The head of the MAHA Institute, Leland Lehrman, thinks Americans are “terrified and so easily propagandized,” according to a Mother Jones report.
Launching in May, the MAHA Institute is an advocacy group that celebrates and magnifies “MAHA wins for President Trump, Secretary Kennedy, and the Cabinet.”
According to senior reporter Anna Merlan, “Lehrman [has a] long history of promoting antisemitic and extreme conspiracy theories.
One of them is that 9/11 was an inside job.
“It’s only because Americans are so terrified and so easily propagandized that this unbelievably bad conspiracy theory that the government has put forward about 19 hijackers and the guy in a cave in Afghanistan even warrants mention,” he told the Santa Fe Reporter in 2007.
Merlan went on to note Lehrman has “extensively touted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an outrageous antisemitic forgery that purports to document a secret meeting where Jews plotted world domination and which has been debunked for over 100 years.”
The report claims that in 2005, Lehrman sat down for a long interview with far-right radio host Jeff Rense where he spoke about “high-level Jewish Illuminists, or Lucifer worshipers” who have “most certainly collaborated with the Lucifer worshipers in all the other sects like Nazism, like high-level Freemasonry. They have most certainly collaborated in the development of this New World Order plan.”
Lehrman descends from a Jewish family, although his father publicly converted to Catholicism four decades ago.
Mother Jones reached out to Lehrman. He “acknowledged receiving a request for comment” from the outlet.
However, Mother Jones says, “he did not answer questions about his past writings and statements before publication. He did not say whether he still holds such views.”
Tony Lyons, a founder of the MAHA Institute, told the outlet, “Five of the six most senior people at The MAHA Institute are Jewish, but that shouldn’t get in the way of a good hit piece.”
The outlet added that Lyons did not respond to follow-up questions.
Health and Human Services also did not respond to Mother Jones' requests for comment.