“I had measles when I was a kid,” reminisced Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a 2021 podcast interview. “I had 11 brothers and sisters — we all got measles. It was a great week. We stayed home. We watched Sea Hunt.” The now-health secretary concluded: “The treatment for measles is chicken soup and Vitamin A. You can’t patent those.”
It seems as if nothing will change his mind. The current outbreak of measles in Texas and New Mexico — which now counts 250 cases and two deaths, one of a child and one of an adult — has been Kennedy’s first test in his new role. So far, he has confirmed the worst fears of his opponents. While he’s acknowledged that the measles vaccine does prevent transmission of the disease, he has not urged people to get it. Instead, he’s enthused about the effectiveness of Vitamin A and cod liver oil as treatments.
It just so happens that Vitamin A and cod liver oil is the measles treatment of choice of the so called “crunchy moms” who are widely credited with powering Kennedy’s ascent. The crunchy moms are reacting online to the measles outbreak with defiance. They generally believe that measles is no more serious than the chicken pox, and even that it’s beneficial to catch it. They refuse to be cowed by what they see as an agenda-driven media circus. “Measles outbreak headlines = paid advertising,” wrote influencer Braci Dutton on Instagram last month. “The real headline? Your immune system was designed to handle life. Fear is the real virus. Sunshine, movement, and real food are the cure.”
“The crunchy moms are reacting to the measles outbreak with defiance.”
The crunchy moms’ fervour on such matters has turned them into a potent political force, one that forms a critical part of Donald Trump’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. They have managed to make the day-to-day business of motherhood — what their children are eating, what kind of medical care they receive, what products they use — a key political issue. And their Covid era-fuelled suspicion of the medical and scientific establishment has become a defining tendency on the Right.
If you’re a mother on Instagram, it’s almost impossible to avoid this crunchy content. I became aware of the moms even before I had my son early last year. The algorithm, having picked up on the fact that I was pregnant, funnelled them into my Instagram feed. They were having “wild pregnancies” with no prenatal care at all, and even “freebirthing” at home with no medical professionals present. When their babies arrived, their conflict with the medical system intensified. There would be no “pokes” or “cupcakes” — code for vaccines, used online to avoid social media filters. Checkups at the pediatrician were best avoided completely. Formula was full of dangerous chemicals, as was sunscreen, as was most processed food available in the supermarket; milk pasteurisation was unnecessary, even harmful; homeschooling was a must. Every detail of home life and childrearing was a battleground, under threat by nefarious forces.
“The personal is political” was the slogan of Left-wing feminists in the Seventies, but today it has no better inheritor than the MAHA moms. In the last few decades, the Right has successfully claimed ownership of the politics of motherhood, and neatly merged them with the Covid era’s upswing in hostility to medicine and expertise. It has made space for a politics centred on motherhood as an identity and on the granular concerns of moms.
The Left, meanwhile, has taken the opposite approach, ignoring the deeply political nature of homemaking altogether. Vice President JD Vance’s remark equating Democrats with “childless cat ladies” may have been unfair, but it reflects a real sentiment that has provoked the rightward swing of the crunchy moms. On paper, during the last election, the Democrats were the pro-woman party, with a female candidate and pro-choice policy. But preoccupied by the girlboss ethos, they failed to include women whose focus is on their home and family. As a result, the kind of mothers who once may have gravitated to the “granola” Left have now completed a hard Right turn.
This mass desertion wasn’t inevitable. The Left used to concern itself more with the domestic realm; take the Wages for Housework campaign, begun in the Seventies, which sought equal recognition for women’s work in the home. Then there was Alix Kates Shulman’s “Marriage Agreement” essay from 1970, which delineated the arrangement she and her husband made to split housework equally, and which included as its first principle: “We reject the notion that the work which brings in more money is the more valuable.” More recently, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s influential 2004 book, The Two-Income Trap, argued that the decline of stay-at-home motherhood had had a deleterious effect on American families. But the overall tendency of mainstream feminism today has been to portray homemaking and care work as a kind of prison — Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name” — and urge women to succeed in the workforce just as a man would. This tendency, culminating in the frenetic Lean In-style corporate feminism of the 2010s, is what the crunchy moms are reacting to.
The MAHA moms on social media often allude to their disillusionment with feminism. “I wish the ‘mainstream feminism’ would also include mothers in their advocacy instead of contributing to the anti motherhood/children culture — further promoting the undervaluing of women’s domestic labor & refusing to acknowledge that the well-being of our children lays the groundwork for the future of society,” read an Instagram video by user “radical.gardenn” earlier this year.
But if feminism is considered one dragon to slay, Big Pharma is another. Twenty years ago, the word “crunchy” evoked NPR-listening New England or West Coast liberals who shopped at health food stores and did yoga. Today, it calls to mind Right-wing homesteaders who eschew vaccines. In a typical crunchy mom reel last week, the account “empowered.mama.nest” wrote: “They lied about thalidomide. They lied about DDT. They lied about tobacco. They lied about asbestos. They lied about mercury. They lied about opioids. They lied about covid. They are lying about vaccines too. You know who doesn’t have the incentive to lie? Mothers.”
Covid and the authorities’ heavy-handed vaccine implementation has much to do with this shift, drawing the battle lines definitively between Left and Right on vaccines and driving any sceptics into the arms of the anti-vaccine movement. But a deep distrust of Big Pharma was simmering well before then — and, again, it was moms at the forefront. Kennedy has said that moms of autistic children who attributed their child’s condition to vaccines inspired his initial interest in the vaccine issue, which has formed the cornerstone of his career. His running mate in 2024, Nicole Shanahan, is a self-described “autism mom” who believes her daughter’s autism stems from vaccines.
These two issues intersect in the online aesthetics of this movement. Crunchy mom content ranges from the gauzy and tradwife-inflected — women in prairie dresses kneading sourdough — to the militant, often by the same accounts. One minute you’re looking at someone’s video about co-sleeping, and the next you’re watching a woman drinking out of a jug of raw milk and talking about chemtrails. The crunchy moms seem to have it all figured out; for every thorny parenting dilemma, they have an answer. It’s easy to see why so many women have sought refuge among them amid motherhood’s flurry of anxiety and decision-making.
And so far, their tactics seem to be working. The Food and Drug Administration, the crunchy moms’ nemesis, lost hundreds of workers during the Elon Musk-led DOGE purge. The National Institutes of Health, also under Kennedy’s purview, announced it was cutting research grants related to vaccine hesitancy. The Centers for Disease Control, another organisation in the Department of Health and Human Services, is reportedly going to perform a large-scale study investigating whether there is a link between vaccines and autism (a notion that has already been studied extensively and is not supported by evidence).
Victory goes to the crunchy moms, but they may find that it’s a pyrrhic one. They want nasty ingredients and dyes out of the food supply, they want clean water and soil, and they want sterner oversight of pharmaceuticals — but they support an administration that is dismantling the federal agencies that oversee these areas. And if they hope that the Trump administration will remain steadfast against big business to defend their children’s health, they may find themselves disappointed. Kennedy’s latest move was to endorse the fast-food burger and milkshakes chain Steak ‘n Shake because it has stopped using seed oils.
This could be the moment for liberals to somehow reach out to the crunchy moms, but so far they’ve shown no interest in speaking to them on their terms — or in general, addressing the large swathes of Americans who have lost trust in the medical establishment. These women are trying to protect their children, and they think they’re doing so — even those who don’t vaccinate for measles. As long as “trust the science” is the only answer to a worried mom who has questions about the vaccine schedule, those moms will gravitate towards the side that embraces them — whether it ultimately benefits them or not.
