In between running for president, having an affair with a journalist, and defending himself against a wave of dead animal scandals, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has vowed to Make America Healthy Again. One of his chief inspirations for doing that is a wellness influencer who apparently felt called to spread the gospel of health after tripping balls on some psilocybin mushrooms.
The Wall Street Journal writes that Calley Means and his sister, Dr. Casey Means, a surgeon, are the wellness gurus from whom Kennedy has sourced much of his New Age-y health philosophy. The newspaper calls the siblings “top advisors” to Kennedy, and notes that their book, “Good Energy,” has been circulated among Trump’s inner circle.
Prior to becoming a health influencer, Means ironically worked as a lobbyist for the food industry. His LinkedIn profile says he also spent brief stints at Booz Allen Hamilton (the shadowy “deep state”-contractor) and the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025.
Means claims he awoke from his corporate slumber after tripping on shrooms. The paper notes that the former lobbyist had a “vision of dedicating his life to reforming healthcare after a high dose of the psychedelic drug psilocybin.”
“Michelle Obama was right, you know, to some degree,” Means admitted during a recent interview with the Journal. By that, Means appears to be saying that Obama’s program to make school lunches healthier was, in fact, a good idea. This is an agenda, you’ll recall, that was broadly derided by conservatives. Indeed, during his first term, Trump rolled back guidelines that Michelle Obama had put in place to heighten nutrition standards for national school lunches, because, in Trump’s eyes, healthy children are too much of a bureaucratic cross to bear.
The Means siblings have cruised the usual circuit of alt-media programming, including the podcasts of Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson. As admitted conservatives pursuing a pro-health, anti-corporatist agenda, they represent an odd ideological juncture that offers a weird hodgepodge of good and maybe not-so-good ideas.
Similarly, Kennedy has often brought derision upon himself by being the mouthpiece for numerous health-related conspiracy theories (most notably, his indulgence of the anti-vax crowd), though not all of his ideas are entirely stupid. Americans should eat healthier—it’s true—and another Kennedy idea—to create government-funded “wellness farms”—has been championed by some progressive activists for years.
That said, the real problem for Kennedy is that it seems highly unlikely Trump will ever let him do anything that legitimately threatens the interests of pharmaceutical companies or the private healthcare industry. After all, Trump’s first administration was in bed with snack and corn syrup lobbyists, and the former President is a well-known fast food fanatic who held an actual McDonald’s banquet inside the West Wing. During a recent podcast appearance involving Means, Kennedy even admitted that he found Trump’s fat-filled dietary habits—which he was exposed to during the campaign—to be “really, like, bad.”
Time will tell whether Kennedy is given an appointment in Trump’s administration at all. So far, Trump has largely betrayed those voters who assumed he would “drain the swamp.” Instead, he’s picked a cabinet full of Washington D.C. insiders, many of whom seem to signal a presidency that will have little to do with Trump’s campaign promises. Maybe, if nothing else, Kennedy can be Trump’s personal trainer.
