MAHA runs on historical amnesia

There's a cost to this conspiracy-driven lifestyle

In 2006, mumps swept through my college in Illinois. If I remember correctly, we had about 90 cases on campus before the disease ran its course. Medical experts scratched their heads—why so many cases in a college community with less than 3,000 students?

After the plague had passed, a friend whispered to me in a fit of giggles: “My roommate and I aren’t vaccinated but we didn’t tell anyone until after mumps was gone.” Wheaton, like most colleges, offers exemptions for students who refuse vaccinations on religious grounds. And it comes with a cost.

On January 28, 2025, the New York Times published an article on conservative Christian mothers and their admiration for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services. The mothers interviewed for the article framed their crunchy homeschooling lifestyle as “rebel stuff” and argued that parents are “waking up” to reality.

Crunchy Christian moms think they’re waking up, but homeschool alumni from the 1980s and 1990s know better. It’s not waking up, it’s historical amnesia.

I grew up with the “rebel stuff,” as Ms. Gleaton describes it. While my homeschooling parents did vaccinate us, many people in our church refused to vaccinate their children. Instead, we held chicken pox parties to build natural immunity. My family rejected processed foods in favor of a strictly regimented diet. Although we had no language to describe it, eating disorders ran rampant in a community obsessed with elimination diets.

Crunchy Christian homeschooling norms kept my parents from recognizing that my fatigue and nausea were symptoms of anxiety and depression, not food allergies. I spent decades dieting and dosing myself with homeopathic supplements because I didn’t know any better. (One chiropractor prescribed an expensive powder for my nausea. It was sodium bicarbonate.)

There’s nothing new about the Make America Healthy Again lifestyle. It only seems fresh and shiny because of historical amnesia.

Our collective memory is shaped by many forces—some innocent and some significantly less so. Watching our nation refuse to process the collective trauma of the Covid-19 pandemic reminds me that historical amnesia is often a form of self-defense. We cannot acknowledge the horror, mourn what we lost, and integrate the experiences into our memories in a meaningful way. We choose amnesia instead.

How quickly we forget the dead bodies stacked in refrigerator vans turned into temporary morgues. How quickly we forget the measles and cholera and polio and other dangerous diseases that killed and disabled so many before vaccines were available.

Other forms of historical amnesia are more sinister. Powerful people benefit from intentional efforts to obscure the truth. This amnesia follows the documents that we quietly destroy, the websites that disappear, and the people who falsify studies to suggest that vaccines cause autism.

As an archivist, my job is to collect, preserve, and provide access to documentation about the past—letters, maps, photographs, video files—so that we can assemble the pieces into a coherent narrative of our past. I rely on archives to combat historical amnesia. But what happens when that documentation doesn’t exist?

Seeking professional help after years of neglect was difficult, but some of my peers faced larger hurdles because they didn’t have documentation to prove their existence. Too often, homeschooled children are denied birth certificates and social security numbers by their parents. Identification abuse is devastating in every context, but in homeschooling families, this type of abuse creates invisible children who are erased from every narrative.

When news outlets like the New York Times publish on MAHA moms, they do a disservice to the public by excluding voices that offer a dose of reality: the generation who already lived this life.