Last month I spoke at CPPAC, which is the New York State Conservative Party’s annual conference in Albany. Due to my law school connection with Bobby Kennedy, Jr., and my connection to various leaders in the MAHA world, I was asked to speak about the status of the MAHA movement and its impact on our everyday lives. Although my speeches typically focus on our Constitutional rights and how the government (particularly in New York and other blue states) has an ever-growing chokehold on those rights, I was happy to cover this topic for a change.
My talk dove into the historical birth of the MAHA movement with Bobby Kennedy, Jr., how MAHA has evolved over the past few years, and its far-reaching implications. Perhaps my most poignant point came at the end of my speech, where I connected the dots on how the MAHA movement can help us defeat the radical, Democrat agenda here in NYS, and prevent defeat in the crucial upcoming mid-term elections! For we all know that if the left gains control of the House or the US Senate in November, then the MAHA and the America First agendas that this Administration is promoting will instantly die on the vine.
Above is the video of my presentation, and below is the transcript if you prefer to read it instead.
Transcript:
Hi, everybody. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me, Chairman Kassar. Nice to see so many familiar faces. So today I’m going to be talking about “The MAHA Moment.” Let’s get the first slide up.
(00:00:23):
So MAHA, for anybody that’s not familiar with it, Make America Healthy Again. It started off really as just a slogan that Bobby Kennedy Jr. was using when he was running for president two years ago. And it really fits in well with who Bobby Kennedy is.
I went to law school many, many years ago, and I specifically chose Pace University Law School because Bobby Kennedy was a professor there, and he was running an Environmental Litigation Clinic. So I first met him back in the 1990s, and I worked for him during law school at this Environmental Litigation Clinic.
At the time, Kennedy was focused on the Hudson River and cleaning up the Hudson River. So we would sue polluters, to clean up the Hudson River. It was called Riverkeeper. That was our main client. That then kind of morphed and grew into what’s called the Water Keeper Alliance. So today there are Water Keepers all around the country, which is the organization that Bobby Kennedy had started back in the early 2000s.
He then shifted into Children’s Health Defense, which is an organization, it’s a 501(c)(3) organization, and there they would bring lawsuits to basically keep children healthy. So they’d go after certain pesticides or certain chemicals in food and water and stuff like that. Bobby was with Children’s Health Defense up until 2023, when he decided that he was going to run for President, and what he took on as his main slogan was, “Make America healthy again,” because he had all of this background with trying to fight for safety and food independence, and children.
(00:02:19):
So, when he saw that his momentum was gaining, but he felt like he was going to be pulling votes from Trump, he decided to suspend his campaign and merge forces with President Trump. And so the MAGA and the MAHA kind of became one. And when Trump won in 2024, he appointed Bobby to be the secretary of HHS.
(00:02:45):
As Secretary of HHS, he actually has oversight over about, it used to be 28 different agencies, and in May or March of last year, Kennedy consolidated those down to 15 agencies. Probably the three most popular that you would know is the FDA, the CDC, and the NIH.
So all of these agencies sit under HHS, and together they make up what we call today MAHA, or the MAHA Movement. I’m going to just talk about probably two or three things that MAHA, HHS, and all of these agencies under HHS, what they are doing today in the name of MAHA. They have about a dozen points, if you go on their website, about a dozen points of what they’re focusing on, but I don’t have time to hit all those, so I’m just going to pull out a couple of them, which are the ones that get most media today, so that you can get a little bit more understanding of them.
I’m gonna talk about the food and the dietary guidelines, the restoring trust in vaccine safety, and then investigating the cause of autism. So here’s what we’ve got, slide two, did it work?
(00:04:17):
MAHA today has several different umbrellas. We’re talking about MAHA as far as HHS and the government is concerned. But when you hear the term or the name MAHA, there are actually several different organizations that carry that name. The ones that are probably the most interesting that you can see up here, MAHA PAC, which is the second one down, that started as the American Values 2024 PAC, which was a super PAC that was created to support Bobby Kennedy’s run for President. When he dropped out and he started to back Trump, it then changed its name and became the MAHA PAC, which is still in operation today.
Maha Action is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit advocacy group, and the people that are running MAHA Action and MAHA Institute are actually, most of them are New Yorkers. So there is a really nice tie between New York State and the MAHA Movement, which is based in Washington D.C., but really is something that’s going nationwide. A couple of my colleagues are in MAHA Institute and MAHA Action.
(00:05:30):
Okay, so let’s take a look at the food topic...
One thing that made a lot of news recently was when HHS and the USDA decided to invert the food pyramid. So the focus now became on cutting out ultra-processed foods, emphasizing whole foods, natural foods, and they literally flipped the pyramid upside down. The focus now is trying to get rid of junk food, candy, sugary drinks, and they’re doing that. One big push is by eliminating those things from the SNAP program.
