Here’s How the Right Is Packaging Its Conspiracies in Environmentalism

Growing up in the early 2000s, my mother instilled within me certain precepts: eat your vegetables, avoid processed foods, recycle. Buying organic was preferable, but often cost-prohibitive. Ideally, you’d want to be able to pronounce the words on a label. Red dye 40 and sugary breakfast cereals were no-nos — though sometimes she could be convinced otherwise.

All of these principles, she said, she’d picked up from her time living in California, where environmentalism and health consciousness were interwoven with the fabric of daily life. This, perhaps, reveals more about her particular social stratum than any overarching truth about Californians, but it’s true that my mom’s “crunchy” inclinations were an outlier in the southern city where we lived. To my friends’ parents, they were cultural markers of a type of West Coast liberalism, regardless of her actual political views.

In fact, none of these habits were inherently partisan; a certain strain of environmentalism has always permeated the political divide. After all, think of the few things that everyone wants: to breathe clean air, to drink clean water, to live a healthy life. But these desires too often translate into movements with solipsistic demands. At the local level, for instance, some Democrats and Republicans will unite to keep polluting industries out of their own neighborhoods, while readily offloading the burden to communities that lack resources to fight back. This NIMBY — “not in my backyard” — mindset fails to grasp how our collective futures are intertwined.

While eating organic may have once been loosely associated with the left, in recent years, we’ve seen a growing embrace of what I think is also a sort of NIMBYism — let’s call it the “not in my body” movement. Critical of pesticides and preservatives, these NIMBYs are focused on modifying their own consumption habits, usually at a higher price tag. Stoked by social media’s hyper-individualism, this line of thought is primarily concerned with health at the personal level: the fiction that one might buy their way into a longer life. And online, seeds of truth — i.e., that among rich countries, the U.S. spends the most on health care while maintaining some of the worst health outcomes — can quickly blossom into pernicious conspiracies. People who start off rightfully concerned about, say, lead in their tap water or microplastics in their brain tissue, might find themselves algorithmically led to influencers hawking raw milk while proclaiming the dangers of vaccines and seed oils.

These online communities really began taking off during the COVID-19 pandemic, when social isolation and flawed government messaging helped inspire a new wave of vaccine denialism and conspiratorial thought. Over the past five years, the gulf between reality and paranoia has seemingly widened, as Americans grow evermore mistrustful of institutions and profit-driven algorithms reward reactionary content. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the fringe has now bled so far into the mainstream it’s been awarded an institutional figurehead: Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

To some commentators, RFK Jr.’s Trump-endorsed “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) campaign marks a “weird political realignment.” One Vox headline from February bewilderedly asks, “The far right is going … green?” In a November 2024 Compact magazine article titled “The Rise of Green MAGA,” Holly Jean Buck writes, “Kennedy’s rightward trajectory and new position within the MAGA movement are the latest indication that ideas that were once a core part of environmentalism are veering in a strange direction.”

It’s true that that the pair is, at its face, incongruous: RFK Jr. spent years as an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a leading nonprofit environmental advocacy organization, while Trump is openly hostile to climate science. Money from the fossil fuel industry, the primary instigator of climate change, overwhelmingly flows into Republican lawmakers’ coffers. Trump’s first administration rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations, and in his second, the president has tapped chemical industry lobbyists for senior Environmental Protection Agency positions — all while signing an executive order to “assess the threat” of certain chemicals and food additives and “Make America Healthy Again” by “eliminating undue industry influence.”

Of course, RFK Jr.’s beliefs are not just your run-of-the-mill environmentalism. His own former colleagues have disavowed him; one NRDC press statement called him a “one-man misinformation superspreader.” RFK Jr. has spent years promoting baseless conspiracy theories and opposing life-saving vaccines; that opposition helped fuel a measles outbreak in Samoa, where vaccine rates dropped after he visited. More than 80 people, mostly children, died in the outbreak. Now, as cases of measles surge in the U.S., he is falsely insinuating that contracting the disease is better than getting vaccinated and peddling misinformation about treatment. His newfound influence over U.S. public health is cause for serious alarm.

But it’s misguided to frame the far right as going in a green new direction. For one, it’s hardly new. As historian Kathleen Belew wrote in a 2022 piece for The Atlantic on the “crunchy to alt-right pipeline,” the white power movement has long used hippie-ish issues like organic farming or a macrobiotic diet “as part of a wider articulation of cultural identity,” focused on purity and back-to-the-land survivalism. “The idea that natural purity translates into racial or national purity — that was one that was very central to the Nazis’ environmental discourse of blood and soil,” Blair Taylor, a researcher at the Institute for Social Ecology, told NPR in 2022. (I can’t be the only one who remembers learning as a child that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian.)

