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MAHA’s Displaced Loyalty
An article I wrote has caused a stir within the health freedom movement despite my role as instigator being mostly concealed.
The controversy surrounds my use of the word “psyop” to describe the “Make America Healthy Again” or “MAHA” campaign, which is a trademarked slogan that its owners aim to use for financial gain with a “MAHA Approved” seal on products.
Much to the displeasure of many of my own readers, I’ve been writing about how MAHA was a political hijacking of the grassroots health freedom movement aimed at its disarmament since before the 2024 presidential election.
I warned of the harmful consequences of empowering Donald Trump for a second term. Since he took office, I’ve continued to warn of sleight-of-hand maneuverings aimed at deceiving health freedom advocates into lending support for the continuation of the very policies they seek to end.
My track record of prescient warnings speaks for itself.
I’m interested in telling people not what they want to hear but what they need to know. Sometimes the truth is discomforting, but we must not delude ourselves if we wish to effectively advance the cause.
My most recent effort to help effect a course correction for the grassroots movement was an article I published on September 30 under the headline “Are Health Freedom Advocates Awakening to the MAHA Psyop?”
In my article, I discussed a recent open letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and President Trump demanding they fulfill MAHA voters’ aims or risk loss of political support.
The letter was organized by Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, who became an outspoken critic of government policies surrounding the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines during the lockdown madness after having witnessed firsthand the harms that the products were causing her patients.
To summarize the controversy sparked by that piece, my headline triggered a reaction by the producer of the Robert Scott Bell Show, which I’ve had the pleasure of being on a few times.
Robert’s producer, who goes by “Super Don”, without naming me or citing my piece, responded to my headline with a Substack article that argues that it’s easy to use the word “psyop” in a manner that is flippant or hyperbolic, thus rendering it devoid of meaning.
To make his point, Don invented an admittedly fictional scenario in which the authors and signers of the open letter to Kennedy and Trump are the ones perpetrating a psyop, the aim of which is to undermine MAHA by costing Republicans votes in the midterm elections.
Don’s piece is titled “The Open Letter To MAHA - Is That The REAL Psyop?” It’s accompanied by the following AI-generated graphic:
With Robert Scott Bell’s permission, Don’s article was then republished by The MAHA® Report, a Substack publication of MAHA® Action Inc., a nonprofit organization founded by Tony Lyons and “dedicated to the Make America Healthy Again® (MAHA®) movement.”
Note the registered trademark symbol in that direct quotation from the website. While “MAHA” has come to be used euphemistically to mean the grassroots health freedom movement, the distinction between the two is critical.
Tony Lyons is also Co-President of MAHA® PAC, a political action committee dedicated to delivering votes for Republicans.
It’s understandable why The MAHA® Report wanted to republish Super Don’s article because it amounts to political propaganda intended to persuade health freedom advocates to vote for Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections.
It doesn’t in any way substantively address the lengthy argument I made—and have been making for over two years—to support my recent headline’s claim that MAHA is a psychological operation that has derailed the grassroots movement.
Having been amplified by The MAHA® Report, the reaction to my headline was noticed by Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, a co-author and main organizer of the open letter.
She responded on X to denounce what she reasonably interpreted as an attack on her person and efforts.
Robert and Don then dedicated a recent segment of their show to discussing the fiasco, highlighting how they’d said in the article that it was made up and that they had no evidence to support the invented narrative.
They criticized angry reactions they received from people for seemingly having read their headline but not actually reading the article, which explicitly states that the suggestion that Mary’s letter is a “psyop” is merely a thought experiment for which there is no supporting evidence.
They also revealed in that episode that it was my headline, specifically, that Don had been reacting to—without having read my article.
That explains why his reactionary piece fails to substantively address any of the arguments I’d made to support my headline’s claim that MAHA is a psychological operation that has been hugely successful in its aim of disarming the grassroots health freedom movement.
The irony doesn’t end with Don complaining about people reacting to his headline without reading his article. Far from seriously challenging my argument, his article and the controversy it generated strongly bolster my conclusion.
When I call MAHA a “psyop”, I am not using the word flippantly. It is not hyperbole. I choose my words carefully. I say what I mean and mean what I say. I’ve been saying it for a long time, and I stand by it.
Now is the time for awakening and redirection. Let’s get the movement back on the rails.
The Disarmament of the Grassroots Health Freedom Movement
To reiterate briefly why I’ve continually called “MAHA” a psychological operation, since before the 2024 presidential election, I’ve been warning health freedom advocates that the “Make America Great Again” or “MAHA” campaign is a political hijacking of the grassroots health freedom movement aimed at its disarmament.
It has succeeded phenomenally.
