Even though Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ended his presidential bid in August, he appears to be as busy as ever—but now, on the campaign trail for former President Donald Trump, where he’s modified the MAGA slogan to MAHA: Make American Healthy Again. Trump has picked up some of Kennedy’s favorite lines, as well: At a recent event, where Kennedy was a featured speaker, Trump bemoaned the epidemic of chronic illness in the United States, which Kennedy long has said he believes is caused by vaccines, toxins in food, and overreliance on medication. Kennedy would be included in a presidential panel, Trump promised supporters, that would focus on “the decades-long increase in chronic health problems, including autoimmune disorders, autism, obesity, infertility and many more.”
By adopting these talking points and embracing the failed third-party candidate, Trump is making a bid for a much-coveted group of crossover voters. Over his years as an environmental activist and then an anti-vaccine crusader, Kennedy has built up a vast network of allies in the political gray zone where far-left natural health enthusiasts meet libertarian-leaning independents and Republicans who rail against government overreach. In a race that is predicted to be won on razor-thin margins, Trump needs all the voters from that left-meets-right zone that he can get. Kennedy is expected to woo a small but meaningful number of them to team Trump—especially if he succeeds in getting his name removed from the ballots in the two swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin.
One emissary from this political gray area is Zen Honeycutt, the founder and executive director of the anti-GMO organization Moms Across America. In a wide-ranging conversation with Mother Jones this week, Honeycutt described her years of work with Kennedy, and what she sees as a sea change in the political leanings of her group’s core followers in the 13 years since she founded Moms Across America. A decade ago, the group attracted a predominantly left-leaning audience who were concerned mostly about toxins in food and what they saw as the dangerous unknowns of genetically modified organisms. But now, the group appeals to many Independents and Republicans who worry more about government overreach.
Honeycutt is the only full-time employee of Moms Across America, and she’s joined by three part-time staffers. The group’s budget is tiny; in 2022, the last year for which financial information was available, it was around $238,000. But, the group has a robust presence on social media. Over the past seven years, she says, its posts, on subjects ranging from traces of weedkiller in pasta to Honeycutt’s recent meet-and-greet with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have received 87 million impressions. But more important than her budget is access; Honeycutt has worked closely with Kennedy and continues to do so, and he serves on the board of her organization. She is well-positioned to influence policies and programs that he’d champion should he be given the cabinet position Trump has suggested might be a good fit. “A dream come true,” Honeycutt says, “for most of the moms I know out there, a lot of the parents and people who just care about their health.”
Those moms are one group that Benji Backer, a climate activist who founded the right-of-center environmental advocacy group American Conservation Coalition, has run into recently. Backer, who is currently on tour with his new book, The Conservative Environmentalist: Common Sense Solutions for a Sustainable Future, said that at his book-signing events, he has encountered “a surprising amount of these kind of RFK Jr.-supporting previously-liberal, now-voting-for-Trump people in the audience.” Those people used to be just “a different wing of the left-wing,” he said. “And they’re almost all shifting to the right now.”
Those people used to be just “a different wing of the left wing, and they’re almost all shifting to the right now.”
Honeycutt founded Moms Across America in 2011 as a group to oppose genetically modified ingredients in food, which she considered to be potentially dangerous to both human health and the environment. But in the years since, she has weighed in on myriad other health issues, such as staunchly opposing childhood vaccine requirements. She believes, that the shot that protects against measles, mumps, and rubella contains GMOs and traces of pesticides, and that it causes autism. (The theory that vaccines cause autism has been widely debunked.)
On its website, Moms Across America says that exposure to 5G cell phone radiation can cause “learning and behavioral issues, fertility impairment, and cancer;” Honeycutt called 5G cell radiation “the ultimate violation of human rights.” In a video posted on YouTube in June, she warned viewers that lab-grown milk was a harbinger of a plot to replace mothers with baby-growing labs. “They’re going to be developing that, so when you grow a baby in a pod and not in a human mom,” she said, “you’re not going to need breast milk for them.”
The root causes of violent behavior are also within Honeycutt’s range of interests. She referred to a scientist who had supposedly found that what “serial killers and parolees and criminals had in common” was “they just bragged that they lived on junk food.” In a 2023 video for Children’s Health Defense— the anti-vaccine advocacy group that Kennedy helms—Honeycutt told the story of the mother of a child who threatened to “blow up the school with a bomb.” His mother’s response, Honeycutt said, was to put him on a diet of organic food. “She knew that her son would have been one of those kids that would go out and buy a gun and shoot the kids at his school because of his mental health issues,” Honeycutt said. “That’s a very hard thing for a mother to admit. And she said, ‘But he’s not going to do that because—he’s 17 now—he’s been eating organic.’” Honeycutt has also blamed antidepressants for “suicidal and homicidal ideation and increased suicide rates.” Kennedy, too, is critical of antidepressants; in a recent video uncovered by Mother Jones, he talked about his plan to send people who were addicted to antidepressants to government-sponsored wellness farms.
