Conspirituality - Brief: MAHA’s Conspiracy Theories

Sept. 13, 2025 - Conspirituality

25:07

Brief: MAHA’s Conspiracy Theories

Derek worked for nearly 10 months on a NY Times opinions video, "You Might Have Already Fallen for MAHA’s Conspiracy Theories," which was published this week. He discusses what it took to produce this video with his collaborator, Alex Stockton, as well as the role journalism has to play in dispelling health misinformation. Show Notes You Might Have Already Fallen for MAHA’s Conspiracy Theories Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	Our team at New York Times Opinion set out to reconstruct the journey people take to falling for the conspiracy theories spread by many Maha influencers.
	So we interviewed some of their former followers.
	Retracing their stories step by step through the videos and podcasts they consumed.
	Our analysis focused on a core group of 38 people and organizations.
	Many are close associates, hosting one another on their podcasts and now shaping government policy.
	These aren't fringe figures.
	Their videos have been viewed more than four and a half billion times in total.
	Not everything these influencers say is dangerous, and it's often contradictory.
	So we used AI to find patterns in about 12,000 videos and podcasts.
	We found that this content can act like a funnel, turning health-conscious people against healthcare.
	I'm going to take you through this funnel to show how these conspiracy theories could pull in even someone like me or you.
	That's Alex Stockton, an editor in the opinion section at the New York Times from a video entitled, You Might Have Already Fallen for Maha's Conspiracy Theories that was published this past Tuesday.
	I was Alex's partner on this project, which we worked on for most of this year.
	In fact, the process of creating this video began last November.
	You can watch the full 16-minute video via a GIF link in the show notes, in case you're not a subscriber, though I think you should be.
	I'm happy to say this is my first byline and producer credit for the New York Times, and I really appreciated the process of creating it, which is what I want to briefly discuss today, because it highlights the difference between what journalism entails and how the influencers we covered in this video present information.
	I'm Derek Barris, and you're listening to a conspirituality brief, Maha's Conspiracy Theories.
	As always, you can find us on Instagram and Threads.
	All three of us are individually on Blue Sky.
	And if you have the means of supporting us as independent media creators, you can find us on Patreon at Patreon.com/slash conspirituality, as well as via Apple subscriptions to receive our Monday bonus episodes.
	Let's get into it.
	On November 7th, 2024, an opinions editor emailed me asking if I'd like to write an op ed about Maha.
	Here's the exact request.
	Quote, I'm reaching out because we're looking for writers who can talk about RFK and make America healthy again.
	We're particularly interested in better understanding why people are so drawn to conspiracies and quack health claims.
	I replied saying I was interested, of course, I've wanted to work with the Times for a very long time, and then I sent a full pitch on what my op-ed would cover.
	A day or two later, I received word that Alex was thinking about working on a video covering similar territory, and he invited me to collaborate.
	I immediately accepted, and that's how the project began.
	The premise was to show how people get radicalized by wellness influencers in the Maha sphere.
	Some of them are directly involved with Kennedy, others are more aspirationally motivated.
	They're in the general space and they share an ideology with Kennedy.
	Everyone we included had some crossover with Maha, be it joining Kennedy at the congressional hearing a year ago, or hosting top Maha figures on their podcast, or actually working in the administration under Kennedy.
	If you've been listening to this podcast for any length of time, I'm sure you've heard me cover Maha.
	Conspirituality was founded to review the pseudo-documentary Plandemic, which Kennedy admitted to funding nearly five years after it came out.
	The chapter on Kennedy from our book, Conspirituality was excerpted by Time in July 2023.
	And as a reporter, I've been covering the anti-vax movement after a measles outbreak tore through wealthy neighborhoods of Los Angeles in 2014.
	So having an opportunity to work on this project with the most respected media outlet in the country was an honor.
	Sure, I know plenty of MAGA stands refer to it as the failing New York Times, and I know plenty of liberals get mad at their broad coverage areas and the fact they offer conservative space to publish op-eds.
	I'm not going to claim I love either all of their opinion section or their news coverage.
	But I've done a few episodes of conspirituality covering similar topics.
	One was on the difference between a newspaper's opinion section and news coverage, which are distinct sections that rarely cross over.
