Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has an Excited Fan Club: Conservative Christian Moms
The New York Times
These parents believe in home-schooling and distrust food and drug companies. In Kennedy, they see “a bull in the china shop.”
Anna Gleaton and her husband operate a small homestead on 60 acres outside Gainesville, Texas, a rural town just south of the Oklahoma state line. Their farm, which operates on the principles of regenerative agriculture, includes pigs, goats and a dairy cow, which Ms. Gleaton described as “an adventure.” Another adventure: home-schooling their nine children, ages 2 to 16.
Ms. Gleaton, 36, describes herself as a conservative Christian, and she voted for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024. This time, she had not been optimistic that he would focus on issues that most concern her, including contaminated soil and waterways, factory-farmed meat and the lobbying by agricultural corporations.
But Ms. Gleaton now gets goose bumps when she looks ahead, largely because Mr. Trump said has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. Mr. Kennedy faces Senate confirmation hearings on Wednesday and Thursday.
“It’s not very often that my world, my realm, is mainstream,” she said.
Ms. Gleaton is part of a growing crowd who question not only educational institutions for what they see as liberal orthodoxy, but also “Big Ag” and “Big Pharma” — leanings coded as progressive not long ago.In that sense, Mr. Kennedy has been speaking her language for years. He has criticized ultraprocessed foods, warned about the dangers of specific food additives and questioned the safety of fluoride in the water supply.
Mr. Kennedy’s views on vaccines have long alarmed public health experts. He has denied that he is against vaccination, styling himself as a safety activist who questions corporate influence on science. But he was a skeptic of the Covid-19 vaccines and embraced the debunked theory that vaccines can cause autism. In a podcast appearance in 2023, he said the polio vaccine had caused cancers that killed “many, many, many, many, many more people” than polio had. In December, he said that he was “all for the polio vaccine.”
