Right-Wing Wellness Influencers Want You to Die
What this video covers
This nearly two-hour video essay by Alexander Avila — a left-leaning cultural critic — is the most substantive critical treatment of the Means siblings in this batch, with 840,000 views. Avila’s thesis, stated in the description, is that Calley and Casey Means built the MAHA movement as wellness influencers, embedded themselves in HHS, and pushed policies that “funnel public health funding into private wellness products” — and that MAHA “risks destroying what’s left of American healthcare.”
The essay is structured in eight parts. It opens with MAHA’s claims, then examines the siblings’ origin stories (“A Tale of Two Origin Stories”), arguing their narratives of defection don’t withstand scrutiny. The longest sections cover conflicts of interest (“When Interests Conflict”) — Avila focuses on Casey’s co-founding of Levels, which sells continuous glucose monitors to non-diabetics, and Calley’s Truemed, which routes HSA funds toward wellness products — presenting these as evidence that the siblings profit from the same fear-based wellness economy they claim to oppose. Later sections cover the movement’s “spiritual crisis” framing, a biopolitics analysis drawing on Foucault’s notion of biopower, and a segment on Jordan Peterson’s analysis of the cultural forces behind MAHA.
Avila also engages the movement’s ideas directly rather than only attacking the messengers: he disputes MAHA’s empirical claims in Part 1, critiques the “doctors hate them” populist framing in Part 2, and argues in the closing sections that MAHA replaces institutional public health with intuition-based individualism (“Intuitions, Not Our Institutions!”). (Note: Casey Means’s surgeon general nomination was withdrawn on April 30, 2026, after this video’s release.)
Key points
- Avila argues the Means siblings moved from “influencer grift to government influence,” using wellness celebrity as a path to HHS-adjacent power.
- He presents Levels (Casey’s CGM company) and Truemed (Calley’s HSA-for-wellness company) as conflicts of interest: they profit from the wellness spending their policy advocacy would expand.
- He challenges the siblings’ origin stories, arguing their accounts of why they left medicine and lobbying are self-serving.
- He disputes MAHA’s empirical claims about food and health in the essay’s opening section, arguing they are overstated.
- The “spiritual crisis” framing used by the siblings is analyzed as a quasi-religious narrative that insulates the movement from empirical critique.
- Drawing on Foucault’s concept of biopower, Avila argues MAHA represents a political project of governing bodies through health anxiety.
- He includes Jordan Peterson’s cultural analysis of MAHA as part of the broader picture, while maintaining his critical stance.
- He features RFK Jr.’s former running mate Nicole Shanahan’s claim that she was promised neither sibling would work under HHS during his Senate confirmation, and her charge that RFK Jr. is “reporting to someone regularly who is controlling his decisions” — with the siblings described as “almost like they were bred and raised Manchurian assets.”
- His closing argument: MAHA would replace institutional public health with intuition-driven individualism, which he presents as dangerous.