Riley Gaines still remembers the moment and day when a swimmer, who came from virtually nowhere, won the 500-yard freestyle by 1.75 seconds: March 17, 2022, at the NCAA championships. The swimmers who finished second and third in that race, Emma Weyant and Erica Sullivan, had both won silver medals at the Tokyo Olympics.

But who was the winning swimmer?

The next day, Gaines touched the wall in a dead tie for fifth place in the 200-yard freestyle with that same swimmer: Lia Thomas, a 6-foot-2 athlete who spent three seasons on the University of Pennsylvania men’s team and was competing as a woman despite being a biological male.

The real clincher came on the podium. NCAA officials handed the only fifth-place trophy to Thomas, for photographs. One official told her plainly, “We only have one fifth place trophy, so yours will be coming in the mail. We went ahead and gave the fifth place trophy to Thomas, but you can pose on the podium with the sixth place trophy.”

Gaines, true to her MAHA spirit, was not pleased. She began to speak out.

That decision, more than the race itself, showed Gaines that the people running the sport had already decided what they wanted to showcase, and it wasn’t her.

Gaines said one of the first people to reach out was Lance Armstrong, who called her just days after the story broke, incredulous. Armstrong knew anti-doping enforcement first hand. During his competitive cycling years, doping was rampant; it wound up costing him everything, not just his seven Tour de France titles, but an Olympic bronze medal and every podium finish across 14 years of racing. To him, the comparison was obvious. He had lost everything for chemically enhancing his body, while an athlete born with the physical advantages of a male – including a larger skeleton, greater muscle mass, and a bigger heart and lungs – could compete against women after just a year of hormone suppression.

When Gaines spoke out against athletes like Thomas, she met significant pushback. She was shouted down, protested, and even physically attacked for saying publicly what many other female athletes would only say in private. Speaking to students at Truett McConnell University in Georgia, she summed up her response to her critics: “When they want you silent, speak louder.”

Gaines grew up around athletes and competition. Her father, Brad Gaines, played football at Vanderbilt, in Nashville, and her mother, Telisha Gaines, played softball at Austin Peay State University, also in Tennessee. By her senior year at Kentucky, Gaines was the reigning SEC champion in the 200-yard freestyle and the fastest swimmer in the country in the 200 butterfly, with her sights set on an NCAA title outright, not a fifth tie she’d have to share credit for.

Now 26, Gaines lives in Nashville with her husband, Louis Barker, whom she met at Kentucky and married in 2022. The couple has a daughter, born last fall. Reflecting on the one pivotal meet during which she was upstaged by Thomas, years before her daughter arrived, Gaines said she knew she needed to stand up for herself, thinking of the example she would want to set for her future children. As she watches her daughter grow, she’s grateful she made her views public.

Today, via a successful podcast, The Riley Gaines Show, Gaines speaks often about the pressure young women face to delay marriage and motherhood for career first; motherhood, she says, is the most profoundly perfect thing a woman can do. Her newest book, 1, 2, 3, We Are Free!, published by Brave Books for the country’s 250th anniversary, teaches toddlers how to count alongside faith, family and freedom.

Gaines is just as pointed about the pressure for women to shrink themselves, physically. As culture drifts back toward thin as the paradigm for beauty, she argues that real female empowerment runs in the opposite direction — toward strength.

“As female athletes, we spend our lives building strength, muscle, and a body that is powerful and functional,” she said. “It’s incredibly disheartening to see the culture pivot back to a ‘thin is in’ mentality that tells young girls they need to shrink themselves to be valued.”

Gaines added. “True empowerment isn’t about fading away into Hollywood’s extreme standards; it’s about embracing biological strength, health, and what our bodies are actually capable of achieving.”

What actually makes a woman attractive, Gaines argues, is standing in her power: strength, muscle, and confidence to know who she is and what she wants out of life.

And her activism around transgender athletes has proven prescient:

One by one, the governing bodies of sport came around to the position Gaines has espoused since 2022. Her own sport moved first. In June 2022, just three months after Lia Thomas’s win, World Aquatics, swimming’s international governing body, barred from all women’s events any male-to-female transgender athlete who had gone through male puberty. That standard would have excluded Thomas outright.

The reasoning came down to the physical traits male puberty locks in regardless of later hormone therapy: bigger, denser bones, broader shoulders, larger lungs, a bigger heart, and greater muscle mass — the very build that gives a swimmer the edge in the water.

Then, in February 2025, the NCAA, which allowed Thomas to compete in the first place, reversed itself entirely, barring any athlete identified as male at birth from women’s competition, no exceptions. The rule Gaines fought in 2022 is no longer NCAA policy today.

Gaines is still making the case she first made in 2022, now on a far bigger stage. Twice a week she hosts The Riley Gaines Show on OutKick, a Fox News Media platform, interviewing sitting senators and fellow female athletes and taking on cultural targets from campus activism to the messages Gen Z women absorb from influencer culture.

In January 2026, Gaines stood on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court as the justices weighed state bans on male athletes in women’s sports, and a bill bearing her name is now moving through Congress.

What began for Gaines as one ‘stolen’ trophy in Atlanta has become the question she asks every girl she meets today — the same one she asked on that podium in Atlanta: If you won’t stand up for yourself, who do you expect will do it for you?

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The fact that Peter Navarro does exist and that of all the White House staffers, he was the one who was in the very center of the action in the first Trump administration at a crucial moment in the nation’s history – and willing to invoke the ire of his colleagues to try to protect the lives of millions of Americans – seems like a stroke of luck, or an act of Providence.

“Be tough. You’re my tough guy,” President Trump told him on January 27, 2020, when he needed someone to persuade the members of the new Coronavirus Task Force to support a China travel ban.

Navarro was Trump’s top trade advisor, and a longtime China expert who shared the President’s strong beliefs that China was doing serious damage to the American economy, and to American workers.

The Chinese Communist government had just locked down the city of Wuhan, blocking people from entering and leaving the city of 11 million. On January 17, the CDC had started screening people arriving at major U.S. airports from Wuhan. But it still didn’t seem that the virus outbreak thousands of miles away would become a worldwide pandemic.

Still, Trump wanted to take action.

The next day, Navarro walked into the White House Situation Room on the ground floor of the West Wing and took a seat at the conference table.

“At high noon, directly across from me, sat a small man I did not recognize with round glasses wearing either a grin or a smirk — I could not tell which. When I looked into his eyes, he averted my gaze, and I thought to myself: This could be trouble,” Navarro recounts in his new book due out next month, Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison.

That small man with the round glasses was Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“I didn’t know Fauci from Adam,” Navarro told The MAHA Report, recalling that crucial meeting. “I immediately got into this very heated argument with him.”

Fauci said that the risk of a pandemic was very, very low.

“I argued that even granting his ‘very, very low risk’ proposition, a low probability multiplied by a catastrophic cost still buys you the insurance,” Navarro writes in the book.

Fauci insisted he’d studied travel bans many times and just kept repeating: “Travel bans don’t work.”

Navarro describes himself at that moment as “incredulous,” saying he challenged Fauci, telling him that with 20,000 people coming in every day on flights from China, arriving at Kennedy airport in New York, into LAX and O’Hare, they were taking a big risk by not doing anything.

CDC Director Robert Redfield sided with Fauci. So did HHS Secretary Alex Azar, whom Navarro hilariously refers to in the book as the “ever-preening once and future Big Pharma exec.” So did Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff who was chairing the meeting, who Navarro calls a “closet libertarian in Trump Land” saying for this reason, he was loathe to close any border.

Only Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger sided with Navarro.

At the end of the meeting, things seemed to go the wrong way.

“Mick Mulvaney said, ‘I guess there’s a consensus that travel bans don’t work.’ I said, ‘Mick, there’s no consensus!’” Navarro told The MAHA Report.

He walked out of that meeting, and that night at home, at zero dark thirty, as he describes it in the book, Navarro began drafting a memo.

Early that morning, in the cold and dark, he biked to his office at the White House and continued working on it. In the late morning, he sent it to the staff of the National Security Council with specific instructions to forward it to every principal on the Coronavirus Task Force, which included Fauci, Redfield, Azar, NIH Director Francis Collins and several other heads of agencies, along with all of their deputies and all of their analysts.

He wanted it to go to everyone before the task force met again that afternoon at 3 p.m.

The memo was four pages long and the focus was a 2-by-2 matrix showing four quadrants, each representing a different scenario.

In the first, the flights from China into the U.S. continue and the virus dies out, never becoming a worldwide pandemic. There is no cost attached to this scenario.

In the second, flights from China are stopped and the virus dies out, never becoming a pandemic. This, Navarro’s memo showed, would cost about $2.9 billion, mostly for the airlines in lost revenue and also for the tourism industry in America.

In the third scenario, the flights are stopped and the virus becomes a deadly pandemic. The losses would be $34.6 billion, he estimated.

In the fourth scenario – and this is where the hammer drops – the flights from China are not stopped and the virus becomes a deadly pandemic that spreads around the world. In this scenario, Navarro predicted in the memo that it would cost the U.S. a stunning $3.8 trillion in losses, including “the possible loss of as many as half a million American lives.”

