MAHA Fury Over Roundup Ruling Threatens RFK Jr.’s Hold on Movement He Fathered

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once stood in a California courtroom and helped convince a jury that Monsanto knew more about Roundup’s risks than it let on. Last week, the Supreme Court effectively closed that courtroom door, and it was the Trump administration he now serves that helped push it shut.In a 7-2 ruling handed down in late June, the justices found that Bayer cannot be sued in state court over claims that it failed to warn consumers that its Roundup weedkiller might cause cancer, because federal pesticide law pre-empts those state-level failure-to-warn claims.The decision, Monsanto Co. v. Durnell, reversed a jury verdict won by a Missouri man, John Durnell, who blamed two decades of Roundup exposure for his non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It also imperils tens of thousands of similar lawsuits still working their way through American courts, with Bayer facing roughly 200,000 Roundup-related claims in total.For Mr. Kennedy, the irony is hard to miss. Before becoming Secretary of Health and Human Services, he spent years as an environmental attorney building cases against Monsanto, and in 2018 he helped win a California groundskeeper a $289 million verdict using the exact legal theory the court just dismantled.He has said he believes glyphosate, Roundup’s active ingredient, causes cancer. His own Trump administration, through the Department of Justice, argued the other side of the case that the Supreme Court just decided.So, what does it mean for a movement when the man who gave it its name and its credibility ends up defending the very ruling his followers see as a betrayal?A Movement Turns On Its Own SecretaryThe backlash from MAHA’s grassroots was immediate and unsparing. Vani Hari, the activist known as “Food Babe,” called the decision sickening and said Congress must act to undo it. Kelly Ryerson, who goes by “Glyphosate Girl” online, wrote that no administration in history had so willingly sold out Americans’ health to corporate interests.Podcaster Alex Clark, affiliated with Turning Point USA, accused the administration of pleading with the court on behalf of a foreign chemical company at the expense of American farmers and cancer patients.David Murphy, founder of the advocacy group United We Eat and a former finance director on Mr. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, went further, telling NewsNation that many MAHA voters now feel misled by Republicans who never intended to follow through on protecting their health, and warning that some supporters could stay home or vote Democrat as a result.Meanwhile an Iowa farmer, Zach Lahn, who won the Republican gubernatorial primary partly on promises to address pesticide risks, called the ruling a “terrible decision” and wrote that farmers had lost their recourse when harmed by these products.For plaintiffs hoping to hold Bayer accountable, the door didn’t close all the way — but it narrowed considerably.“It takes away a crucial avenue to hold companies to account for exposing people to products that unknowingly cause them harm,” the environmental health science director of the Center for Biological Diversity, Nathan Donley, tells The New York Sun. “There are still other avenues to pursue, but they are much more difficult to bring.”Those remaining avenues are narrow: claims alleging that Roundup’s chemical formula itself is defective, rather than that its label lacked a warning, along with negligence and false-advertising theories that don’t hinge on labeling at all. Lawyers who track the litigation say those cases are harder to win because they require proving that the product’s design is defective rather than simply pointing to a missing warning the EPA never required in the first place.The Science That Was Never SettledAt the heart of the case is a regulatory disagreement that has simmered for over a decade. The Environmental Protection Agency has consistently found that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer in humans when used as directed, and it has never required a cancer warning on Roundup’s label.The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer reached a vastly different conclusion in 2015, classifying the chemical as probably carcinogenic to humans. However, an epidemiologist and cancer researcher, Geoffrey Kabat, contends that the international agency’s finding never held up to scrutiny.“IARC conducted a badly biased assessment of glyphosate,” Mr. Kabat tells the Sun.He points to a recent article of his that lays out the case in detail, noting that the Environmental Protection Agency, Health Canada, and the European Food Safety Authority have all found that glyphosate is not carcinogenic at exposures typically encountered by the general population. Mr. Kabat traces the wave of litigation to the international agency’s 2015 label and the financial incentives of tort firms that have since built a business around the claims.Mr. Donley offers a different explanation for the conflicting assessments. He points out that regulators often rely on studies submitted by pesticide companies, which are kept confidential. At the same time, the World Health Organization’s cancer arm relies solely on publicly available research that can be independently verified.In essence, the EPA is largely reading the pesticide industry’s own homework, which no outside scientist can double-check, while the international body only counts research anyone can pull up and verify for themselves.Regulators also tend to exclude studies on formulated pesticide products containing multiple ingredients, he says, while the international body factors those in alongside the purified active ingredient, a distinction he says can shift the outcome considerably.