	Another was on the history of the news.
	And I believe a nation without the New York Times looks a lot worse than the one we now inhabit.
	The very aspiration of unbiased and holistic news coverage began in the middle of the 19th century with the founding of the New York Times, then known as the New York Daily Times.
	They don't always do it right in my opinion, but it's a massive media undertaking, and many of the parts rarely talk to each other.
	So I might seethe when I see another Ross Duthat hot take, but I remain a longtime subscriber.
	Let me give you a big picture overview of what it took to publish this.
	First, it involved numerous meetings with lawyers and editors pouring over every single word in our script, which went through dozens of iterations.
	Every sentence was vetted, fact-checked, and signed off on before being recorded.
	Sometimes this was for clarity, sometimes for legal reasons.
	And every new script that we produced required going through the same process over and over.
	And this is important because most of the content churned out by the influencers we cover in the video have no oversight whatsoever.
	Some of the larger figures like Mark Hyman and Dave Asprey likely have a team writing and posting the content on their site in emails.
	But then they go on social media or on podcasts and just spout whatever shit comes off the top of their heads.
	For example, Hyman goes on Barry Weiss's podcast to claim that vaccines are not studied against placebos, which he said, or he jumps onto his YouTube channel and says that upwards of 90% of all disease is caused by leaky gut, which he also said and which is not a thing, and he suffers no repercussions for saying these things.
	Asprey can post on Instagram that, quote, nicotine slows down aging by altering your body's metabolic process, which has some shade of truth in that studies on mice show some age-related effects from nicotine administration, but which is certainly not an anti-aging protocol in humans by any means.
	And he can say it freely.
	Both men then turn their pseudoscientific paranoia into marketing funnels to their many companies and products that magically counteract all the problems that they just invented.
	And that's one layer.
	That's a layer I've exhaustively covered on this podcast for years.
	But for the Times video, we focus more on the anti-medicine, anti-doctor propaganda being pumped out by these influencers.
	And seriously, I thought it was bad before I started working on this project, and my God, it is worse than I ever thought.
	We found nearly 800 instances of influencers telling people not to trust their doctor or the healthcare system, or saying that medical professionals or the system are trying to purposefully harm you.
	We clip RFK Jr. saying the system doesn't want kids dead, but they want them sick so that they're lifelong clients.
	This is such a disgustingly perverted view of health and health care and the world.
	It presupposes a romanticized time when humans were all just magically naturally healthy, which is a basic misunderstanding of history and anthropology.
	The real hypocrisy is that most, if not all of these people, will rush themselves or their family members to a doctor when they need them, then they'll turn around and act like they're the CEO of their own body, as some influencers like to claim.
	And yeah, you should know your body.
	When I taught group fitness for decades, I talked about proprioception often, which is simply the internal mechanisms we all have for understanding how we move through space.
	I believe it's probably the closest thing to self-realization that exists.
	Yes, it's kind of metaphorical, but it's also being aware internally of how you, as an animal, have physical agency in your environment.
	What it doesn't involve is a metaphysics of agency.
	For example, the idea that your thoughts can cure cancer.
	So, yes, I know my body pretty well, but the idea that I know the unconscious processes my body performs in order to accomplish its physiological goals, or that I can know when viruses and bacteria are affecting these processes, is just absurd.
	And anyone who claims you should know is trying to sell you something.
	As we know, Maha is filled with salespeople.
	You might have picked out in the clip that I shared earlier that we used AI to analyze nearly 12,000 videos and podcasts.
	And this is true.
	The New York Times built a special AI tool that helped us analyze quotes, which were then dumped into a spreadsheet.
	Here's where everything changes from the influencers that we cover.
	We had to go back and verify every claim identified based on the prompts that it was fed.
	That's thousands of clips we had to review to make sure the data we mined were accurate.
	And this process was myself, Alex, and Amanda Sue, who is also a producer on this project.
	The bulk of time was spent doing the most tedious administrative task imaginable.
	Fact-checking.
	You know, that word that influencers just hate on all of the time.
	Making sure the numbers we present later in the video were accurate is part of this process, and they were.
	I personally worked over a hundred hours on this 16-minute video, and Alex did all of the recording and actual editing work.