The memo hit everyone’s inbox at noon. And it hit hard.

At 3 p.m., when Navarro headed to the Situation Room, he was blocked in the corridor and told he was not on the list.

They’d kicked him off the task force for tangling with Fauci. But it didn’t matter. Navarro had won.

Everyone including Fauci quickly got behind the travel ban and President Trump announced it two days later, on January 31. There would be no more flights from China coming into the U.S. for the foreseeable future.

The memo had changed everything, putting everyone on notice that if they didn’t get behind the travel ban, they’d be responsible for horrific losses that could have been prevented.

“I was tough with him in the meetings, but I was right,” Navarro says about Fauci.

And getting kicked off the Coronavirus Task Force didn’t stop him.

“The task force was a bunch of bureaucrats sitting on their asses. I just did stuff,” he says.

Navarro became the quartermaster of the pandemic, taking quick action to get masks, ventilators and Covid tests where they were needed, sometimes in just days – procuring a Pentagon plane to go pick up millions of swabs and getting Fred Smith’s help to deploy six FedEx planes to distribute them all over the country.

He sliced through red tape and bureaucracy, working from his stand-up desk in the White House complex.

Navarro is one of Trump’s closest aides – a trusted advisor and China hawk with a PhD in economics from Harvard. Until 2016, when he joined the Trump campaign, he was a professor of economics at the University of California-Irvine Paul Merage School of Business. He was a rare breed among American professors, warning loudly of the destruction of the American economy by communist China and authoring several books on the topic. One of them, Death by China, he made into a movie.

His latest book, Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison, is a fascinating side-by-side comparing his diary of the Covid-19 pandemic with Fauci’s, and exposing Fauci as a master manipulator, and liar.

Steve Bannon, host of The War Room on Real America’s Voice, wrote a spirited introduction to Navarrow’s book, saying no one was better positioned to say what really happened in the Trump White House in early 2020 than Navarro, calling him “the White House warrior who took Fauci on harder, earlier, and more relentlessly than anybody alive . . . . “

In the book, Navarro calls Fauci the “godfather of the pandemic” as he and the agency he ran, the NIAID, funded the gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through grants to British zoologist Peter Daszak and his company EcoHealth Alliance – research that likely created SARS-CoV-2.

He knew exactly what he was doing, says Navarro, and he knew the risks.

“That guy. He’s one of the most evil people who’s ever walked the planet. And people need to know that.”

Navarro was the first person in the Trump White House to say the virus had likely come from a lab. But he goes further than just nature v. lab.

“My concern was not accidental leak,” he says. “My concern was that it might be intentional release.”

Navarro had been tough on the Chinese, and he said it’s clear now that the Chinese wanted to prevent Trump from being re-elected in November of 2020.

“If they did do it intentionally, it was a brilliant strategy, because it did help bring him down,” he says.

Navarro’s Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison is set up like a prosecution, laying out the case against Fauci.

In 2024, it was Navarro who went to prison, for defying a House subpoena and refusing to testify before the January 6th Committee, claiming executive privilege. He spent four months in the federal prison in Miami-Dade County.

“I was the only guy in for a misdemeanor,” he says. “Everyone else was a felony.”

He was also the only one who got no reduction in his sentence – a sign of the highly partisan prosecutions of Trump officials by Biden’s Department of Justice following the 2020 election.

But the tables are now turning, with the heat on Fauci as the man most responsible for a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans and over 7 million people worldwide.

“He’s in his own prison and the walls are only going to close in more and more,” says Navarro.

[Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison is due out from War Room Books, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, on October 13, 2026. It’s available for pre-orders now.]

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Before she became a farmer, educator, or advocate, Merinoff was a sculptor, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan and a Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College in New York. She credits that artistic training with teaching her to observe closely, imagine what does not yet exist, and then make it tangible.

“As an artist, you learn to build things that weren’t there before,” she said.

Where the Vision Took Shape

The turning point in Merinoff’s life came during her roughly ten years working for Heifer International, a non-profit focused on creating sustainable farming and addressing poverty and hunger.

Traveling through Asia, Africa, and South and Central America, Merinoff encountered families living in extreme poverty, but she also witnessed what happened when those same families received livestock, agricultural training and practical skills: they could grow food and generate income. Through Heifer’s “Passing on the Gift” model, recipients commit to extending the opportunity to another family traditionally by passing on offspring from the livestock they receive, along with the skills and knowledge they have gained.

She watched communities move from profound scarcity toward stability and, in some cases, abundance.

“We saw that poverty can be ended,” Merinoff said. “There are answers to questions. You just need to have the will and the skill to put them in.”

Those experiences eventually sent her home asking a different question: in a country surrounded by abundance, how much of our own ability to feed ourselves, make things, and solve practical problems have we lost?

Merinoff began to look at her own life differently. After more than a dozen trips abroad, she’d return from communities where people had practically nothing to American grocery stores overflowing with brightly packaged food. She realized that, despite all that abundance, she lacked many of the basic skills she had witnessed abroad.

“I was a sculptor,” she said. “I didn’t grow anything… I literally couldn’t take care of myself.”

Eventually, that realization became impossible to ignore.

“I can build,” she remembers thinking. “So go build something.”

Building Meadows Bee

In 2006, Merinoff purchased land in Vermont and founded Meadows Bee Farm, devoted to teaching young people about ecological farming and farming arts.

She wasn’t interested in simply producing food for other people. She wanted to learn how to do things herself and then teach others.

The farm expanded into livestock, gardens, and food production, and the community ecosystem began to flourish as she helped revive an old community store and a post office and started a café, a farmers market, and a teaching kitchen.

Over time, her attention increasingly turned toward children, a focus that now feels especially personal as the mother of two adult children, Leslie and Andrew, and a new grandmother of two.

The reason, she says, is simple: children still want to try things.

Show a child how to milk a cow, turn that milk into yogurt, pick berries and make a smoothie, Merinoff says, and the child doesn’t just want to sit there and observe. The child wants to participate.

That insight became the foundation of Meadows Bee’s Young Farmers Program, an experiential curriculum in which children earn badges by demonstrating skills in subjects ranging from livestock and gardening to cooking, sewing and homesteading.

Merinoff intentionally made the badges difficult to earn.

A child who completes one should know, she says, “that they earned this.”

Her latest project is Young Farmer Starts, designed to take her desire to teach the next generation beyond Vermont. The national program begins with hands-on experiences that families, farms, homesteads, and schools can replicate, connecting children with farming, food, and practical skills. The mission of Young Farmer Starts is to build “capable, confident kids,” as Merinoff’s ultimate goal is to help return home economics to American schools.

“My ultimate goal is to get every fourth grader in America to know how to make chicken soup.”

It sounds modest, but for Merinoff, it represents something bigger.

A pot of soup can teach children where food comes from, how ingredients become a meal, how to nourish themselves, and how to stretch food economically. More importantly, it gives them something modern childhood increasingly lacks: competence in the kitchen.

“Get children to start using their hands,” she said.

Nearly 20 years later, Meadows Bee has grown well beyond a small family operation. A team that includes farm and garden, livestock, and education managers, along with teachers, interns, and WWOOF volunteers, keeps the farm and its programming running. Merinoff says she deliberately built it that way, so it could continue without her daily presence.

Creating Change

Merinoff and her husband of 40 years, Charles, who is chairman of their family business, Breakthru Beverage Group, a national wine and spirits distributor, frequently had the opportunity to meet with policymakers. Merinoff began using that access to raise issues outside of the beverage business, particularly agriculture, the PRIME Act, and her longstanding interest in bringing home economics, farming, and shop skills back into American education.

Over time, she became less interested in political affiliation and more interested in whether policies actually produced results.

“I cannot call myself a Democrat,” she remembers concluding. “I can only call myself someone who supports this policy.”

That philosophy eventually brought her into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign orbit and then into the organizations that grew out of the MAHA movement.

At MAHA Center, Merinoff helped build the organization’s structure and launch the Chiropractic Hub. The hub now has its own executive director, committees, a website and eight areas of focus spanning education and research. It is also supporting H.R. 539, legislation intended to expand Medicare access to chiropractic services, which Merinoff says currently has 174 congressional co-sponsors.

Further, Merinoff is deeply involved with the Rural Health Transformation Program. Over the past year, Merinoff has worked with governors and state officials, including West Virginia Secretary of Health Dr. Arvin Singh, to identify ways the program can support rural communities. She says the MAHA Center team has now submitted 25 vendor applications connected with that work.

She is currently helping build additional health and food-focused hubs at MAHA Center, while participating in media, roundtables and events designed to move MAHA priorities from ideas into implementation.

Observe. Learn. Participate. Build something.

Yet even as the scale of Merinoff’s work has expanded from a Vermont farm to Washington, her approach has remained consistent: observe closely, imagine something better, and then get to work building it.

“If you have anything wrong that you don’t like about this country,” she said, “then go participate and try to fix it.”

That insistence on participation is the thread connecting her life’s journey. She has taught children to use their hands rather than simply watch. She has encouraged families to understand where their food comes from. She has brought farmers into conversations with lawmakers and pushed citizens to read legislation, identify what they want changed, and advocate for it themselves.

