Inside a podcast studio at Turning Point USA’s headquarters last month, a former witch sat in a pink velvet armchair, telling Alex Clark about the demon that stalked her house. Even though this self-described witch, known on TikTok as @yourspiritualbigsis, had only ever used her powers for good, she believed that practicing sorcery had made her vulnerable to satanic forces. The demon—10, maybe 15 feet tall, whose face had “divots” for eyes—had tormented her, she said, until she spoke the name “Jesus” out loud and became a Christian. 

Clark, whose Culture Apothecary is one of America’s top wellness podcasts, told her guest that she was going to ask “counter questions,” as she does with everyone she interviews. In this case: If the spells she was doing were technically producing good—helping people make money, get pregnant, pass a test—why is that evil? How can Christians tell whether someone has the spiritual gift of prophecy or they’re harnessing dark power? Clark wasn’t concerned about whether sorcery was real—“It is real,” she said—but when her guest brought up the occult sacrifice of babies procured through a sex-trafficking network supported by the government and Hollywood, Clark had no further questions. 

This was just another day in the studio. Since 2024, when she launched her podcast with a mission to “heal a sick culture” and to do so “physically, emotionally, and spiritually,” Clark has welcomed a wild array of guests, united only by their willingness to contradict conventional wisdom and generally accepted facts. Listening to Culture Apothecary, you might hear a regenerative farmer recommend the subcutaneous fat of a “healthy, happy pig” as a miracle skin-care ingredient, a chiropractor talk about testing muscle strength using “homeopathically charged frequencies,” the self-described Christian nationalist Doug Wilson suggest spanking as a form of biblical discipline for children, or leaders in the “Make America Healthy Again” movement disavow vaccines and industrial agriculture. 

On the podcast, Clark positions herself not as an expert but as a question-asking woman of the people. Depending on who you talk with—and I spoke with Clark’s colleagues, her critics, her close friends, her mom—she’s either a powerful force connecting everyday women to the GOP or an agent of chaos. She has been the Republican commentator posting bikini photos while her peers post pictures in cardigans and the single 33-year-old podcasting about child-rearing. By her own account, she is also the contributor at TPUSA, the late Charlie Kirk’s conservative organization, who causes the nonprofit the most trouble with the Trump administration. 

Clark grew up in an evangelical, conservative home in southern Indiana. After high school, she worked at Sephora and took classes at a community college, and planned to transfer to a four-year school for fashion merchandising and journalism. But then she started an internship at a Louisville, Kentucky, radio station, which led to a full-time job as an anchor and the unofficial Millennial-woman correspondent for a morning show. She had always loved pop culture and politics, and came to TPUSA in 2019 so that she could air her conservative views while discussing Dancing With the Stars. Even before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump teamed up, she pivoted to podcasting about wellness because she thought that talking about organic food, herbal medicine, and suspicions about vaccines could bring more women into the GOP. When the MAHA movement came to Washington, Clark’s own profile rose, and soon she had the attention of some of the most powerful men in the country. 

But recently, MAHA and MAGA have started to drift apart. MAHA is failing to draw hordes of voters to Republicans; the Trump administration has failed MAHA on many of the issues Clark cares about. As the rift widens, Clark is stretching to keep a foot on each side and figuring out, if she does have to choose one, how to take her audience of MAHA moms and conservative young women along with her.

Between tapings, Clark ate takeout from a seed-oil-free restaurant as she reviewed podcast transcripts and a spreadsheet of upcoming episodes, reacting to them with facial expressions worthy of a mime. Her team member took notes while she dictated episode titles (“He Was Gay, Then Everything Changed” and “Acetaminophen Before Age 4: What Parents Should Know”). The whole time, she exuded the energy of someone who had incredible gossip to share. The minute I stepped away to check out a rack of Culture Apothecary sweatshirts (Trust Farms, Not Pharma), Clark shrieked. “We’re all peeing our pants, screaming, crying, throwing up,” she said, her eyes wide and made even more dramatic by false lashes. Taylor Swift had just announced a new single. She looked for clues in Swift’s post and predicted that the music video would debut later that week at the MTV Video Music Awards. (She was right.)

