Conspirituality Brief: Did MAHA Put MAGA In Power?
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Jan 31, 2026 Dr Jonathan Howard, neurologist and psychiatrist at NYU Langone who tackles medical misinformation, returns to dissect MAHA’s role in empowering MAGA. He explores how doctors lent credibility, media laundered disinformation, and influencers flirt with dangerous "natural experiments." The conversation calls for documenting enablers and confronting the real harms of letting preventable diseases return.
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Medical Legitimacy Fueled Political Power
- MAHA's merger with MAGA may have helped elect Trump by lending medical legitimacy to authoritarian messaging.
- Doctors like Jay Bhattacharya and Vinay Prasad framed public health as a roadmap to tyranny and gained political power as a result.
Histrionic Rhetoric Primed Political Shifts
- Prominent academics presented themselves as neutral while promoting alarmist narratives about a biomedical security state.
- That rhetoric primed followers to accept anti-public-health politics and later back authoritarian leaders.
Media Laundered Credibility For Fringe Claims
- Major media outlets helped launder disinformation by platforming credentialed dissenters without adequate fact-checking.
- Profiles of figures like Marty Makary downplayed past misinformation and normalized their authority.