	I'm gonna guess there were hundreds out of hours of labor put in by over a dozen people at a cost that I'm also gonna guess stretched it into six figures, and this is all done for one piece of reporting by one of the largest news organizations in the world.
	And it's a piece that I'm proud of.
	The response I've seen in the last couple days has been overwhelmingly positive, but that doesn't surprise me because it's coming from the crowd that's skeptical of Maha in the first place.
	There's been some pushback, of course.
	Shortly after the piece was published, Cali Means, who's featured extensively throughout our video, tweeted 76% of the country has a chronic disease.
	There is a coordinated campaign from the media and the largest industry in the country that profits from this fact to convince Americans that anyone who criticizes this system is a dangerous anti-vaxxer.
	He doesn't mention our video, so I can't definitively say it is about us, but the timing certainly lines up.
	And it's just pure deflection.
	It's something I always hear.
	We have the receipts.
	Again, we have 12,000 videos and podcasts.
	We have a tweet of Cali sending out don't trust your oncologist.
	So if he wants to turn around and make this bullshit up that it's a deflection and that we're being funded by pharma, it's it's all just a way to rile up his crowd.
	And as we point out very clearly in the video, a way for him to take that crowd and to shuffle taxpayer money into his business, which is specifically what he's on record saying he wants to do.
	So it doesn't surprise us that he doesn't point people to the video, and it definitely doesn't surprise me that he will not discuss the content of the video, but rather just pivot and deflect, which is something his friend Gillian Michael also does.
	She tweeted twice, in fact, the first one.
	I just gave the New York Times credit for an honest, balanced portrayal of my position.
	Two weeks later, a blatant hit piece.
	For 30 years, I've said the same thing.
	Every medication of vaccine carries risks and rewards.
	The smart approach is weighing the cost benefit with your doctor, not blind acceptance or blind rejection.
	If they were confused, they could have read the piece they themselves just ran on me.
	So why the sudden smear campaign?
	Desperate to cover what?
	Why would anyone be so intent on trashing those of us asking why America can't take its chronic disease crisis seriously and put more focus on prevention?
	An hour or two later, she then sent out this tweet.
	So I guess she was having a day.
	In just the past month, the legacy left-wing media, CNN, New York Times, HuffPost, even rags like US Weekly, have thrown every smear they can come up with.
	Racist, anti-vaxxer, fat shamer.
	Everything short of calling me a rapist, tough sell, I'd imagine.
	I don't know where that comes from.
	They put out a documentary.
	Okay, that so they, Netflix.
	Netflix, the whoever produced the documentary has no relationship with any of the media organizations that she just mentioned.
	So this follows up our reporting, right?
	And then she's talking about the Fit for TV documentary, which is completely separate from anything that she's talking about here in terms of like putting the times in because when she's referencing CNN HuffPost, she's talking about coverage of that documentary, but that royal they just makes it seem like like Cali does, like it's all in coordination, which is just fucking absurd.
	They put out a documentary dedicated solely to trashing me, packed with lies, I've already debunked with receipts.
	And even when digging through my dating life from 30 years ago to find an ex who says I spit on waiters, at that point, it's not reporting, it's a coordinated smear campaign, an all-out effort to destroy the credibility of anyone asking the most dangerous question of all.
	Why is the establishment so terrified of people who suggest prevention and accountability over chronic sickness and blind obedience?
	My God.
	So I'll say a few things.
	First off, I know I read the piece The Times published two weeks ago.
	I sent it to Alex.
	I'm pretty sure he read it as well.
	I don't know when they started working on that, but we started, as I said, last November.
	And here's the thing, and I've done a full episode on this in the past, and I mentioned it earlier.
	Historically, in newspapers, there is the editorial reporting side involved.
	and then there is the opinion side.
	And there is generally a firewall between them.
	Not that they can't communicate, they generally don't because it's a very large organization.
	And most newspapers, the opinion is separate from editorial, is separate from advertising.
	And the sort of coverage and firewalls that exist between them is so that they do not influence each other.
	Editorial at its best is pure reporting.
	Opinion is just what that is says.
	It is your opinion, but importantly, it also involves an editorial process.
	It's not always the same process, but I already said how many hundreds of hours we put in and how many meetings with lawyers, fact-checking everything need to happen for the opinion section.
