gonna keep today’s show just a bit shorter than usual. People had a very long night. We had a big team on the ground trying to help Zach. And all of you who fought so hard deserve a rest. You did an incredible job. You laid it all on the field. But there was no way that I was gonna let this day pass without coming up with a statement and without talking to all of you.

Let’s start with Dr. Joe Ladapo, the Surgeon General from Florida. He earned both his MD and his PhD in Health Policy from Harvard. He was a vocal opponent of the oppressive Covid measures and documented his experience in his book Transcend Fear: A Blueprint for Mindful Leadership in Public Health. He has been one of the most fearless voices in the country for medical freedom and honest science. Welcome Joe, it’s great to have you back!

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Kennedy referenced his environmental work and talked about the mighty Hudson River. I see that river regularly because I live just a few miles from its shore. When I go on hikes with my sons, I remind them that the Hudson is alive again and that Kennedy was crucial in healing it.

Not too long ago, the Hudson was a lifeless, poisoned body of water. It was contaminated with PCBs, mercury, and other toxins. The fish were all dead or dying. The Bald Eagles that fed on the fish in the Hudson Valley were going extinct.

You could count the number of Bald Eagles nesting in the region on one hand.

America did that to the Hudson River. We desecrated our own water, our own land.

In 1984, Kennedy arrived at the shores of the Hudson as a young environmental attorney. He listened to the fisherman – the people connected to the river and to the land. The people who worked the river.

Kennedy chose those people over the experts and bureaucrats. He put his talents as a lawyer to work and brought the polluters to court.

The cleanup started with hundreds of hours of tedious and often acrimonious public engagement. The process was messy. It took hard work and sacrifice.

And it took time.

But now, forty years later, the Hudson River is alive again. Sturgeon and other fish populations are rebounding. Eagles are nesting. Even whales have returned.

There is still more work to do. Although fish are thriving, it is still unsafe to eat them in certain parts of the Hudson. The fisherman and the industry they ran for hundreds of years have not come back.

Healing takes time.

As a nation, we are just at the beginning of our clean up. MAHA, at its core, is about cleaning up our bodies from the myriads of toxic insults that Big Ag, Big Food, Big Chem, and Big Pharma have unleashed on our countrymen. In doing this work, we are restoring our souls.

Zach Lahn is seeking to become Iowa’s next governor and has said how much Kennedy has influenced him. He’s outlined a similar plan – clean up the water, restore the land and the people will be healthy again.

The Republican candidate intends to reduce nitrate and other contaminant levels in the state’s drinking water, echoing Kennedy’s success with the Hudson .

Lahn spoke about Iowa’s cancer crisis and how Iowans now dying at sixty years old had parents who died at ninety. Like Kennedy, he called out corporate capture and pointed blame at polluters, Big Ag and Big Pharma. Lahn also noted that the public health and medical establishment have done nothing to regain the trust they severed during the Covid era.

Lahn has focused his campaign on these issues because he, too, listened to the people. “Iowa has the best land, the best farmers and the best people,” Lahn said.

From the podium in Iowa, Lyons added that the state needs Lahn precisely because he cares about its children’s future and its citizens’ present. “This is the moment when we can do the right thing, and we can have a great human being in office, who is going to do things that will benefit every one of us,” Lyons said.

As you head to the polls on Tuesday, we ask you to consider to vote for Zach Lahn for Governor of Iowa and other MAHA-endorsed candidates, including Joe Mitchell, who is seeking Iowa’s 2^nd Congressional District; Representative Anna Paulina Luna in Florida’s 13^th Congressional District; Mike Haridopolos, Florida’s 8^th, ; Vic Mellor in Rhode Island’s 2^nd ; Tom Barrett, in Missouri’s 7^th ; Kevin Kiley in California’s 6th; Brandon Herrera in Texas’ 23rd; and Jace Yarbrough in Texas’ 32^nd.

By listening to the people, Kennedy brought healing to one of America’s most iconic waterways. All MAHA candidates share Kennedy’s love and respect for nature, as well as his humanism and core values. They need our support before healing can begin.

It’s time to do your part. Go vote.

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Steven Bannon (SB): You got up at four in the morning to get back here. You had a rally yesterday, Make America Healthy again. The president just announced scratching Kansas. They’re going to do a tele town hall. He’s going to Iowa on Sunday. You were just in Iowa. Give us a report from the ground.

Tony Lyons (TL): We had an incredible night there. We had all the MAHA dream team and you know, Zach Lahn is the MAHA dream candidate but we had Bobby Kennedy, Calley Means, Zen Honeycutt, Joe Ladapo, Joel Salatin. I mean, it was just a great night. It went on for about two hours. There were a thousand people there. It was covered by about a hundred different media.

Zach was really on fire and he really needs to win this. And if you look at his life, he doesn’t have to do this. He’s a successful businessman, but he’s driven, he’s sincere, he’s smart, he is passionate, he’s authentic, and he genuinely cares about not only his seven children that he’s raising on a homestead in the state, but for every child in the state.

And he’s gonna clean up Iowa’s water, he’s going to test farm chemicals in the state because he doesn’t trust the corrupt corporate science, and he’s gonna serve kids locally grown food for school lunches. There’s so many different MAHA things that he’s going to do. And it’s gonna be a blueprint for what needs to be done for the whole country.

Bobby Kennedy said that this is the most important race in the country, because this is just a test, for MAHA, for what’s possible. And he said that he loves Zach Lahn because we have to make this country the breadbasket of the world without degrading our soils, and most importantly, without poisoning our people and all of our children. And we’ve been doing that now for a generation and it has to stop.

Lahn is gonna make cancer and clean water the heart of his tenure and he’s going to treat chronic disease as the crisis that it is, and not just some statistic. We spend three times the amount of money as any of the 30 industrialized countries in the world on healthcare, and we have the worst health outcomes. Lahn is talking about prevention, he’s talking about ending the corruption in this country, and about not just treating people, but actually making them healthy. And he’s running against a career politician, this guy Rob Sand. And we’ve all seen people like him before, and he’s what the country is sick of and wants to get rid of.

But we’ve never had somebody like Zach Lahn as the governor of a state. So the real choice is: do we want another career politician who’s going to protect these big corporations and the people in power, the Big Pharma and Big Ag, all these food companies, or all these people who have basically failed their way to the top by making money, becoming more famous, more powerful, while the people of their state got more sick and suffer chronic disease at levels that don’t exist in any other country in the world. Or do we want somebody who’s a political outsider, who’s a farmer, who’s gonna fight for your children, for our health, for our freedom, for land.

Zach Lahn is gonna challenge the status quo. He’s gonna end the corruption, and he’s going to end 70% of children eating ultra-processed food and eating dangerous pesticides and all the Big Pharma coming into our schools and giving our children drugs that they don’t need and that keep them sick for their whole lives. He’s said that we have to get rid of the MRNA Covid shots. He’s gonna get the best possible deal for the people of his state and then he’s gonna be, like I said, a blueprint for what can happen all around the country.

The problem is: Zach is down in the polls, but he was down in primaries by a lot. And MAHA voters came out and took him over the edge. Nobody had heard of him two years back and he came out of nowhere, won the primary and now he’s within four points. But if you think about that, Donald Trump in 2024 was down four points four days before the vote. And then he won by 13 points. So, you know, the [polling] numbers in the state really don’t mean that much. So he’s trailing now, but the polls were wrong before. They’re gonna be wrong this time.

We’re gonna pull out the stops. We’re going to get everybody to vote! Everybody! You can’t be complacent. This is an existential vote and people have to get out there and vote for Zach Lahn and have this be sort of the test of what’s possible in a state, of whether we can actually take the country back from these corrupt companies, from these corrupt politicians, and really protect people.

SB: Real quickly, because the president is going, they’re going to have the trick or treat holiday, you know, all Hallows Eve on Saturday at the White House. We have all the kids there. There’s some there now. The New York Times and MSNBC tell me MAHA is dead and it’s going to get buried on Tuesday in Iowa. Your response, sir?

TL: What’s gonna happen is that MAHA is gonna help get him over the finish line, get him back those four points and show The New York Times and all of these places that have been wrong about everything for years, that MAHA is here and it’s here to stay and it is winning, and it winning all around the country, and the only place that it’s losing is with places like The New York Times, who wanna go back to allowing these corrupt companies to poison our children and they should think for themselves. What side are they on? This is not even a Democrat or a Republican question, this is our children, this is every child in the country, and they are on the wrong side of history and they should be ashamed.