Advocates have been persuaded by MAHA to effectively support a continuation of the status quo instead of vigorously and uncompromisingly opposing it.
The trick has been for the Trump administration and MAHA influencers to engage in public relations ploys designed to make advocates believe that real meaningful progress is being made while in fact the “public health” machinery doubles down on all the things the grassroots movement is supposed to stand against.
The administration keeps tossing health freedom advocates bones and calling them steaks, and MAHA voters gnaw at the scraps as though devouring a kingly meal.
Because Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is the person now heading the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and because he’s fought so hard for the cause and is presumably acting out of best intentions, they believe they must support Donald Trump, which means supporting the Republican Party in the upcoming midterm elections.
We can stipulate that Kennedy’s intentions are good. But good intentions do not equate to wise strategy or desirable outcomes. The conclusion that we must vote Republican certainly does not follow.
As the saying goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Or as economist Milton Friedman put it, “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
A huge segment of the health freedom movement, you see, has aligned itself with one of the two heads of the very beast we ought to be united against. Instead of bickering over which head should devour us, we ought to be focused on just slaying the beast.
We ought not to be empowering and legitimizing the very criminal organization in Washington that has caused such disastrous harm to Americans’ health and that treats both the fruits of our labors and our bodies as state property over which we have merely government-granted privileges.
This political alignment is a key distinction between “MAHA” and the grassroots movement it hijacked, which was comprised of people from all political perspectives united in a common goal of ending the systematic violation of the right to informed consent and government-facilitated poisoning of our food, water, and air.
(I say “all political perspectives”, but truthfully, the movement was conspicuously and curiously devoid of libertarians pre-COVID. In my own networks, which include connections to the movement’s leadership—including Kennedy himself—I was one of perhaps a handful who professed adherence to the non-aggression principle. My efforts to persuade a leading libertarian podcaster to cover the vaccine issue, including by making the introduction to Mr. Kennedy, were met with failure. It wasn't until the medical tyranny reached the level of the authoritarian lockdowns and mandatory COVID19 vaccination that this individual finally started speaking out. My original disappointment was restored when he later advocated voting for Trump.)
Before the Kennedy-Trump alliance, it didn’t matter which party was in power; health freedom advocates criticized the policies that prevailed across administrations all the same.
That essential dynamic of the grassroots movement has been destroyed by MAHA.
In place of the grassroots movement came a new politicized offshoot. Health freedom advocates who’d been in the fight for years, if not decades, were condescendingly told to “Join the MAHA Movement.”
All one had to do to belong to this new movement was to vote for Trump.
After he quit his own presidential campaign—first running as a Democrat and then as an independent candidate—to form an alliance with Trump, a banner an Kennedy’s reformulated campaign website declared “A VOTE FOR TRUMP IS A VOTE FOR KENNEDY”.
In a speech announcing the alliance, Kennedy encouraged his supporters to vote Republican on the grounds that with Trump in office, “the vast burden of chronic disease that now demoralizes and bankrupts the country will disappear.”
Yet when MAHA critics seek to hold Kennedy accountable to that promise, they are accused of being too impatient, failing to “trust the plan”, and being naïve for thinking Kennedy could move faster toward the goal.
A key consequence of the political alignment of a huge segment of the health freedom movement is that MAHA voters have come to defend and make excuses for broken promises and the continuation of the very policies that they believed they were voting to end.
An unambiguous example was the MAHA leadership endorsing an Executive Order from Trump aimed at subsidizing domestic production of glyphosate-based herbicides with liability shielding for manufacturers, which is directly contrary to the grassroots movement’s goal of ending the government-supported systematic poisoning of Americans’ food supply.
The false pretext propagated by MAHA thought leaders, following Kennedy’s own example, was that this was necessary for “national security”, to protect the glyphosate supply from our “adversary” China because, as much as we might not like it, the reality is that farmers’ livelihoods are dependent on the continued use of glyphosate-based herbicides like Bayer’s Roundup.
The truth is that the threat to farmers’ livelihoods was caused by Trump’s own tariffs.
Loyalty to political party, you see, has superseded loyalty to the cause.
The cult of personality that arose around Trump’s “Make America Great Again” or “MAGA” slogan has been mirrored by its MAHA subsect.
The belief that loyalty to the cause now requires loyalty to Trump and the Republican Party is itself the clearest proof of the validity and accuracy of my analysis.
With midterms approaching, MAHA thought leaders like Del Bigtree are using language like we can’t “abandon” Kennedy. You can’t “pull your support” for the Trump administration. To advance the cause, we must “support” Kennedy—and thus Trump and the Republican Party.
It’s a reiteration of the same tired talking points that we must be “patient” with the slow pace of ostensible progress and “trust the plan”.
