Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she works with activists in the Make America Healthy Again movement because the problems the movement is trying to address, such as corruption in agriculture and corporate influence over regulators, are not partisan.
The Democrat from New York was interviewed in the studio on The Majority Report with Sam Seder, a progressive radio and podcast show. The episode in which Ocasio-Cortez talked about the situation in the Democratic Party and the Defiance Act was aired on July 30, according to the show’s website.
The host prefaced the question by calling the movement opportunistic. “So what do you make of the MAHA movement then, because our hypothesis, or at least mine, has been on the show that these charlatans are able to fill a vacuum because there’s so much anxiety that people have with the health care system,” the host said.
“I agree completely,” Ocasio-Cortez responded.
“I actually meet with MAHA activists, I work with MAHA advocates because a lot of them really don’t believe that their fight is partisan, and it’s not, in many ways,” she said. “We do have extraordinary corruption in our agricultural system, in our big corporate system as well, and this is an area where both parties in our entire political system has been compromised.”
MAHA is a loosely affiliated movement that emerged around HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his views on the way industry practices make Americans ill while benefiting corporations, according to the Washington Examiner. The movement has largely aligned with President Donald Trump, although disagreements about the pesticide policy have surfaced recently.
Ocasio-Cortez mentioned her early work in the House on PFAS contamination, a class of industrial chemicals referred to as “forever chemicals.”
“One of the first things I did was, when I first got to the House, be part of these congressional investigations on PFAS dumping,” she said. “You have companies like 3M and others, and this goes back decades, where you have a big company that is doing manufacturing of some kind and they just dump whatever cancerous byproduct that they have and poison communities around them, and then they just pay off our political class to ignore it and to let it continue to happen, or to shield them legally, like with glyphosate, from everyday people trying to get that back.”
Executives from 3M, DuPont, and Chemours testified in September 2019 before the House Oversight Subcommittee on Environment at the hearing “The Devil They Knew,” where former Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson said 3M knew about the health dangers of PFAS since the 1950s and hid it from consumers and the EPA, according to the committee release. None of the companies agreed to compensate victims of the chemicals, according to the same release.
Her mention of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, followed a series of recent legal and regulatory victories for the chemical’s manufacturer. The Supreme Court decided 7- 2 in June that Bayer could not be sued under state failure-to-warn claims over cancer risks from the weedkiller, according to Farm Policy News. Trump issued an executive order in February protecting glyphosate production through invoking the authority under the Defense Production Act, according to The American Prospect. North Dakota and Georgia have passed legislation that protects pesticide producers from lawsuits, and at least a dozen other states have proposed similar bills, according to Mexico Solidarity Media.
Ocasio-Cortez mentioned the cost of healthcare as another reason for the popularity of the movement. “You’re right also, it’s because there’s a ton of anxiety around our health care system,” she said.
She described her childhood shaped by these factors. “I grew up in a household that was very much shaped by these dynamics,” she said. “My dad’s side of the family is Catholic, and I was raised Catholic, but my mom’s side of the family is evangelical.”
“I see how all of these issues that have been at their surface level expressed as right-wing are actually very much just the anxieties that we have as working people not being able to afford health care,” she said.
She said that these anxieties lead to the set of questions. “So it’s also like, how do I stop being sick? How do I prevent being sick by limiting my exposure to things that I think are toxic?” she said, noting that “there are things that are actually toxic and things that aren’t actually toxic that get taken advantage of.”
“And then also when I do get sick, and I can’t afford medicine, what are the holistic and low-cost alternatives that I can turn to, because I know that I can’t afford to see a doctor?” she said. “And that is a place of tremendous vulnerability that people feel that is immensely legitimate.”
Ocasio-Cortez said that the distrust of institutions was even deeper on racial grounds. “And then if you add the racial component too, you know, I’m Puerto Rican. The United States sterilized women for decades,” she said. “And so you have COVID, you have vaccines, and obviously in the Black community, same thing.”
Beginning in 1937, the United States initiated one of the biggest sterilization campaigns in modern history in Puerto Rico, and by the 1970s roughly one third of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age were sterilized, most without being informed that the procedure was irreversible, according to Ms. Magazine.
“That is a perfect storm of a lack of trust in institutions that is oftentimes very valid and very legitimate, and you don’t win that by saying, ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ or condescending to it,” she said. “We do need to fix our health care system, absolutely.”
Other Democrats also have started addressing the issue, with Rep. Chellie Pingree of Maine encouraging her colleagues to reach out to MAHA voters about toxic chemicals, according to The Hill. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey attended a rally outside the Supreme Court during the Roundup case hearing, according to the Washington Examiner.
