MAHA is back!

It was always the most obvious self-goal of the left to surrender on health, doubling down on woke celebrations of insanities and e.g., obesity.

Leaving the health space open to the right was an obvious error/reversal of fortunes. It used to be left-wing people who opposed vaccines, concerned themselves with toxins and healthy living. Workouts, nature-admiring outdoors, yoga/consciousness etc etc etc.

Nah, in the age of MAHA and Kennedy, all respectable lefties had to go berserk

The irony is incredible:

These people shouldn’t even have children,” my co-worker railed. Another piped in: “The parents should be arrested for neglect!” We were in an editorial meeting in a Midtown Manhattan magazine office, batting around the news of the day, and the issue of non-vaccinators had come up. This was 1999, and the anti-vax movement was just beginning to stir in the U.S., but in those days it was associated with people on the furthest-left edge of society: hippies, homesteaders, and other holdouts from the counterculture of the ’60s. Normal people didn’t question the advice of the medical establishment, and neither did my older and far more conservative co-workers at this classic women’s magazine.

Look at this insane right-wing nut from the 1990s!

Other things I planned to keep away from my child included plastic toys and cups (endocrine disrupters); snack foods that are wickedly marketed to children (high-fructose corn syrup, seed oils, artificial colors); fast food (gross); and disposable diapers (landfill cloggers). I also planned to serve my kid home-baked bread and foods with a minimum of processed ingredients, white flour, and sugar.
We shopped at quirky little health food stores and co-ops that smelled like bread yeast. The organic and natural food market hadn’t exploded yet, so we were the type to pack our own lunches.

"Does this all sound familiar? Minus the political views, I was a MAHA mom before my time—highly skeptical of the status quo and willing to forge my own path to health."

in the eccentric leftist household I grew up in, I was trained to question authority.

Oh, the irony... when the marsh through the institutions shoved the shoe onto the other foot, leftists found that they liked the power. Indeed, makes perfect sense since it fits their ideological bent much better.

Today, it’s the leftists who sneer at the idea of “doing your own research” on vaccines. Skeptical of medications like antidepressants? Progressives might scream that your opinion will cost lives. At the same time, conservatives have embraced the unprocessed foods they once broadly rejected; and in the last presidential election, moms anxious about microplastics mobilized to help elect not a Democrat, but a Republican.

"As far back as I can remember, the traits we now think of as MAHA were the preserve of the left"

In many cases, we have been ousted from social groups or discouraged from attending family events for opinions that were once considered completely normal among liberals. And we’ve been shocked to find ourselves agreeing with people on the side of the political aisle that once held our mortal enemies.

Beautiful. I have nothing more to add, this lady nails it. The shift and drift, and truly reversal of fortunes of ideas have been incredible to behold. Nordic unions and social democrats from the 1990s used to campaign (quite aggressively) against immigrants, showing up and stealing their jobs... do that today, and you're a right-wing nationalist/fascist cunt.

My parents were devoted to resisting the consumerist mainstream culture that puts profits and efficiency over humanity and health. We belonged to food co-ops, and every few weeks we took a drive through the Connecticut countryside to get to a small family farm where you filled up your own glass jugs and bottles with their raw, unhomogenized milk.

lol yeah, you go to jail for that shit now. Upstanding and respectable leftist (if indeed such a thing exists) would shiver in horror at this prospect today. Don't mention the free speech issue!

a 110-fucking-percent!

I attempted to invoke the vast history of mistakes on the part of the medical and pharmaceutical industries. I thought of the opioid epidemic, therapeutic hysterectomies, lobotomies, birth defects caused by thalidomide, routine but unnecessary tonsillectomies, and how so much of 21st-century knowledge has been a steady refutation of 20th-century common facts. We have been wrong about so much.

Incredible article, def worth your time

I'm sure there's some paywall fuckery but it just opened for me.