This maniac's obsession is poison to MAGA

As a writer, people assume you’re never at a loss for words. But here we are. All I can think of is Caroline Kennedy’s warning about her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and how “he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks.”

From this whack-a-doodle comes a gobsmacking, utterly inexplicable, surreal display of stupidity that upends both the seriousness of American public health policy and confirms RFK Jr., somehow become U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, as the country’s number one health destroyer.

Kennedy teamed up with Kid Rock for a 90-second “BawitMAHA” workout video that showcases two absolute buffoons attempting to do God only knows what.

I say attempting because even as a fitness fanatic for 30 years, I genuinely have no idea what to call what they are doing. The bizarre clip features the duo shirtless in a sauna — Kennedy in his customary jeans — biking, stretching, flexing, and plunging into a cold pool.

Then comes the truly stomach-churning moment: the two of them, drinking raw milk in a hot tub.

I’m sorry, but the thought of consuming unfiltered milky mammal secretions while sweating in a hot tub is nothing short of vomit-inducing.

Cutting to the chase, the ludicrous video serves as a fittingly chaotic emblem of Kennedy’s so-called “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) initiative, which ostensibly doesn’t include eating raw chicks and mice out of a blender, but you never know.

This “campaign” — seriously, what do you call this? — appears more focused on dad-rock aesthetics, hyper-masculinity, and rank foolishness than on using evidence-based strategies to fight disease and help people live healthier lives.

Kennedy bypasses scientific rigor for viral content with an off-his-rocker partisan rocker less muscle-ripped than booze-addled. Kennedy has turned the Department of Health and Human Services into a nut-job quackery — or, in his case, chickery — that dispenses not life-saving vaccines but unadulterated idiocy. If there were a childhood vaccine for stupidity, Kennedy surely missed it.

Could MAHA be any less serious? Yes! The absurdity doesn’t end in the milky hot tub. The Hill reports that Republicans are treating RFK Jr.’s wellness crusade as an electoral asset, with strategists whispering that MAHA could stave off midterm losses.

This thought process is more ridiculous than whatever results in wearing jeans to the gym.

Over at Politico, GOP insiders are described as being as brain-wormed as their health secretary. RFK Jr. is the belt-tightening Beltway guru, a Washington fascination, endlessly debated in conference rooms and catered luncheons — and, dare I say, in unpasteurized Capitol Hill hot tubs. So much for draining the swamp.

The fact that some Republicans are pinning their 2026 hopes on a health crusade led by RFK Jr. is just bonkers. What was once — pre-Trump — a party with a coherent platform is reduced to stumping for a fringe health scheme.

It’s a scheme that has gained traction with weird online wellness influencers and conspiracy-tinged critics of Big Pharma, and which polls show does not address top concerns of most voters, like high costs and low wages.

And that’s the point: the Trump quagmire has lost its association with the MAGA base if it thinks MAHA will inspire flags, bumper stickers, placards, and lines outside polling stations.

In deep-red districts, food choices are cultural signals. Steak and beer versus salads and a smoothie. Telling MAGA voters to reject vaccines while embracing quinoa is not a strategy. It’s an electoral nightmare.

The contradiction is glaring. RFK Jr. rails against the government “telling you what to put in your body” when it comes to vaccines, yet embraces a moralizing, top-down approach to diet and wellness that feels exactly like the elitism MAGA voters despise.

Freedom, corruption, and riches for me. Discipline, disease, and raw milk for thee.

What’s more, this strategy ignores the lived reality of low-income Americans. Healthy food is expensive. Access is unequal. Food deserts are real. Time poverty is real. Equipment costs money. Transportation costs money. Groceries cost money — more and more each week.

MAGA voters are feeling the pinch, so telling them to replace boxes of mac and cheese for ninety-nine cents with one piece of daily broccoli for around $2 borders on a bum steer — and I don’t mean the sort of cow that doesn’t produce hot-tub milk.

The GOP’s Beltway brain trust can celebrate salad bars and rail against processed foods all it wants, but in many rural and working-class communities, grocery stores are miles apart, fast food is ubiquitous, and budgets are tight.

I have friends in deep-red areas who mock my plant-based diet as “liberal,” i.e., “Casey, you are now part of the far-left.” It’s not because they’ve studied science or the new upside-down food pyramid from Kennedy’s HHS, but because culture and identity shape food in ways Washington consultants misunderstand.

We’ve seen this before. When Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to regulate soda sizes in New York City, the backlash in rural America was swift and scathing, framed as nanny-state overreach, an urban billionaire telling regular people how to live.

On that note, how many people in rural America — and elsewhere — do you know who own a sauna or have access to one? There you go.

The end result is a MAHA movement that manages to insult MAGA voters who don’t want their food policed and low-income Americans who can’t afford the lifestyle being preached.

MAHA is about as far from a populist uprising as can be. MAHA is an inside-the-Beltway wellness, a grass-fed fixation being twisted into something that it is not — grassroots.

• John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”