WHATEVER MEANS NECESSARY

After a dizzying rise in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s MAHA movement, CALLEY MEANS has been a key leader of its federal health takeover. But former coworkers have questions about whether Means embellished the powerful narrative he rode to the top

- By KATHERINE EBAN

In March 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. crowded into a sweat lodge near Austin with about 40 other people, including a regenerative-farming advocate and a nutritional-supplement entrepreneur.

“We were front to back, side to side, you couldn’t move,” Chase Iron Eyes, a Lakota legal activist, later recalled on a podcast. “I was like, Man, I want to get out. I got to take a break. And then I was thinking, I’m the only Lakota in here.... My whole nation’s riding on me over here.” He stayed in.

The sweat lodge was the closing event of the American Wellness Summit, a one-day fundraiser for Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Those in attendance had come in search of spiritual healing and cleansing renewal, yes, but also access to worldly power.

And indeed, one of the people perspiring inside that jam-packed lodge was struck by a vision that would prove to have seismic repercussions for the health of every American. “It sounds very woo-woo,” Calley Means, 39, told Joe Rogan six months later. “I just had this strong vision of [Kennedy] standing with Trump.”

A former wedding-dress entrepreneur, Means had become a vocal proponent of ending chronic disease in America. Inspired by his epiphany inside the lodge and convinced that it represented the best path to implementing Kennedy’s radical health care agenda, Means enlisted Tucker Carlson to help arrange a meeting between the candidates. On the night of July 13, after the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Means and Carlson made the fateful introduction. “There’s rare moments in history when the deck can change,” Means told Rogan, adding that he felt “this could be a realignment of American politics.”