And she has little patience with the idea that meaningful change is someone else’s responsibility.

“Come up with the one thing you want to change,” she said. “And then advocate for it.”

During our conversation, Merinoff lightheartedly described herself as the “MAHA grandma” surrounded by a generation of MAHA moms. The description made me smile, but the more I listened to her, the more fitting it seemed.

There is something uniquely inspiring about the way Merinoff moves through the world. She sees potential in a neglected building, an unused piece of land, a child who has never milked a cow, a policy that has stalled for years, and immediately begins thinking about what it could become. Her instinct is not merely to criticize what is broken, but to gather people, teach skills, create tangible solutions, and invite others to join her in the work.

That creativity may be one of her greatest contributions to MAHA. Movements need policy experts and advocates, but they also need builders: people capable of looking beyond what exists and imagining what is possible.

Today, the materials are different. Instead of clay or stone, she’s working with farms, schools, communities, legislation, and ideas. But the artistic impulse remains the same.

After speaking with Merinoff, it is difficult not to come away energized. As a mother, I am grateful that someone with her imagination, persistence, and decades of experience is helping shape the future of the MAHA movement.

Perhaps, most importantly, she is still asking the question that has driven her work for decades:

What can we build together?

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“I started getting sicker and sicker and sicker,” he tells me. “I had arthritis in my hands, had a blood sugar problem, but I couldn’t wake up until like 11 a.m. And the inside of my eyelids were completely bloodshot and red and irritated. That was a severe blood sugar problem. I didn’t know it.”

The wildly popular online health doctor, and author of a new book, Change Your Environments: Redesign Your Life to Reclaim Your Health (MAHA Books, Sept. 8), Dr. Berg said he felt old at 28 – and had no idea what to change to reboot his life.

“At 28 years old I had extremely low awareness of nutrition, health, diet,” he says. “They don’t teach you these things in chiropractic. It’s not until you graduate and you study on your own that you start learning these things.”

What followed was years of experimenting through nearly every trend of the era. Colon cleansing, fasting on lemon and maple syrup, carrot juice, veganism, and colon hydrotherapy, which he points out flushes away good bacteria as well as bad. “I was just trying different things,” he said. “Everything I did was just a disaster.”

But the thing that finally moved the needle was rather mundane. “It wasn’t until I stumbled on adding more protein to my [sic] breakfast,” he said, “that it was like someone took a helmet off my head.”

Drawing on his clinical training and years of study, he found his way back to health, and that personal transformation is part of why millions of people trust and follow him. At 61, at once charismatic, articulate, and down to earth, he is by his own measure far healthier now than thirty years ago.

The turnaround drove him to build what would become one of the most-watched health platforms on the planet, with 14.9 million subscribers on his main English-language YouTube channel and 45 million subscribers across all platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

Berg, who online goes by the moniker “The Knowledge Doc,” is a chiropractor by training and a health educator to millions, myself included. For years, he was after one thing: a single way to trace health problems back to their cause. The answer he landed on is a framework he calls “ancestral mismatch.”

Compare how our ancestors lived to how we live now, he says, and the contrast jumps out. How much sun did they get? How much time outdoors? Was food available around the clock, and did it look anything like ours? Lay the modern environment over the ancient one, and it’s startling, he says, how far we have drifted.

Every guru in health, Berg said, tells people the same thing: that they need more discipline, a better frame of mind, to try harder, to just stick with it. He lived in that world for years. And then he stopped believing it.

Reading about what had been engineered into the food supply changed his mind.

“It wasn’t until some of the books came out that made me aware of the chemicals in our food and the addictions, until I started saying, ‘you know what, this is probably not just willpower. If I’m having these problems, I bet everyone else is too.’“ Dr. Berg said.

He added, “It’s not that people have low willpower; it’s actually that the environment they live in is stacked against them. Everything is engineered for addictions on all levels.”

Processed food, Berg argues, is designed to addict you the same way alcohol and drugs are, and a body surrounded by it will be driven toward it whether the person wants to be or not.

If the environment is the problem, Berg reasoned, then changing the environment is the answer. [Change Your Environments elaborates.]

Moving to a farm was not part of that plan, at least not at first.

“I really didn’t think about moving to a farm until I was literally like 49 years old,” Berg tells me. “I wanted to maybe do something on the weekends.”

He and his wife looked close to home and came up empty. “So we eventually moved farther and farther out, to the point where we found a farm four and a half hours away,” Berg recalls.

What began as a weekend project turned into an experiment on himself. Berg moved away from the ancestral mismatch of the city to a farm in the mountains of Virginia, where he now raises 70 sheep, three dozen cows — plus pigs, goats, chickens, and ducks. Berg does not hire farmhands. He does the labor himself and he loves it.

His experiment was a resounding success. Berg says he could stay on the farm and never leave, because his body responds to it in a way it never did in the city.

“I do videos half the day, and then I go out there and I work fences—I love it! I just love that type of physical work, and working with the animals. My body just thrives in this environment,” Berg says.

While we don’t all need to move to a farm, the lifestyle is undeniably more healthy – and it helps explain the premise of Berg’s book, Change Your Environments.

In full transparency: I have been a fan of Dr. Berg’s for years – because he understands something simple and true: what you put into your body shapes your health more than almost anything else. His instinct is the same as mine: to look for the deficiency or the diet behind a health problem instead of reaching for a prescription. So, I knew his thinking well before we sat down to talk about his new book.

Just a few minutes into our discussion and he revealed its powerful premise: where you live explains the health of most Americans.

It’s such a simple idea and a good one. Why hadn’t I thought of that?!

Berg’s core idea is fundamental to the MAHA movement– distilled to daily life. Chronic disease is largely environmental, largely reversible, and ordinary people like you and me hold far more power over our health than they we think and have been told.

Changing eating habits is the fight most people enter into first. But, by Berg’s account, this is a struggle you can’t win on willpower alone.

“You are up against food companies that have spent billions to get you to keep eating,” he explains. “You eat one [bite], and you can’t stop.”

But food is only where it starts. Nearly everything about modern American life — the artificial light, the hours of sitting at your desk, or staring at your cellphone or computer – the numbing isolation of it all – steers us away from what our bodies were built for, Dr. Berg explains.

If there’s one thing that the book taught me it’s this: the fix is not more willpower; it’s about finding new ways to rebuild the world around us, one unhealthy environment at a time — until health stops being the fight and becomes the default.

Change Your Environments: Redesign Your Life to Reclaim Your Health, which publishes on Sept. 8 from MAHA Books, an imprint of Skyhorse, is available for pre-order, here.

[A portion of the book’s proceeds goes to MAHA Action, whose staff writes and edits The MAHA Report.]

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But it was only during the pandemic, when he played a central role in organizing the Great Barrington Declaration opposing lockdowns, that he became known to millions of Americans who were dismayed by the government’s response to Covid and looking for voices of reason.

Tucker’s political journey began in earnest in the 1980s when he studied economics at Texas Tech University and in graduate school at George Mason University. He volunteered at the Mises Institute’s Washington office. He then went to work in Ron Paul’s foundation office as his private researcher.

He was initially a supporter of President Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s election in 1980 was about more than the state of the economy: It was also about economic theory, particularly debates between the interventionist theories of the Keynesians and the reformist agenda of the Monetarists of the Chicago School.

By the end of the 1980s, Tucker rejected both and, instead, became a leading young advocate for the Austrian school – an economic theory predicated on sound money, typically expressed in pieces of gold. He also met Murry Rothbard in 1985 and maintained a close friendship until Rothbard’s death in 1995.

In 1992, Tucker joined the Mises Institute as editorial vice president, a role he held until 2011. In that position, he helped transform Mises.org into one of the preeminent online resources for Austrian economics, dramatically expanding its reach through digital innovation, open-access publishing, and high-quality content. He also wrote several books that helped popularize and shape modern libertarian thought by promoting the ideas of the institute’s namesake, Ludwig von Mises, and also Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and contemporary scholars and commentators.

After 2011, Tucker joined Laissez Faire Books as executive editor, and then editorial director of the Foundation for Economic Education, a position he held until 2016. Tucker was an early pioneer of eBooks offered to the public at no charge..

During Covid, Tucker became disillusioned with the libertarian movement. “I realize now why so many on the left, right, and the libertarians all fell apart when confronted with realities of the microbial kingdom,” Tucker said. “It’s because people in narrow disciplines never study this so they are inclined to defer to experts.”

The Covid era shifted Tucker’s focus and the course of his life. “Now I’m interested in all kinds of medical freedom issues, including those which affect foods,” he says. “I used to cheer junk food as just fine, a product of capitalism. I’m now mortified that I ever believed that. I’m much more crunchy than I used to be. I see now that the agencies in Washington are there mostly to protect big business interests. That’s what leads to all the distortions of medicine, food, therapeutics, and so much more.”

When it comes to the infringement of liberties that took place beginning in 2020, Tucker does not blame the political class alone. Instead, he lays the blame at the feet of big business and how, according to Tucker, corporate interests manipulate big government, big media, and the legal profession to get their way.

