Excerpt
These Moms Wanted to Save Their Kids. They Became Soldiers in the MAHA Army
In an excerpt from her new book 'One Bad Mother,' Ej Dickson tracks how vaccine skepticism turned a swath of women into extremists
Is there truly such a thing as a “good” or “bad” mother? This is the driving question behind One Bad Mother, the debut book by former Rolling Stone senior culture writer Ej Dickson, a collection of essays in defense of the worst stage moms, momfluencers, MILFs, and psycho bitches in history. By examining figures as wide-ranging as Joan Crawford, Kris Jenner, Peg Bundy, Dance Moms, MLM Karens, and the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Dickson traces how the concept of the “bad” mom has evolved over time, from a basically nonexistent social construct — yes, no one cared in the 18th century if you kept your kids alive — to a storm cloud that constantly hangs over the heads of women, serving as a social force used to punish and control those who refuse to stay in line.
One particularly reviled and often misunderstood “bad” mom in popular culture is the MAHA mom, a trope that emerged in the leadup to Trump‘s 2024 reelection. Pert, smiling, and all-natural (except for their Botox), the MAHA mom helped Trump ascend to victory by propagating dangerous misinformation about the MMR vaccine, a modern medical advance that has saved countless children’s lives. They’ve been derided as brainwashed MAGAbots blindly following their patron saint, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and accused of preying on mothers of vulnerable children with chronic illnesses. And while some of the stereotypes about anti-vax MAHA moms aren’t wrong, the truth behind their politics, what draws them to the movement, and their fierce and undying devotion to their own children is a lot more complicated — and heartbreaking — than you’d expect.
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The media first started covering the rise of MAHA moms in early 2025, a few months after Donald Trump’s reelection. They breathlessly quoted soccer moms and yoga influencers singing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s praises, framing them as guardians of gentle domesticity who “post videos explaining their politics while cooking dinner or resting a swaddled baby in their arms,” as a Guardian trend piece put it. People seemed surprised that Kennedy would resonate with a demographic of crunchy moms. But I’d seen it all before, albeit in a slightly different context.
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In March 2020, when Covid hit, I was a writer at Rolling Stone, focusing on internet culture and trends. A month or two into quarantine, I started seeing momfluencers — women who had previously only posted lactation cookie recipes and how to turn your baby’s nursery into the perfect shade of beige — posting about QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory positing that Democratic establishment figures like Hillary Clinton were involved in a secret child trafficking ring.
Prior to the pandemic, QAnon followers tended to be white male MAGA heads who’d flock to semi-obscure internet communities like 4chan to decipher Trump’s tweets using numerology and “secret codes” — sort of like Swifties, except more anti-Semitic and into posting fly-fishing memes on Facebook. But it was largely viewed as fringe until 2020, when the world shut down and people started spending a lot more time on their phones, plummeting down internet rabbit holes about sex trafficking rings and Democrats kidnapping children from Walmart.
Mothers seemed particularly vulnerable to this messaging. Because schools were closed, mothers assumed most of the domestic labor and struggled more than ever to keep their heads above water. Many were also concerned about how things like school closures and mask mandates would impact their children’s development. All of a sudden, the movement became flooded with what Will Sommer, author of Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America, describes as “mama bears”: “[T]he idea of a mandatory vaccine to go to school set off a lot of moms who maybe were already steeped in anti-vaccine stuff” he says. “So it was kind of a perfect storm for moms to get into conspiracy theories.”
After Trump lost the 2020 election, interest in the QAnon conspiracy theory seemingly ebbed. For a short period, it seemed the QAMom — a term I coined in a 2020 Rolling Stone article — was just a blip on the radar. But this turned out to be overly optimistic. Following the 2020 election, right-wing “mama bear” organizations like the lobbying group Moms for Liberty started popping up to campaign against lifesaving gender-affirming health care for trans youth, referring to LGBTQ+ adults as “pedophiles” and “groomers,” and spewing transphobic hate at school board meetings. By the time white women went for Trump in the 2024 election, it was clear they were being underestimated by the mainstream media at its own peril.
All of this was fascinating to watch, for a few reasons. As a reporter at Rolling Stone, I’d spent the first half of my career watching extremism take root on encrypted messaging apps and anonymous forums, where mostly male posters spewed hatred about Jews and Black people and queer people. Now I was watching the same types of messages going viral on mainstream social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. They were making TikToks claiming the Trolls franchise promoted pedophilia, or posting about how they were boycotting Disney because the corporation endorsed grooming. Except the people sharing these messages weren’t disenfranchised young men with greasy hair and acne-scarred faces but moms just like me.
Not only was I watching the face of American extremism change seemingly overnight — I was watching the definition of what it meant to be a “good” or “bad” mother change as well.
For years, the consensus in this country has been that a mother’s job is, ostensibly, to protect her children at all costs.
