MAHA and Influencers

 This Atlantic piece profiles a - wait for it - MAHA, socially conservative podcaster and influencer. This is not really another Cleetus Safari, where the Times sends someone to those famous Ohio diners to talk to Real Muricans. This is a profile of a fairly high profile figure in the MAHA space. She's also supposed to be part of the Republican Party's outreach to women.

It's a fascinating and only slightly disturbing read. The disturbing part is really just extrapolating from what she says to find our how she got there and where she's going. Basically, it starts by rejecting a lot of consensus science. Like...A LOT. Sure, there are aspects of MAHA that are common sense. Whole foods are better than processed foods. Critically, there really are some aspects of wellness culture that are probably a needed corrective to "take a pill for the rest of your life." 

But! The pills DO work, and supplements are really a perfectly Republican product, as they largely exist outside of good regulatory oversight. If supplements really do work, we need to know that through rigorous studies, not the anecdotal musings of a podcaster. This is how you get weird shit like the Ivermectin craze. 

The overall vibe from MAHA is that expertise is a conspiracy against them, largely because they are at least ignorant if not outright dumb. Vaccines are the obvious prime example of this. The more evidence you present as to the safety of vaccines, simply proves to them that the conspiracy just goes deeper than they thought.

Living in an evidence-free world is both liberating and deeply imprisoning. At first, you've freed yourself from having to follow advice, but soon you've simply traded the strictures of the "medical establishment" to the fever swamps of conspiratorial nonsense. The thing about conspiratorial thinking is that it is really difficult to unwind. You can't produce evidence that refutes, because the evidence is just part of the conspiracy.

This runs hand in hand with the rise of podcaster/influenced ecosystem. This requires precisely no really expertise. You can just be Joe Rogan "asking questions" and suddenly people are taking a horse antifungal drug to treat a virus. This democratization of knowledge means that experts are wrong because they are experts. It's the perfect complement to MAGA, because of the fervid embrace of ignorance as a virtue. 

Trump's one real success before 2016 was as a reality TV star. Reality TV fakes reality, of course, which again is a perfect metaphor for all this. Trump's authenticity is a scripted sham, that decries expertise on things like economics or military and foreign policy. This is deeply tied to evangelical Christianity and it's own rejection of modern knowledge and the scientific method.

TL;DR: We're fucked as long as these people vote in large numbers.