SNAP is a federal welfare program basically for what we used to call “food stamps.” And so what they’ve done is said that you can no longer use the SNAP funds to buy certain foods that are either too high in sugar content, junk food, candy, and whatnot.
New York State is pushing back at all levels on the MAHA agenda. As I’m talking through what MAHA is and what it’s doing, I’m going to point out a couple of the glaring situations where New York State is pushing back.
So for example, with the SNAP program and trying to remove these unhealthy foods and drinks from that program… New York State Governor Hochul has said that she ordered the emergency funds to be used, New York State funds to be used in order to cover all of the SNAP benefits so that people can continue buying whatever they want under SNAP. She’s completely countering what the federal agency is trying to do.
Then Tish James is suing the Trump administration for freezing funding because now they’re saying, well, if you’re not going to follow our MAHA agenda, we’re going to pull some funding. So, of course, Tish James is now suing to try to get the funding restored.
So, food is one of the main things that MAHA is focusing on right now.
(00:08:03):
Another big MAHA push is in trying to sever what we call the big pharma health connection. They’re trying to restore trust in vaccines. So you’ll see here on the slide, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which is called ACIP, Bobby Kennedy actually completely changed all the members on the ACIP panel.
What was happening was you were getting ACIP panel members who had large conflicts of interest. They were either pharma executives or they used to work for pharma and then they were moving into government and it was like this revolving door that was going on. And a lot of them had conflicts of interest because if you’re working for Big Pharma or you’re lobbying for Big Pharma or you’re part of Big Pharma and you’re sitting on a vaccine committee to decide what vaccine should be given at what ages and how many doses for which diseases, obviously it’s a conflict of interest.
So Kennedy completely restructured ACIP. I actually had breakfast last weekend with the new chairman of ACIP, a really great guy, Dr. Kirk Milhoen.
Then another thing that happened was, on this slide you’ll see, the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee. And that is a new committee that Kennedy just formed recently. In essence what it’s supposed to do is it’s a combination of experts on autism and it also has two members that he appointed who are have autism and they’re actually non-verbal, but they can speak by by using electronic means. The point of that agency or that group is to try to figure out ways that the people affected by autism can be more easily integrated into our society and be supported.
(00:10:16):
I will go to the next slide.
The next thing that HHS and the MAHA movement is focusing on is trying to understand what is the cause of autism, because the autism rates in our country have skyrocketed over the past 20, 30 years. And so they’re trying to find what was the cause, what is the cause, and why are these numbers going up so exponentially.
One thing that President Trump just did in December was he tasked Secretary Kennedy with looking at what is the vaccine schedule and structure in other countries around the world that are similar to the United States, other developed countries, and let’s compare and contrast and let’s see what our vaccine program looks like compared to theirs. So they underwent an intense research and a deep dive into looking at what other countries did, and they found that the United States, these are just recent findings actually, a couple weeks ago, that the United States is grossly out of step with other developed countries around the world.
For example, in certain European countries, they immunize their children against 10 diseases, whereas here in the United States, we immunize our children against almost 20 diseases, so basically double the number.
Then they also compared how many doses are the children in Europe, let’s say, getting versus the children in the United States, and they found that the children in Europe get a fraction of the number of doses that the children here in the United States get. [And yet, our children are less healthy].
So they’re looking into this and they are actively going to be revamping the childhood vaccine schedule as a result.
(00:12:16):
The autism rate today, in the 1970s, so we’re talking about basically the span of the last 50 years, in the 1970s it was about 1 in 10,000 children had autism, and today it’s 1 in 36 children have autism. That number is actually a couple years old.
I looked up the most recent statistics as of this morning, and it was one in 31 children. So there’s obviously a problem there, and the cost is tremendous. Right now, the United States spends about $300 billion, with a B, billion dollars a year on autism, meaning not just the research of trying to find a cure and the cause, but also on supporting those children and adults that have autism.
And that is only going to increase. That $300 billion a year is only going to increase over time.
(00:13:18):
So New York State is pushing back against the MAHA movement as far as the vaccine safety and efficacy goes. New York State is one of only four states in the country that do not allow any sort of an exemption from vaccines. The only exemption permitted is a medical exemption, but that’s very hard to get in New York State because of the policy position of the governor and the administration she has.
In Hochul’s State of the State, last month, she did make note that she’s going to advance legislation to ensure that New York can set its own immunization standards.
Meaning, as the CDC under Kennedy and ACIP under Kennedy start to change the childhood vaccine recommendations, trying to bring them more in line with what, for example, European countries are doing, New York State is saying, well, we’re not going to do that. We’re just going to keep our own schedule and make our own decisions.
(00:14:29):
Okay, I’m going to the next slide.
Part of the MAHA movement is also, obviously, the health of our air and our water, and that ties into the environment.
Our good friend, Lee Zeldin, who is now running the EPA for President Trump, you’ll see him here on one of the slides, he made an announcement last summer that the EPA is taking a new position on the Obama-era “Endangerment Findings.”