One of the clearest contemporary articulations of this mindset can be found in “tradwife” influencers, short for “traditional wife,” who promote the importance of rigid gender roles alongside manicured photos of their backyard chickens and grass-fed organic beef diets. Many of these women claim that their lifestyle connects them to their “ancestral roots,” a white power dog whistle that plays out in the tradwives’ odd embrace of both organic and extremely red meat-heavy diets. Just as New Age hippies preached spiritual and physical detoxification, the ideal tradwife “not only takes care of the children but protects them from anything that could corrupt their bodies, minds, and souls,” as Gaby del Valle wrote in The Baffler in 2023.

The overarching idea from these accounts is that we’re being poisoned — by Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Government — and we must take individual action to make ourselves healthy and happy again. This is also the logic of the anti-fluoridation movement, one of RFK Jr.’s cause célèbres that also has roots in both the far right and environmentalist communities. In the 1960s, a group of wealthy businessmen called the John Birch Society vehemently opposed the government’s addition of fluoride to drinking water, claiming that, rather than a public health intervention to prevent tooth decay, fluoridation was actually part of a communist plot to take over the country. In the latter part of the 20th century, Belew writes, “White-power activists worried that fluoride would make people docile, such that revolution against the state and race war would be harder to accomplish.” Meanwhile, some environmentalists, including the former executive director of the Sierra Club, argued that fluoride was a risk to ecosystems. But while anti-fluoridation conspiracies existed only on the fringes for decades — research, after all, has shown that water fluoridation is safe and effective for promoting dental health — these, too, have now gone mainstream. This month, Utah’s governor announced the state would become the first to ban fluoride in drinking water.

RFK Jr. and his acolytes are dangerous. It is abhorrent, for instance, that the growing anti-vax movement has led us to a moment where, in 2025, we are grappling with what should have been an easily preventable measles outbreak among schoolchildren in Texas. What’s especially pernicious about the MAHA movement is the kernels of truth it contains: Industry interests do have concerning influence over U.S. agricultural policy and chemical regulation. Growing research shows that PFAS, the industrial “forever chemicals” linked to a host of deleterious health impacts, are virtually everywhere. When Trump claimed in his MAHA executive order, that “6 in 10 Americans have at least one chronic disease,” he wasn’t lying.

In trying to establish themselves as the party of science, the Democrats have also unintentionally fueled anti-science conspiracies. If “science is real,” as the Democrats’ adage goes, and science overwhelmingly points to the urgency of more drastic measures to combat climate change — why haven’t they taken them? If “science is real,” and science points to a chemical’s carcinogenic potential — why wouldn’t it be banned? If “science is real,” but scientists helped fuel racist 20th-century eugenics programs — and faced little to no accountability for it — why would marginalized groups, harmed by that legacy, readily agree to “believe science,” no questions asked?

To be clear, science is real, and MAHA is not the answer. But ideological inconsistencies, and gaps between rhetoric and action, leave spaces that conspiracy theorists are all too happy to fill.

“If you’re the average American,” P.E. Moskowitz recently wrote in their newsletter Mental Hellth, “then you’ve been presented with two options: support the team who acknowledges how unhealthy we’ve all become […] or support the side that pretends these problems simply do not exist.”

As STAT News noted, if government mistrust was the starting point, the pandemic was the tipping point. It is both true that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, urgent and necessary for safeguarding public health, and that Pfizer received windfall profits from said vaccine. Acknowledging this is uncomfortable; pretending it’s not true is worse.

In the absence of systemic solutions like universal health care, it makes sense that people are seeking out their own flawed treatments on the internet. And when they do go looking, they’ll inevitably encounter snake oil salesmen and right-wing grifters, the false promise of self-improvement through consumption. The only way for the left to counter the swindle is by highlighting systemic faults and widely publicizing the alternatives — taking corporations to task, dismantling for-profit health care, subsidizing access to nutritious foods and shutting down repeat polluters, to start. Although some segments of the left have adopted these rallying cries, the Democratic establishment has largely tried to counter RFK-style misinformation with a piecemeal approach that fails to address root concerns.

It’s also important to recognize that the right-wing has succeeded in borrowing green-ish rhetoric because of the failures of NIMBY — body and backyard — environmentalism. New Age hippies were never particularly known for their racial diversity; the high cost of organics and “clean” products has long meant that access to a nontoxic lifestyle is circumscribed by class lines. Everyone deserves healthy food, unpolluted air, clean water. A “health for me but not for thee” approach just isn’t going to work.