Like many 30-something women, she is devoted to Taylor Swift, and, however unfiltered Clark can sometimes seem, like Swift, she aims to make every detail of her world matter. Her studio’s forest-green wallpaper includes illustrations of her preferred remedies for America’s ailing culture: raw milk, steak, butter, wildflowers, hair bows, the Bible. Her podcast-planning spreadsheet is in that same bespoke shade of green, which she developed with graphic designers. (She calls it “Forks, Washington,” after the town made famous in Twilight.) Even her off-the-cuff X posts can be seen as part of her brand—a girl speaking her mind, even if that includes insinuating that Candace Owens performed oral sex on Vladimir Putin. The ads she writes for the show might seem borderline nonsensical—in one ad for a clean-beauty company, for reasons that I do not understand, she includes a monologue about a taxidermied possum who wears a cheerleading uniform and is named Gerald—but according to Clark, that strategy tends to bring high returns for her sponsors. What listener is going to want to skip those? 

Not the “Cuteservatives,” as Clark calls her fandom. They keep tabs on her personal life, too, and at the TPUSA Women’s Leadership Summit in June, she orchestrated an announcement for them. “There’s one thing I haven’t told you guys,” she said. The stage lights went out, and when they came back on, she was standing beside Vance Voetberg, the bespectacled author of the MAHA fitness Substack Running on Butter. On her finger was a diamond ring. “I’m engaged!” The crowd screamed. Later, on Instagram, she described him as her “‘BUTTER’ half.” She has since released a steady stream of content about their small summer wedding at his family home in rural Washington State: a recipe for the prosciutto butter they served, details about the outfits she picked for Voetberg and her maid of honor, and a two-hour interview with her new husband, in which she revealed that she walked down the aisle to Swift’s “You Are In Love” and gifted all of her guests a Jaspr, perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing air purifier in existence.

Clark is also, like Swift, a woman of distinct eras. For most of her life, she was focused not on health but pop culture. MTV was banned in her childhood home, but when she saw Britney Spears’s “I’m a Slave 4 U” music video at a sleepover, “I was absolutely mesmerized,” she said. She idolized Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Jessica Simpson. She was also so conservative “that she’d make Rush Limbaugh look like a liberal,” her high-school radio and TV teacher, Timothy Dench, told me. 

She knew even then that she wanted an audience made up of young women. She dreamed about being a fashion writer at Teen Vogue or Seventeen, but got the job on a local radio show. Listeners knew her as a fast-food connoisseur and the “Chicken Nugget Princess”—she ate nuggets at least once a day and would peel off the skin, eat that, then turn to the meat. By 2019, she was co-hosting an Indianapolis morning show, but her superiors were telling her to stop bringing up politics on air and on Twitter. She imagined a show that would combine her passions for the GOP and for pop culture—“TMZ and Fox News if they had a baby,” she told me—and pitched it to Charlie Kirk at TPUSA as a way to show women that Republicans could be cool. POPlitics became TPUSA’s first show.

Clark’s wellness era started around 2020. She was skeptical of the COVID shot and never got it, and, after watching the Hulu series Dopesick, became convinced that Big Pharma’s misdeeds were the greatest true-crime story ever told. Practically overnight, she emptied out her fridge and began her transformation into someone who keeps a tiny vial of unrefined sea salt in her purse, sits in front of red light every day, and makes a morning smoothie with six different types of powder, glyphosate-free oats, aloe-vera juice, Cowboy Colostrum, collagen, creatine, strawberries, cherries, pineapple, peaches, and an entire avocado.

And she noticed that her audience was moving toward wellness with her. Whenever she had a guest on to talk about why, say, women should be suspicious of the pill, viewership spiked, so she met with Kirk about rebranding her show around health. “If we are the ones championing these issues, we will grab all the female voters,” she remembers telling him in July 2024. Two weeks before Culture Apothecary was scheduled to debut, she watched RFK Jr. endorse Trump live at a rally in Glendale, Arizona. The crowd was so electric it reminded her of Swift’s Eras Tour. 

