Authored by Cooper Davis via The Brownstone Institute,
During a recent family vacation over lobster, I watched my “vote blue no matter who” aunt, herself a paragon of New England liberal sensibilities from a leafy suburb outside Boston, argue with her Fox News–watching, burn-it-all-down brother about recent goings-on at HHS. “Just because Fauci lied about Covid,” she said, “doesn’t mean all science is fake; there’s something worth saving here.”
Meet J.Crew-Anon: affluent, educated, professional, skeptical but not nihilistic. They still read the Times and the Journal, but also subscribe to multiple Substacks and are daily imbibers of less “safe” publishers, like Brownstone.org. They triangulate. They parse information with friends and peers, seeing fact-checkers as either dangerous or useless or both. They are more interested in steelmanning the opposition than shouting it down. Having left one echo chamber—the legacy media consensus—they are wary of entering a new one. They know the dangers of epistemic bubbles, and they prize conversations that test their skepticism rather than simply confirm it. They can be angry, but not anarchic. They have mortgages, careers, kids, PTA meetings—and a deep distrust of institutions that used to feel unshakable.
If this archetype sounds unfamiliar, it may be because your friends and colleagues aren’t comfortable enough yet to reveal the depth of their own skepticism. J.Crew-Anon thrives quietly, often hidden in plain sight, surfacing only when the cost of dissent has fallen low enough to make honesty safe.
What J.Crew-Anon represents isn’t entirely new. Up until the early 2000s, the United States had a vibrant anticorporate, antiauthoritarian left that acted as a watchdog against pharmaceutical, corporate, and governmental overreach. Ralph Nader’s consumer rights campaigns, feminist health collectives publishing Our Bodies, Ourselves, and ACT UP confronting the FDA and NIH during the AIDS crisis all carried the same distrust of official reassurances, and the same heated insistence that ordinary people could see through corporate spin.
That movement didn’t disappear, but it was blunted by the professionalization of NGOs, captured by the Democratic Party’s neoliberal consensus, and gradually domesticated into policy shops. But its sensibility never dissipated. What we are seeing now is its reemergence in unexpected form. J.Crew-Anon revives that watchdog instinct, this time distributed across suburbia, podcasts, Substack feeds, and social networks, rather than marches and union halls.
As of 2025, what was previously called the mainstream media is no longer mainstream. A growing swath of ordinary folks—educated, suburban, professional—have quietly lost confidence in legacy information outlets, and the institutions and industries they have long served.
Speaking as executive director of Inner Compass Initiative, I can say that the movement of which we are a part is made up of completely normal, mostly non-ideological people, looking critically at the mental health system and working towards its reform, along with building parallel frameworks of succor and support. Many of us have learned the hard way that the experts don’t always know everything, but there’s not a single person among our ranks who feels all credentialed expertise is worthless, or that non-experts are right by default.
Among us are doctors, lawyers, town planners, small business owners, pilots, CEOs and teachers. We are indistinguishable from other broad demographics, such as “people who prefer cats more than dogs” or “people who like spicy food.” But now that broad outlook—distrust in legacy authority of all sorts—is spreading.
J.Crew-Anon exists not just because so many narratives once dismissed as “conspiracies” have turned out to be true. The second-order effect is that denial or minimization of these “inconvenient truths” is no longer a prerequisite for being invited to the neighborhood BBQ. Over the last 12–18 months, the social cost for defecting from the world depicted by legacy media and adjudicated by Harvard and Yale has been reduced to less than nothing across much of the middle and upper classes.
I don’t need to list off the various egregious counterfactuals here, but suffice it to say that the “wrong opinion” is no longer the same thing as the “actually true opinion,” and examples abound. The Twitter Files revealed government–tech collusion. Monsanto’s glyphosate cover-ups, PFAS contamination. Social media’s own architects admitting their platforms cause immense harm. Even opposition to Covid school closures, once derided, is now treated as laudable in the New York Times itself.
Closer to my own vantage point, the issue of psychiatric drug withdrawal offers an instructive vignette: For decades, patients who struggled to come off antidepressants were told withdrawal didn’t exist. Over the last couple years, we’ve seen a growing consensus across mainstream media that SSRI withdrawal not only exists, but might actually contribute to climbing rates of diagnosis (due to withdrawal symptoms being mistaken for “relapse” of depression, anxiety, or whatever the drug was originally prescribed for).
In response to this shift in public sensibility, industry pushed out a sham review in the form of Kalfas et al.’s JAMA Psychiatry paper, dismissing the problem as minor. But only a month prior, Awais Aftab, in the pages of the New York Times itself, explicitly warned against this exact folly by pointing out the obvious: if the field refuses to acknowledge what patients have come to experience for themselves, they should not then be surprised that those same people decide, occasionally with gusto, that RFK, Jr. does a better job of looking after their health and safety than the APA does. Can you blame them?
Psychiatric withdrawal is just one instance of a much older pattern. In the era of Ralph Nader’s consumer crusades or ACT UP’s battles with the FDA, ordinary citizens forced institutions to acknowledge what they had long denied. The difference now is scale. Where once denial and reversal were confined to niche activist domains, today the cycle—grassroots exposure, institutional minimization, reluctant admission—runs through psychiatry, nutrition science, pandemic response, and even foreign policy. That expansion of scope is what makes the current moment qualitatively different.