“Consider vaccine mandates. They are a form of conscription,” Tucker said. “It’s remarkable that any society that calls itself free could mandate injections of any potion but here we are. It’s been going on for a very long time. Once the doctors can require you to taint your body with a concoction, all bets for long-run freedom in anything else are off. We have bodily autonomy or we do not.”

In the spring of 2021, with the pandemic still ravaging the country, Tucker founded the Brownstone Institute. It launched, publicly, that fall. “We set out to make it appear that we had always existed so it took a while for the proponents of lockdowns and mandates to figure out that we had just been founded,” Tucker said. Meanwhile, the influence grew. The Brownstone Institute website now attracts around a million readers per month.

Beyond web publishing, Brownstone also publishes books, funds fellowships, holds supper clubs coast to coast, and hosts retreats. Tucker writes a daily economics column for The Epoch Times. “The topics are diverse because I’m rather restless intellectually,” he says. “By my calculation, I’ve written more than 20,000 articles, so when someone says ‘I read all your stuff,’ I know for sure it is not true.”

At Brownstone, the authors and guest writers the institute invites are not expected to hold any specific ideological belief beyond a commitment to freedom. Who does Tucker fear more – the left or the right? “History shows that toggling between the left and the right is a way that tyranny entrenches itself,” he says. “Both can be used by the ruling classes to fasten despotism on the people. This is why it is in everyone’s interest to stay as philosophically independent as possible and to fix one’s mind and heart on something other than the god that has failed, which is the state.”

Earlier this year, he commissioned a poll jointly with Leslie Manookian, the founder and president of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, a non-profit group. The poll, conducted by John Zogby Strategies, showed that supermajorities of Americans favor health freedom over top-down mandates.

“Jeffrey is not only a gifted writer and communicator, he’s a principled and relentless pursuer of truth,” Manookian tells us. “His grounding in both civil liberties and facts led to him founding Brownstone Institute – the organization that became the refuge of so many censored and ostracized researchers and scientists – and a beacon of light to scores of people seeking truth.”

Tucker is happy to not be in any ideological camp, and to entertain a broad range of ideas. “I adopted the tribe called libertarians but they collapsed during the Covid years, much to my amazement,” he told The MAHA Report. “I’ve now never been more independent. I’m happy to draw on any tradition of thought that makes sense with an eye toward knowing what is true. I also strive to be objective and open-minded. Tribal politics is not my way.”

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Dr. McAllister is a widely respected thought leader, author, podcast host, and endurance athlete whose work centers on whole-being care. She has completed the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon and twice swum the waters surrounding Alcatraz, accomplishments that reflect the courage and strength to exceed perceived limits.

In conversation, she is magnetic and deeply engaging, pairing that vibrant energy with a reflective wisdom that moves beyond symptoms into larger questions of identity, purpose, and how we choose to live. Shaped by her own health journey and decades of experience across healthcare settings, Adjusted Reality distills that vision into seven pillars: investment, replenishment, nourishment, movement, adjustment, contentment, and revitalizement, which became the foundation of our conversation.

McAllister’s health journey begins at 19, when she was injured in a serious car accident. Months of pain, medications, referrals, and uncertainty followed.

“I did not know I was even taking an opiate,” she told me.

The medication made her sick, so she stopped it, but not everyone is that fortunate. Studies suggest that roughly 5% to 6% of previously opioid-naïve patients – in other words, people with little to no experience taking opioids – continue using opioid pain medications for months after an initial prescription or surgery. In a study of more than 1 million opioid-naïve surgical patients, both repeated refills and longer treatment were independently associated with higher rates of documented opioid misuse: 44% for each additional refill and about 20% for each additional week of prescribed use.

Persistent use is not the same as addiction, but longer use creates more opportunity for dependence, misuse, and opioid use disorder – a clinical term which refers to compulsive opioid use and also the inability to stop using despite negative impacts.

What stayed with McAllister most, however, was the loss of hope: no one could explain what was wrong until a classmate handed her a chiropractor’s card.

That experience redirected her life and inspired a question she returns to throughout her book, Adjusted Reality: Why are conservative options so often treated as a last resort instead of a first consideration? McAllister calls for a shift from “last hope” to “first hope,” offering patients conservative, whole-being options earlier, rather than waiting until medications, referrals, and fragmented care have left them discouraged and out of answers.

“I don’t want anyone else to spend their life wondering why the last option isn’t the first,” she writes.

From “Nowhere” to “Now Here”

McAllister calls her approach “whole-being” care. During our conversation, she explained that the phrase describes both who we are – body, mind, purpose, and spirit – and what we do each day.

“Health is not merely something we possess,” she said. “It’s something we practice.”

That distinction stayed with me. In functional medicine, we often talk about root causes and the whole person. McAllister adds another layer: being fully present in one’s own health.

She uses the phrase “from nowhere to now here” to describe the shift from feeling lost and disempowered to actively participating in one’s own care.

Seven Pillars, One Connected Life

‘Investment,’ McAllister said, is really about intention.

“The deposits we put in today are going to show up later.”

This is not about finances but whether daily choices are building the future we want or quietly depleting it.

‘Replenishment’ begins with sleep, when the body’s “internal pharmacy” carries out essential repair and restoration. McAllister put it memorably: “You do better for your cell phone than you do for yourself.” We faithfully plug in our devices each night to charge, yet often treat getting 7-9 hours of sleep as a “luxury.” The resulting sleep debt leaves the brain, hormones, immune system, and nervous system without the time needed to recover.

During our conversation, McAllister referenced Socrates—“Contentment is natural wealth; luxury is artificial poverty”—which captures the point beautifully: without adequate sleep, the body becomes biologically depleted, no matter how full life may appear.

‘Nourishment’ begins even farther upstream: in the soil. McAllister shared the story of tasting freshly harvested organic mountain spinach for the first time. “My mouth sparkled,” she said. The moment captured more than the pleasure of eating something fresh and flavorful; it illustrated how different food can taste when it is grown in healthy soil and reaches our plates close to its natural state. Her larger point was that food is not simply fuel; it is information, and its quality matters. What we eat sends signals that can influence metabolism, inflammation, energy and overall health. Nourishment therefore begins long before food reaches the plate, and farmers, manufacturers, policymakers and consumers all share responsibility for moving the food system away from ultra-processed products, excess sugar and artificial ingredients and toward food that genuinely supports health.

‘Movement’ is built on stability, flexibility, mobility and capability, or strength.

“This is a four-leg stool, not a three-leg stool,” she said.

Strength matters, but strength without balance, mobility or flexibility can still leave a person vulnerable to injury, falls and loss of independence.

‘Adjustment’ is the pillar most closely associated with chiropractic care, but McAllister sees it as more than pain relief or the familiar “crack.” She connects joint function with proprioception or knowing where the body is in space; sensory-motor integration or the brain’s ability to use sensory information to coordinate movement; balance and posture; and neuroplasticity or the brain’s ability to adapt and reorganize itself over time.

‘Contentment’ may be the most unexpected pillar.

She sees grief, anxiety, loneliness, purpose and community as inseparable from physical health.

“Contentment is why we’re on Earth,” she told me.

McAllister emphasized that emotions are not separate from physical health; they can be a powerful part of both illness and healing. Yet our current health care system often focuses on the symptom, such as pain, poor sleep or delayed recovery, without asking what may be driving it, particularly when the underlying factors are emotional. The connection is substantial: a 2025 meta-analysis of 376 studies involving more than 347,000 adults with chronic pain found clinically significant symptoms of depression in 39.3% and anxiety in 40.2% of participants. Chiropractors can help recognize when emotional distress may be contributing to a patient’s symptoms and, as part of an interdisciplinary care team, communicate those concerns and refer patients to appropriately trained mental-health professionals.

‘Revitalizement’ brings everything together.

The goal, McAllister explained, is not to recharge just enough to return to the same depleted way of living. It is to become “supercharged,” restored enough to show up with greater energy, clarity and purpose in the places that matter most. In that state, health becomes more than the absence of symptoms; it becomes the capacity to be fully present with family, contribute meaningfully at work, pursue a sense of purpose and participate in community.

The Policy Question

By the end of our conversation, the subject had moved naturally from personal health to public policy.

“Collaborative care is not a trend, and it’s not a buzzword,” McAllister said. “It literally has to be the evolution of healthcare.”

A bipartisan bill introduced last year in the House and Senate would expand the services Medicare can reimburse chiropractors for providing. Medicare currently pays chiropractors only for spinal manipulation, even though it may cover services such as examinations or therapeutic exercise when they are provided by other qualified professionals. The bill would allow chiropractors to receive payment for those same Medicare-covered services when they are licensed to provide them under state law. Supporters say the change could give older adults broader access to non-drug care for back, neck and other musculoskeletal conditions.

McAllister envisions chiropractors working alongside physicians, pharmacists, physical therapists, nutrition professionals and mental-health clinicians, each contributing distinct expertise while keeping the patient—not the profession—at the center.

“The patient has choices,” she said.

A better system would make those choices easier to understand, coordinate care across disciplines and offer conservative, non-drug options earlier when clinically appropriate. In that model, chiropractic care is not a last stop after patients have exhausted every other avenue, but an integrated part of a collaborative care team that helps patients move toward healing with greater clarity, support and hope.