But it’s not that progress has been slow. It’s that the machinery of government has continued moving things in a completely wrong direction.
The key difference from the situation that previously obtained is that now this wrong trajectory is MAHA-approved.
MAHA’s Movement in the Wrong Direction
To illustrate my point about MAHA facilitating movement in the wrong direction, a brief review of examples I’ve documented at great length in prior writings is warranted.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has doubled down on the regulatory malfeasance that enabled manufacturers of mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines to market their products.
There’s now also an FDA approved mRNA flu shot on the market, which did not undergo a placebo-controlled trial.
Currently approved for adults aged fifty and older and facilitated by the usual malfeasance, the manufacturer, Moderna, aims ultimately to get FDA approval for younger adults and children.
We can anticipate that one consequence of policies implemented under the proud executor of “Operation Warp Speed” will be movement toward replacing “traditional” vaccines on the CDC’s schedule with mRNA products.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continues to recommend COVID‑19 vaccines for children and pregnant women.
Pregnant women, of course, were excluded from the clinical trials because it’s considered unethical to include them in a controlled experiment. Yet, somehow, it’s considered ethical to treat all pregnant women as subjects of a mass uncontrolled experiment where properly informed consent is a logical impossibility due to absence of trial data.
Apart from a change for COVID‑19 vaccines from “universal” to a “shared clinical decision-making” category, the CDC’s recommended childhood vaccine schedule remains as it was before Trump took office for a second term in January 2025.
Meanwhile, in clinical practice, pediatricians continue to follow the guidance of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which effectively recommends COVID‑19 vaccination for all children by perversely defining anyone unvaccinated as being “at risk”—even if the child has already acquired superior natural immunity.
Additional attempted changes to the schedule of a very modest nature have been stayed by a federal judge since March 16, 2026, under a lawsuit filed by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).
The legal grounds for the stay are that a January 2026 revision likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) for having been made without the involvement of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP); and that prior changes involving ACIP were made after replacing all members, which reconstitution was deemed to have likely violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA).
As HHS Secretary, Kennedy had the authority to immediately terminate the “public health emergency” declaration enabling Big Pharma to target children with their COVID‑19 vaccines under “Emergency Use Authorization”—a status for FDA unapproved products still considered experimental.
Instead, Kennedy waited to do so until June 30, 2026, thus allowing Moderna time to get its “Spikevax” mRNA COVID‑19 vaccine approved by the FDA for use in young children who have any of a long list of conditions that the CDC says places them “at risk” from the disease.
Of note, the condition of “pregnancy” is also included on that list.
As mentioned, the AAP continues to recommend the shots for healthy children, too, which is an “off label” use—and the CDC now has also aligned its recommendation more closely with the AAP’s by explicitly endorsing the “off label” use of COVID‑19 vaccines in healthy children, who are at very low risk from SARS‑CoV‑2 infection.
Kennedy also has the authority to terminate the “emergency preparedness” declaration granting legal immunity to COVID‑19 vaccine manufacturers under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act). Yet he hasn’t done so. The government’s liability shielding remains in place.
An independent journalist named Tiffany Cianci has created a website called MAHA Scorecard that “examines 42 commitments made to MAHA supporters, measuring the Trump administration's actions against its promises on food safety, agriculture, environmental health, and chronic disease prevention.”
She says her work “reflects a conviction that political accountability must transcend party affiliation, personal relationships, and ideological loyalty.”
As stated in a press release announcing the initiative,
The scorecard finds an abysmal string of broken commitments and betrayals: more than 85 percent of the administration’s policies and executive actions on food, environmental health, and agriculture directly contradict pledges on these issues made to MAHA.
The scorecard currently shows that of 42 promises made, zero have been fully kept and only five partially so—and that's without even wading into the waters of public vaccine policy.
The promise to “drain the swamp”—broken.
The promise to end the poisoning of our food supply—broken.
The promise to support family and organic farms—broken.
Etcetera.
The scorecard and the open letter to Kennedy and Trump were reported by NBC News on October 8, which Dr. Bowden shared on X with the remark, “The Overton window just took a leap in the right direction.”
The “Overton window” refers to how the mainstream media limit coverage to a narrow range of subjects and viewpoints, with perspectives falling outside of that range dismissed as fringe or extreme, but how over time such views can gain enough acceptance to force entry into the public discourse.
To summarize why I call MAHA a psychological operation to disarm the movement, consider how, as a result of the authoritarian lockdown madness and its coerced mass vaccination endgame, the grassroots movement had made enormous progress in awakening Americans to the complete untrustworthiness of the so-called “public health” establishment.
That progress has now been arrested as the HHS Secretary continues to receive MAHA voters’ support to pursue a policy of “restoring trust” in the CDC et al.—and “in vaccines”.
