Means is obviously correct that the American diet is a disaster, and most people would benefit from better sleep, more exercise and stress-control techniques like meditation. What’s insidious in her philosophy is the notion that good choices and a positive attitude can obviate the need for modern pharmaceuticals. (Health is, alas, never limitless, even with the ENERGYbits algae tablets Means hawks on her website.) She is a vaccine skeptic, suggesting in her newsletter that “the current extreme and growing vaccine schedule is causing health declines in vulnerable children.” She’s also a critic of birth control pills; as she told Tucker Carlson last year, “The things that give life in this world, which are women and soil, we have tried to dominate and shut down the cycles.”
These views, however, are not the reason that some of Donald Trump’s supporters erupted into virtual civil war after he nominated Means to be surgeon general last week. (Trump tapped her after withdrawing his first choice, the former Fox News contributor Janette Nesheiwat, who was found to have exaggerated her credentials.) Means is a close ally of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the secretary of health and human services. Yet much of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement has revolted against her nomination. It’s a rift that underscores the instability of a political coalition built on paranoia, distrust and the dogged pursuit of social media clout.
Among the loudest voices railing against Means is Laura Loomer, the conspiracy theorist who has achieved an outsize role in some of Trump’s personnel decisions. In a post on X, she zeroed in on Means’s new age spiritual practices, detailed in a 2024 newsletter article Means wrote about finding love at 35. The surgeon general nominee described working with a medium, doing full moon ceremonies and “plant medicine experiences,” and asking for help from trees. Loomer called her a crackpot and warned, without a trace of irony, “The inmates are running the asylum!”
At first glance, it might seem that we’ve fallen so far into the upside down that Loomer has emerged as a voice of reason, but that isn’t quite true. Means’s enemies in both MAGA and MAHA circles may think that emphasizing her woo-woo beliefs is the best way to sink her nomination. But in truth, most of them aren’t opposed to Means because she’s outside the medical mainstream. They oppose her because she’s not far outside enough, especially when it comes to vaccines, which she has raised doubts about but not denounced as agents of mass murder.
Even before her nomination, some anti-vax influencers had grown suspicious of Means and her brother, Calley, a wellness entrepreneur now working with H.H.S. They saw the pair as sketchy parvenus who were diverting their movement’s attention from vaccines to food, perhaps at the behest of shadowy outside forces. After the Means siblings appeared on Carlson’s podcast last year, the right-wing radio host Shannon Joy devoted an entire episode of her show to raising red flags about them.