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch ,dissented from the majority, writing that the decision departs from the near-unanimous view of state and federal courts that had previously rejected Bayer’s preemption argument. Bayer’s stock climbed sharply after the ruling, and the company said in a statement it expects the decision to result in the dismissal of pending warning-based claims.A Political Reckoning With No Easy ExitThe ruling lands at a delicate moment for the coalition Mr. Kennedy helped assemble. MAHA mothers rallied outside the Supreme Court in April under the banner “The People vs. Poison,” and some of that energy is now turning toward Capitol Hill, with activists demanding legislation to restore the right to sue and require clearer warning labels on pesticide products.Congress, however, has never moved quickly when a fight like this one lands on its desk.“There is very little realistic path forward in the near term,” the political strategist and Nestpoint Associates managing director, John Thomas, tells the Sun. “Overturning this kind of Supreme Court preemption ruling would require Congress to pass new legislation explicitly preserving state failure-to-warn claims, which is something lawmakers have shown little appetite to do when it involves confronting major corporate interests.”Mr. Thomas points out that the disagreement between the Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization’s cancer arm goes beyond differing scientific standards.“The EPA has long maintained a close relationship with the agricultural chemical industry, while the IARC takes a more precautionary approach,” he says, calling it “a classic example of regulatory capture.”Mr. Thomas is describing a dynamic in which the agency meant to police an industry has grown so close to it, through lobbying, funding relationships and years of routine contact, that its judgment calls tend to favor the companies it regulates rather than the public it’s supposed to protect.For Mr. Kennedy, the test now is whether he can hold onto a base built on suspicion of corporate influence in American food and medicine while serving in an administration that just went to court to protect one of agriculture’s largest chemical manufacturers.The president of the Environmental Working Group, Ken Cook, whose Washington-based nonprofit researches and publicizes chemical exposure in food, water and consumer products, has said it is MAHA’s critics rather than its believers who should be surprised. He says it was never realistic to assume that a president who occasionally mentioned pesticides on the campaign trail would upend the conservative movement’s longstanding alliance with industry.That alliance rests, in large part, on glyphosate’s deep integration into modern American farming. The chemical allows farmers to kill weeds without tilling their soil, a practice that cuts erosion, preserves topsoil and lowers fuel costs. It underpins the genetically modified, herbicide-resistant corn and soybean varieties that dominate American row-crop farming.Losing it, or facing a wave of liability that makes manufacturers reluctant to keep selling it, is the kind of threat that mobilizes the farm lobby fast, regardless of which party is in power.The Environmental Protection Agency, for its part, told reporters that it is conducting a fresh scientific review of glyphosate even as it defends its existing safety findings.Mr. Donley, who does not identify with the MAHA movement himself, says he expects the coming months to test whether it can survive a direct hit to one of its founding causes.“It will be interesting to see how the MAHA movement deals with something that is a direct betrayal of one of their core issues,” Mr. Donley says.Mr. Thomas, however, is less uncertain about where the balance of power lies.“MAHA can push the margins,” he adds, “but it doesn’t control the core.”What he means is that the movement has proven it can shift smaller, consumer-facing fights, like getting food dyes reformulated or pushing ultra-processed ingredients off shelves. However, it has yet to demonstrate that it can override the deeper, decades-old ties between the political parties and the agricultural industry that depends on chemicals like glyphosate to operate.For now, the man who spent a career arguing Monsanto knew more than it admitted is left explaining to his own movement why, this time, he didn’t fight harder to make the case.

MAHA Fury Over Roundup Ruling Threatens RFK Jr.’s Hold on Movement He Fathered

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