SB: Tony, where do people go to get more information about the Make America Healthy Again movement, and,Tony, where do people go to find out more about this all-important Iowa?

TL: Iowa is about MAHA. We’ve got to win there. This is the MAHA state that should go to MAHA. For more information on our MAHA endorsements, please go to www.MAHAaction.org/endorsements. And please register to vote, if you haven’t yet.

SB: Tony, thank you for going out to Iowa. Thank you for carrying the message out there.

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A year and a half after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked the food industry to pull petroleum-based dyes out of the food supply, the candy aisle at most supermarkets across America looks almost the same as it did before the industry agreed to comply with HHS voluntary recommendations.

That means this Halloween American children will carry home the same candy they always have, tinted with the same Red No. 40, Yellow No. 5, and Blue No. 1.

What happened?

Dye-free versions of some of the biggest candy brands do exist now, although they have to be ordered from Amazon because many candy makers are still moving slowly, long after the rest of the food industry has begun to clear synthetic dyes out.

A request, not a rule

On April 22, 2025, HHS and the Food and Drug Administration announced a plan to phase out six petroleum dyes: Red No. 40, Yellow No. 5, Yellow No. 6, Blue No. 1, Blue No. 2, and Green No. 3. Kennedy has said the dyes are “clearly associated with a variety…of diseases, including cancers and behavioral disease and neurological diseases like ADHD.”

Under the plan, food and candy companies voluntarily set their own deadlines, which run from the end of 2026 to the end of 2027. However, if a company misses their own target, there are no legal consequences and the government is not enforcing it – yet.

The FDA did issue a ban on Red No. 3 in January 2025, and by law, food and candy sold in the United States cannot contain it after January 15, 2027. After that date, the FDA can pull any products containing Red No. 3 from shelves.

The food industry took action, but candy makers are dragging their feet

Of the 24 largest food manufacturers tracked by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), an independent consumer watchdog that has campaigned to get synthetic dyes out of food since the 1970s, about half pledged to remove synthetic dyes from everything they sell, and several have already taken action. Nestlé USA, Tyson Foods, and Campbell’s have cleared the dyes from their American lineups. General Mills has pulled them from every food product it sells to schools, and Welch’s reformulated its fruit snacks to omit dyes. For a voluntary program, that is real change.

The candy aisle is where progress stalls: Hershey pledged in July 2025 to remove synthetic dyes from all its U.S. products, including Reese’s, Kit Kat, Jolly Rancher, and Twizzlers, by the end of 2027, and it is the only major American candymaker with a full, dated commitment. But the end of 2027 is more than a year away, so this Halloween, Hershey’s Jolly Rancher, Twizzlers, and Reese’s Pieces are still colored with petroleum dye.

The candy company scorecard

• Mars (M&M’s, Skittles, Starburst) refused Kennedy’s call in July 2025, calling it “premature to make commitments,” then reversed under pressure, including a deceptive-practices investigation by the Texas attorney general. It now sells its naturally colored versions on Amazon.

• Ferrero owns Ferrara Candy and Nerds, Brach’s, SweeTarts, Laffy Taffy, Trolli, and Jelly Belly. It carries the highest share of dyed products of any company CSPI tracked – 60 percent in 2020 – and has said it will do only what the law forces, dropping Red No. 3 by 2027 and following any state bans where they apply.

• Mondelēz (Sour Patch Kids, Swedish Fish) says it is “actively working” on natural dyes but has set no deadline, after missing its own 2015 promise to drop artificial colors by 2020.

• Spangler (Dum Dums) kept its dyes, and its chief executive complained that beet juice makes a “nice red” but “tastes like beets.”

Because the phase-out is voluntary, every one of these companies can stall and wait it out, and many are doing just that. But this MAHA fight is moving to the states. California, West Virginia, and Texas have passed their own dye laws to enforce what the federal government requested, and the candy and dye industries are suing to block them.

Clean candy is available on Amazon but not in stores

Mars is the sharpest example of how a little progress can look like a lot. Its naturally colored M&M’s, Skittles, and Starburst, tinted with beet juice, turmeric, and spirulina, are real, but you can only buy them online, and the M&M’s are still missing blue and brown until Mars solves the color problem by 2028. Selling them online lets Mars test how many shoppers will hunt for the clean version without giving up grocery shelf space, which stays stocked with the dyed candy Mars says “consumers already know and love.”

Synthetic dyes cause real health issues

CSPI places every synthetic dye in its worst category – “Avoid” – and tells shoppers plainly to “avoid all synthetic dyed foods.” The specific concerns include Red No. 3 causing thyroid tumors, Yellow No. 5 contaminated with a carcinogenic ingredient, benzidine, and Blue 1, Red 40, Yellow 5, and Yellow 6 are known to trigger hypersensitivity reactions.

While the cancer and allergy concerns are serious, it was the evidence that these dyes affect children’s behavior that pushed Europe to act. A 2007 randomized, double-blind study at the University of Southampton, in the United Kingdom, found that the dyes increased hyperactivity in normal children, not just those with attention problems.

Since 2010, the European Union has required a warning label on foods made with six of the problematic dyes, and California reached the same conclusion in 2021. After reviewing the research, the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment found that “synthetic food dyes are associated with adverse neurobehavioral outcomes in some children,” according to its director, Dr. Lauren Zeise.

Asa Bradman, the UC Berkeley scientist who led the review, noted that “children tended to have higher exposures than adults,” and higher still in lower-income families.

Better candy options for Halloween

There are dye-free candy options available at the stores, and some that were never dyed to begin with. Those include Tootsie Rolls, Twix, 100 Grand, Werther’s, Bit-O-Honey, mini Hershey bars and Kisses that do not contain any synthetic dyes. Health-food stores like Whole Foods, Sprouts, and Natural Grocers carry brands that leave synthetic dyes and artificial flavorings out of everything they make, among them YumEarth, SmartSweets, Surf Sweets, Unreal, Black Forest, and ChocZero. Many Target and Kroger stores now stock these cleaner candy versions also.

A year and a half after Kennedy and HHS called for their removal, petroleum dyes are finally disappearing from much of America’s food. MAHA families can make the dye-free choice themselves, filling the Halloween bowl with candy that was never dyed and skipping the hold-out candy brands.

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In an interview, Lahn told The MAHA Report that after meeting with Kennedy and Joel Salatin, he decided to launch his bid for Iowa’s next governor. Thereafter, he built his campaign platform around MAHA policies, he said, promising to protect Iowans’ water supplies and help farmers use fewer chemical inputs.

This was an aggressive gambit for a Republican in Iowa, the nation’s largest corn producer and second-largest soy producer. But this also made the alliance between MAHA and Lahn a natural fit.

Opening Wednesday night’s standing-room-only rally, MAHA PAC President Tony Lyons shared how and why Lahn became an early, strong MAHA candidate. “If there was any candidate who could be a MAHA candidate, it had to be Zach Lahn,” he proclaimed.

“With a candidate like Zach Lahn, we can see change for Iowans such as we are seeing at the federal level. He wants to help rebuild the whole state of Iowa,” said Lyons. “He will win now because Iowans recognize the real thing when they see it…. This is the moment when we can do the right thing, and rebuild the state of Iowa and the whole country!”

Hours before the event, energy and excitement were high. The food was apropos: Lahn donor and MAHA ally Steak ‘n Shake provided a robust supply of beef tallow French fries and grass-finished burgers. And the first 100 attendees received a complimentary copy of Pete Evans’ The MAHA Cookbook, while others donned various MAHA hats (often stacked atop a MAGA or other hat). Raw chocolate milk was free, as were samplings of pork and beef bacon and other meaty treats. MAHA T-shirts, hats, and buttons intermingled with Lahn slogans on shirts and jackets. American flags and Christian symbolism were prominent.

Following Lyons, Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo took the stage to proclaim that he and his family are ‘all in’ on the MAHA mission. “We need leaders like Zach Lahn who will restore our connection to our birthright, an agenda for better health…. It’s important to vote for people who care about you and have your back. Let’s support Zach Lahn and every candidate out there who will stand for MAHA and your family’s health!”

