Amid the MAHA Anti-Vaxxers at the Texas Book Festival

When I walked into the hotel lobby the first person I saw was a woman with enormous lips wearing a T-shirt that said BAN ASSAULT VACCINES.

Wow, Austin really has changed, I thought. I used to come to the Texas capital for the Texas Book Festival quite often in the 2010s, but this was my first time back in a decade. I had heard about the Rogan-ification of the city, how the alt-right (or, I suppose, the regular right) was taking over the city and its cultural scene.

Still, I was not prepared for the chaos I would find in the lobby of the JW Marriott. There was a line to get to the line to check in, and there was a manic energy among the crowd. Where were all of the bookish people I was expecting to see?

Many of my fellow travelers were carrying Children’s Health Defense totes, so I turned to Google to see what I was dealing with. I found a lot of gobbledygook about protecting children, along with a quote from bestselling author and noted scientist (I kid about the latter but not the former) Robert F. Kennedy. Uh oh.

The CHDers, I found, were in town for a conference called Moment of Truth. When I saw who would be speaking—Senator Rand Paul, Senator Ron Johnson, Andy Wakefield, and Cheryl Hines—I realized: I came to Austin for a book festival but I had ended up smack dab in the middle of an anti-vax meetup. Cheryl would be a surrogate for her cybersexing, whale-dismembering, brain-worm-addled husband, who had apparently founded the organization. The people in the lobby were there to Make America Healthy Again.

I put my bags in my room but then immediately went out to the nearest CVS to buy masks. I was caught up on my Covid and flu vaccines but I wasn’t taking chances. I also didn’t know how the ones from my infanthood had held up. There had recently been a measles outbreak in Texas.

Back at the hotel I received an email with the subject line “How’s Your Stay at JW Marriott Austin?” and I went off. The TLDR is “I’m diabetic and I take great pains to avoid getting sick so I was a little surprised to show up at this lovely hotel to find myself at an anti-vax convention. WTF?” The reply came quickly: “Please know that we host a variety of groups throughout the year and always strive to ensure all our guests have a comfortable and enjoyable experience.” Weak, like the research cited by MAHA to defend their positions.

Books are not fact-checked. Books are the perfect medium for grifters.

But I didn’t have time to dwell. My schedule for the weekend was packed and I wasn’t intending to be at the hotel too much anyway. There were parties and panels and bookmobiles and coffee meetups and taco dates. Through it all I entertained fellow authors by telling them what was going on at my hotel.

On Saturday night, while I was judging an event called Literary Death Match in which a group of authors read from their work and got silly onstage, Cheryl Hines was also doing book promotion.

The tentpole event of the conference was a conversation between Hines and accused rapist Russell Brand, who is currently out on bail (his trial is scheduled for June 2026 in the UK) and who I saw entering the hotel wearing just a bathrobe. A photo published by the New York Times that Monday would show the two sitting in front of a poster that said “Help Make This Book a NYT Bestseller.”

Cheryl’s memoir would be published that coming Tuesday by the same imprint, Skyhorse Publishing, that had disseminated her husband’s conspiracy theories. Senator Rand Paul, a copy of whose book Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up I had found abandoned near the elevator bank on my floor, was also published by Skyhorse. Skyhorse is distributed by Simon & Schuster, one of the biggest corporate publishers in the country.

Later, I was masked and on the elevator with a bunch of guests carrying MAHA swag. Another woman asked the group, “What’s Moment of Truth?”

And one said, “It’s a conference for  the Children’s Health Defense. We protect children.”

To which another replied: “But also adults and everyone, really!”

And a third said, “We try to prevent environmental harm.”

And then they all got off on the third floor and I turned to the woman and said, “They’re anti-vaxxers.”

She laughed and thanked me and said she’d been confused.

Words matter.

As I walked down Congress Street on my way to my next panel, I thought about the new epidemic of confusion we’re battling. The MAHA crowd speaks in euphemisms. Even the ones who pay to attend conferences, the ones who firmly, earnestly believe they are saving children. The more cynical ones tend to be the people who get speaking fees and book deals. Books, as I like to remind readers over and over, are not fact-checked. Books are the perfect medium for grifters. Lately the world, including the book world, has felt like an epic battle between good and evil in which the evil side has been kicking our asses.

Still, after walking a few blocks I got to the tents set up for the book festival and found myself in a crowd of thousands of people who had come to the Capitol to celebrate art and literature and yes, even science. There were long lines at the author signing tent, and even the area bars and coffee shops were full of people talking about books. That energy was, pardon the word choice, infectious. I am not without hope.