What Hippies, Tradwives, and Trump Voters Have in Common

During this year’s Super Bowl, boxer Mike Tyson took a big bite out of an apple in a commercial that commanded us to “eat real food.” The ad felt more like a political gambit than a PSA. Here was a chance to show off the seemingly strange alliance of the second Trump administration: MAGA and MAHA.

After Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Donald Trump in 2024, Republicans added a woo crowd to their base. Some outsiders found the connection odd. But in retrospect, it’s easy to see why it works. What unites alternative medicine practitioners, organic fanatics, tradwives, and Trump voters isn’t all that strange when you think about it: Each group is obsessed with what’s supposedly “natural.”

When discussing alternatives to modern medicine, the Make America Healthy Again legion wants “natural” family planning (no contraceptives), “natural” meat (devouring uncooked organs and raw milk as a show of virile masculinity), and “natural” immunity for viruses (fewer vaccines). The body is a temple that should remain untampered with—even if that means the return of measles.

For the diehard MAGA right, the same values hold true. Christian conservatives believe in what they see as a naturally apparent hierarchy in the family, calling for people to have more children and for mothers to stay home to care for them. (Memorably, Vice President JD Vance has gone so far as to suggest that parents should get extra votes.) And then there are far-right pundits like Curtis Yarvin, who once called slavery “a natural human relationship.”

In both cases, common sense or a gut feeling becomes a way to argue their point without the laborious demand of evidence or facts. In this way, right-wing thinkers’ critiques of the modern world—with its genuine problems—become an excuse to call not for a better world, but for an old one. Even if it means the return of fascism. When the right says “natural,” “normal,” and “healthy,” what they really mean is “untouched.”

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Famously, the Third Reich often touted “cleanliness” and “natural” ways of being. (One of Hitler’s close associates, Rudolf Hess, called Nazism “applied biology.”) Those who did not conform—racially, mentally, or sexually—were weeded out.

In the United States, “natural” has been a more flexible term. Early Puritans exercised dominion over the natural world as they began to colonize America. Later Christians began to see nature as God’s second book—something to be both revered and feared. Writing about the slipperiness of the term in 2015, Michael Pollan noted that “we can ransack nature to justify just about anything…[It is a] blank screen on which we can project what we want to see.”

Right-wing thinkers have also drawn from Christian teachings on the “natural” order. Thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas famously explained, “The natural law is nothing else than the rational creature’s participation of the eternal law.” In the 19th century, social Darwinism merged the scientist’s theory that only the fittest survive with religious notions of natural law. Even without God, there was hierarchy that could not be disputed.

The body is a temple that should remain untampered with—even if that means the return of measles.

Social Darwinism was soon taken up by capitalists and pseudoscientists to justify their ruthless pursuit of wealth and racial discrimination. Paleoconservatives—those on the right who call for strict traditionalism and non-interventionism—have gone further. During his infamous culture war speech in 1992, paleocon Pat Buchanan summed up the conservatives’ biggest nightmare: “The agenda that Clinton and Clinton would impose on America: abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units.” All these new advances, he implied, were unnatural. Of course, he didn’t feel the need to state why.

Like the fascists of the past, modern MAGA desires a specific form of strength that is supposedly obvious. They see weakness in many forms: homosexuality, promiscuity, abortion, autism, gender ideology, illness, disability. Trans health care, like surgery and hormones, is considered outside the bounds of acceptable medicine, an extraneous intervention that goes against nature. Gender-affirming surgery is considered akin to pasteurization, vaccines, or drinking fluoride—an unnatural intervention. Kennedy has called puberty blockers for transgender kids “castration drugs.”

This has ripple effects. Everything from hormone replacement therapy to abortion and vaccines are, by design, becoming harder to obtain as the right limits the scope of bodily autonomy. MAHA podcaster Alex Clark went so far as to tell the New York Times, “It’s not very feminist to think that women are too stupid to know how our cycles work and be able to avoid pregnancy naturally.”

But who gets to define what is innate and what is adornment? Despite all this opposition to hormonal intervention for trans people, it’s not uncommon for men on the right to use it. Kennedy himself takes testosterone as part of an “anti-aging protocol.” (He has said he can’t even seem to remember all the supplements he’s taking.) Such clear hypocrisy and moral incongruency don’t register to conservatives, who believe that everything from natural law to biological determinism is self-evident. They label queer and trans people as unnatural and therefore subject to terms and conditions. It’s fine if men take testosterone or women get Mar-a-Lago face with plastic surgery—but only if they double down on the sex they were assigned at birth.

In the void created when evidence and facts fly away, a marketplace has popped up where pseudoscientists hawk natural remedies, from supplements to raw milk and gray-market peptides. Who needs mainstream medicine when the secretary of health and human services promotes vaccine skepticism? He seems more focused on designing a workout routine—all while wearing jeans. While the White House attempts to defund decadeslong scientific research, right-wing bodybuilders and fanatical biohackers are stepping in to fill the gap and sell their brands of natural body enhancement. Turns out MAHA’s version of naturalism can be quite lucrative.