This is the environment that gave rise to the MAHA movement. It is not a top-down, anti-science reactionary crusade, as critics caricature it, but a crowdsourced, populist response to scientific and medical authority overextending itself to the point of credibility collapse.
Every issue in the coalition—psychiatric drug harm (including but not limited to withdrawal), environmental toxins, nutrition guidelines, food safety, digital addiction—has its own movement: its own subculture, heroes, villains, court cases, history. In the past, grassroots movements like these would coalesce quietly, then events in the news would eventually force a broader acknowledgement of their existence. Once they made some noise, industry took notice, and used media, professional guilds, and lobbying to marginalize them. Once securely placed in the “kooky corner” with the other “anti-” types, they often faded as leaders aged out, factions turned insular, and institutions co-opted whatever inoffensive, non-threatening energy and ideas they possessed.
The internet has altered that cycle: forums, Subreddits, Facebook groups—archives of lived experience, link dumps and independent research that do not vanish, but accumulate, compound, and refine. The next generation inherits a body of knowledge instead of starting from scratch. Whether that makes the emergent movements and political coalitions more durable remains to be seen. But it does make them more obvious.
Politics, at its core, is transactional: find a constituency, hear its grievances, and represent it in exchange for support. Kennedy’s only innovation was listening to the growing ranks of people convinced that the healthcare system itself is inflicting needless harm. Had he not done so, someone else would have. That inevitability—not his persona—made him a vehicle for the energy of J.Crew-Anon.
From this perspective, MAHA might be best understood as a window into a vast, loosely collected ecosystem of people and organizations that are, at this moment, attempting to march in lockstep for shared goals: informed consent, regulatory capture, industry overreach, etc. Like any insurgent movement, it already carries barnacles: opportunists, cranks, hangers-on. Whether it can scrape them off is an open question. If not, more established and disciplined institutions will siphon off bits and pieces on the promise of more effective representation. Either way, the underlying constituency is real, and it isn’t going away, and those who don’t understand what it is—or who it is—are already in danger of losing their own credibility.
For any such unfortunates reading this, a cheat sheet: J.Crew-Anon is not programmatically conservative, though they share suspicion of media and bureaucracy. They are not progressive, even though they live in liberal metros and heartily support diversity and pluralism. They are not centrist, if centrism means deferred trust. They are something else: a post-institutional middle.
They are educated, mid-career professionals—often suburban or urban upper-middle class. They still work demanding jobs, raise kids, join HOAs, shop at Costco, play pickleball. But they no longer believe that institutions have credibility. Instead, they filter information through group chats, endless online sources, and their own judgment. They are pragmatic, not utopian. Skeptical, not anomistic. They respect individual autonomy. They know institutions lie—but they also know truth exists and is worth salvaging. That balance—conditional trust, selective belief—makes them powerful.
What’s striking is not that they believe wild things, but that they now take for granted knowledge once known only to obsessives: sugar myths, saturated fat controversy, the concerning pervasiveness of endocrine disruptors and PFAS and glyphosate, the revolving door between regulators and industry, the opioid crisis as a consequence of captured agencies, dopamine-driven design in social media, clinical trial corruption and conflicts, even the (potential) epidemic of psychiatric drug withdrawal.
Examples of this stripe of credible-but-not-credulous, people abound: NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya is perhaps the highest profile one; Jillian Michaels and Andrew Huberman on health; Nina Teicholz and Gary Taubes on nutrition and food; Marc Andreessen and David Sacks from the VC world; journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, who shifted from prestige outlets to exposing collusion between government and media; Walter Kirn and David Samuels channel this sensibility into County Highway, which one might consider the flagship chronicle of this cultural shift.
Examples aside: these people manage to straddle mainstream consensus reality while also recognizing that much of it is an illusion. J.Crew-Anon is a new gestalt, not perfectly reflected in a single character. It is a new intellectual and political class that, unlike others, is prone to growth but unlikely to shrink. Once you’ve migrated to the side of skepticism, you tend not to regain your faith in institutions, and the J.Crew-Anon template is for people who don’t need to trust institutions in order to make use of them, or even care deeply about them.
But because of its preoccupations with superficial acronyms and characters, the establishment itself is still failing to understand what it is dealing with. The gleefulness with which they herald dysfunction among the high-profile expressions of these ideas is unchecked by any awareness that this is a bottom-up movement, largely fueled by fairly recent defectors from the political left. Instead, every sign of dissidence is rendered as some version of a pesky, top-down, “right-wing fascism” or MAGA.
Perhaps the mainstream press, the institutions, and the still-credulous among the populace are holding onto hope that this is a temporary spasm of weirdness that will fade away in the coming years. There does seem to remain a chortling conviction that “normal” will return to the land in time. But that will not happen. “Normal” hung on as long as it could in a post-internet era, and ultimately blew away after Covid pulled up the last few remaining stakes holding down the threadbare tent of 20th century consensus reality.
The question is not whether J.Crew-Anon exists. It does. The question is who it will select as its champions, and to what end. Whether its ascendance will be enough to quell the growing rebellion from working-class ranks who are not nearly as polite, elitely educated, or establishment-adjacent as their J.Crew-Anon neighbors remains to be seen.
I’m sorry, but I can’t help with that.
