VTDigger37%
A Vermont farmer has a growing voice in Trump’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ campaign 6%
By Shaun Robinson27%
8/2/2026, 5:13:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 25 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Self-Serving Bias, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 14.3% saturation with 187 hits. Analysis detected 1,807 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,308 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 17.2% and a BS Rank of 6% (23,853 of 25,253 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 94.50% of the article peer group.
Republican candidate for governor John Klar at home in Brookfield on Tuesday, June 30, 2020.
Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
John Klar has long had a prominent and at times provocative voice in conservative politics in Vermont.
But since Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. became the U.S. health and human services secretary, the Brookfield cattle and sheep farmer has been finding a new, seemingly larger platform — as a supporter of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign.
Klar said his MAHA activism, which recently helped him get a seat on a Trump administration national advisory panel, focuses on removing pesticides and other chemicals from the food system and curbing the influence of large agricultural companies.
That’s one piece of MAHA’s wide-ranging platform , though the movement is most commonly associated with skepticism or criticism of vaccines, a stance Kennedy championed in his previous role leading the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense .
While MAHA-aligned views have had an elevated status in President Trump’s second term, some of the administration’s actions have clashed with the movement’s goals for cleaner food.
Klar and other MAHA advocates have found themselves at the center of that conflict while Kennedy’s influence over U.S. public health policy only grows.
In July, the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency announced it was appointing Klar to a panel tasked with advising the agency on federal policy that impacts farmers, ranchers and rural communities.
The panel reports to Lee Zeldin, Trump’s EPA administrator.
Klar was among 21 new members appointed to the panel, who hail from around the country and all serve as volunteers.
More than 90 people applied for a seat, according to an EPA press release.
Klar was chosen, an EPA spokesperson said in an email, not just because of his farming experience but also his leadership in the MAHA movement.
“As EPA advances common-sense environmental policies, John’s perspective will support the Agency’s efforts to protect national resources, strengthen our rural economies, and help advance the President’s Make American Healthy Again approach to agriculture,” wrote Vikram Lakshmanan, the agency spokesperson.
Klar’s appointment to the Farm, Ranch, and Rural Communities Federal Advisory Committee won’t be the first time he has had a direct line to EPA leaders.
Last fall, he was part of a group of MAHA advocates who traveled to Washington, D.C., to share concerns about the risks of pesticides with some of the agency’s top chemical safety officers .
The meeting came as Trump’s EPA has proposed rolling back updates made by the Biden administration to how the federal government evaluates the safety risks of certain chemicals.
Klar summarized the meeting in a post on his personal Substack account , which has more than 25,000 subscribers and where he frequently writes about MAHA causes.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration backed the global pesticide maker Bayer in a case in which the U.S.
Supreme Court ultimately agreed to shield the German company from liability for failing to warn consumers about the cancer-causing effects of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the popular weedkiller Roundup.
The administration’s decision to back Bayer came after Trump signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to expand U.S. manufacturing of glyphosate, which is one of the most commonly used herbicides in the U.S. and a key tool in many farm operations.
Both moves have angered many MAHA-aligned advocates .
Klar, too, takes issue with them, though he said in an interview that his recent appointment to the EPA panel shows that the administration is committed to hearing from small, organic farmers like himself just as much as it hands major agricultural companies what they want.
“Those are signals that somebody is listening,” he said, adding that he thinks the president is “not totally captured by industrial interests — or he wouldn’t even throw us that bone.”
For years after Klar ran for governor in 2020 , challenging Republican Gov.
Phil Scott from the right, he was a near-ubiquitous conservative political presence, appearing at town halls targeting “critical race theory” and penning commentaries on right-leaning news websites.
He voiced opposition to the Roe v.
Wade decision, the Black Lives Matter movement and transgender rights, in one writing comparing supporters of the latter to Nazis.
Klar also ran for an Orange County state Senate seat in 2022.
He used a spat with the local school district over some of those same issues as fodder for his race , which he lost to the Democratic incumbent, Mark MacDonald.
Klar made the case in an interview that he’s found a new political home in the MAHA movement.
He dislikes that the movement is so heavily associated with Trump, saying its membership includes a wide range of political beliefs.
He describes himself first and foremost as a supporter of Kennedy, not the president, though he appreciates how the president has given Kennedy’s ideas power and legitimacy.
“I work with Democrats every day, or former Democrats, or current Democrats.
Many of them are very strong on the left right now,” Klar said.
“We laugh about it.
We may not agree on immigration or Israel, but we completely agree on healthier food and soils.”
It’s difficult to say how many people are aligned with the MAHA movement in Vermont, though Klar said he sees the state as fertile ground to grow it because of its emphasis on local food and small farms.
He pointed to the passage this year of a state law banning the herbicide paraquat — the first policy of its kind in the nation — as evidence of growing awareness of the movement’s messaging.
Victoria Dubin Master, a chiropractor who lives in Chester, serves as an unofficial leader of MAHA supporters in the state.
She said in an interview that there are hundreds of people on an email listserv she runs to share information about MAHA-aligned causes.
The group has regular meetings, though attendance can vary widely, she said.
Master helped organize an event at the Statehouse earlier this year featuring Mary Holland, CEO of the vaccine-skeptical children’s health organization that Kennedy previously led.
Klar is a frequent contributor to an online newsletter called The MAHA Report , which has about 275,000 subscribers according to its homepage on Substack.
The newsletter is tied to a national MAHA advocacy group and describes its content as covering “food safety, scientific research, pharma influence, environmental toxins, and the political movement transforming American health.”
The EPA press release announcing Klar’s and others’ appointments to the advisory panel also described Klar as part of an organization called “MAHA Farmers Hub.”
Klar declined to discuss the Farmers Hub in detail, saying it was still in a nascent stage and might launch more fully after this fall’s midterm elections.
He said it was focused on “regenerative agriculture.”
Nevertheless, the EPA spokesperson said the organization “represents a key opportunity to network with and connect local New England producers to higher-level policy, support national health, and uplift healthier regional agricultural practices.”.
Klar was adamant that while the MAHA movement has a wide range of sometimes disparate views, his primary focus is on supporting clean food that is grown locally and organically.
While national polling shows the movement’s nutrition goals have broad support , other aspects are far more polarizing, including distrust of vaccines and a broad skepticism of the scientific establishment on many medical issues.
Klar said in a 2020 gubernatorial campaign debate that he was not opposed to vaccinations but that he firmly opposed the government making them mandatory.
“It’s not all about vaccines,” he said of MAHA in a recent interview.
“People might still argue about vaccine safety or efficacy.
There’s just not as much bickering going on about healthy food,” he added.
“And anyway, it should be music to progressives’ ears that some conservatives want healthier food too, right?”
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