The successes in de-indocrinating Americans from the vaccine religion were effectively reversed as the new MAHA-endorsed mission is the literal opposite of the old.
Simply stated, MAHA is on the wrong mission.
Maligning the Open Letter to Kennedy and Trump
On September 18, an open letter to Kennedy and Trump was published that demands progress on key aims while threatening to withdraw support for the administration.
The letter was organized and coauthored by Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, who became an outspoken critic of government policies surrounding the COVID‑19 vaccines after witnessing firsthand how patients of hers were being disabled by the shots—and then being suspended by Houston Methodist hospital for her outspokenness on social media.
That letter was the impetus for my September 30 article titled “Are Health Freedom Advocates Awakening to the MAHA Psyop?”
On October 1, I shared the link to my article in an X post responding to a video of Kennedy speaking at a “CHD in DC” event held by the organization he formerly presided over, Children’s Health Defense.
(Note: I have collaborated with CHD on numerous occasions, and Tony Lyons’ publishing company Skyhorse published my book The War on Informed Consent under CHD’s imprint, with a Foreword by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.)
In the video clip, Kennedy addresses criticisms from people he characterizes as having unreasonable expectations of him for demanding more rapid progress toward the movement’s goals.
He excuses the admitted lack of progress on the grounds that “the government moves slowly”, and “it’s a very laborious system” with “a lot of inertia built in”.
He says, “If we were able to overcome it, we would have changed things on day one, but those would have been short-lived, and I would have been out of a job.”
So, there you have it.
It is hardly reasonable for Kennedy to characterize his critics within the health freedom movement for having unreasonable expectations considering the fact that he’s the one who originally plantedthe expectation in their minds that if they just voted for Trump, then “the vast burden of chronic disease that now demoralizes and bankrupts the country will disappear.”
There are only two possible conclusions: either Kennedy allied with Trump because of his own hopeless naivete about the machinery of Washington, or he deceitfully told his supporters what they wanted to hear just to gain political power despite knowing he’d never be able to deliver on the promise.
Either way, Kennedy deceived and led the health freedom movement astray—as I warned he was doing in October 2024, before the presidential election.
My recent article on the MAHA psyop caught the attention of “Super Don”, the longtime producer of the Robert Scott Bell Show, who on October 2 replied to my X post with his graphic, but no link to the accompanying article.
To which I responded:
Your #7 should be #1.
MAHA was a political hijacking of the grassroots health freedom movement.
The latter preexisted the former. Remember, members of the grassroots movement were told that to join this new "MAHA" movement, all they need to do was vote for Trump.
I was not yet aware that the image was accompanied by an article he also published on October 2, “The Open Letter To MAHA - Is That The REAL Psyop?”
While the byline of Don’s article bears the Substack’s name of “The Robert Scott Bell Show”, his authorship is disclosed at the foot.
That attribution, too, may be misleading as the text bears hallmarks of having been AI-generated. The rating providing for it by the AI detection tool Pangram is “100% of this text is AI”. (I personally view the undisclosed use of AI-generated content in literature generally and journalism especially as unethical.)
In that piece, Don explains at the very start that it’s just a thought experiment and that he doesn’t have any evidence to support his headline’s hypothesis that the open letter is a psyop or that Mary Talley Bowden and others behind the letter are “knowingly agents provocateurs.”
His point was rather that “we’re hearing the word ‘psyop’ thrown around constantly”, including “MAHA is a pysop.”
He wrote, “Okay. Then let’s play that game. Let’s connect some dots and see how easy it is to make the exact opposite argument.”
The graphic suffices to summarize the text of his argument that follows, which concludes with the same caveat it started with: that he has no evidence to support the argument and just “made it up.”
His point in doing so was to illustrate how “we can turn anything into a psyop”, and “when everything is a psyop, the word doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
Don continues,
This letter does not have to be a psyop to produce the exact outcome that somebody trying to weaken MAHA might want.
Nobody has to secretly control anybody.
Everybody involved can be completely sincere.
They can genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing.
And the movement can still fracture.
The movement can still start eating itself.
The coalition can still become weaker.
And the industries everybody was fighting yesterday can still benefit while the people fighting them turn their fire on each other.
That doesn’t require a psyop.
It just requires human beings.
Ironically, that echoes my own article’s observation that a psychological operation aimed at manufacturing public consent for criminal government policies doesn’t necessarily require an architect.
As I wrote, “I am not suggesting that Kennedy himself is an architect of the operation”, and “such an operation doesn’t necessarily require a mastermind or architect, only actors whose incentives the system already selects for.”
Beyond that, his article implicitly attempts to equate my well-documented and well-reasoned argument with his entirely “made up” scenario.