Next up was Iowa House District 43 candidate Nicole Hasso, a particular firebrand who exhorted her fellow Iowans: “Why are we here? Because we want clean water, because we want Iowa first, and because we declare war on cancer.” Hasso thanked Kennedy for “bringing MAHA to Iowa,” and elicited loud cheers when she shouted, “Our state is at a crossroads. I don’t want them to Minnesota my Iowa!” Referring to Lahn’s Democratic Party opponent, Rob Sand, she said she has knocked on thousands of doors, and one message she has received repeatedly is that Lahn must “Go Pound Sand!”

During her turn at center stage, Moms Across America founder Zen Honeycutt shared how she had lost many family members because of unhealthy food, including her son Ben. Zen explained that Iowa exports most of its agricultural production for livestock feed or other products, echoing Lahn’s proposal to one day source 80% of Iowans’ food from within the state. “Iowa grown, for our own,” she chanted, as the crowd enthusiastically joined in. “I’m here today for the man who puts Iowa first, and it is Zach Lahn…. Be responsible for health and freedom, and vote for Zach Lahn today!”

Iowans also spoke, including congressional candidate Joe Mitchell, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird, and Iowa House District 40 candidate Bill Gustoff. The effect was to meld national and local MAHA passions behind Lahn, and build toward the night’s big names.

Many Iowans clearly savor their national leadership on MAHA issues. MAHA PAC arranged a bus to transport 59 supporters from Cedar Rapids, over 120 miles away. Following the event, chiropractors Dr. Janet Cuhel and Dr. Gene Cretsinger gushed about the intense enthusiasm they experienced at the event, writing, “We feel this will be part of history. The MAHA support and endorsement makes me proud to be an Iowan. We also want to thank MAHA for getting a bus for the event.”

Another speaker, Calley Means, was infused with the spirited zeal of the occasion. He asked the audience: “Why are Iowan kids so sick? Why are China and hedge funds buying up Iowa farmland?” Means labeled Lahn an “insurgent candidate” who focuses on human health, challenging Iowans to choose between the status quo and visionary, bipartisan solutions. “Bobby Kennedy is the most fearless man I have ever met,” Means said. “We must put people like Bobby and Zach Lahn in power… The reason we have these crises is because of corruption, and there are so few leaders like Zach who speak the truth.”

Self-styled ‘lunatic farmer’ Joel Salatin took the food-sovereignty theme to new heights during his remarks. Salatin shared how decades of regulatory capture by industry lobbyists has destroyed farmers’ freedom to grow and sell the food most Americans consume: prepared foods. If farmers could bake and sell chicken pot pies, he said, they would make far more money than selling the chickens used to make them. Salatin then warned that half of all American farmland will be transferred in the next 15 years, so the nation needs a new generation of land lovers:

“We call them ‘land masseuses,’ to massage our landscape instead of exploit it, to come to it as nurturers rather than conquistadors, and to view themselves as part of a healthy food system, to bring healthy food to Americans, to bring health back to Americans, and choice back to our food system. The man to do that is Zach Lahn!”

The stage was set for Lahn to share his vision for a healthier Iowa. Lahn’s full speech covered a broad range of issues and was published in full here at The MAHA Report. His campaign has centered on MAHA policies that support regenerative agriculture to reduce water pollution, rebuild soils, and provide nutritious, Iowa-grown food in school lunches.

Iowa has some of the highest cancer rates in the nation. Lahn has advocated for reducing nitrate and other contaminant levels in Iowans’ drinking water, much as Kennedy years ago fought to clean up the Hudson River. Lahn acknowledged the two men’s shared passion, telling the Iowa rally crowd:

“One of the reasons I got into this race, one of the primary reasons, was because I believed in what Bobby Kennedy [Jr.] said. He said: we’re gonna make real progress on these issues when we decide that ‘we love our children more than we hate each other.’ This man has been an inspiration to our country. And I will tell you, the entire country owes his family a debt of gratitude.”

Kennedy joined Zach on stage. Known for his passionate impromptu speeches, he began by recounting his decades-long battle to stop pollution of the Hudson River, during which he learned of laws prohibiting unauthorized discharges into waterways. He explained the ancient legal foundations of the idea of a ‘public trust’ in which the air, water, and wildlife “belong to all the people. Everybody has a right to use them.” Applying this ethic in the MAHA movement, he argued that “Every child in this state has the right to drink water without the fear that they’re gonna get cancer, to breathe air without getting asthma.”

Kennedy next tied this idea of public rights to America’s historical identity as a nation defined by wilderness and wild landscapes, citing famous American thinkers, writers, and painters who helped shape the nation’s self-image around a connection to grasslands, mountains, and prairies. As humans, Kennedy said, “our connection to nature is the closest connection that we have to God… These landscapes connect us to everything that is important.” He then recounted pivotal wilderness episodes in the lives of great spiritual leaders (including Moses, Mohammed, and Buddha), noting that “Almost all of Christ’s parables come from the farm.”

Having developed his theme of the connection between farming, food, and human health, Kennedy expressed his conviction that “it is a sin to poison our children.” He closed with this MAHA message:

“We have to think of a way to grow food without poisoning our kids, without giving ourselves cancer, without destroying the soils that enrich us and enrich our microbiome and connect our brain with all our organs and make us healthy, robust, and vibrant people. And we need somebody who is really smart, who understands these issues… And I can think of the most important ones, and it’s the person we’re here tonight to support.”

These words neatly tied together the night’s themes. The audience’s intense passion inspired the many speakers, who in turn rallied the crowd to cheers, clapping, and several standing ovations. Lahn was visibly energized, pausing at one point to observe, “I can feel the movement. Can you feel the movement? I can feel it … One of my goals for the state of Iowa is to make Iowa the real food capital of the country.”

In just four days, Iowans will vote for their future – for all of ours.

For information on voting click below

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• Xavier Becerra is the Biden-era HHS Secretary poised to be installed by the Democratic Party as California’s next Governor.

• During Becerra’s tenure as HHS Secretary, he pushed for medical mandates, pandemic countermeasures that had no scientific basis, suppressed early treatment protocols, and censored any viewpoint that differed from official narratives. In addition, RFK Jr. has alleged that under Becerra’s watch, hundreds of thousands of children referred to HHS custody were lost to traffickers; that Becerra’s HHS encouraged transgender surgeries, and that it disabled the entire program-integrity apparatus, allowing hundreds of billions of dollars of theft from the agency.

• Steve Hilton’s alignment with RFK Jr. in philosophy and policy makes him MAHA’s favorable pick for Governor. He values health, bodily autonomy, parental rights, evidence-based science, and government transparency, and vows to restore the rights stripped away by the Newsom administration.

• In the latter half of this article, I share video clips of Steve Hilton, taken from the MAHA Gubernatorial Townhall cohosted by We The People Team and pickax. The videos cover key MAHA issues such as vaccine mandates, parental rights, geoengineering, farming, processed food, veterans’ affairs, corporate capture, and more.

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The “Anointed One” - Xavier Becerra

It came as no surprise that the oligarchical machine picked Xavier Becerra to be the next Governor of California, continuing Gavin Newsom’s legacy. Of Latino heritage, charming, charismatic, and on the surface seemingly caring for the rights of immigrants, Becerra appears perfectly suited for our racially diverse state.

Backed by deep-pocketed corporations and organizations — including Meta, Uber, Laborers International Union, California Association of Realtors, the California Medical Association, and of course the California Democratic Party — Becerra’s campaign has substantially more financial support than his opponent Steve Hilton. Furthermore, according to CALDOGE, CHIRLA has spent $72 million in tax dollars to mobilize immigrants to vote for Xavier Becerra (https://www.facebook.com/jenny.r.leroux/videos/2208359879901306/; https://www.herbmorgan.com/post/cal-doge-chirla-taxpayer-funding-investigation).

As the Biden-era HHS Secretary and RFK Jr.’s predecessor, he is antithetical to everything RFK Jr. stands for — which caters to the Trump aversion many in the state hold. Since Trump and RFK Jr. took office in early 2025, California health authorities have enacted many policies to counter federal health reforms, and Becerra, if elected Governor, will undoubtedly continue those policies.

