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.”
But among home-schooling mothers like Ms. Gleaton, Mr. Kennedy has long been seen as a bold truth-teller, one who understands their skepticism about the education and health establishments, including traditional vaccine regimens. And his rising profile comes as this particular constituency is also coming into its own politically and culturally.
“He’s saying what parents like me have been thinking for a long time,” said Nicki Truesdell, a mother of five and a home-schooling activist in Gainesville. “In the ‘crunchy’ world, he’s very well known and loved.”
When Melissa Crabtree’s son, who is now 22, was just a few weeks old and being breastfed, he began displaying symptoms that seemed to her like allergic reactions after she had consumed corn or dairy. Her pediatrician said he couldn’t have a food allergy at such a young age, she recalled, and prescribed antibiotics. Months later, after she pushed for testing, her baby was diagnosed with multiple food allergies.
“That was my first lesson as a mom that I need to follow my gut,” she said. “God gave me a brain and gave me this child to take care of.”
For Ms. Crabtree, who lives in Washington State, home-schooling her two children was a natural extension of her decision to cook most foods from scratch and research connections among the pharmaceutical industry, medical schools and health agencies in Washington.
During the coronavirus pandemic, while she lived in Oklahoma, she also got involved in politics and joined a “health and parental rights” group that lobbies on issues like vaccine mandates for school children.
Ms. Crabtree has followed Mr. Kennedy for years. She said many people in her network viewed him much the same way they view Mr. Trump: someone whose wealth and influence allow him to speak the truth, regardless of whom they might offend.
“Finally there’s a bull in the china shop,” she said.
Mr. Kennedy ran for president on a platform to “make America healthy again,” which was adopted by Mr. Trump when they joined forces in August. The slogan encapsulates a sweeping but eclectic agenda that aims to elevate prevention over treatment. Many supporters consider this an inversion of the approach driven in recent decades by corporate interests. Online, home-schooling mothers and other “crunchy moms” use the hashtag #MAHA to share their enthusiasm for Mr. Kennedy’s vision.
Home-schooling expanded dramatically during the pandemic as many Americans grew skeptical of public-health expertise. And even as classrooms returned to normal, the number of home-schooling families has continued to climb. Of the 21 states that have reported data from the 2023-24 school year to the Homeschool Research Lab at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, 19 reported more home-schooled children than the year before.
Parents’ motivation for opting out of public schooling vary widely, as do their religious and political convictions. For many, including conservatives, questioning traditional schooling often leads to skepticism of other institutions.
“If you are countercultural enough both to take on the rigors of home-schooling, and to take the risk of social opprobrium for doing so, chances are you are far more willing to be open to other forms of counterculturalism,” Rod Dreher, a conservative writer, wrote in an email.
Mr. Dreher reported on the phenomenon of what he called “crunchy conservatives” in a cover story for National Review in the early 2000s, which later became his first book. At the time, he was writing about — and a part of — a subculture that even many conservative Christians were unaware of.
Since then, “crunchy” has gone mainstream within conservatism.
Joel Salatin, a self-described “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer,” has been a crunchy conservative for decades. In books and articles, he evangelized about his life running a farm and home-schooling his children.
In the 1990s, he said, liberals — “tree-huggers, earth muffins, greenie weenies” — were mostly the ones who made pilgrimages to his farm. Now, conservatives are showing up in greater numbers. They want to “disentangle,” he said, from society’s most dominant institutions, including public schools, large-scale agriculture and mainstream medicine.
“I feel like Cinderella — I’ve been back in the ashes forever, and suddenly we’re being asked to dance at the ball,” he said. “This is as big a cultural shift as I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
There were false rumors that Mr. Salatin was joining the Trump administration. But today, Mr. Kennedy is the flag-bearer of the crunchy conservatives. Along with his emphasis on vaccines and food, he is seen as a supporter of mothers.
They often share a quote from Mr. Kennedy: “The last thing standing between a child and an industry full of corruption is a mom.”
Hannah Burlaw, 37, home-schools her two oldest children in a small town in New Mexico, where the family raises chickens and ducks. Reading about birth practices and vaccine schedules started her on what she described as “my journey in the MAHA movement.”
“A lot of people say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about — you’re just a mom,’” she said. But Mr. Kennedy has always been “a really strong advocate for listening to mothers.”
A week before Christmas, Ms. Gleaton gathered with a few friends at New Life Bible Church in Gainesville. The church has become a magnet for home-schooling families in the mostly rural community. Of the 80 or so children who regularly attend services — many of whom were racing through hallways or playing on a swing set — the women could think of only one who was enrolled in a traditional school.
Lives here are intertwined. Most families have made sacrifices to live on one income. Women barter fresh-laid eggs for chicken broth, yogurt for sausage and honey for sourdough bread. Men help one another with household repairs and small construction projects.
They had palpable confidence at what they saw as the future: one with fewer pesticides and chemicals, with no vaccine mandates for their children.
“Parents are waking up,” Ms. Gleaton said. “The rebel stuff is starting to be normalized.”