In short, Don’s reaction to my headline was to offhandedly dismiss my argument without actually reading my article to see how I’d arrived at the conclusion.
His article was, in other words, an exercise in willful ignorance, mischaracterization, and deflection—all for the purpose of arguing against the open letter’s threat to withdraw political support for the Trump administration.
Mary Talley Bowden’s Response
On October 4, Don’s article was reposted by The MAHA® Report, with authorship misattributed to Robert Scott Bell, who granted permission for the republication.
The republished article was then noticed by Mary Talley Bowden, who responded on X by saying, “MAHA must be worried - they’ve resorted to accusing me of being controlled opposition.”
It was that post of Mary’s that first alerted me to the existence of Don’s article. I suspected but did not yet know that it was a reaction to my own article. It wasn’t obviously so since it didn’t cite me and didn’t make any attempt to substantively address my argument.
My thought was that if this is a response to my article, it’s a thoughtlessly dismissive one!
In another X post, Mary requested Tony Lyons to take down the article from The MAHA® Report, which he refused to do.
The article was widely perceived by commenters on X as a personal attack by MAHA against Mary.
Indeed, the argument that even if Mary’s effort is not a psyop, it might as well be, is inherently a political message advocating support for the Republican Party by directly targeting her for dissent and ostensible disloyalty.
The Mischaracterization of My Article
On The Robert Scott Bell Show on October 5, as I learned the following day, Robert and Don discussed how events had transpired in a way they find regretful.
They said that the article had been misconstrued as an attack on Mary despite Don’s article explicitly stating that it was just a thought experiment to make a point. They claimed that no disrespect was intended, although it is certainly easy to see how Mary could find it disrespectful.
They criticized how people had evidently read only the headline or viewed the graphic without actually reading the article.
They also explained how Don’s article was a direct response to my own headline’s claim that MAHA is a psyop.
As Don later confirmed to me on X, he’d reacted to my headline without actually reading my article.
I was alerted to that episode of their show on October 6 by someone in one of my networks who shared the link.
The segment discussing my article starts at about the 1:03:45 mark in the following video (a transcript is here):
The description for that segment on Robert’s website says,
Robert Scott Bell uses a deliberately hypothetical conspiracy scenario to make a broader argument about division within the Make America Healthy Again movement and the danger of casually labeling political disagreements as “psyops” or controlled opposition.
Don’s article was intended to show how “an imaginary scenario” could take “real events” and assemble them into “a seemingly convincing conspiracy theory.”
Hence, my use of the word “psyop” was implicitly characterized by Robert and Don as a “casual” labeling of a mere “political disagreement”—and as a “conspiracy theory”.
Since his piece was a direct reaction to mine, he thus implicitly equated my own article with “an imaginary scenario”—notwithstanding the extensive documentation I’ve provided to support my headline’s claim over the course of two years now.
Confusingly, the show’s webpage attributes authorship of the “thought experiment” to Robert despite the duo clearly explaining how it was Don’s work. I take that as Robert accepting responsibility for the piece having been published.
To be clear, I like and respect Robert and have been on his show twice.
The first time was in November 2021 to discuss the need for critical thinking skills and open debate as we faced increasing authoritarianism and medical tyranny. Robert said of me, “I respect him immensely. He’s a real critical thinker.”
The second time was this past February to discuss my article “Why Medical Licensing Should Be Abolished”. We saw completely eye to eye, and I thoroughly enjoyed that conversation, which Super Don chimed in on.
In the recent episode of the show where they discuss my article, Robert again paid his respects to me, saying, “He's a very well thought out guy, great researcher.”
Yet, mischaracterizing my argument so grossly for the purpose of dismissing it without bothering to even try to identify any factual or logical errors in my argument is inherently disrespectful.
With the whole context being Don’s reaction to my headline, Robert argued that it is “easy” to “just point to someone who you don’t agree with” and “just call them names” like “a schoolyard scenario.” He cautioned against reacting emotionally, without doing their homework with sufficient research, and based on “preconceived notions”.
But I didn’t do any of that. On the contrary, the person in this scenario who reacted based on preconceptions and without doing his homework was the producer of the Robert Scott Bell Show.
Although offering no indication he’d read my article, Robert expressed agreement with my central point by saying, “I don’t believe the solution lies in the government.”
Then he said, “At the same time, I’m not going to yell at somebody who goes in there and tries to make a change for the better, like Bobby Kennedy, Secretary Kennedy now.”
As though my article was merely an emotional hissy fit against Kennedy.
He conceded that “it’s okay to critique and criticize” other members of the health freedom community, which of course I did do, just as they criticized Mary’s open letter.
He goes on to complain how people characterized their own criticism as “an attack”, which intent they deny. Yet they implicitly mischaracterized my own criticism as a purely ad hominem attack!