With the machine rushing to install him as Governor, Becerra is doing very little to campaign for his candidacy. He appears calm and composed in his interviews, giving off an air of assurance that he WILL be the next Governor.

The Bad, The Ugly, and The Lost Children Under the Watch of Xavier Becerra

As former Attorney General of California and then Biden’s HHS Secretary, Becerra has a long track record of opposing the demands of the Health Freedom community — bodily autonomy, parental rights, evidence-based science, freedom of speech, etc. Here are a few examples of his mismanagement of HHS during the COVID pandemic:

• Federal vaccine mandates: Supported COVID vaccine mandates for federal employees, healthcare workers, and in school settings, with termination or loss of employment as consequences for non-compliance.

• Religious exemption litigation: Continued to limit conscience-based exemptions to vaccine mandates.

• Early treatment suppression: HHS and the FDA aggressively discouraged ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as COVID treatments and coordinated with social media platforms to remove content on those topics; medical professionals who prescribed these drugs faced board complaints and institutional action including suspension of medical licenses.

• “Wait and see” (non)treatment protocol: Official guidance discouraged outpatient interventions in favor of monitoring until hospitalization, by which point many had suffered catastrophic and irreversible harms.

• Disregard for VAERS signals: Adverse event reports immediately following the rollout of emergency-authorized vaccines hit one million in a single year (roughly 17x the pre-pandemic baseline) yet drew no meaningful scrutiny from HHS.

• Misinformation labeling: HHS categorized vaccine skepticism and promotion of “unapproved” early treatments as “misinformation” and worked with digital platforms to suppress such content.

• Restrictions on independent research: Researchers examining vaccine injuries or questioning official vaccine narratives were subjected to funding cuts, publication barriers, and adverse career consequences during Becerra’s tenure.

An exchange between Becerra and Sen. Rand Paul during a September 30, 2021 Senate hearing exemplifies Becerra’s arrogance and his general philosophy that disregards science, common sense, and basic respect for the rights of the people he’s supposed to serve. In this clip, Becerra claims that his policies “follow the science,” while outright denying any knowledge of natural immunity and the adverse effects of vaccines on the immune system.

In his June 10, 2026 response to a hit piece in the New York Times, Secretary Kennedy provided more details on Becerra’s conduct as former HHS Secretary:

“When I took this job, the building was empty. About 90% of the employees were not coming to work. I changed that, but your newspaper never covers my reforms. Nor did you cover the fact that my predecessor almost never showed up for work here during his four years in office. When we came in, there were still artifacts from the first Trump administration in many of our office drawers because no one showed up for work during the Biden years. Just as Rochelle Walensky spent her entire term as CDC Director in Cambridge, Xavier Becerra reportedly spent most of his term as HHS Secretary in California. (I live in California, but I’ve only been there once in fifteen months).

“His only notable accomplishments here were losing 300,000 children, referred to HHS for custody and care, to human traffickers and drug runners, encouraging transgender surgeries, and disabling the entire program-integrity apparatus, allowing hundreds of billions of dollars of theft from my agency. I have set out to find the children Becerra lost. He is now the front-runner for the governor of California. These are not invented stories; they are genuine scandals that the Times will never cover, presumably, because the malefactors are Democrats.”

***Exact figures of missing children vary across reporting sources, with some estimates well above 300,000. See references list for more information.

A Republican Protégé Emerges in a State Perpetually Monopolized by Democrats

On June 9, 2026, after an agonizing week-long ballot-counting saga following California’s primary election, Trump-backed Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton finally emerged as one of the top two winners, entering a face-off race for November’s general election against the infamous Biden-era HHS Secretary.

Promising to restore the “California Dream” through affordability, deregulation, and results-oriented governance, Steve Hilton has garnered massive support from Republicans and independents who have grown tired of heavy-handed Democratic rule. His awareness of issues such as geoengineering, medical freedom, and pandemic countermeasures, and his alignment with Secretary Kennedy, also lend him appeal to the MAHA crowd that values health, parental rights, and bodily autonomy as top priorities.

Inevitably, some may view his endorsement by Trump as a blemish. I would argue this election is about what will benefit us locally. It has very little to do with Trump. Love or hate him, his endorsement doesn’t make Steve his proxy. The vast majority of officials in our state government are still Democrats. As a Republican Governor, Steve is committed to working with his Democratic colleagues congenially and, most importantly, abiding by state laws.

In April this year, We The People Team, together with pickax, hosted a MAHA Gubernatorial Townhall with then-candidates entering the primaries: Chad Bianco, Leo Zacky, and Lewis Herms, along with Steve Hilton. In the townhall, candidates answered the essential questions that MAHA voters care most about, each offering an impressive scope of knowledge on these topics. The following clips are taken from that townhall, where Steve Hilton offered his insights and policy proposals on these key MAHA issues. Take a listen, and you’ll see he understands the needs, wants, and pain of MAHA voters in this nanny state. He’s the only one of the two general-election candidates who aligns with MAHA philosophically and politically, regardless of party affiliation.

Covid Accountability Commission

Steve plans to establish a Covid Accountability Commission to hold accountable the likes of Anthony Fauci and to prevent future violations of our rights under the guise of health emergencies.

On Gaslighting on Vaccine Injury

Steve acknowledges that the gaslighting of parents with vaccine-injured children has to stop.

On Environmental Regulations

Steve promises to do away with carbon-centered policies and excessive environmental regulations, and focus on nature-oriented policies that put communities first.

On Geoengineering

Steve promises to stop the gaslighting and investigate chemtrails.

On Firefighters and Veterans

Steve promises to innovate firefighting to protect the health and safety of firefighters, and take good care of veterans financially and in other respects.

On Healthy Food

Steve believes California should be leading the MAHA movement worldwide when it comes to healthy food. And it can be achieved by removing overregulation and letting businesses thrive.

On Parental Rights and Vaccine Mandates

Steve vows to restore religious exemption and medical exemption.

On Farming, Chemicals, and Preserving the Ag Industry

As Governor, Steve will bring people together — farmers, scientists, and the public — to preserve agriculture in the state while phasing out harmful chemical use.

On Corporate Interest - the “Third House”

Steve vows to expose and stop behested payments (political donations solicited by officials) and corporate control — including the medical industry’s control — of government.

On School Nutrition

Steve promises to get the corruption out of school lunches, bring back wholesome food, and remove industrialized processed food from public schools.

Watch the full gubernatorial townhall here: https://rumble.com/v78k73q-make-california-healthy-again-gubernatorial-town-hall.html

Let’s Make California Healthy Again

RFK Jr., a long-time California resident and advocate for the rights of Californians, is now at the top of the health agencies, pushing through the agendas of the Health Freedom community he has served for 20 years. It would be the ultimate irony to have his predecessor — who is antithetical to everything he stands for — installed as our Governor to continue blocking his reform efforts in California. It’s time for MAHA to vote for a Kennedy-aligned Governor, take our rights back, and Make California Healthy Again.

Scarlett Fang is a Health Freedom warrior mom. Host of Holistic Health Space Podcast. Contributor to Children’s Health Defense CA chapter. Opinions expressed in this channel are not medical advice. HHSpodcast2025@gmail.com

You’ve heard a common theme here. You heard Calley Means talk about it. You heard Joel Salatin — by the way, as an Iowa kid who grew up in Northwest Iowa, out in the country, coming to this place right now, sharing the same stage with Calley Means, with Joel Salatin, and with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — what an honor.

Let me tell you: you’ve heard a common theme. And that common theme is one of corruption. One of the big versus the little. One of government choosing a side against the [special] interests. And I’ll tell you what you all saw in the primary. That has not changed one bit.

I am here for a very simple reason. I am not for sale. One of the reasons I got into this race, one of the primary reasons, was because I believed in what Bobby Kennedy [Jr.] said. He said: we’re gonna make real progress on these issues when we decide that '“we love our children more than we hate each other.” That’s what he said. And you’ll notice that not everybody up here believes all of the same things. This is not a monolith. This is what it’s supposed to be. It’s not supposed to be where everybody’s thinking the same thing all of time. General Patton said, “If everybody’s thinking the same way, somebody’s not thinking.”

I think, in politics, we’ve seen that. We’ve seen as politicians have been given the piece of paper by a special interest group or a corporate giant that tells them exactly what to think, exactly what to say, and they do it because they’ve been bought off.

