Embrace the woo woo
Nothing in this column is meant to suggest vaccines are hazardous. Nor should it be read as implying all doctors are quacks. You should, in any event, consult a medical professional, probably a psychiatrist, before taking health advice from Lexington. That said, amid the chaos, crowing and lamentation enveloping the second term of Donald Trump, it might be good for everyone to take some time to marvel at how he is making the Republican party a home for people who ask trees for help with their love lives, dabble with psychedelics, bemoan consumerism, long for European-Union-style regulation, and turn for insight to the poet Sylvia Plath and the Disney movie “Moana”.
“Women are lunar beings who exist on a 28-day moon cycle, inherently reflecting the cycles and patterns of the cosmos,” mused one such person, Casey Means, Mr Trump’s nominee to be America’s surgeon general, after she watched “Moana” recently. Yet, she continued in her weekly newsletter, the modern world “rejects, even demonises,” these cycles: “it demands constant productivity, endless yang energy, and punishing speed.”
Mr Trump has largely imposed his taste and views as he has coaxed or bullied Republicans to reverse their former orthodoxies when it comes to tariffs, autocrats, certain forms of rioting or a president’s receipt of lavish gifts from foreign potentates. There is one seeming exception: the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. It hates the junk food Mr Trump loves, frets over the sort of ecological catastrophe he considers a hoax and yearns after achieving spiritual fulfilment not popularly associated with the Trump brand promise. To borrow Dr Means’s taxonomy, her feminine yin energy seems less to complement Mr Trump’s “endless yang energy”—what an elegant distillation of MAGA’s essence, by the way—than to contradict it. Yet as part of his movement Mr Trump is fostering an emerging hippy right.
In some respects, Dr Means is a typical Trump appointee. She lacks some conventional credentials, and, he has said, he does not know much about her. Dr Means, who is 37, does not have an active medical licence. She graduated from Stanford Medical School and embarked on a five-year residency to train as a surgeon. But she quit just months before finishing.
In interviews and a best-selling book, “Good Energy”, Dr Means has recounted a classic MAHA awakening. She describes a dawning realisation, as she puts it in the book, “that every institution that impacts health—from medical schools to insurance companies to hospitals to pharma companies—makes money on ‘managing’ disease, not curing patients”. Her brother, Calley Means, with whom she wrote the book, has said he quit lobbying for the food industry after a similar Damascene conversion. He is now a top adviser to Robert F. Kennedy junior, the MAHA poobah who is secretary of health and human services. On Mr Kennedy’s recommendation, Mr Trump nominated Dr Means on May 7th after credentials claimed by his previous nominee came under challenge. Dr Means must be confirmed by the Senate. There is reason to look forward to her confirmation hearing.
After giving up her residency, Dr Means embarked on a search for the underlying causes of illness. It led her to conclude, as she puts it in the first words of “Good Energy”, that “everything is connected”. She warns that rising rates of all sorts of maladies—from cancer to Alzheimer’s to erectile dysfunction—stem from plastics and chemicals in the food chain, over-medication, needless surgery, bad lifestyle choices and disregard of nature.
Her message is apocalyptic. “We’re becoming infertile and we’re losing our minds,” she declared in an appearance with her brother last autumn on Joe Rogan’s podcast. As her passionate delivery gathered steam, she sounded less like a member of a conservative movement than a Cassandra speed-reading the Whole Earth Catalogue. “Health is the tip of the iceberg of fundamentally, like, a planetary issue but, like, the planetary issue is the tip of the iceberg of what I think is really really going on here which is, like, a spiritual issue,” she told Mr Rogan. The central question, she said, is this: “are we committed to life and to awe and to connecting with source, and then listening?” If not, “I do think we’re on the road to existential disaster.”
Vax on, vax off
Dr Means, who co-founded a company to help people monitor their glucose levels, has built a career as a wellness adviser, recommending dietary supplements, skincare products and other choices. Her tips range from ethereal to pragmatic. In describing how she “found love at 35”, she urged readers to “embrace the ‘woo woo’”—she “did full moon ceremonies” and asked the trees for help—but also to “get extremely tactical”: she moved from relative seclusion in Oregon to Los Angeles and joined the dating site Bumble, where she met her fiancé.
Dr Means has called vaccine mandates “criminal” and the childhood vaccine schedule “insane”. But some MAHA adherents, suspicious that Mr Kennedy is prioritising food quality over combating vaccination, find her scepticism too mild. “She’s not a vaccine truther,” one influential anti-vaxxer, Mike Adams, wrote on X. “She’ll never recommend natural cancer cures or remedies.”
One can hope. When it comes to overseeing Americans’ health, the post of surgeon general, once significant, is itself a vestigial organ; what authority it has left is not regulatory but hortatory. Mr Trump could do worse than appoint someone concerned that Americans take too many pills and eat too much lousy food, or even that society puts quarterly profits ahead of “sustainable living”. But Democrats should worry that Mr Trump, having already co-opted some of their economic policies and their working-class constituency, may make off with their yin energy, too. ■
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