	That off that also happens in editorial.
	When people say the New York Times, oh, they're not credible because they publish this article.
	Are you talking about an opinion piece?
	Are you talking about video?
	Are you talking about editorial reporting?
	These actually tangibly make a difference in terms of what media is, but it has gotten very flattened because of the social media environment that we all operate in.
	It's really hard for people to tell the difference between opinion and editorial.
	And I'm not only putting that on people.
	I think newspapers, I think they generally do a good job.
	Because if you, for example, if you share a link from the New York Times, the first thing it says is opinion.
	That gives you a sense that this is not editorial working.
	And if it's editorial, usually it doesn't say that.
	But people like Gillian and Callie, they're not really interested in those distinctions.
	And probably, I would guess aren't historically aware of the different functions that those sections are supposed to accomplish in society.
	Is it time to let those distinctions go and just pretend that newspapers are all one thing?
	I don't think so, but I also was trained 30 years ago in this industry.
	And I still believe that both sections have different purposes, and I think they both have value.
	And it is why, as I said, Ross Duthot, or you know, the Times gave Chris Rufo an op-ed earlier this year, which I thought was absolute garbage and bullshit in terms of content.
	But historically, an opinions page is there to serve that function of giving a broad range of views.
	We've seen the Washington Post come out where Bezos says the opinion section is no longer going to be about these things.
	It's only going to be about a select few things, predominantly things that promote America.
	And that is where the real trouble comes in with billionaires owning media operations.
	The LA Times has gone through something similar.
	Fortunately, the New York Times has not.
	They still have an independent editorial board.
	We'll see if that continues.
	Thankfully, at this point, I think they're doing okay financially with their subscriber base.
	So that sort of distance between oligarchs and billionaires controlling their content has not yet affected them.
	But it has, which then skews perceptions of media writ large.
	Second point on this, everything Callie and Gillian says here is pure deflection.
	They do not actually focus on the criticism.
	So for example, when Gillian says that every medication of vaccine carries risks and awards, I've been saying this for 30 years, you have to weigh the cost benefit.
	We share clips in the video where she says specifically, I don't even take an Advil, and I don't think I would ever take an MRNA vaccine.
	That is not a cost-benefit analysis with your doctor.
	That is not a balance, those are not balanced statements.
	Again, because if she had to actually live up and face the consequences of making those statements in the public realm as someone with millions of followers, then she would have trouble making the statements she does in her tweets, which distract you from actually focusing on the content of the video.
	This is a very common influencer technique.
	I think it's a common human technique if you don't want to actually own up to the words that you've said.
	And to me, that's really a big red flag, especially if these are people who are selling you things.
	And Jillian, if you watch the advertising and the sponsors on her podcast and all the work she does, she is definitely selling you things.
	So I'll go back to the heuristic that I came up with early in conspirituality.
	Watch what they say and then watch what they sell.
	Okay, enough about the video.
	I hope you watch it.
	Again, you can watch it for free if you're not a subscriber via the gift link.
	I just want to close by saying I began training as a journalist in 1993.
	That's when my first article was published.
	It was definitely an opinion piece about Rage Against the Machine, I believe, at the time, but that's where I started.
	And the field has changed dramatically since that time, but it's been changing consistently for the 500 years since the concept of news was first being dreamed up in Italy as people were making broadsheets while talking to docs workers.
	Docs meaning the shipworkers coming in from foreign lands.
	The New York Times, as I said, is responsible for introducing unbiased news and phenomena that's lasted roughly 170 years now.
	And honestly, I don't know how possible it is moving forward given how fractured our media landscape and our fractured society is at the moment.
	I hope unbiased reporting continues, however.
	I've also long said that my work on this podcast is largely opinion informed by editorial, not the other way around.
	But editorial plays a primary role in forming those opinions, which means that fact-checking is one of the main responsibilities of my work.
	The fact that the New York Times and other publications I've worked for in the last year, like Mother Jones and The Guardian, all take that process seriously, does give me some hope, which is way more than I can say about the Maha influencers in our video.
	Showing your work is an essential part of the job of journalism.
	It makes sense that the feedback from those influencers doesn't address our claims because they can't show the work refuting what we found.

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