You are in the presence right now of people who are not for sale, who are not able to be bought off, who are going to do the bidding of the people. This is much deeper than politics. I think you know that. This is a spiritual battle. This is the battle that we’re in. This is battle of corruption, of people that would put the bottom lines of a company ahead of the health of our children, something that we believe as Republicans, we believe in the free market. I know there’s Republicans, Independents, and Democrats here today. We believe in free market, but we also understand that for a long time, a select few have gotten very rich off the backs of the health of our children. And when I am governor, I am telling you this right now, in the State of Iowa, that is over!

I think there’s a lot of things that we should be absolutely proud of as Iowans. In the Iowa legislature, the Iowa governor stood up to make Iowa a place that protects the lives of the unborn in our state, something we should be very proud of. But I brought a message that goes further than that, because I think we have to go further than that. We’ve been ignoring some of the big issues as well. That is a monumental shift, a monumental change for the state of Iowa. It’s something we should be very proud of. It’s a spiritual battle, but here’s the deal. The fight for life doesn’t end at birth. The fight to put healthy food grown in the state of Iowa, in our schools, is a pro-life issue.

You know, I was at a debate, anybody watch the debates by the way? And I said I have a moonshot goal, which by the way, we all have to have moonshot goals. Secretary Kennedy has moonshot goals. We have to big ideas. We’re not gonna fix this system by fiddling around the edges. I have the moonshot of seeing a day when 80% of the food served in our public schools comes right here from the state of Iowa. And in this debate, one of the moderators argued with me on this, said, you know, that it’s going to be really difficult to do. Good. We’re here to solve big problems. We are not here for the small problems. We’re here to make life better for the next generation.

Even on the educational front, innovation in our schools, the idea that young kids shouldn’t be expected to sit in a desk for seven hours a day and when they can’t, told there’s something wrong with them and then put on a medication — when there’s actually something wrong with the system. Our kids requiring less medication is a pro-life issue.

And I’m gonna tell you something that I’ve gotten a lot of flack for. And if you notice anything about me it is I don’t back down. I am a fighter and I will fight for you. That’s my promise — was something I’ve got a lot of flack for, but here’s the deal. I’m not a politician. I don’t just regurgitate the talking points. I read the studies. I try to understand. And, ultimately, I do it for the same reason you do it, because I want my children to be healthy. I want the next generation to be healthy. I want them to live long lives.

Right now in the state of Iowa, we are going to funerals for people who are dying at 65, whose parents live to be 90. It’s unacceptable. But I’ll say it here again, even with the fake news here: I’m going to say this. There’s a couple of good ones. The fight to pull the Covid vaccine off the market is a pro-life issue.

I don’t believe that the ideas in this movement are radical. Look, there’s an idea that I believe is very true that we have just ignored for a very long time when we’re talking about healthcare. There’s a lot of discussions about healthcare. Look, the number one tenet in healthcare is very simple. Food is medicine — that’s the number-one tenet. But we believe other things. Like parents should be in charge of the medical decisions of their children, not bureaucrats. And as one of my heroes, Joel Salatin, said, we deserve to have food freedom in the state of Iowa. That’s something we deserve. You know, I tell my children — if you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.

You have to have big goals. One of the big goals I have for the state of Iowa — and by the way, so much of what we want to do in the state, so much of what will help us in the state — is going back to the principles that our grandparents and great-grandparents knew, understanding the wisdom that they had. One of the big goals I have, as your next governor, which, by the, we’re going to win this race, guys. I can feel the movement. Can you feel the movement? I can feel it … One of my goals for the state of Iowa is to make Iowa the real food capital of the country.

We have the best land. We have the best farmers. We should be growing the best food. We should be an exporter of food to the rest of the county. But first we should take care of the people in our state.

We should make sure that kids have healthy meals at school. Look, for some of these children this might be the only healthy meal they have all day. And this goes back to the heritage of who we are as a people. We are a state that for a long time has been known to care about the people in our state, to care about the next generation. Let me tell you, this thing that’s called MAHA, has existed long before it had a name. It existed as an idea. And the idea is that we as parents, we as citizens, should have safe medications. We should have good, real science that’s not bought off by corporations that have far too much influence over our government. And in the state of Iowa, we deserve, let me be very clear with you, I’m asked all the time, what is the number one thing you wanna work on as governor after you get elected? I’ll be very clear. My number one priority as your governor is to clean up our water and to stop the cancer crisis in the State of Iowa.

There’s a tremendous amount at stake in this election. I think you can see it. I often talk about the culture of our state and how I don’t believe you guys are here for politics. I believe you’re here because you want to preserve the culture in the state of Iowa. This is why I’m here. And for a very long time, we have to recognize that there has been a battle for the institutions in our society. And this has been battle not just with politicians, but with corporations that have garnered far too much control. The left has known this. And I’m not just talking about the Democrat left, because I believe there are good people in the Democrat party, but I also believe their party at the top end has been taken over by radicals, absolutely taken over.

The institutions of our society built what we love here in Iowa today. We’re talking about business, the government, education, the family, the individual. I was asked by one of the reporters here today: Is this going to be a talk about culture, or is this gonna be a talked about health and MAHA? I said, you don’t get it, they’re the same thing. The fight to have clean water in our state — it’s a pro-life issue. It’s a fight to make sure people can live long, healthy lives.

For a very long time, we’ve had this fight to protect the lives of the unborn, and we’ve largely forgotten about this fight. Let me tell you: the fight to protect the un-born is all about protecting human potential. An unborn child could be anything, do anything, solve anything, love anyone. But on the other end of this, when we’re protecting their lives and make sure that people can live long, healthy lives, we’re protecting human wisdom. That’s what we’re protecting.

You cannot know where you want to go if you forget where you’ve been. And I believe this group, maybe more than any, understands that. There’s no way to put this group in a box. That doesn’t exist. And I think for a long time, what other people want to do is try to make every movement like this something that’s strictly political, but it’s not. It’s way deeper than that. It’s much deeper than politics. It’s about the next generation, the generational contract that we have all signed up for, that our ancestors have signed up for.

I could go through this room and talk to just about any one of you and find we have a shared story about what it means to be an Iowan and about the people who came here before us to pass something down to us but would never meet us. And the question that Secretary Bobby Kennedy has been fighting for is what is the generational contract of this generation going to be? Is it going to one where these big organizations have the outsized control and are doing the bidding, the politicians are doing the bidding of them? Or is it going be one in which our kids can thrive, live long, healthy lives. Understand that they have the ability to solve problems to do things in the world that they never thought they could do — because they are now healthier and more vibrant and I believe that’s what’s going to happen because of [RFK Jr.’s] leadership in HHS. I truly believe that.

This is not a political movement. This is the definition of a grassroots movement, and it’s been going on for decades. You all know people who have been in this for a very long time. I believe wholeheartedly that during Covid the veil was lifted, that we saw firsthand what the medical establishment was willing to do to collude with the government to gain power. And let me just be very clear about this: the medical establishment has completely lost our trust and has done nothing to earn it back.

“The medical establishment has completely lost our trust and has done nothing to earn it back” — Zach Lahn

They have not. And while I believe there’s a lot at stake in this election, I also believe something else and this is what my campaign for governor has been all about. I believe that there’s tremendous amount of opportunity. I believe we have the opportunity to make Iowa the best place to raise a family — to start a farm, to build a business, to pass something down to the next generation. The opportunity to stop our kids from leaving the state faster than 46 other states. Stop family farms from dying off at the rate of 10,000 over 20 years. Stop our public education system from being number one and then dropping to number 27 — and to stop the cancer crisis in our state.

I think there’s opportunity that we can only imagine in this state because we have the best people in the country, bar none. They live here in the state of Iowa.

I’m gonna end with this: I think this goes back to the ability to think critically, the ability to make decisions for yourself, to understand that there are groups that have been bought off for a long time and politicians that have been doing the buying. And I believe you all understand that. But I also believe that we have an opportunity here. And I think you all see that. I think that’s why I’m standing here. You all know I’m not supposed to be standing here today. I was outspent by 30%, opposed by the establishment. I will tell you: there was one group in the entire country that early on saw the promise of this race and saw the promises of what Iowa could be, and that is the MAHA organization, when they endorsed me as their first candidate ever in the history of their organization.