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Joel Salatin, the self-described “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer,” who runs Polyface Farm in the hills of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, calls this surge the “homestead tsunami.”

Nationwide, events devoted to homesteading and self-sufficient living are growing, including the Homesteaders of America Conference in Virginia and the Modern Homesteading Conference in Idaho.

In August, Salatin and Polyface Farm will host the Rogue Conference, an annual event held at a different location each year that emphasizes regenerative farming, local food systems, and food sovereignty, and embraces activism against what Salatin calls “cumbersome regulations.”

He wrote a book released in 2024 called Homestead Tsunami: Good for Country, Critters, and Kids. It highlights the trend of Americans moving to the country for homesteading and serves as a template for people interested in becoming more self-sufficient.

In mid-June, in the hills of Amish Country in eastern Ohio, Salatin spoke about why homesteading is on the rise.

“There’s been a real disconnect between the younger generation and where their food comes from,” he said.

“People have an intuition that there is more opportunity in the country than in the city to be self-sufficient,” he added. “The problem is, we are now several generations removed from commonly knowing how to gut a chicken, tap a maple tree, and plant tomatoes. When you make a change from your routine in life, you need support, and that is why the homesteading and sustainable living events are important, and that’s why I do what I do.”

The homesteading movement gained momentum during the Covid-19 pandemic when seed companies sold out, canning supplies disappeared from shelves, and backyard chicken flocks grew.

Online searches for sourdough recipes and canning methods spiked.

What began as a reaction to empty supermarket shelves and lockdowns has evolved into a sustained cultural shift.

Amid the rolling green hills of eastern Ohio’s Amish country, the Seed to Spoon Summit teaches attendees to return to their grandparents’ roots and become more self-sufficient.

Exhibitors and experts offer instruction on everything from beekeeping, cheesemaking, butchering, canning, and gardening to bread making, soil care, meat processing, and growing microgreens, among other skills and tasks.

Launched in 2022 and originally called the Food Independence Summit, the gathering was co-founded by John Miller, owner of Superb Canning, and Marcus Wengerd, owner of Berlin Seeds. Both businesses are nestled in a region where Amish and Mennonite farms dot the landscape along roads traveled by horse-drawn buggies as well as automobiles.

Widely known as an Amish Country tourist mecca, Holmes County and neighboring Tuscarawas County are also teeming with entrepreneurs focused on sustainable living products and services.

Self-sufficient living here is a way of life for both Amish and “English”—the Amish term for those who do not belong to the Amish community.

Miller and Wengerd changed the name to “Seed to Spoon” because it “captures the entire journey of food—from planting and growing to preserving and eating,” Miller said.

“The new name also clearly communicates the deeper goal of empowering families and communities to become less dependent on fragile, centralized food systems,” Wengerd added.

“This is more than just a conference; it’s a movement by many who want to be healthier,” Miller said.

Homegrown food is one of the keys to healthier communities, Wengerd said.

“Seed is the currency of our planet. If we don’t have seed, then we go hungry. And if we don’t properly preserve what we harvest, that food will go to waste. And it all starts with healthy soil,” Wengerd said.

Miller noted they put together the first summit in 2022 in six weeks.

“We sought as many experts and influencers in sustainable living as we could find, and we keep growing every year,” Miller said.

The region where the summit is held includes the second-largest community of Amish in the world. Most live in and around Holmes County, which has the highest concentration of Amish of any U.S. county. Half of the county’s population is Amish, and many members of closely related denominations such as the Mennonites reside here, too.

Amish Country is one of Ohio’s most visited tourist areas. Visitors flock there to experience farm attractions and museums and buy a wide assortment of handmade goods and artisan products.

Bed-and-breakfasts and inns line a landscape of sprawling, meticulously maintained farms. On many of the roads, horse-drawn buggies are just as common as automobiles.

What makes this area “perfect” for an event that encourages gardening and homesteading is its heritage, Miller believes.

“We live in a community where homesteading is a way of life. The notion of sustainable living is a deeply entrenched tradition dating back several hundreds of years,” he said.

“Our purpose here is to help people become more self-sufficient where they are and with what they have,” Miller added. “Any step you take to living a healthier lifestyle and knowing where your food comes from will give you more peace of mind.”

Max Kane has a 211-acre farm in southwest Wisconsin and operates a raw milk buying club. In 2009, he said the USDA, FDA, and state authorities tried to jail him over his raw milk deliveries to Chicago.

The experience reinforced his belief that Americans need the option to opt out of the industrial system and form private food networks built on trust between farmers and consumers, a view espoused by Salatin, who has spoken of the need for a “Food Emancipation Proclamation” that would allow farmers and consumers to conduct food transactions without government restrictions.

Kane created FarmMatch, an online marketplace he describes as “Etsy for local food.” The platform connects consumers with vetted farms and buying clubs.

Initially, FarmMatch arose to manage Kane’s own raw milk club more efficiently before it evolved into a broader project for the local food movement.

The food people eat is “the single biggest determinant of their ability to perform their life, whether that means litigating a case, playing professional sports, driving a bus, or carrying a child to the park,” Kane explained.

“If citizens cannot legally build private food systems that nourish their bodies and minds, they risk becoming permanently dependent on an infrastructure that leaves them sick, disempowered, and economically challenged. Providing awareness at events like this one [the Seed to Spoon Summit] is a valuable way to keep expanding the number of people who take the first steps to knowing where their food comes from and how it is raised,” he added.

RuthAnn Zimmerman and her husband Elvin live on a 21-acre homestead in northeast Iowa. An author of multiple self-sufficiency books, including The Heart of the Homestead, Zimmerman urges people to ask: “Where did this grow, who grew it, and how was it grown?” when buying food items.

She believes the interest in events and books related to homesteading, and on-farm learning experiences, can be attributed to mistrust of government and institutional stability.

Zimmerman thinks that many Americans still look at the government as their “Plan B” for food, and she advocates for people to grow and locally source food like “there is no Plan B.”

“That shifts the accountability back to individuals and communities to create real nourishment for themselves instead of relying on something that is not guaranteed to be there,” she said.

The homestead tsunami isn’t free of turbulence. New homesteaders face steep learning curves, health problems with animals, crop failures, predators, infrastructure costs, and physical demands. Property prices in many rural areas have escalated, making it more costly to buy land.

Social media can romanticize the homestead lifestyle and lead to disillusionment when reality hits. Animal husbandry, especially processing, carries risks if done without proper knowledge.

Success requires patience, community support, and realistic expectations.

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“A lot of people, especially recently, have asked me how Bobby is handling some of the attacks that come at him,” Hines said on the weekly podcast. “We see hit pieces in the press, and I’m here to tell you, he takes it in stride. Bobby has one of the strongest wills of anyone I know and hit piece attacks don’t bother him. In fact, it only makes him stronger and it makes him more determined.”

The weekend before, The New York Times ran a long article under the headline: “Kennedy Shows Minimal Engagement with Vast Health Portfolio,” reporting that the Secretary of HHS shows “little interest in managing the details of his department” and instead is “single-mindedly focused on his top priorities” – which the article listed as food, pesticides and vaccines. It was a hit piece, but one that probably had many of his supporters cheering, knowing that the man in charge of public health is focused on these three huge issues and not getting pulled into the weeds of managing a federal agency with an annual budget of more than $3 trillion.

Kennedy, Hines said, knows that when you have truth on your side, it’s very powerful.

“It’s a very big job, I don’t have to tell you that,” said Hines. “But the work that Bobby is doing, the work that Dr. Oz is doing, it’s important. It could be disheartening because there are so many attacks and there are so many people coming at them. But, the strength of MAHA is like a force field around them.”

During the podcast, Hines also shared news of big MAHA wins around ultra processed foods. “I was just in his office yesterday, and [Special Advisor to HHS Secretary Kennedy] Calley Means came in and said, for the first time in over a decade obesity is down in America,” she said. “The obesity rate is down. [Bobby] also said that Americans are buying less ultra-processed food. So we are seeing results. We are seeing engagement. We are seeing the messaging getting out to people regardless of what the press is saying or what the attacks might be. Real progress is being made and it’s because of you. So I wanna thank you for that.”

Over the last several months, Hines has become a MAHA advocate and spokesperson, speaking at three MAHA Action gatherings at the Ned, a private club in Washington, D.C., and appearing on numerous podcasts and TV shows, including The Joe Rogan Experience, “The View,” The Tucker Carlson Show, The Megyn Kelly Show, “Jesse Watters Primetime,” Dedicated with Doug Brunt, The Katie Miller Podcast, The Adam Carolla Show, Club Random with Bill Maher, Juicy Scoop with Heather McDonald, The Dr. Drew Show, and others.

In March, on The Outkick podcast, Hines addressed the outlandishness of the attacks on her husband and what he’s trying to accomplish at HHS.

“It’s really ridiculous for anyone to fight against wanting to remove petroleum-based dyes in food, or wanting to remove arsenic in baby formula,” she said.

The work that Kennedy is doing, she added, shouldn’t be controversial.