But as the political climate becomes increasingly fractured and the world more terrifying to navigate, this has become increasingly difficult to do. And as mothers on the right lead the charge in attempting to “protect” their children from an unseen enemy — from so-called groomers, or the government, or vaccines — they ultimately, and ironically, end up making their children far less safe.
We’ve seen this happen countless times. We see it in the story of Rebecca Vance, the Colorado mom who became so deeply invested in “Great Reset” conspiracy theories, or the belief that elites were plotting to take over the world, that she moved her 13-year-old son to the wilderness, the two of them ultimately dying of malnutrition and hypothermia in early 2023. Or the tragic story of Danielle Johnson, the astrology influencer who became so deeply invested in QAnon conspiracy theories that she tossed her eight-month-old infant out of a moving car on the freeway, fatally crashing into a tree minutes later.
Over the past few years, there have been countless examples of these types of narratives in the media, of mothers who have been so radicalized by right-wing conspiracy theories that they ultimately end up harming, or even killing, their children. But this radicalization occurs in less extreme ways as well — and often, it happens for understandable, even sympathetic, reasons.
It’s hard for people to admit this to themselves, particularly in such a polarized political climate. Good liberal mothers are so invested in inculcating positive moral values in their children that it’s easy to demonize those on the other side of the aisle who are attempting to do the exact same thing. But I’ve seen this trajectory unfold enough in real time to know how easy it is for bad actors to prey on women’s anxieties about being good mothers, and how rapidly these women can fall down rabbit holes. It’s easy to dismiss the MAHA moms and QAnon Karens of the world as horrible people. It’s a lot harder to acknowledge the reality: that when women become so consumed by the desire to be good mothers, so unilaterally focused on protecting their children from both the real and imagined horrors of the world, they may find themselves becoming the worst kind of all.a
MOMS HAVE PLAYED AN IMPORTANT role in far-right extremism since well before the ascendance of MAHA mama bears. During the early 20th century, for instance, women and children were heavily involved in the Ku Klux Klan’s activities, with the organization enlisting children to pass out pamphlets at cross burnings and ride on parade boats beneath a “Ku Klux Kiddies” banner; one 1927 photo shows a group of Klansmen baptizing a seven-month infant, who is wearing a miniature Klan hood. The WKKK (Women’s Ku Klux Klan) routinely planned weddings, funerals, and fundraising events for the KKK, as well as food drives to foster trust with the greater community.
This has, weirdly, resulted in far-right communities being one of the few spaces where maternal labor is explicitly celebrated, rather than dismissed or ignored.
Though women enjoy a special role in white supremacist spaces as the guardians of traditional values, these communities are still inherently misogynistic, which means they rarely assume leadership roles or wield any power. The anti-vaccine movement, however, is an exception to this rule. A 2017 study looking at data from anti-vaccine content on Facebook found that the vast majority of those posting anti-vaccine messaging were women.
It’s hard to draw a straight line between far-right extremism or white supremacy and anti-vaccine views; in my experience, it’s more like a Venn diagram, with people tending to gravitate toward the center the longer they spend in the community. Not every mom who chooses not to vaccinate is affluent, conservative, and/or white; and not every mom who is pro-vaccines isn’t those things. But it is true that the widespread cultural perception of anti-vaccine mothers is that they are upper-middle-class suburban women, whose affluence, privilege, selfishness, and helicopter parenting tendencies drives them to put the health of others at risk.
To be fair . . . there is some truth to this. But it’s also true that as the movement has evolved, the picture of the average anti-vax “Whole Foods mom” has become a lot more complex. For instance, though most research focusing on the anti-vaccine community has promoted the idea that the majority of women in it are white, this is not entirely true. As early as 2017, a Pew Research study found that Black parents were less likely than white parents to see the health benefits of the MMR vaccine and more likely to consider the risks of potential side effects. In a 2022 Gender and Society paper analyzing anti-vaccine sentiment among Black women on social media, coauthors Jennifer A. Reich and Courtney Thornton detailed some of these concerns, writing that Black mothers’ decisions about whether to vaccinate their kids were highly informed by “experiences with structural gendered racism in interactions with healthcare and education systems.”
Honestly, it’s hard to argue these concerns aren’t valid. From the Tuskegee experiments to the fact that maternal mortality rates are three times higher for Black mothers than they are for women of other races, it is easy to understand why a Black mother would feel unsafe navigating the U.S. health care system, and would be vulnerable to misinformation exploiting their deepest anxieties. “The structural racism that shows up in hospitals and health care institutions has been an under-examined contributor to how people die,” the reproductive justice scholar Monica McLemore explained when I spoke to her a few years ago. “If Black people are less likely to be believed, either in recognizing their own symptoms or in explaining to their health-care [providers] what their symptoms are, and they don’t receive the care they need, what are they supposed to do?”
Additionally, though it is not nearly as endemic as it is in the Black community, the phenomenon of women’s pain being dismissed or ignored by medical providers is well-documented: multiple studies have shown that women on average receive less treatment for chronic pain conditions than men, as well as less intensive and elective pain relief care.