A month later, Clark got a standing ovation at the Capitol. Her speech at a Senate roundtable, on behalf of Millennial mothers outraged by food and pharmaceutical corporations harming their children, cemented her as MAHA’s big sister. Sponsors and listeners flocked to Culture Apothecary, and Clark, who now had the attention of both stay-at-home moms and powerful politicians, became the person most visibly fusing MAHA and MAGA for women. 

Over the past year, that union has gotten shakier. Trump’s accord with MAHA—his promise to let RFK Jr. “run wild” on health and food—has been one defining force in his second administration, and the health secretary has managed to remake federal vaccine policy, change the food pyramid, and extract some voluntary commitments from companies about food dye. But many MAHA supporters feel like they were owed more—especially when it came to regulating food and pesticides. The disillusionment has gotten bad enough that one of MAHA’s top leaders, Calley Means, resigned from the Trump administration less than two weeks before the midterms, reportedly out of frustration that the government wasn’t advancing MAHA’s food policy.

Clark, meanwhile, keeps getting angrier. In January, she and other MAHA activists were abruptly disinvited from an event at the Department of Health and Human Services—which they believe was because MAHA had recently launched a petition to fire the head of the EPA. Someone later sent Clark a picture of the check-in table: On the front page of the “Not Permitted List” was her photograph. (In response to a request for comment, HHS referred me to the White House, which did not comment on the disinvitation; a spokesperson told me, “The MAHA coalition has never been stronger or more empowered.”) After the White House and the Supreme Court both came down in favor of the weed killer glyphosate, the chemical that MAHA hates most, Clark headlined a rally outside the Supreme Court Building, wearing a camo jacket that read: I TURN INTO ERIN BROCKOVICH WHEN I’M ANGRY. 

Clark thinks that Trump is a true MAHA believer (despite his love of McDonald’s) and that he’s getting hemmed in by those around him. Before the April rally, Trump met with her and other MAHA leaders, and he kept talking about making an executive order about vaccines. According to Clark, what he described was so extreme that if she shared the details, they would “make him look bad right before midterms.” She believes that his advisers steered him away from it. (Trump did later issue an executive order reducing the number of diseases included in the childhood-vaccination schedule. The White House spokesperson wrote in an email that “President Trump wants to execute on ideas that are durable, long-lasting, and hold up in court to ensure the permanence” of the MAHA movement.) Clark still loves the president, but “I have zero stomach for conservative commentators that all they do is blow the Trump admin,” she said. “Sorry to be crass.” As a Republican, she’d be sad if the GOP loses this cycle, but as a MAHA leader, “then I’d kind of get to flex an ‘I told you so’” about the party needing her audience’s vote.

Clark’s own career doesn’t necessarily hinge on the White House’s approval or MAHA’s political viability. Her wellness episodes were doing well before the MAHA label existed, and she’s proved that she has an instinct for where the conservative movement is going and how to get American women—even those who don’t think of themselves as political—to follow it. Maybe this election will mark the end of an era for MAHA. But Clark is already entering a new one herself.

After a day of taping, Clark took me back to her apartment in Scottsdale, Arizona, where she now lives with her butter half. It still looked like a Millennial girl’s Barbie Dreamhouse: maximalist floral wallpaper, a brocade velvet shower curtain, black-and-white striped accent chairs. A Jaspr air purifier hummed in the corner, and on the floor, her Pekingese, Mochi, ate raw rabbit and organic pumpkin puree from his dog bowl and drank glass-bottled, micro-plastic-tested Loonen water. 

Voetberg had homemade cookies and raw milk waiting for us. He is a national-champion fiddle player and competitive runner, who grew up homeschooled and one of 10 kids. He’d been a fan of Clark’s podcast for years, and after lobbying mutual friends to set them up, he and Clark had their first date last fall, got engaged over Memorial Day weekend, and got married at the end of August. They’d just returned from their Bora-Bora honeymoon. “We have sex now!” She laughed and leaned over their glasses of raw milk to kiss him. 

Clark’s primary goal in life was always to get married and have a family. When, at 23, she appeared on the Fox dating show Coupled, she was so earnest about looking for a husband that the producers told her she needed to relax, she said. Over the years, being single became an occupational hazard. Groypers, the followers of the alt-right leader Nick Fuentes, would DM her pictures of empty egg cartons and tell her that she was useless because she wasn’t married with kids; feminists criticized her for being an unmarried career woman who told other women to focus on their families. 