“We’re talking about people’s health. Either you’re happy that the U.S. is now paying lower pharmaceutical drug prices or you’re just angry about politics and you’re just never going to say you’re happy about that.”

At the MAHA Action event at the Ned last month, Hines made a point about the MAHA movement transcending partisanship.

“I love that the MAHA moms, they don’t care if you are a Republican, if you’re a Democrat, if you’re an independent,” she said. “They care about the policies that are being made that are impacting their families’ health. They are unstoppable, and I think Washington, D.C. will verify that because they are feeling it and they’re putting a lot of heat on the right people at the right time and I am really very, very proud of them.”

Cheryl Hines of course is the internationally recognized actress and comedian who co-starred on the hit show “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” playing the wife of comedian Larry David for all 12 seasons that the show aired on CBS.

With co-star David making the introduction, Hines and Kennedy met at a Waterkeeper fundraiser in 2005. At the time, Kennedy was an environmental lawyer in New York who’d made a name for himself suing companies for discharging industrial waste into the Hudson River, killing fish and threatening the livelihoods of Hudson River fishermen, whom Kennedy was representing.

The two were married in 2014 at the Kennedy home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and were living in California when Kennedy announced, on April 19, 2023, that he would challenge President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination for president.

But halfway through, and seeing no path forward after the Democratic Party blocked him from the ballot in several states, Kennedy switched to running as an independent. And then, in late August of 2024, in a moment that the medical freedom movement will never forget, Kennedy joined Donald Trump onstage at a Glendale, Arizona rally, linking the health freedom movement, MAHA, to Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, MAGA.

After he was nominated by President Trump to head the Department and Health and Human Services and, in February 2025, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Kennedy and Hines took up residence in D.C.

“Being in Washington, D.C., you can feel the power of MAHA here,” Hines said on Wednesday, June 10 during the live MAHA Media Hub stream. “I will tell you, when the MAHA moms show up on Capitol Hill, no one is ignoring them. People are scared of them . . . . And a lot of people are cheering around the country.” …”

Hines was seated behind Kennedy during his confirmation hearings in late January of 2025 – hearings that brought thousands of MAHA moms to Capitol Hill, where they lobbied their senators to support Kennedy’s nomination.

“They are too knowledgeable and they are too loud to be ignored,” said Hines. “They get a lot of stuff done because they are true to their one mission – to keep their families healthy. So it is really something to see when you’re watching them go toe-to-toe on Capitol Hill against these politicians, and the politicians can’t argue that. They can try. But who is arguing against having a healthy family? It’s impossible.”

Hines has a 22-year-old daughter named Catherine from a prior marriage and is the author of a memoir entitled Unscripted, which was published by Skyhorse last November. In the book, she tells the story of the remarkable twists of fate that took her from Orlando and Tallahassee, Florida, where she grew up, to Los Angeles, where she struggled as an actress for many years, getting only bit parts, before finally landing the role of Larry David’s ever-patient wife on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” – a turn of events that she described in the book as life-changing.

During an appearance on ABC’s “The View” last October, Hines described what it was like meeting Kennedy. “He was living in New York,” she said. “I was living in L.A. I had just been in this entertainment sort of bubble. And then I meet him and he’s an environmental attorney and was just – he’s fascinating and he’s interesting and he’s smart and he’s funny, and completely different from anyone I’ve ever met in my life.”

One of the hosts of the show, Sunny Hostin, quoted from Hines’ book, in which she’d written that when Kennedy joined forces with Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign, her friends wrote to her, saying “You can’t let Bobby do this. He’s going to get Trump elected. You’ve got to stop him.”

Hines replied that she always shares concerns with her husband, but that she has not been a political person most of her life. She said that as a young adult, she was at first an independent and didn’t affiliate with any party, that she then changed her affiliation to Democrat, and has now changed back to independent.

It was Joy Behar who stepped in and brought up the issue of vaccines, pressing Hines on her views.

Hines replied that the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has paid out $5.4 billion for vaccine injuries since its inception.

“Yes, they are important and they are an important part of our health care,” she said about vaccines. “Can we do better? Can we make them safer? Can we listen to parents who say, ‘My child got the vaccine and changed, and stopped hitting markers and stopped developing the way they were developing’? Can we listen to people when they say that instead of saying, ‘you’re crazy’?”

Hines was widely praised for this careful and thoughtful response, and for asking that parents with vaccine-injured children be heard and respected, instead of being dismissed.

Secretary Kennedy and Cheryl Hines now live in a townhouse in Georgetown that they purchased last year. On the June 10 Media Hub, Hines said she’s been enjoying life in the nation’s capital.

“I have been cooking more, actually, since I’ve been in D.C.,” she said, “and I think Bobby appreciates it, though he really eats a very limited diet, we know this. He eats steak and ground beef and fermented vegetables. So I really don’t have to do much cooking for him.”

She said that Bobby is “as strong as ever” and will continue to fight.

“And one of the reasons why he can stay so strong is because of MAHA,” she said, “and because of the group that we have here. Everyone seems to move in such an organized, informed, enthusiastic way that it just is, a force, and we can feel it. He can feel it.”

Put more simply, Salatin wants to liberate small farms, like his own, from the large regulatory agencies.

In an interview with The MAHA Report in May, Salatin said family farms in America are slowly disappearing, citing a 2022 USDA census report that found the United States had lost 142,000 farms over the prior five years.

The economics are difficult for farmers.

“Out of every dollar that’s spent at the grocery store, the farmer gets 9 cents of it on average,” Salatin said, adding, “For beef, it’s higher. For wheat, it’s lower, but on average it’s 9 cents. So that means 91 of those cents are spent dealing with middlemen, transportation, processing, packaging, marketing, and distribution.”

What’s more, the average farmer in America is now nearly 60 years old, and younger generations are hesitant to take over because of excessive costs and regulations.

Farmers don’t need government subsidies to thrive, Salatin said. What they really need is “the freedom to innovate and sell directly to local consumers without facing a morass of red tape, regulations, and mandates.”

Salatin runs Polyface Farm in the hills of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and his work there is truly innovative.

The self-described “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer” speaks at homesteading conferences and agricultural events across the country, and he travels the world helping farmers transition from conventional to regenerative methods.

In every season, Salatin’s schedule is stocked with these engagements and appearances. He wrote a book released in 2024 called “Homestead Tsunami: Good for Country, Critters, and Kids.” It explains the growing trend of Americans moving to the country for homesteading and serves as a guide for people interested in becoming more self-sufficient.

Visiting Polyface Farms is a pilgrimage for many sustainable living and regenerative agriculture enthusiasts and Salatin offers a variety of tours, including“The Lunatic” tour, which features a two-and-a-half-hour wagon-guided adventure around the farm.

Salatin is a small farmer, but his reach is large and growing. Besides “Homestead Tsunami,” he’s written 16 more books, including “Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front.”

People also flock to his blog, “The Lunatic Farmer,” listen to the Beyond Labels podcast he co-hosts with Dr. Sina McCullough, and take his online courses that include “Farm Like a Lunatic.”

But his biggest project may be the “Food Emancipation Proclamation” drive, which would “allow direct farmer-to-consumer” transactions without cumbersome regulations.

“If you want to come to my farm and get sausage, I should be able to sell it to you without a bureaucrat being involved,” he said.

He continued, “If someone wants to do that now, I first have to take the pigs to a federally inspected processing facility, which has to pass through a whole bunch of licensing hoops to keep their license, and I have to pay them to do that.”

Polyface Farm would be a turnkey operation if that was legal. Instead, regulations require otherwise.

“We have to take that pig up the interstate to a slaughterhouse, and we pay a lot of money to bring it back,” he said. “We lose all of our guts, you know, the stuff that we could compost and use for fertilizer, and the income we could get by doing it ourselves.”

Salatin’s decades-long critique of regulatory “red tape” resonates with farmers who report they are struggling to comply with rules written for much larger operations while trying to sell eggs, raw milk, or pastured meat to locals.

He chastises industrial food systems, government subsidies, and excessive rules that hinder small farmers — and he promotes decentralization, seasonality, and consumer connection to food sources.

“As farmers, many of us live every day wondering, ‘What infraction did I make today or who do I have to ask permission for today?’ We are suffocated in this morass of regulatory oversight,” Salatin said.

Salatin sees it this way: “The bottom line is you can’t have a successful small business with big government. Big government and small business don’t go together. Big government and big business, that goes together really well.”

He has what he calls a simple message to decrease chronic disease, reduce food prices, and rebuild local farm economies. It includes rebuilding the land from the soil up, shortening the distance between the farm and fork, and trusting local farms over distant institutions.

Polyface incorporates multi-species rotational grazing to mimic natural ecosystems. Cattle graze pastures, followed by chickens in mobile coops that scratch through manure for larvae, fertilizing the soil in the process. Pigs, turkeys, and other animals integrated into the cycle.

This “stacking” approach builds soil fertility, reduces parasites, and produces nutrient-dense meat without chemicals, grain feeding, or confinement.

The farm sells directly to consumers, restaurants, and through shipping.

Farmers, advocates, and policy thinkers across the world mention Salatin’s name as the architect of a blueprint for a different agricultural future.