Honeycutt’s work with Kennedy long predates his run for president: Children’s Health Defense lists Moms Across America as a partner organization and has helped fund Moms Across America’s testing of school lunches and fast food for traces of pesticides. Kennedy penned a blurb for Honeycutt’s 2019 book Unstoppable: Transforming Sickness and Struggle into Triumph, Empowerment and a Celebration of Community, describing her as “a modern-day Rachel Carson.” Honeycutt included Kennedy in her 2019 list of men who “are our new dream boats” because of their environmental activism.
Kennedy’s close alliance with Honeycutt continued as he launched his campaign. During a May rally that Honeycutt attended, he introduced her as “a friend for I don’t know how many decades, but a long, long time.” According to Federal Election Commission filings, the Kennedy campaign paid Honeycutt $7,000 for campaign consulting. Another Moms Across America staffer received $1,750 from the campaign for “design services.” Honeycutt donated $996.15 to Kennedy, and several Moms Across America board members made contributions totaling upwards of $10,000. Honeycutt told Mother Jones she “was able to advise [Kennedy] just before he would go on TV, sometimes about [the weedkiller] glyphosate,” she recalled. “He would message me to give an update on glyphosate, because I’ve been focused on it for so long.”
As with so many of the voters whose concerns about health and government overreach are moving them to support Republicans, Honeycutt herself used to be a staunch Democrat. From her home in California, “I marched in the parade for gays to be able to get married,” she recalled. But she became disillusioned with what she saw as government overreach around school vaccine requirements. Mostly for that reason, she, her husband, and their three sons relocated a few years ago to a farm in North Carolina. Since then, she said, she has heard from “thousands and thousands” of other parents who had become disillusioned with what she described as “the fascism of the Democratic party,” such as “mandatory vaccines or maybe medication down the road.” she said. “We already have mandatory chemotherapy that kids have to get—you can get your kid taken away from you if you’re you don’t give them chemo if they have cancer.” For these reasons, many former Democrats she has talked to “have found in the Independent party or the Republican party a home they can connect with around their personal health freedoms.”
Many former Democrats she has talked to “have found in the Independent party or the Republican party a home they can connect with around their personal health freedoms.”
In a follow-up email to Mother Jones, she shared more of her theories about why formerly left-leaning voters were now tacking right. “The right cares about the ability to reproduce and procreate,” she wrote. “These chemicals are causing a reproductive health crisis.” Parents, she said, were concerned that “masking, schools becoming vaccine administration centers, and WiFi access points (close and constant radiation)” were “causing our children to be depressed, violent, and suicidal are all factors of why more and more parents” were leaving the Democratic party.
But other forces influenced these formerly left-leaning families, Honeycutt said. Parents also didn’t want their children to be “indoctrinated with education from public schools that influence their sexual identity,” she wrote. “There has been a massive uptick in homeschooling, and most cite the information being taught (the inclusion of sexual information in grade school) to students as a main factor.”
Honeycutt told Mother Jones that she was grateful to the Biden administration for its advocacy around organic foods and funding school lunches. Yet, she said that on the issues Moms Across America cares about, Harris has remained largely silent. “I have not heard her speak about pesticides or regenerative organic agriculture or children’s chronic illness,” she said. The Democrats’ focus on climate change is an unfortunate distraction. “There’s a lot of funding that’s going towards climate change issues that is questionable, and it could be simply going towards making these corporations wealthier,” she said.
Backer, the conservative environmental activist, said that he had noticed this wariness of climate initiatives among some Kennedy fans he had met at his book signing events. “A couple of them were kind of like, ‘well, I used to believe in climate change, but now I’m kind of skeptical of the science,’” he said. Kennedy’s message of environmentalism without climate change resonates with some conservatives whose environmental priorities are “largely based on a connection to nature, a connection to the land, the connection to food, like something personally related to the environment, rather than parts per million in the atmosphere. And RFK has tapped into that in an interesting way.”
Kennedy himself has dichotomized the issues clearly: Climate is a concern of the left, and the right is worried about environmental contamination. “The Democrats obsess about counting CO2, while neglecting urgent issues such as the chemicals in our food, soil, and water,” he posted on X last month. “I have found to my surprise that many people on the Trump team, including President Trump himself, care about the same environmental issues I do.” Ditto for Moms Across America’s supporters: “They’re like, ‘Oh, climate change,’” Honeycutt said. “’Well, what about stop poisoning us?’”
Trump’s actual record on removing toxins from the environment is dubious. Among the more than 100 environmental rules that his administration rolled back, his Environmental Protection Agency took away California’s ability to set strict emission standards, lifted rules that limited mercury emissions from power plants, and allowed more toxic waste from power plants in waterways. Whether the next Trump administration will prioritize vanquishing GMOs and pesticides remains to be seen.
But for Honeycutt, Trump’s alliance with Kennedy is an encouraging sign. “I’m very hopeful that if Kennedy gets any type of position in the future administration, that he will actually make changes,” she said. One could be on regulations around vaccines. “Kennedy is one of the only ones who has brought it to the forefront,” she said. “The fact that Trump is willing to listen to him about that makes a huge difference for a lot of voters.”