A bit further into the episode, Don explains how he objects to misuse of the word “psyop”, how terms like “controlled opposition” and “disinformation agent” are “abused”.
He continued,
Do those things really exist? Yes, they do. But when every time you come across somebody that you don’t like, somebody that disagrees with you or something like that, if they automatically turn into a “CIA disinformation agent” and a “shill” and a “sellout” and a “psyop” or whatever, what happens is that the term and what it means becomes so diluted, and people become so desensitized to it that when an actual psyop is in front of you, you may not even recognize it’s there.
He then explains how, after reading about the open letter to Kennedy and Trump, he saw my headline referring to the “MAHA Psyop”. He reacted, “And, so, I'm looking at that and I'm like, here we go again. Right?
Hence, Don saw my headline and immediately presumed that I was using the word “psyop” flippantly, in a way that renders the term devoid of meaning and is purely ad hominem.
Without reading the article (as he later admitted to me on X), he then acted on that presumption by saying to himself,
“Hey, I wonder what it would look like if we tried to take this open letter and let's see how easy it would be to turn that into a psyop.” An exercise is what this was. It was an imaginary scenario where I was like, “Here's this open letter. What would it take for us to be able to make that look like it's a psyop?”
He thus drew an equivalence between his “imaginary scenario” and my article—as though I hadn’t fully supported my argument with facts and reason but had just, like him, “made it up.”
They go on to complain how people took their article “out of context” and reacted to the headline without reading the article. Robert lectures his audience about the need to “do your homework” and “get the facts” because “in this case, nobody did that.” People “didn’t read the article” and instead “just looked at what somebody said that the article was about and went with that and didn’t read it.”
They really ought to have followed their own advice and read my article before reacting to it with such gross mischaracterizations.
Another ironic moment comes further into the show when Robert again agrees with the central point of my own article.
With respect to the health freedom movement’s goals and MAHA’s approach, he says, “I don’t ever believe, perceive, that it’s going to happen from the top down. The reason that it even is occurring at all is because of the bottom up.”
It’s like he took the words right out of my mouth!
As I wrote in the concluding section of my article in a little lecture of my own, “Stop hoping for some politician to provide a top-down solution and understand that meaningful change only ever happens from the bottom-up.”
Robert also concedes, “Now, politically, Trump might’ve said, ‘Hey, I need those voters. Kennedy is the guy. I’m going to bring him in.’ And maybe he duped Kennedy, but apparently Kennedy doesn’t believe that.”
Whatever Kennedy’s own beliefs might be, that Trump allied with Kennedy to win more votes is hardly disputable.
Super Don’s Double Standard
On October 5, Dr. Bowden posted a clip on X from the episode in which Robert explains how The MAHA® Report asked his permission to repost it on Substack, which he gave.
She described Robert as someone “who has a tiny audience and no one has ever heard of”.
To which I replied, “To be fair, I was aware of RSB long before I knew who you were.”
Mary, after all, was not known within the health freedom movement until she started speaking out against COVID‑19 vaccine policies, whereas Robert had been in the fight against medical tyranny for a long time prior.
Having been alerted to and watching the segment of the Robert Scott Bell Show in which my article is discussed, I also replied to her to explain how Don appeared to have written his counterargument to my headline’s claim without having read my article.
Don replied to that comment of mine on October 7 to confirm that he’d reacted to the headline and did not read my article.
In the exchange that followed, I pointed out that reacting to a headline without actually reading the article is exactly what he and Robert had complained about others doing with respect to his “thought experiment” article.
Don replied to suggest that we were somehow having a misunderstanding and “talking past each other” because his piece was not a response to my article, only to its headline.
I reiterated that this was precisely the problem: he’d reacted to my headline without actually reading my article—the very thing he and Robert complained that others had done with his “thought experiment”.
Don’s response was to suggest that we “just agree to disagree”.
I replied,
No, I do not agree to that. My point is logically valid and not a matter of opinion.
You reacted to my headline without reading the article.
That is exactly what you've complained about others having done with your piece.
Don argued that what he’d done was not like what he’d criticized others for doing on the grounds that people had made “specific assertions about the content and intent of my article without reading it.”
I pointed out that he’d implicitly made claims about the content and intent of my article without actually reading it, and that there is no getting around that fact.
I like and respect Robert Scott Bell. His producer has lost my respect, though, for his refusal to own up to his own actions and demonstrating such gross hypocrisy.
A follow-up piece written by Robert and published on his Substack includes this image making my point for me:
Irony doesn’t get much thicker than that!
Robert’s article is titled “No Psyop Required: We’re Dividing Ourselves”.