Now that she’s married, she told me, she will not be a tradwife who embodies a pioneer-esque domestic crunchiness: A nail artist comes to her house every two weeks, and she “wouldn’t last five seconds living more than 10 minutes away from a Sephora.” Nor does she plan to adhere to strict domestic gender roles. Voetberg told me that he takes the lead on household chores; he made those cookies and stepped in to cook chili for dinner while Clark was busy talking with me. She has said she will put family first, but she also wants a career. Between that and her choice to continue using the last name Clark professionally, some people on the right call her a closet feminist. She is not, she told me, and believes that feminism has been a “net negative.” Voetberg chimed in to say that he could see how people might think that she has benefited from the movement. But Clark kept returning to the idea that, overall, feminism had badly served women by pushing them to prioritize their careers over motherhood.

Her latest Culture Apothecary series—“Wife School”—certainly has gone well beyond any feminist’s comfort zone. In these interviews, she asked married Christian women about how to be a good biblical wife. Guests had tips on household organization but also on giving one’s husband input while still allowing him to be the family’s final decision maker. In one particularly controversial episode, the Christian writer Tilly Dillehay said that, for the health of a marriage, women should have sex with their husbands even when they do not want to. 

If part of MAHA’s success was that it could speak to people across the political spectrum, the issues Clark is now exploring almost certainly don’t. Over chili, Voetberg said that he thought aspects of first-wave feminism had been good. Like the right to vote, I suggested. 

“Don’t get her started on that,” Voetberg said. 

“I’m not gonna advocate to repeal the Nineteenth!” Clark replied, although some people in the MAGAverse insist that the Nineteenth Amendment was a mistake that should, like Roe, be corrected. I asked whether they’d vote as a family, and they started talking about landownership, which was once attached to suffrage, and how the question of who should vote in America was a “giant, giant topic,” as Voetberg put it. Clark joked—maybe?—that she’d love it if she needed her husband’s permission to open a bank account, as American women once did. (Later, she wrote in an email that she and Voetberg had not consciously adopted household voting as a practice—“We just automatically vote the same.”)

When she has kids—and she wants to be pregnant before January—she said that she may look at her newborn and decide to never do another interview again. But her current plan is to keep working. Her audience loved “Wife School,” she said, and she is sensing another groundswell like the one she saw toward health—this one toward human connection, in community and family. Championing those issues could be another way to grab female voters: Moms of all political persuasions can probably agree that, as a recent Culture Apothecary episode argued, “babies don’t need all that STUFF!”—even if many of them are not quite ready to give their husbands the final say on their family decisions, finances, or sex lives.

Knowing how seriously to take Clark’s more provocative stances can be difficult. If Taylor Swift is one of Clark’s idols, so is 1980s and ’90s Howard Stern: He was clever and funny, and wasn’t afraid to be shocking. (“I’m not saying, as a Christian, that I agree with the type of content he was doing,” she said.) For similar reasons, she admires the early days of the sex-and-dating podcast Call Her Daddy, when the hosts graphically detailed their own exploits. “I don’t ever want people to feel comfortable,” Clark said—and her more MAHA-leaning listeners might not be, if she doubles down on a conservative vision of family and femininity. But, she told me, “I love controversy.” It keeps people listening. “Whether you listen to me because you love me, or listen to me because you hate me,” she said, “you’re still a fan either way.” 

At Café Soul, a semi-regular party in New York City, $30 buys you a chance to belt R&B hits, sip margaritas from commemorative glasses, try out Awkward Games’ icebreaker cards, and—as the ticket page promises—form “genuine connections.” When I arrived 45 minutes after the rooftop party started on a recent Saturday afternoon, the few 20- and 30-something guests were mostly sitting on mid-century-modern couches, looking at their phones. But Tionne Barmer, who dreamed up the event, promised me that, in two hours, the rooftop would be packed: People would be enjoying the Patrón-sponsored bar, trying the brown-sugar cold brew (underwritten by On the Way Coffee), using Awkward Games cards to skip small talk, and maybe even flirting. (The event was also sponsored by Tinder.) They’d have a chance to make genuine connections, which is what Barmer was really selling. “People will pay for the entertainment,” he said, “and, on the side, they get community.”

