MAHA’s Perfect Villain

This morning, a crowd gathered near the Supreme Court to protest the weed-killer Roundup. Inside, justices heard arguments for Monsanto v. Durnell, weighing whether to exempt the company that created Roundup from lawsuits alleging that it failed to warn users that its herbicide causes cancer. Outside, the protesters rehearsed long-running grievances against Monsanto: One man was passing out flyers about “the hidden truth” of genetically modified food, and one speaker railed against “Mon-Satan.” Developed by Monsanto and now owned by the German conglomerate Bayer, Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, have long been concerns for left-leaning environmentalists; now the MAHA coalition has taken up the cause with enthusiasm. The headliners of “The People vs. Poison” rally were a who’s who of MAHA: The HighWire’s Del Bigtree; the host of the Turning Point USA podcast, Culture Apothecary, Alex Clark; the founder of Moms Across America, Zen Honeycutt; and the “Food Babe” and the rally’s organizer, Vani Hari.In this way, the event was a very public demonstration of MAHA’s horseshoe politics. The rally’s roughly 30 speakers included environmental activists and politicians from both parties. “This is not a left or right issue,” Democratic Senator Cory Booker, a surprise guest speaker and potential 2028 presidential candidate, told the crowd. “This is a right or wrong issue.” If Democrats have balked at MAHA’s rejection of vaccines, battling glyphosate has a chance of locking in the movement’s wider base of support.The safety of glyphosate is still contested. Bayer continues to emphasize that scientific assessments have not definitively linked glyphosate to cancer. It says that because pesticides are federally regulated and the EPA has deemed glyphosate safe, the company should not be subject to state-level lawsuits such as Durnell. The U.S. government, meanwhile, as Booker would tell it, has been on the “wrong” side of the issue. In February, President Trump passed a