They describe Joel as a thought leader of the regenerative agriculture industry and cite his emphasis on sourcing food locally, selling locally, and building resilient regional food systems instead of embracing distant commodity markets.

Others point to Polyface as evidence that small farms can thrive without relying on chemical-intensive monocultures or corporate processors.

Salatin has long met with resistance from neighboring farmers who don’t approve of his regenerative farming practices. One naysayer called him a “lunatic,” he said.

Instead of taking offense, Salatin took what was intended as an insult and used it as his moniker.

“I was getting so much heat from the conventional agriculture system. You know, we use compost, not chemicals. We don’t vaccinate. We don’t medicate. We move the animals around. They have an immune system,” Salatin said.

“I’ve been called a bio-terrorist, Typhoid Mary, and a starvation advocate among other names. After one particularly aggressive phone call, I hung up and said to myself, ‘I can either be depressed and frustrated about this or have fun with it. So let’s embrace it.’ I just grabbed that mantra and it stuck,” he said, proudly proclaiming that “if you Google lunatic farmer, there is not another lunatic farmer on the planet.”

An opponent of what he believes is “extreme government overreach” in agriculture. Salatin hopes government regulations that “are detrimental to farmers, and subsequently detrimental to consumers” will be removed.

He laments that “four companies control 85 percent of what we eat in America” and believes that we need “freedom of choice with our food.” Thousands of farm entrepreneurs would launch clean food alternatives, but they can’t get to the marketplace because of these food regulations, he said.

Salatin learned regenerative farming methods from his father, who bought the property where Polyface Farms sits in 1961. Salatin’s grandfather was a “charter subscriber to Rodale’s Organic Farming magazine when it came out in 1945” and his father cultivated an interest in non-chemical agriculture.

The Salatins focused on land restoration, inspired by Biblical stewardship principles and the ideas of organic farming pioneer, J.I. Rodale.

Salatin’s father recognized that, as a small farmer, “he could never compete at the low-margin commodity level because he couldn’t produce enough commodities.”

“We had to become the middleman, the processor, the marketer, the distributor, in addition to the producer. The middleman makes all the money,” Salatin said.

As a teenager, Joel Salatin, now 69, sold rabbits, eggs, and poultry at local markets. In 1979, he earned an English degree from Bob Jones University.

Initially, Salatin was a reporter at the local newspaper in Staunton, Virginia.

“I figured I would be like Woodward and Bernstein and uncover a scandal, write my bestseller, and retire to the farm. That was the trajectory I had in mind,” he said.

Instead, he married a young woman named Teresa in 1980. The couple, who met during childhood, fixed up an attic in the old farmhouse on the Polyface Farms property and lived frugally.

“We drove a $50 car, a 1966 Dodge Coronet that I eventually sold for parts for $75,” he said.

“We lived so cheaply that we were able to save half our paychecks,” he recalls. “We never went on vacation. We didn’t go anywhere, we didn’t go to movies, we didn’t eat out. If we didn’t grow it, we didn’t eat it.”

The young couple lived on $300 a month selling beef directly to local customers.

“We didn’t have very many, but remember, we were living on 300 bucks a month, so we didn’t need much income,” he said.

Salatin left the newspaper on Sept. 24, 1982 and the couple decided to solely farm.

“I’ll be the first to say I thought I might have to go back to work [at the newspaper]. I didn’t know this full-time farming gig would work. But I had vision. I’m thankful that somehow, for some reason, God gave me vision,” he explained.

Salatin is keen on biodiversity. Polyface Farms shelters rabbits, chickens, and pigs “all in the same hoop house” during the winter instead of separating them like a conventional farm would.

Pathogens from rabbit droppings encounter chicken droppings, which are toxic to the rabbit pathogen. The chicken droppings then kill the rabbit pathogen before infecting another animal without chemical intervention.

Biodiversity creates necessary checks and balances on farms, Salatin said.

The pigs live in the pasture until they are brought inside for the winter. They are moved every five to ten days or so, Salatin explained.

“They run around in the fresh air and sunshine, eat grass, and have a wonderful life,” he said.

“Our meat cooks about 15 to 20 percent faster than regular store-bought meat because our animals never secrete adrenaline because they’re happy and not stressed,” Salatin continued. “Animals that are confined get stressed and spend their whole life secreting adrenaline. You can eat happiness or eat stress. I think eating happiness tastes better and is healthier.”

Please note: On June 17 and June 18, Salatin will speak and host workshops at the Seed to Spoon Summit in Ohio’s Amish country. Formerly called the Food Independence Summit, it’s one of the nation’s largest homesteading events.

Dr. Joel “Gator” Warsh shows signs of being a maverick.

The Los Angeles-based pediatrician isn’t in lock step with the mainstream medical community’s approach of giving a vaccine to everyone just because it’s recommended by the CDC. A strong proponent of informed consent, he believes in educating parents on the pros and cons of vaccines and letting them decide if they want to proceed, instead of pressuring parents to vaccinate their kids, an approach that aligns with the MAHA mission.

Warsh, who says he’s not “pro-vax” or “anti-vax,” considers himself to be in the mainstream. But he hasn’t hesitated to voice concerns about the potential dangers of vaccines, as he did in his 2025 book, Between a Shot and a Hard Place: Tackling Difficult Vaccine Questions with Balance, Data, and Clarity.

“I just want to see what’s best for my children and other people’s kids, and I’m just asking questions based on what I see,” he told The MAHA Report. “If that makes me a maverick, then so be it. We’re injecting kids with 20-plus vaccines in the first few years, and more and more people have questions. Many parents, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, have the same story of ‘my kid was fully healthy. I went to get a vaccine and that day or over the next few days everything changed.’ To me, that’s what we should be listening to. I don’t think every single one of those parents can be wrong. I know coincidences happen. But that seems like a lot of coincidences, and I feel like there are more vaccine injuries than we recognize.”

Doctors are supposed to follow informed consent for all procedures, but vaccine cases feel “slightly different,” Warsh says.

“A large majority of pediatricians are very dogmatic when it comes to vaccines,” he says. “And many practices require you to follow the CDC schedule, or they won’t accept you in the practice, or they’ll kick you out if you refuse. To me, that’s wrong. I feel like we shouldn’t be discriminating based on vaccine choices. We should be treating all kids. Most practices kick you out if you choose to politely decline, or even if you want to do an alternate schedule, which I think is unfortunate.”

Warsh, 42, has two decades of experience as a board-certified pediatrician. At the practice he founded in 2018—Integrative Pediatrics and Medicine—he specializes in vaccines, wellness, and integrative medicine. He’s published peer-reviewed research on childhood injuries, obesity, and physical activity and has been featured in many documentaries, films, podcasts, and media outlets.

Most patients in his practice vaccinate, with some doing a regular schedule and others a slow schedule. Some don’t vaccinate at all.

“Most of the information out there, anything you hear about vaccines, just tends to be so one-sided like, ‘vaccines are the best thing ever, and they can never cause a problem,’ or ‘vaccines are the worst thing ever, and you should never do it,’” he says. “I’m trying to bridge that and meet parents where they are. Most people are just scared and don’t know what to believe. I feel that doctors are a little bit more confident in vaccine research than maybe they should be. A lot more needs to be researched for doctors to be as confident as they tend to be about vaccines.”

Recently, Warsh was a guest speaker at a roundtable discussion focused on bringing to light the possible medical harms of vaccination and what can be done to tackle the massive epidemic of vaccine injuries. The MAHA Institute, a think tank aimed at fixing America’s health system, hosted the event in Washington, D.C.

At the roundtable, Warsh said one reason many mainstream pediatricians may not fully acknowledge vaccine injury is the lack of effort to adequately track and study it, making it hard to understand how common it may be or whether there are links to chronic disease. He also noted that many clinicians have not reviewed the primary literature on vaccine injury.

He referenced, for example, a 2020 study by the Henry Ford Health system in Detroit that followed more than 18,000 children born between 2000 and 2016. The researchers reported that vaccinated children were at least 2 ½ times more likely to develop chronic health conditions than unvaccinated kids. The study, which was not peer reviewed or published, is considered one of the most important of its kind.

Warsh believes the lack of a randomized controlled trial comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated children is the “gigantic elephant in the room.”

“Where are the studies using inert placebos as controls?” he wrote in his book. “Where are the studies that show giving multiple and a rising number of vaccines simultaneously is safe?”

Warsh would love to be on a team pursuing a long-term prospective trial on vaccine safety.

“That type of study would be the most important thing to be done in vaccine science,” he says. “I don’t know how easy it would be to get into a main journal. But if we could run a vaccinated versus unvaccinated study and people could come together to do it, especially around autism, it would be so important. I have pitched the idea before to do it, but people are very concerned it’s so expensive and that the idea will be dismissed.”

A native of Toronto, Warsh earned a master’s degree in epidemiology before completing medical school at Thomas Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. He trained in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles and practiced in Beverly Hills, then opened Integrative Pediatrics and Medicine.