But if we want to change the trajectory of our state, I’m going to say something a bit different now. It has to start with education. Look, we have to start teaching kids the true story of America, the underdog story of our country. If you want to destroy a culture, destroy their stories. Make them believe that the people who came here before them were bad people, that they wanted bad things. If you wanna teach the true story of America, you have the opportunity to inspire the next generation. That’s what you have. You have the opportunities to let the next generation know that America has done more to alleviate poverty, to alleviate oppression, to secure rights. They’ve led more humanitarian missions, taking care of more people than any other country ever in the history of the world. And by the way, it’s not even close.

As our children are unburdened from that idea, and they understand the true story of America, they can understand that they are the protagonist in the story, they are hero in the the story. And they have the ability to literally change the world. I believe our education system has to prioritize that. And, if we do, we’re gonna see more people think freely, like all of you think freely. We’re gonna see more people that understand that the entirety of Western civilization rests on their shoulders. And it’s up to them to carry it on, and that is a burden they should be proud to bear.

In just a moment, I’m gonna introduce somebody to you. Before I do, I wanna say this. There is a lot at stake. In six days, we are gonna decide the trajectory of our state. We’re gonna decide who’s in charge in our state. If it’s just the money that matters, we’re going to decide, is Iowa for sale? And I believe Iowa is not for sale.

But I’m going to tell you this - sometimes we can forget. I was at a funeral for somebody a while ago and she was an amazing agrarian, a daughter of the prairie. And I remember her son was eulogizing her and he said: one of the greatest sins is a sin of forgetting. Forgetting where you came from, forgetting the responsibility that you have. And I believe we can do the same thing here and I think the media likes to help us have amnesia about what’s at stake and where we’ve been. But I had two groups in the primary that endorsed me. One was this group I’m standing with right now. And one was the group that was started by my longtime friend named Charlie Kirk. Thirteen months ago, my friend’s life was taken from us. It was just 13 months ago.

People ask me all the time — “how can we help?” And I’m gonna tell you right now how you can help. We have six days until an election. We have six days to make sure the people that might be thinking of sitting out this primary, sitting out this midterm, decide to get into the race. And let me just tell you this. We need to remind them what’s at stake in our culture. If we’d understand that it was 13 months ago that that man’s life was taken and that people are thinking of sitting out the midterms, we’d say, are we crazy? Are we crazy?

Everybody wants prices to come down. The president wants prices come down'; we all do. We wanna end wars, we wanna do that. But there’s some things that are so much deeper. And let me tell you, the left has known this for a very long time. They have known that they’re in a battle for the institutions of our culture. We are waking up to that battle. And I believe on November 3rd of this year, in the state of Iowa, we are going to send a message that Iowa is not for sale, that we are here for the next generation, and we are gonna prioritize them over these groups that seek to exploit and extract from the state of Iowa.

I’m asking you for your vote and your support. Thank you very much.

And now... I have the pleasure of doing something that I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do. Let me just tell you that. When I got into this race, my wife and I were talking about why I should do this. She had a million reasons. I had a millions reasons why I shouldn’t. And I remember taking a walk with her at the farm the day after we went in the primary, and she said, what’s on your mind? I can tell a lot’s on you mind. I said: I think my life would be a lot better if I wasn’t running for this seat. And you could all understand that with the amount of attacks that have been lodged against my family and my children. But the next thing I said was that I actually believe that my grandkids’ lives will be better if I do run.

About 13 months ago when I was thinking about doing this I told [my wife] I had one requirement and that requirement was that I wanted to meet Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And I had no connection to him whatsoever. Let me tell you that right now none of us did. But if you believe in divine providence you’ll understand that three weeks later I was sitting on his couch in Georgetown and we were talking about the future of the state of Iowa. We are talking about what’s at stake — and that, combined with what happened to my friend, there was no way that I couldn’t get in this race.

This man [RFK Jr.] has been an inspiration to our country. And I will tell you, the entire country owes his family a debt of gratitude. And when he could have not got in the battle, when he had every reason to not get in the battles, he chose instead to leave a life that was likely largely more comfortable and get into this battle because he believes that our children are worth it. I wanna introduce my friend, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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The tool, part of SHF’s Vote for Health Freedom initiative, points beyond conventional partisan platforms to questions about informed consent, parental rights, food quality, environmental health, medical privacy, and individual liberty.

Through a structured candidate survey covering 11 core issue areas, SHF aims to help voters move past campaign slogans and examine candidates’ stated positions on policies that affect them. Importantly, SHF frames health freedom as a cross-partisan concern rather than a party-line issue.

The 11 Issues on the Ballot

SHF’s questionnaire asks candidates to address:

1. Parental Rights — Preserving parents’ authority to make health decisions for their children, including vaccination choices.

2. School Vaccine Mandates — Whether candidates support protecting parental choice on childhood immunization requirements.

3. Private Business Vaccine Mandates — Support for legislation that would eliminate vaccine mandates imposed by private employers and businesses.

4. School-Based Health Centers — Views on health centers operating inside schools, including questions of parental involvement and services provided without a parent present.

5. Food Freedom and Small-Scale Farming — Reducing regulations that affect small farms, local food producers, and home-based food businesses.

6. Fluoride in Drinking Water — Support for legislation prohibiting fluoridation of public water supplies.

7. REAL ID and Privacy — Positions on the national REAL ID program, state sovereignty, and digital identity concerns.

8. Pesticide Manufacturer Liability — Stance on proposals that could limit legal claims against pesticide manufacturers over product warning labels.

9. Freedom of Speech — Protecting expression and addressing concerns about censorship, particularly in health-related discussions.

10. Religious Freedom — Safeguarding religious exercise, accommodations, and workplace protections.

11. Informed Consent and Medical Privacy — Commitment to informed medical decision-making and protection of personal health information.

Candidates respond through a mix of yes/no questions, numerical scales, and written explanations. They are also invited to define what “health freedom” means to them and to indicate whether they would meet with constituents after the election.

Why State Races Matter

National races dominate headlines, yet many of the decisions that most directly affect families are made in state legislatures. Policies on childhood immunization requirements, school health services, agricultural rules, professional licensing, and public-health authority are frequently set at the state level. A candidate’s party affiliation alone does not reliably predict where they stand on these specific questions. Survey responses, legislative records, and public statements offer a clearer picture.

A Practical Way to Research Candidates

SHF organizes the information state by state. Voters can:

1. Visit VoteHF.com

2. Select their state

3. Review the voter guide, candidate responses, and related materials

4. Compare positions against their own priorities

5. Download and share the guide

Districts without listings typically indicate that candidates either did not respond or did not align with the organization’s health-freedom criteria. The full candidate survey is available at standforhealthfreedom.com/vote/survey.

From Campaign to Accountability

SHF treats the endorsement process as a learning opportunity. Candidates seeking support are directed to resources that clarify the issues, creating openings to resolve misunderstandings and build longer-term relationships. Those who win receive SHF’s Policy Blueprint and access to model legislation so they can begin work quickly.

The survey also asks candidates whether they will meet with constituents after Election Day. That commitment underscores a larger point: elections evaluate promises, but civic engagement continues afterward. Voters can track legislation, attend hearings, and measure elected officials against the positions they stated during the campaign.

An Informed Choice

Conversations about parental rights, informed consent, food quality, environmental health, and medical privacy have long drawn Americans from varied political backgrounds. The MAHA movement amplifies those discussions.

Stand for Health Freedom’s Vote for Health Freedom initiative gives voters a concrete way to examine how these concerns translate into electoral choices.

With November 3 on Tuesday, SHF encourages MAHA and MAHA-curious voters to review their state’s guide, study the positions that matter most to you, ask questions, and vote accordingly.

SHF is rallying around these objectives: protecting children, supporting families, and preserving the ability to make informed decisions about health and food. The organization invites all Americans to go to its website, VoteHF.com, and select the candidate survey and education pages at standforhealthfreedom.com.

So said Debra Sheldon during the MAHA Institute’s Summit on Screen & Social Media Harms: Reclaiming Childhood, held October 21, 2026, at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Citing research on the effects of screen use, Sheldon, the Institute’s vice president, described how early exposure to digital media can begin before a child’s first birthday, with toddlers spending an average of two hours a day on screens and preteens and teenagers averaging four or more hours.