What Obama’s EPA did was they said that there were certain greenhouse gases that they had to regulate under the Clean Air Act because they were endangering our environment.
What did that mean? That basically gave the Obama EPA, and since then, right, that was, you know, 20 years ago, almost 20 years ago, since then, they’ve been regulating CO2, carbon dioxide, and anything that releases carbon dioxide. So, for example, cars and factories and whatnot.
So they basically gave themselves, by changing the definition of what a greenhouse gas is, they gave themselves this power that the EPA should never have had. And so Commissioner Zeldin has rolled that back and has now said that they are reversing the endangerment findings, and, for example, CO2 is no longer a greenhouse gas that should be regulated by the EPA.
Of course, they’re being sued over it.
What you’re going to start to see, though, is that if that does actually take hold, you’ll start to see a relaxation in the regulations, and that means that it’s going to be a savings to all of us because, for example, the price of a car has more than doubled over the past 20 years, if you look at the numbers.
And what is that from?
Well, it’s from all the regulations that the EPA has been placing on car manufacturers. So if we can ease some of those regulations, then the costs are gonna go down.
(00:16:41):
New York is actively opposing the EPA’s reversal on the endangerment findings, no surprise there.
New York passed the CLCPA, which is the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, and that pushes for a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and they want carbon neutrality by 2050, meaning no emissions at all of carbon by 2050. So these are very, very aggressive goals.
The governor is pushing to expand wind energy, just as the federal government is rescinding approvals for offshore wind farms. So of course New York is suing the federal government on that.
Meanwhile, you know, they’re doing things like Hochul closes the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant, which is down in the Hudson Valley where I’m from, which provided 25% of the energy for downstate New York. And, you know, there was no plan on how to replace that energy source. So this is why we’re seeing, in part, why we’re seeing such skyrocketing energy prices.
Okay, we’re going to go to the next slide.
(00:18:04):
Part of MAHA ties in your whole mental wellness, and so they tie safety into that as well. And of course we see, that New York crime rates have skyrocketed under Kathy Hochul.
In 2017, Cuomo signed an executive order which basically set up New York State as a Sanctuary State. Hochul could end that policy simply with the stroke of a pen, but she refuses to do that.
And the Republicans have been trying to push back by, for example, introducing a law that they call the Lakin Law. That was introduced two years ago. It basically was named after Lakin Riley, who was the 22-year-old Georgia nursing student who was brutally murdered by an undocumented alien that was in New York, was arrested in New York, and then was released, was not turned over to ICE for deportation, then went down to Georgia and ended up murdering this girl.
That bill basically would require law enforcement and the courts to notify ICE when an arrested person or defendant was not a US citizen, but the Democrats killed that bill, so that is not going to pass.
Then, at the start of this session last month, the leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, said that she’s going to be pushing for New York for All Act, which basically prevents local and state law enforcement from working with the federal immigration agents.
The Democrats in the New York State Legislature, and Hochul, they are planning to weigh bills that are intended to guarantee legal representation for free for people facing deportation.
They are going to open up a right of way for people to sue federal agents who are trying to enforce federal immigration laws if they think their rights are being infringed upon, so the list goes on and on.
The sanctuary state status is a problem because it costs us, not just financially, but it costs us in mental health and in safety.
Crime is up and that is a direct relation to MAHA and how we are functioning and how we are able to handle various situations.
These are just a couple of news clippings that I had that I thought were of particular interest on the anti-Maha safety that Hochul is pursuing.
(00:21:01):
But basically, so I’m gonna wrap it up here.
The bottom line is that we have a really great opportunity here in New York State this year. In 2026, we have, Hochul is up for election, Tish James is up for election, the entire State Senate is up for election, the State Assembly is up for election. And we have congressional seats open.
It’s a golden opportunity to really turn the tides in New York state.
You’ve got MAHA pushing Bobby Kennedy, the Trump administration, pushing through various agencies. You’ve got the CDC, the FDA, the NIH, the EPA, you have all these agencies that are pushing this overall general idea of wellness, health, safety, trying to make Americans healthy again.
And you see New York State pushing back in various ways through lawsuits and through executive orders, through public statement, through policy decisions. It’s counterintuitive to what the federal government is trying to do to help us.
So if we can tap into that MAHA base here in New York State over the course of this year, I think it’s going to be very beneficial for our candidates on the Conservative line and on the Republican line.
And I’m just going to leave you with this thought, a little bit of statistics.
When Bobby Kennedy was running for president, he was polling in New York State around five percent, four or five percent. We have about twelve, twelve and a half million registered voters in New York State. So that is about 500,000 to 600,000 voters.
And Lee Zeldin only lost by 377,000 votes.
So if we can motivate that MAHA base this year, I think it’s going to be a tremendous push to getting Hochul out of office, getting our people in at not just the state level, but at the congressional level and also at the local level, because we also have, thanks to a recently passed law, we also have a lot of local elections this year.
Thank you for your time!
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