Because of his concentration on integrative medicine—which combines conventional approaches such as drugs and surgery with complementary therapies like exercise and proper nutrition—he’s learned that parents who come to his office have a lot more questions about vaccines, often because they’ve read more about them. At first, he didn’t have all the answers but began diving into research about the potential dangers of vaccines with a burgeoning curiosity.

But the Covid era, when pharmaceutical companies declared their vaccines to be “safe and effective” without definitive studies, served in his mind as the “gasoline that lit the fire,” he says.

“That pushed me and a lot of others to start asking, ‘If they’re lying about this, what else might they be lying about when it comes to vaccines,’” he says. “For me, a lack of trust was certainly building before the pandemic. But that was the final straw that pushed me much deeper into the discussion and feeling like I want to be involved.”

Just like frustration built in him because of the Covid messaging, he takes issue with mainstream medicine where, in his view, everything is about supporting more vaccines instead of focusing on overall health.

“My job as a physician should not be pushing people to get more vaccines,” he says. “It should be to help people to get as healthy as possible. That should be 1,000 vaccines or zero vaccines, whatever the research shows. But it seems today everything is focused on more vaccines and vaccine efficacy, not about vaccine safety. Both things are important and both things can be true. The vaccine that can protect you can also cause harm. There’s no reason you can’t have honest conversations about that.”

Now one of the nation’s most widely known health freedom activists and the co-author of a book that encourages readers to exit conventional medicine and embrace natural living, Wilson remembers a particular night working on a case at her law firm.

“I was walking down the internal stairwell of the office with a deposition folder in my hand, and I looked at my partner and said, ‘Well, I’m leaving early tonight. I’m going to lead a shopping tour to teach people how to shop like the doc,’” Wilson said with a grin.

“Even then – when I spent so many hours working on corporate litigation – my greatest joy was felt when I was involved in helping people with their health.”

At the time, her husband, Dr. Nick Wilson, had opened a chiropractic and holistic wellness clinic.

Dr. Nick Wilson and Leah Wilson are now leaders in the natural health and health freedom movements.

Dr. Wilson is the founder of Alignment Training, Restructured Chiropractic and Vitality Metabolics. He also has a podcast and an Indianapolis-based radio show focused on natural health.

Leah Wilson is a health freedom attorney and co-founder of Stand for Health Freedom.

Through their respective advocacy, clinical work, foster care, writing, and speaking, the couple has crafted a movement that inspires families to improve their health by reclaiming vitality.

The principles of vitality, and the Wilsons’ story, are detailed in their new book, Reclaim Vitality: A Guide to Exit Conventional Medicine and Live Naturally, released by Skyhorse Publishing in January.

The book chronicles the corruption of what the Wilsons call the “sick care business” that is fueled by pharmaceuticals. The authors present a roadmap to natural healing featuring a “vitality score sheet” that allows readers to assess their assets and liabilities, optimize their environment, and rewire the thoughts that harm them.

In Reclaim Vitality, the Wilsons also offer a roadmap to activate the body’s God-given ability to heal. The five pillars of their plan are Rewire the Mind, Reset Sleep, Repattern Movement, Remove Toxic Inputs, and Restore Alignment.

The Wilsons encourage readers to live “vitalistically” with a lifestyle centered around conscious food choices, movement, breathwork, alignment, and rest.

Before you divorce yourself from the decades of lies you’ve been told about conventional medicine, you must take a first step toward reclaiming your health, Leah says.

Traditional medicine can lead to a dead end when you’re seeking healing.

“When people understand the truth, they won’t be able to be tricked into bad healthcare decisions anymore,” she says.

Leah Wilson told The MAHA Report that she and her husband framed the book in terms of virtues and principles “so that it will be more of a framework, and not a ‘how to avoid this food or how to find the best foods.’ It’s about shifting our reference point and exiting the model of whack-a-mole health care and fear-based decision making.”

Dr. Wilson describes modern conventional medicine as “whack-a-mole healthcare.”

You get a fever, and whack it with Tylenol. You get a cold, and whack it with an antihistamine. You take a vaccine for one condition, and it leads to a litany of other health issues.

“People just continue playing whack-a-mole, and the moles come faster and faster, and they never stop coming. And you end up increasingly frustrated,” Leah Wilson said.

“The game doesn’t stop by simply substituting your cholesterol-lowering medication with an herb that artificially lowers cholesterol, so to speak, if that exists,” she said. “It stops when we start looking at the underlying ability to heal and what’s interfering with your cholesterol naturally, as an example.”

Symptoms are the body’s whispers, and when they are ignored or suppressed, the body eventually screams.

Dr. Nick Wilson describes how a fever is a physiological process intended to eliminate invaders and give the body a “genetic upgrade.”

“Artificially suppressing the process could rob the body of immune-system reprogramming” it needs to thrive, Dr. Wilson said.

He recommends listening to the body and supporting its natural healing processes, which requires a mindset shift.

“Your body isn’t broken and in need of fixing, it is brilliant and just needs support to heal and thrive,” Leah explained. “When you understand this, you learn to trust your body’s natural healing process. You reach less for artificial treatments to suppress symptoms and more towards natural ways to aid these processes.”

The Wilsons’ foray into advocacy started after she and her husband became foster parents.

Years had passed since the birth of their first son when they were confronted with secondary infertility. The couple had long planned to become foster parents. The delay in having a second biological child moved the fostering timeline forward.

As an attorney, Leah Wilson hoped the day would arrive when she could address two patterns she saw in foster programs – aging out of the system, and overmedication.

When they entered the foster parent program, the Wilsons were paired with a sick 2-year-old boy who had been found in the cold on a 30-degree night.

The infant was unhealthy – inflamed, and completely swollen – Leah recalled. The boy also struggled to sleep and was afraid of men.

Most foster children with health issues are treated with pharmaceuticals, tended to by a local doctor who manages the trauma with medication.

The Wilsons’ home is a calming sanctuary, and the boy lived in an environment free of synthetic fragrances and harsh detergents, drank filtered water, and consumed only whole foods.

The couple gave the boy a non-toxic home that treated the whole child, and not only the symptoms.

The child gradually recovered. Over a year, his inflammation subsided, and he became calmer and happier.

Before this third birthday, the Wilsons returned a healthier boy to his mother, who was living in a Salvation Army shelter.

The foster agency was impressed. They recommended the Wilsons for more placements.

The couple prepared to welcome a new placement when Indiana issued a new mandate that all children in the home be up-to-date on vaccines.

Leah Wilson attempted to use a religious exemption, but she learned that this did not apply.

No family member can be a threat to the welfare of the foster child, Wilson was told, recognizing that, in the state’s view, being unvaccinated was considered a threat.

The agency delivered an ultimatum to the Wilsons: Walk away, or have their foster license permanently closed.

“It was unbelievable that they would rather have kids sleeping on the floor at the Department of Child Services than in our safe and loving home. It was unbelievable that they considered vaccination status a threat to a child’s welfare,” Wilson said.

The Wilsons were prevented from taking a new foster child.

The issue was “too big not to fight, but also too big to fight,” she said. They set out to overturn the vaccine mandate in Indiana. Ultimately, that happened. Foster homes in Indiana are no longer required to provide vaccination records, with the caveats of children being six months or older, and as long as children are not medically fragile.

“They don’t really actually understand that even medically fragile children and infants are safe in unvaccinated homes,” Wilson said. “But we did get that switch so that there are more available homes to children who need them, regardless of vaccine status.”

Propelled by their own experience, the Wilsons felt compelled to grow their activism.

“The health freedom movement lacked a voting bloc,” Leah Wilson said.

“Even though there were many national organizations and several state organizations that care about these issues and would host rallies or educate on the issues, we needed to have a meaningful voice to show that there are thousands of voters in every constituency that care deeply about health freedom, informed consent, parental rights and privacy, and everything that is related to health freedom,” she added.

That is what led to the creation of Stand for Health Freedom.

The Wilsons joined Sayer Ji and Dr. Joel Bohemier to establish Stand for Health Freedom amid the 2019 measles outbreak. The group expanded nationally, gained hundreds of wins across the country, and empowered hundreds of thousands of new families to reclaim autonomy over their health, Leah Wilson said.

“Many Americans don’t know if this school mandate issue or this employer mandate issue is a concern of their congressman or their state senator or their city council,” Wilson said.

“We wanted to provide that bridge and build a really meaningful voting bloc and voice for the health freedom movement to stop public health overreach,” she added.

Leah Wilson no longer works at the clinic, though she does teach occasional classes on natural health. Her focus is on Stand for Health Freedom and helping secure more wins across the country. She also embraces the opportunity to work with her husband to help more people find their vitality by escaping conventional medicine and living naturally.

“There’s definitely a one-way exodus from conventional medicine. That exodus will leave you in the wilderness if we don’t have the framework to reach the promised land,” Wilson said.

Reclaim Vitality is intended to help people ask better questions and to know that the majority of chronic illnesses today – like heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and autoimmunity, most cancers, even neurodegenerative disorders like dementia – aren’t random acts of bad genes, bad bugs or bad luck.

“They are predictable outcomes of how we think, eat, move, sleep and live,” Wilson said. “When we start to think, eat, move, sleep and live differently, we can get unstuck.”

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