MAHA Fury Over RFK Jr.’s Fitbit Frenzy

Plus: How Iran is splitting the right. And the travails of the Liver King.

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RFK Jr.’s gadget craze alienates fans

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shook up his tenuous “Make America Healthy Again” coalition during a congressional hearing on Tuesday when he announced that he wants to ensure every American is equipped with a fitness-tracking “wearable” by the end of Trump’s second term.

“My vision is that every American is wearing a wearable within four years,” Kennedy said. He went on to reveal that a major government-funded ad campaign to promote wearables—a category of digital devices that includes Fitbits, Apple Watches, and similar devices—is in the works.

This is not what many of Kennedy’s most devoted fans want to hear. And, to a certain degree I think they have a point.

The MAHA discontents’ opposition to the government pushing fitness wearables centers on a few issues, ranging from the crazy (wearables are the “mark of the beast” from the Book of Revelation), to the unproven but harmless (wearables generate energy at damaging frequencies), to the pretty reasonable (wearables raise data-security and privacy concerns).

Taken together, Kennedy’s endorsement of MEGAFTA (the Make Everyone Get A Fitness Tracker Agenda) provoked a wave of backlash from leading figures of MAHA.

“Horrifying,” prominent anti-vaccine podcaster Shannon Joy wrote on X.

“Wearables are spy devices,” fringe health figure Mike Adams, who has often appeared on InfoWars, posted, adding that the devices would be “medical shackles” fit for prisoners of a “medical police state.”

Several of Kennedy’s critics are concerned that the federal government could use data from health trackers to impose new medical restrictions on people deemed to be unhealthy. And while that might seem extreme, Kennedy himself has called for people with health problems ranging from opioid addiction to ADHD to be sent to “wellness farms”—exactly the kind of thing mass health data collection could, in theory, help facilitate.

Under Kennedy, HHS already plans to spend between $10 and $20 million on just the first wave of a health campaign aimed at, among other goals, making people see “wearables as cool.”

And while Kennedy clearly views wearables as helpful to getting the country back to the (imagined) good old days in the areas of the food supply and medicine, there may be other explanations for his enthusiasm for getting people used to having a hunk of technology attached to their bodies—and spending taxpayer money to convince them.

For one thing, wearables are central to the businesses founded by two of Kennedy’s closest allies: brother and sister duo Calley and Casey Means.

Entrepreneur Calley Means, sometimes described as Kennedy’s “right-hand man,” is the cofounder of a company that advises people on how to use health savings accounts to buy fitness technology—including, as the Guardian reported last week, health wearables.

Meanwhile, Casey Means, recently nominated by Donald Trump to be surgeon general, cofounded her own company, Levels, that sells fitness wearables as an optional add-on for an app-based health-tracking subscription package.

The potential conflicts of interest haven’t been lost on MAHA critics of the wearables push. Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, an outspoken critic of the Means siblings, pointed out the problem on X shortly after RFK Jr. circulated a clip of his wearables pitch on the site.

While you might think of fitness wearables as something like a step tracker or a sleep-analyzing ring, Means’s company sells wearables that go further, including tracking glucose levels. (While the Levels app integrates with continuous glucose monitoring devices and the company sells them, Levels does not make its own proprietary devices.) Curiously, Kennedy’s testimony on Tuesday described a government campaign to advertise exactly the kind of glucose-tracking wearables that Casey Means’s company sells.

“People can take control of their own health, they can take responsibility, they can see, as you know, what food is doing to their glucose levels, their heart rates, and a number of other metrics,” Kennedy said.

So what’s the price tag for one of these devices, which Kennedy is promoting as a key health solution? According to the website for Levels, the company Casey Means cofounded, adding a glucose monitoring device to the company’s wellness-tracking subscription package will cost you $199—a month.¹

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Post-ceasefire recriminations roil the right

War with Iran might be off for now, but on the right, the war about the war is just getting started. Trump’s (apparently) successful diplomatic maneuvering to prevent a more protracted American military engagement (for now) has elicited a flurry of recriminations.