Sheldon discussed research linking screen use to attention and behavioral difficulties, sleep problems, anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem, with nearly half of teenagers reporting experiences with cyberbullying

Children have only one childhood. Yet much of it now is devoured and co-opted by a screen, while parents and teachers give in to technology designed to addict children.

“We really should be angry when a healthy childhood comes second to making money,” said Dr. Stephanie Haridopolos of the Office of the Surgeon General.

Haridopolos, a family physician and mother of three, described research linking heavy screen use with concerns about sleep, physical activity, vision, academic performance and mental health. She compared Big Tech to Big Tobacco.

London’s Law

Following the tragic suicide of Charay Gadd’s 12-year-old daughter, London, an investigation uncovered online searches that lead London to self-harm and suicidal content. London’s death also raised questions about broader mental health treatments, and Gadd says she cannot prove any single factor caused her death. But she believes social media platforms are failing to protect vulnerable children. “A child’s vulnerability should never be someone’s business model,” she told the MAHA Institute summit.

Citing CDC figures, Gadd noted that 481 children ages 10 to 14 died by suicide in the reported period. “The statistics stop at 481. Our grief does not.” Through London’s Law and Unscripted Minds, she is fighting for greater transparency, stronger safeguards, and accountability, so other families don’t have to live with the same loss.

Policy Panel: From Phone-Free Schools to Tech Company Accountability

Tennessee State Rep. Michele Reneau sponsored legislation requiring public school districts and charter schools serving kindergarten through fifth grade to adopt policies governing students’ use of digital devices, with the goal to minimize unnecessary screen time while preserving effective instruction. The measure, signed into law as Public Chapter 808, took effect July 1, 2026.

Haley Hinkle, policy counsel at Fairplay, highlighted the growing momentum behind phone-free schools, saying, “So we’ve got about 24 states, plus the District of Columbia, that are now officially bell to bell phone-free schools required at the state level.”

Jason Frost, co-founder and CEO of Wired Human, raised the concept of duty of care: the principle that technology companies have a responsibility to take reasonable steps to protect children from foreseeable harm associated with their products. Responsibility does not rest exclusively on parents to monitor screen time, set restrictions, or intervene after something goes wrong. Companies have a duty to consider how their platforms are designed, what risks they expose young users to, and what safeguards are needed to protect them.

Doctors raise concerns about physical health

Dr. Sandra Cremers, an ophthalmologist specializing in eye-surface disease, warned that prolonged screen use can damage eye health. She described how the brain’s reward response to screens can suppress blinking as children become absorbed in what they’re watching or scrolling past. Fewer blinks mean less frequent spreading of tears across the eye, which can leave the surface dry and irritated. Cremers also raised concerns about damage to the meibomian glands, which produce the oils that keep tears from evaporating too quickly, and that prolonged screen use contributes to chronic eye health issues. She urged families to take the physical effects of screen use seriously and make time away from devices a regular habit.

Dr. Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, explained how social media engages the same brain systems involved in substance use. A “like” triggers the brain’s reward system, making you feel good and encouraging you to repeat the behavior. Social media algorithms learn what grabs your attention and show you more of it, strengthening these reward loops in the brain.

He urged parents and clinicians to ask themselves whether screen use interferes with sleep, school or relationships, and whether young people struggle to control their screen use.

“Smart Schools”: a false promise

The debate extends into classrooms, where schools have spent billions on educational tech.

Casey Sacks of the U.S. Department of Education compared educational technology to food. Some tools can support learning, much like nutritious food supports a child’s growth. Others are designed to keep kids clicking and coming back for more, offering the digital equivalent of junk food. She warned that some products amount to “candy in a broccoli wrapper,” appearing educational while prioritizing engagement over learning.

Sacks said the goal should be to choose technology based on whether it helps children become stronger learners, rather than how much technology they use. “My measure of success for education technology is not how much technology is actually in Emma’s life,” Sacks said, referring to a hypothetical 10-year-old student. “It’s whether the technology we give her helps her become a stronger learner who grows up to be a more capable and fully human adult.”

For Brian Scannell, an English and history teacher, the effects of screens are seen in students’ struggles with reading and sustained attention. He said reading requires children to imagine entire worlds, an ability he believes is declining as digital entertainment fills more of their time.

“We’re in a crisis of imagination,” Scannell said.

The solution, he says, is to surround children with the arts.

Dr. Brad Kershner, a former Waldorf School administrator, said his school has prohibited cell phones for five years. He called phone-free schools “a low bar.”

Parents have been told the implementation of educational technologies were necessary so that children gained tech literacy to prepare for the workforce and make learning easier. But Kershner rejected this argument.

“What we need to do is prepare children to be intelligent and thoughtful and able to have relationships and conversation and think and read and write,” he said.

The Tech Exit

Clare Morell, author of Tech Exit, sang an encouraging message: you can raise screen-free children. Her book provides practical guidance for families who want to opt out but don’t know where to start.

She advocates for screen-free homes, with room for intentional exceptions like family movie nights, and believes parents must model the habits they want their children to develop. If teenagers need a way to stay in touch, she recommends simple phones without internet access. Removing devices is the first half of the answer. The other half is that children need traditional, grounded activities that build purpose and connection.

Dr. David Martin, a pediatric endocrinologist and researcher in integrative medicine, presented scientific research from 1,500 families.

After parents reported positive changes when they removed television from their homes for a month, Martin, who came to the roundtable from his native Germany, helped develop a “media fasting” program that encouraged families to replace screen time with shared daily activities. The program used a calendar with a new activity for families to complete together each day.

Martin argued that children need movement, nature, physical touch and genuine human connection to develop. Screens can never fulfill the depth of real-world experiences that children need to thrive. “Those 12 senses are cared for in Waldorf education, and they are ignored by our screens,” he said.

The summit closed with MAHA Institute’s Sheldon urging parents to work together rather than face the pressure alone. Changing household habits is difficult when screens are woven into school, friendships and daily routines. Schools and communities can help make different choices more practical.

For parents considering a change, Morell offered a straightforward starting point: take a break from interactive screens, find a few families willing to join you, and make room for activities children can enjoy together in real life.

Every day in America, 30 million children eat a hot lunch at school. But that lunch is usually cooked somewhere else and brought to the school in trucks or vans where it’s re-heated in warmers. It doesn’t taste fresh because it isn’t fresh. The hamburgers are often a pale grey color and rubbery, the chicken is dry, and the bread is soggy. Students joke about it, but they have no recourse. They have only two choices: eat the food anyway, or throw it away. A lot of school food ends up in the trash, and many students find themselves hungry an hour or two later, long before the bell rings and they can go home and eat.

What if things were different? What if school meals in America were made from scratch every day, in the school, by trained chefs? What if students got excited about the food they were eating because it was fresh-cooked at the school, and was juicy and delicious?

On Saturday, Oct. 17, at the World Food Championships in Indianapolis, the MAHA Center sponsored a special contest to have chefs compete to make the tastiest school lunches, from the freshest ingredients, while meeting all USDA nutritional guidelines for the National School Lunch Program.

More than 20 million kids in America qualify for free lunch, because their family’s income is at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty level.

Those meals are provided at taxpayer expense through the National School Lunch Program, which is run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Schools are reimbursed a base rate of $4.76 for each free lunch.

Because this program pays to feed so many children, all food provided by schools is made to meet the nutritional requirements of the program, which are very specific.

Lunches must have between 550 and 650 calories for students in grades K-5, 600-700 calories for students in grades 6-8 and 750-850 calories for high school students (grades 9-12). The maximum amount of sodium is 1,110 milligrams for K-5, 1,225 for grades 6-8, and 1,280 for high schoolers.

There must be a certain amount of food from different categories in each lunch: including 8-10 ounces of meat or fish for grades K-5, 9-10 ounces for grades 6-8 and 10-12 ounces for high schoolers. Students also must be given fruit, a starch and a certain mix of vegetables.

But these requirements aren’t really enough to make sure that meals taste good. Without trained and talented chefs, and with food so often cooked offsite hours before it’s served, the lunches are often overcooked and dry or just not tasty.

At the Indianapolis event, one of the judges was Lori Taylor, the founder of The Produce Moms.

