Make Our Children Healthy Again

The MAHA Report Will Disrupt. But It Will Fail

AI, Expertise, and the Limits of Private Equity State Capitalism

The MAHA Report: Make Our Children Healthy Again Assessment (May 22, 2025) dropped like a grenade. It claimed to speak truth about children's health—and hit a nerve. But we got stuck on how it was written before asking whether it was right.

Was it AI-generated? Were the citations fake? Did a chatbot write public policy?

Those questions hijacked the conversation.

The real issue isn’t AI. It’s “expertise”—and who gets to define truth in a system built on control, not care, a system where perception is managed, not questioned.

That’s what we must confront—to make our children healthy again.

Why We Wrote Our Book

We wrote our book, How Private Equity State Capitalism Consumes Democracy, to confront a system that defines truth through control, not care..

We feel the drift away from shared truth, from systems built to serve people, and toward those who manage them.

We watched the private equity model move from Wall Street to Main Street to Constitution Avenue. The same tactics used to gut a company were being used to gut our public institutions and health.

· Strip it for parts

· Load it with debt

· Sell off the future

· Blame the workers

We called it Private Equity State Capitalism (PESC). It's not just a theory—a survival manual for understanding our moment.

We wrote to show how spectacle suppresses resistance, how chaos becomes a strategy, how regulation becomes a weapon, not against pollution or fraud, but against dissent.

Most of all, we wrote to name how the design of expertise, governance, and truth serves power, not people. The MAHA Report didn't surprise us; our framework saw reports like this one coming.

Spectacle Obscures the System

The MAHA Report is disruptive. It challenges official narratives. It dares to name a truth many feel but rarely hear in public health policy: something's wrong. Kids are getting sick, and the institutions meant to protect us aren't working.

But instead of sparking investigation, the public conversation turned theatrical. Accusations flew: fake studies, hallucinated sources, AI-generated paragraphs.

None of that is irrelevant. But none of it is the heart of the matter either.

We’re interrogating the report's claims. We’re interrogating its performance.

That's how PESC keeps control. Through distraction. By overwhelming us with noise.

Reports Can't Reform

Let's be clear: the MAHA Report will disrupt—it already has—but it won't transform anything. Not because it's too radical, but because PESC doesn’t respond to need, only to opportunity.

Under PESC:

· Government is treated like a distressed asset.

· Public services are stripped, privatized, or repackaged as 'innovation.'

· Regulation is rewritten to serve capital.

· Crisis is the trigger, not the problem.

· Expertise is whatever justifies elite extraction.

Under this model, public health becomes a market, not a mission.

The MAHA Report plays inside that frame. It names the crisis but funnels the response toward deregulation, privatization, and personal responsibility—the very forces that created the situation in the first place.

What Counts as Expertise Now?

Traditionally, Expertise meant:

· Lived experience

· Rigorous study

· Institutional accountability

· Community trust

However, PESC doesn't need that kind of Expertise. It prefers:

· Technocratic language

· AI-generated fluency

· Market-approved conclusions

· Ideological alignment

The MAHA Report simulates Expertise. It uses urgency to perform authority. But its purpose isn't to investigate—it's to legitimize:

· Decisions already in motion

· Ideology laundered through science-speak

· Public consent managed through performance

In this context, 'Did AI write it?' is a distraction—a scandal designed to avoid the honest reckoning of how truth and Expertise are being redefined for control.

What If We Took MAHA Seriously?

Let's stop chasing the drama and test the report's claims:

· Are chronic illnesses among children rising? (Yes.)

· Are industrial food systems, chemical exposure, and overmedication factors? (Likely.)

· Have regulators failed to prevent this? (Absolutely.)

These are public health concerns—documented, debated, and resisted for decades.

That's the conversation MAHA could have opened. However, PESC will never let it flourish because those questions threaten its core logic.

Disruption Isn't Enough

PESC is designed to absorb disruption and convert it into spectacle. Into churn. MAHA creates churn—it surfaces a crisis, then channels outrage into:

· Wellness markets

· Deregulated 'freedom zones'

· Privatized care

· Distrust without alternatives

And when the churn fades, the system resets. Crisis isn't a failure. It's fuel.

How Do We Respond?

We can't just critique MAHA. We have to refuse its logic:

· Don't just debunk the data—deconstruct the framework.

· Don't ask who wrote it—ask who benefits.

· Don't demand better formatting—demand better questions.

We need:

· Counter-expertise rooted in people, not profit

· Applied Meditativism to stay emotionally clear

· AfricanAmericanism to guide resistance through memory, art, and truth

· Anti-PESC strategies that link local struggle to systemic shift

A Final Word

MAHA may be flawed, but it names what many feel: our children are unwell, and our systems are not responding. If it opens deeper debate, it's done some good.

But let's not mistake disruption for change. MAHA names the crisis—but reinforces the system that caused it.

The MAHA Report will disrupt. But it will fail because it operates within a political economy based on illness, not wellness. Just look at the budget working its way through Congress.

We can't wait for the next report if we want a future beyond managed despair. We must write that future for ourselves, grounded in care, clarity, and courage.

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Read our book: How Private Equity State Capitalism Consumes Democracy: From Extraction to Resistance. ReclaimPowerower in the Age of Authoritarian Rule By James E. Paige, Jr. and Jerome S. Paige ebook: Paperback