Hawkish Fox News host Mark Levin, for example, has been on a days-long campaign against the more war-skeptical podcaster and political strategist Steve Bannon. Levin has dubbed Bannon a “perpetually disloyal fraudster” and brought up Bannon’s associations with unsavory people involved in various federal criminal trials.

The war mania also ended the most unlikely alliance in MAGA-land: the one between pro-Israel far-right activist Laura Loomer and white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes. After they took opposing sides on the question of whether Trump should support Israel’s attacks on Iran, Fuentes exploded at Loomer on his show, accusing her of being a puppet for various rival Trump world factions.

Getting personal, Fuentes added that he regretted every minute of the time he spent with Loomer. Who knew the friendship between an ardently Zionist Jew and an antisemite who has downplayed the Holocaust wouldn’t last?

But no one is using the bombing aftermath to go after their enemies harder than online video host Steven Crowder. On Tuesday, Crowder released a video skewering all kinds of right-wing personalities who had warned that the bombing of Iran would bring about World War III, from Alex Jones to conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll.

Crowder focused most of his criticism on popular conservative YouTuber Candace Owens, whom he wants to apologize for being wrong.

At one point in the lead-up to the bombing, Owens urged American troops to leave the military rather than follow orders to attack Iran.

“Get dishonorably discharged, who cares?” Owens said. “Why should you go die in a foreign land?”

To put it mildly, this is not the kind of clip you want following you around if you’re a conservative personality and World War III doesn’t happen. Crowder brought up the discharge video repeatedly, saying Owens had essentially urged soldiers to desert their posts.

Crowder could have a little more than the country’s best interests on his mind here. His beef with Owens dates back more than two years to when she was still working for the Daily Wire. Crowder rejected an offer to bring his show to the Daily Wire for $50 million, then described the negotiations in a video that essentially said the Daily Wire’s talent was being forced to work under conditions resembling indentured servitude.

A few months later, Owens shot back at Crowder, championing his estranged wife in their divorce and suggesting that sordid details about Crowder’s marriage would soon emerge. Soon after, journalist Yashar Ali released a video that showed Crowder nastily berating his then-wife.

Now Crowder can get some payback. In his video Tuesday, he included Owens on a list of conservative personalities who unwittingly make their views more controversial to garner clicks.

“These people don’t even know that they’re controlled entirely by an algorithm,” Crowder said.

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Unhand me! I’m the Liver King.

MAHA isn’t the only community increasingly at war with itself. The manosphere is too.

Brian Johnson, the disgraced fitness TikTok star better known as the Liver King, was arrested in Austin on Tuesday after posting videos about how much he wanted to fight podcaster and manosphere figurehead Joe Rogan.

Johnson once enjoyed social media fame for his extreme, meat-based diet. He insisted that he got his caveman-tough physique not from steroids, as his critics suspected, but from gobbling up unusual meats and other animal parts, like the livers from which he derived his royal title. And he made a lot of money selling supplements along the way.

But the Liver King’s empire came crashing down in 2022, when he had to admit that, yes, he had lied about forgoing anabolic steroids. These days, he’s in somewhat rougher shape, and his condition hasn’t been helped by his admitted use of the hallucinogen ayahuasca. That dovetails with a growing belief on the right that you can be “oneshotted”—i.e. lose your mind—to the drug, perhaps by opening a portal to a dimension where demons reside.

Appropriately, the news of Johnson’s arrest was broken by InfoWars chief and Austin resident Alex Jones, who announced that Austin police were en route to arrest his hepatic highness.

“We hope the Liver King gets better,” Jones said, admitting that Johnson looked “extremely deranged.”

“That just shows how crazy society is going,” Jones observed. “We need to get back to God.”

1. À la carte prices vary widely for both the initial purchase cost of a continuous glucose monitor system and the cost of maintaining them by regularly replacing the sensors the devices use.