“We need great chefs in our school cafeterias,” she said just before the competition began. “We need infrastructure, we need these schools to be properly equipped. But we also need schools to have the funding and the talent pipeline of culinary skilled, trained professionals to come make these scratch meals in school cafeterias across America.”

Five chefs competed in the MAHA School Food Showdown in a large building at the Indiana State Fairgrounds – all of them chefs employed by Taher, a Minneapolis-based company that provides food service to schools, making all food from scratch.

Each chef was assisted by a middle or high school student, most of them from the small town of Monrovia, Indiana.

One of the five chefs, Benedetto D’Epiro, made chicken cacciatore – a recipe based on the dish his grandmother in Italy used to make, with the chicken marinated in a vinaigrette made with honey and three kinds of vinegar, but no olive oil, surprisingly.

“I have to make it and represent my culture,” he said with a smile.

D’Epiro is originally from Rome, Italy, but is now based in Milwaukee where he works for Taher as the executive chef for the Muskego-Norway School District in Waukesha County.

He had to adjust his chicken cacciatore recipe to comply with USDA requirements and use a little less salt than his grandmother used to use. But it must still be full of flavor, he noted. His grandmother used to say in Italian that “the food should jump from the plate to your mouth – otherwise it’s not good,” D’Epiro said.

The MAHA School Food Showdown was timed, with chefs working in makeshift kitchens set up on the floor of the pavilion. As usually happens at such events, everything didn’t go exactly as planned.

“The sheet pans don’t fit in the oven!” one chef called out to another. “The sheet pans do NOT fit in the oven!”

The young assistants were mostly tasked with prepping vegetables, and the chefs were seen instructing them how to slice red peppers, and chop green onions.

The emcee of the event went from one chef to another with a microphone, asking what they were making. Just as he was about to put the microphone in front of one of the middle school students, she fainted. It turns out it was just nerves. After a brief pause, and some assistance from adults, she was able to get up and everyone got back to cooking.

Another one of the chefs, John Sugimura, made boba – an Asian drink with jelly-like bubbles on the bottom that’s become wildly popular among American teenagers and young adults.

“How do you make boba?” I asked him, curious about those colorful bubbles and how they’re formed.

“How do I make boba? My boba?” he asked.

Yes, his. It’s not the regular boba found at the bottom of milk tea that is laden with sugar. His boba uses no sugar. The bubbles are made from coconut gelatin and sit in small cups on the lunch trays, soaking up natural strawberry juice so that they are naturally sweet.

For his entree, he and his student assistant, high schooler Jamarah Frederic, made Japanese dumplings called gyoza that they dusted with potato starch. The starch “keeps the dough soft and keeps the moisture from going in,” he said.

Taher is known as a school food service company that only cooks food from scratch, with ingredients from large providers like Sysco, but also with food sourced from local farms with which they’ve built relationships. They grow lettuce in towers in schools, so that it’s always super fresh.

Jeri Crater, the vice president of operations for Taher, was on hand assisting the chefs. She said the company has been committed to cooking from scratch since its founding.

“Quality is always number one,” she told The MAHA Report. “When you can’t get kids to eat when it’s free, you’ve got a problem.”

In August, USDA Secretary Brook Rollins and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Trump administration will spend $70 million to help schools upgrade their kitchens.

Many schools had their ovens ripped out years ago, and some schools have even been built without ovens and stoves, with districts centralizing food preparation at a separate facility, or contracting it out.

In a survey of school superintendents last summer, only 44 percent of those who responded said that every school in their district had a fully equipped kitchen for cooking meals from scratch.

This is all likely changing, and the MAHA School Food Showdown may play a small part in sparking interest in upgrading the meals children are served every day.

At the competition, the lunches were plated on school cafeteria trays – the same trays that Taher uses in the schools where their chefs work – and were judged by a panel made up of Lori Taylor, Deirdre Goldfarb, and a chef from the culinary arts program at Ivy Tech Community College.

The winners of the first round were John Sugimura and his assistant Jamarah Frederic and the dumplings they made, and chef Brian Renz and his assistant Zoey Beltz, who made za’atar sumac chicken wings, with flavors inspired by trips Chef Renz has taken to Turkey and North Africa.

The final winner later that afternoon was Sugimura, who was awarded the title of MAHA School Food Champion.

The MAHA School Food Showdown was part of the MAHA Center’s “Eat Real Food” campaign, which aims to put whole, nutrient-dense foods back at the center of the American plate, from school lunches to federal nutrition policy.

Before the event, Deirdre Goldfarb, a spokesperson for MAHA Center, said, “Students deserve food that’s real, nourishing, and actually tastes good. The World Food Championships brings together some of the most talented cooks in the world, and we can’t think of a better place to show what school food can be. The MAHA School Food Showdown is proof that healthy, affordable, and delicious can all go on the same tray.”

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He’s been campaigning tirelessly on a “Make Iowa Healthy Again” platform that includes support for Iowa farmers, prevention of out-of-state ownership of Iowa land, and boosting education opportunities.

[The MAHA PAC encourages all Iowans to register to attend one or both of the upcoming rallies — On Oct. 26 in Ames and on Oct. 28 in Des Moines. The first rally features Lahn and Sen. Rand Paul (Republican - KY); the second features Lahn, Joe Mitchell, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Joel Salatin and other special guests. All Make Iowa Healthy Again supporters can register to attend, here – or watch the event live-streamed, here.]

Lahn has proposed procuring 80% of public school meals from Iowa farmers, and pledges on his website to “break up monopolies, defend independent farms, and demand accountability from corporations who harm our people.”

Those are fighting words.

Lahn’s impact on Iowa, and the nation, has already been seismic. On June 2, he defeated establishment Republican congressman, Randy Feenstra, in Iowa’s gubernatorial primary. Feenstra was endorsed by President Trump; it didn’t matter. Conservative voters favored a MAHA health and regenerative farming policy platform, in America’s No. 1 corn-producing and No. 2 soy-producing state, which portends well for other Republicans who, over the next four weeks, before their primary elections, lean into MAHA..

With passion and tireless commitment to the MAHA mission, Lahn has steadily won over his detractors, who often resort to character assassinations rather than engage on issues. Lahn has challenged Big Ag and Big Pharma by criticizing their products, like glyphosate, and claiming they have sickened Iowans.

But, in the race for governor, he’s no shoo-in. He’s up against State Auditor Rob Sand, and the deep-pocketed Iowa Democratic apparatus supporting him.

Midterms are notoriously difficult to predict, and independent voters may also feature as a wild card in 2026.

For his part, Lahn attributes his success to the MAHA messaging he chose to prioritize as a conservative candidate, and pledges that the “truth” his campaign is focusing on in the general election has not deviated from his focus throughout the primary: “talking about the big agricultural conglomerates that are extorting our farmers, talking about clean water and how we need to lower our cancer rates….”

Lahn calls his MAHA-inspired principles an “Iowa First” platform, putting human health above corporate greed. It’s a refreshing message from a conservative in a strongly conservative, row-cropping state. Lahn is not just running for office: he’s moving the regenerative needle into the heartland of conventional agriculture.

MAHA grassroots keeps growing

Lahn’s embrace of the MAHA movement’s principles reflects a broader, grassroots embrace, by Americans from diverse backgrounds, of the simple premise that healthy, local food is a sensible counterpoint to the nation’s chronic disease epidemic.

If Lahn manages to capture the governor seat, it will be a huge victory for the MAHA movement that will resonate across the country.

Just a few years ago, the very idea of an Iowa Republican running for governor on a platform of opposing agribusiness and reducing chemical exposures would have seemed laughable. Leigh Merinoff, a MAHA Action board member who leads several key initiatives for the organization, says she’s excited about Lahn’s success.

“Zach’s campaign reflects many of the core priorities of the MAHA movement: stronger families, thriving farms, cleaner food and water, and reduced exposure to unnecessary chemicals,” Merinoff said. “His focus on strengthening local agriculture, protecting health, and supporting the people who produce our food is closely aligned with the issues MAHA Action has worked to elevate nationally.”

Lahn has demonstrated his resolve in the face of adversity, and, four weeks out from the midterms, his MAHA message has prevailed over his better-funded competition.

Iowa is one of the most important agricultural states in the nation. Under a Governor Zach Lahn, it can become a national leader in MAHA policy.

That’s where you come in.

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