With so many women having negative experiences with the health care system, it’s far from surprising that many of them develop skepticism or outright hostility toward medical providers. This can manifest itself in various ways, but one of the most frequent outcomes is vaccine hesitancy, according to a 2023 study from the University of Maine, which interviewed anti-vaccine mothers. The study found that the majority of women who were vaccine-hesitant had experienced some form of “ongoing and repeated instances of medical harm,” ranging from being threatened with institutionalization to forced Pitocin administration during labor. One reported having a rectal exam performed on her without her consent when she was just 12.
Often, however, it’s not one single experience with the health care system that results in radicalization. Usually, it’s an aggregate of different encounters with the medical field. I spoke with one MAHA mom, Ceara Foley, who served as a southeastern field director for Kennedy’s ill-fated presidential campaign. When her daughter was four months old, Foley noticed she was having trouble breathing, so she rushed her to her pediatrician’s office. A doctor at the practice said her daughter was fine, characterizing Foley as “just a nervous new mother.”
“[My] experience was I had to figure out everything on my own,” Foley told me.
Foley later discovered there was mold in their home that was causing her child to have trouble breathing; once it was removed, her daughter seemed to get better.
Foley had always been skeptical about mainstream medicine and interested in alternative treatment methods. But the experience with her daughter’s breathing problems deepened her distrust. So, like many MAHA moms, she did her own research, leading her to decide not to vaccinate her daughter. Through her research, she became friends with dozens of other moms of kids with autism, with childhood cancer, with diabetes; many of whom attributed their children’s health issues to vaccines.
“These women have watched their children get ill,” she explained. “They’ve watched their children die, and they’ve been silenced and shamed and mocked and gaslit for a very long time by the medical industry.” When Kennedy announced he was running for office in 2023, she says, she and the other MAHA moms instantly supported him: “He was a champion for those women who saw that something was wrong with their child, and nobody else was listening to them.”
Over the course of the past 10 years or so, I can’t tell you how many of these stories I’ve heard: a mother with an ill or severely debilitated child desperately searching for answers, finding them in places far outside the mainstream medical establishment. Often, they were driven by extreme desperation, a need to believe any explanation, no matter how outlandish, to explain their children’s pain.
Another such example is the story of a woman I’ll call Becca, a mom of two boys who were diagnosed with autism when they were quite small. According to Becca, both of her kids developed normally, hitting their milestones and learning how to walk and talk. But after they received the MMR vaccine when they were 18 months old, she says, they “regressed,” developing rashes and losing the ability to walk and talk. (Many anti-vaccine parents have similar stories like this, reporting their children started showing signs of autism after they got their first dose of the MMR vaccine at 12 to 15 months old. The consensus among experts, however, is that this has to do with the fact that children with autism tend to start exhibiting symptoms around that same age.)
“Mainstream doctors had no answers for me,” she told me. “I was desperate. Then I found other moms on the internet who were going through other things I was going through.” After poring through journals and studies of varying degrees of legitimacy and connecting with other moms of “vaccine-injured” children on Facebook, she became convinced that the MMR vaccine had caused her sons’ autism, and she became a prominent lobbyist for the anti-vaccine movement.
In listening to the stories of women like Becca, I’m always struck by two things. The first is that they are hyper-cognizant of the fact that most people view them with skepticism at best, and outright contempt at worst. “I don’t know any other issue where we have more women screaming for people to listen and we are constantly ignored,” Becca told me.
They usually attribute this skepticism to sexism. “If we had a movement of dads that was worried about the health of our children, it would be an entirely different scenario,” Ceara Foley told me.
The second thing I am struck by, though, is how clear and cogent these women sound when they describe how they arrived at their beliefs, and how deeply they felt betrayed by the medical establishment. And though I think it’s disingenuous to attribute people’s resistance to their messaging entirely to sexism, I don’t think they’re entirely wrong. I believe they are taken less seriously because they are mothers because I’m a mother, too, and I know what it’s like to feel utterly isolated and failed by a system you have naively always believed would protect you.
I want to be clear here: I think what these two women are doing is objectively horrifying. Not only are they peddling non-evidence-based propaganda that puts the lives of other vulnerable children at increased risk, but I believe they are also, consciously or not, preying on other mothers clinging to literally any explanation to make sense of the inexplicable.
But when they say the system has failed them and their children, I believe them. When they say people are less likely to listen to them because they are mothers, I believe them. I believe them because I’m also a mother who has shouted into a void, imploring people to believe me when I said my child needed help — and I know how frustrating it is not to be listened to, how isolating it is to struggle alone, and how tempting it can be to think that you’ve finally found some answers. Women like Becca and the MAHA moms are predators, plain and simple — but they are also victims.
Copyright © 2026 by Elisabeth Dickson. From the forthcoming book ONE BAD MOTHER by Ej Dickson to be published by Simon Element, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.