In it, he objects to Mary’s interpretation of Don’s article “as accusing her of being controlled opposition” and “a purposeful attempt to ruin her reputation.”
He goes on to criticize people for having reacted angrily to the headline or graphic without having actually read the article, which he argues causes unnecessary division.
He rightly explains how “the characterization becomes the story” with nobody talking about “what the article actually elucidated.”
He characterizes the angry reaction to their article as ironic.
The lesson he encourages everyone to draw from the whole fiasco is, “‘Do your own research’ cannot just be a slogan we use when we distrust the source. It has to be a discipline.”
If somebody says something, he writes, “check it.”
“Nobody should be exempt from that standard.”
He emphasizes the importance of “reading the source” because without that, “we’re not evaluating information at all. We’re reacting.”
He summarizes,
The lesson isn’t: “Everybody should agree with our article.”
Absolutely not.
The lesson is:
Know what you’re disagreeing with before you disagree with it.
In closing, he pleads, “We can do better.”
Indeed.
Super Don has obviously failed that very test, yet despite my respectful pleadings on X, he’s refused to own up to.
After repeatedly trying to make excuses for reacting to my headline without reading the article—that is, refusing to apply the same standard to himself as he applies to others—he posted a condescending response, characterizing my respectful request for a mere acknowledgment as irrational and “bizarre”.
I had gone out of my way to be friendly and respectful toward him in my pleadings for a mere acknowledgment that he ought to have read my article before publishing a reaction to it. So, I replied to reemphasize his hypocrisy and call him out for his lack of sincerity in claiming to have intended no disrespect.
Don’s response to that was to block me.
So much for the mature and civil discourse Don and Robert have called for to heal the divisions within the health freedom movement.
While Don cowers from my valid criticism of his piece, which amounts to political propaganda that The MAHA® Report clearly saw value in to advance its mission of delivering votes to Republicans, I stand by my article and its conclusion.
Mine has the distinct advantage of being non-fiction.
Mike Adams Weighs In
On October 7, Mike Adams, the “Health Ranger” who founded NaturalNews.com and the Brighteon video hosting platform, responded to an X post in which I shared the link to my article by saying, “Solid analysis. Thank you!”
The same day, Mike published an article of his own about the open letter, the Robert Scott Bell Show’s response to it, and how it was amplified by The MAHA® Report. Mike attributes no malicious intent to Robert Scott Bell, with whom he is friends, only to Tony Lyons’ publication, under the headline “The Real Reason Why MAHA Is Fracturing: It Betrayed Its Base and Attacked Its Champions”.
Mike writes,
It now seems clear that the Make America Healthy Again movement is fracturing because its leaders chose power over principle, and the people who built this coalition are now watching it get hijacked by the very institutions the health freedom pioneers set out to dismantle.
I disagree with that characterization only because MAHA itself was the political hijacking.
Mike makes the following observations that fully accord with my analysis (bold emphasis added):
The signs are everywhere. Both MAHA and MAGA now excuse failure, celebrate symbolic crumbs, and smear the original truth-tellers who refuse to shut up and cheerlead. The core promises that rallied millions— ending the forever wars, banning mRNA injections, exposing the Epstein network, draining institutional corruption—have been broken, one after another. . . .
Die-hard MAHA and MAGA defenders now celebrate tiny symbolic wins like red dye removal while ignoring the mass harm still flowing from FDA-approved toxic jabs. They tell us to be patient, to trust the process, to appreciate the incremental gains—even as mRNA shots stay on the shelf and childhood vaccine schedules remain largely untouched.
If Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—with decades of research, genuine good intentions, and a national grassroots movement behind him—could not change HHS, FDA, and CDC from the inside, then no insider ever will. That is the hard lesson of the last year. . . .
The FDA was built as a Rockefeller medicine enforcement monopoly to protect pharmaceutical profits and criminalize natural healing. . . .
Voting for a single reformer is pointless when the uniparty bureaucracy controls the agencies regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. Only collapse, decentralization, or outright dismantling of HHS, FDA, and CDC will end the slaughter. MAHA has at least revealed that truth, even if its leaders refused to act on it.
Amen.
Urging his readers to “Stand with Principles, Not Personalities”, Mike continues,
I stand with Dr. Mary Talley Bowden and the original health-freedom movement, not with MAHA's institutional hijack. . . .
The government will never save you. And voting new people into positions at the top of a broken, corrupt bureaucracy does not instantly transform it into an angelic and ethical pillar or wellness. The sooner you realize this—and start taking initiative in your own life to reject the government-enforced medical cartel—the healthier and happier you'll be.
I am glad to see what passes for a “health care” system in the US being called a government-enforced medical cartel.
As I noted in my article about the MAHA psyop,
The AAP is basically the pediatric counterpart to the American Medical Association (AMA), which played a central historical role in the creation of the government-enforced medical cartel that masquerades as a “health care” system in the US.
For that matter, we do not have a constitutional government. It’s a criminal organization in Washington.
More people need to start calling things what they are instead of using words so perversely to conceal the true nature of such institutions and thus to manufacture consent for their continuance.
As I mentioned, I prefer to use words that say what I mean and to mean what I say.
The True Cause of the Movement’s Division
Since MAHA’s inception, members of the health freedom movement who’ve dared to criticize the Trump administration and his HHS Secretary for failing to keep—or breaking—promises, or otherwise for moving things in the wrong direction, have continually been accused of undermining the cause, being disloyal, and dividing the movement.
The MAHA leadership itself has maligned MAHA critics as “chaos agents” who are “intentionally splintering” the movement.
Anyone who doesn’t support the administration’s actions must be “easily manipulated and distracted” and is “hindering” the movement’s objectives.
They are “nattering nabobs of negativity” seeking “to generate more clicks, likes, and followers.”
They are grifters aiming “to divide the MAHA movement”.
They’ve failed to recognize the “miracle” of the Kennedy-Trump alliance—on par with Moses’s parting of the Red Sea—and are undermining the administration’s efforts at “fighting the deep state”.
Those of us criticizing Trump administration policies have been continually told to “trust the plan” and to bite our tongues so as not to be “disloyal” and cause “division” that harms the movement’s goals.
I personally received two different phone calls from two different individuals close to Kennedy who delivered precisely that message to me because of my efforts to dissuade people from voting for Trump within my networks, and for criticizing his administration and the direction of MAHA.
One of them argued that I need to understand that Kennedy was just playing politics—as though that would change my perspective when the whole reason I initially supported his candidacy was because I stupidly believed that he would be honest with Americans and not play politics.
The other caller acknowledged that I was right to say the movement was being politically hijacked—while delivering the message that we must still withhold criticism and support what the Trump administration was doing because, now that he was on the playing field, we had to help Kennedy carry the ball forward.
I was also offered a lucrative job working for HHS as an independent contractor that would have ended my personal anxieties about being able to financially provide for my family. It required me to pass a test in which I professed my loyalty to Trump, which I refused to do.
You can deduce the answer to whether I got the job from the question of whether I have been successfully silenced.
Have I suffered financially for it? Yes. And still I’m accused of being a “grifter” for speaking out.
“There have been times I wish I had a check from MAHA®”, Super Don said on the episode of the Robert Scott Bell Show after Robert clarified that they’d taken no money from MAHA®.
I’ll leave it to my readers to conduct their own thought experiment to hypothesize an answer to the question of whether he’d have taken the check.
We’re told, “Don’t be naïve”, just “Follow the leader.”
In a nod to the “Q anon” cult during Trump’s first term, the new MAHA subsect of MAGA insisted that Kennedy was “playing 4D chess”. Trump and Kennedy are “in the swamp, and they have to place chess . . . the 5D chess”.
And therein lies the key to success of the psychological operation—the political hijacking of the grassroots health freedom movement—known as “MAHA”.
That is a key achievement of MAHA: a silencing of criticisms of the same ongoing policies that the non-partisan grassroots movement had previously criticized unrelentingly.
Hence, when one of the faithless critics calls MAHA a “psyop”, the reaction to it by MAHA voters is to refuse to even consider the argument and the vast amount of evidence presented to support it, including the critic’s consistently prescient warnings, and to instead mindlessly dismiss it as just another effort to divide the movement—by undermining support for the Republican Party.
MAHA is concerned with empowering one face of the two-headed beast.
The grassroots health freedom movement—or the remnant of it—remains focused on slaying the beast.
We beast-slayers are just voices crying in the wilderness now.
It isn’t MAHA’s critics who have caused the huge rift that now exists within the health freedom movement.
It is MAHA itself that achieved that goal most successfully.
I rest my case.
You write at one point: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continues to recommend COVID‑19 for children and pregnant women.”
I think you intended to say: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continues to recommend the demonstrably unsafe COVID-19 MRNA ‘vaccine’ for children and pregnant women.” Or words to that effect. Not even the CDC is actually recommending that children and pregnant women contract the disease.
Whoops! Thanks for pointing out that error. I have corrected.
Very thorough analysis Jeremy. It’s a bit discouraging that so many have to be led by the hand to show how the “system” deals with so called grass roots movements.(Occupy,etc). Its so damn hard to get people to shed their sheep-dipped party colors and realize the fight is not horizontal….its vertical.
It is indeed discouraging. That’s a great way to put it: the fight is not horizontal, it’s vertical. Thanks for the comment!