Barmer has always had a talent for bringing people together, and now he’s making a living out of it. Some people call this job “event curator”; others have started using the term community builder. People like Barmer are, in essence, professional scene-makers. They were student-body presidents, sorority leaders, slumber-party queens, that one guy in the friend group who threw the best parties—and now they organize knitting circles, silent reading parties, adult summer camps, run clubs, and life-story sharing sessions to help young adults find one another. They sell their guests the opportunity for friendship, and they sell brands access to the groups they’ve gathered, not on Instagram or TikTok, but in real life.

If Barmer and others like him can make this a full-time profession (he quit his finance job only when his side gig as a community builder could match that income), it’s in part because Americans are in desperate need of shindigs. As The Atlantic has reported, in the past three decades, pretty much every measure of socializing—hosting dinner parties, going on picnics, volunteering—has dropped by double digits; in 2023, only 4.1 percent of us managed to make it to a social event or host one on an average weekend or holiday. “Everyone wants to attend parties, but no one wants to throw them,” Ellen Cushing wrote in this magazine last year.

Planning a party is, after all, a lot of work. Umama Kibria, a co-founder of Play Social Club, grew up helping her father host picnics for their Desi community. He’d cater meals and create elaborate The Price Is Right–esque games. Although he sold tickets to cover the cost of the food, he’d spend his own money on the decor, activities, and prizes. Kibria saw how the events drained his energy and finances. When she graduated from college, she started hosting large gatherings of her own, including grown-up field days and her own Desi picnics. Unlike her dad, she charged enough to make a profit.

What really shocked her father, Kibria told me, was how she was able to find brand partners who’d contribute $10,000 sponsorships so that she could periodically host free events. Between ticket sales, affiliated codes, equity deals, and consulting gigs, she made her dad’s hobby her full-time job. If she provides her peers with the social life they crave, she realized, “people will pay.”

They really will, Joan Li, an associate principal of wellness-industry insights at the market-research firm Mintel, told me. Many Americans now see social connection as a purchasable good. Just as DoorDash offers food delivery for people who don’t have time or don’t want to cook, solo entrepreneurs and businesses offer social calendars. This so-called IRL economy is in some ways a reaction against the internet and the ills of the influencer economy: People want to get off their phones and go somewhere to make an actual friend. But the job of “community builder” is also an outgrowth of influencer culture, Brooke Erin Duffy, a communications professor at Cornell who studies influencers, told me. Because social media is now saturated with creators monetizing their followers, anyone who can get people together offline and in-person could command a premium.

That’s part of the pitch that Pie (short for “People I Enjoy”), a new platform for hosts to advertise and monetize events, is making. “Think about the value of how much influencers get paid to make a video to, hopefully, get someone for three-to-five seconds in a feed, versus sticking someone IRL in front of a logo or a product for an hour. The value is so much higher there,” Nadya Okamoto, an influencer and a co-founder of Pie, told me. The thought of Michaels sponsoring knitting circles so that the company can stick its logo in front of people for longer might give some of us pause—it certainly bummed me out—but Pie, along with platforms such as Onbrand and Offline, which match brands with events to sponsor, is pushing to build a world in which socializing is also a marketing opportunity.

Right now, Pie offers participants in its Pie Creator Club, including Barmer, an average of $445 and up to $3,500 a month to organize gatherings. The company also co-hosted a dinner this summer at which community builders swapped best practices for “communitymaxxing.” It’s currently using venture capital to pay its creators, but long-term, Pie is wagering that businesses will pay community builders like they do online influencers, for access to their guests. And some brands are already betting on this new economy: Tinder launched an “Events” section of its app this past spring, and by the end of the year, plans to feature events in 75 cities, mainly through partnerships with party organizers like Barmer.

As I wandered around Café Soul, which was part of a series that Barmer had designed to get people off their phones, signs reminded guests to LIVE IN THE MOMENT. And as the party picked up, they were doing just that: Hundreds of people formed a dance circle, then opened it up for a man in head-to-toe stone-washed denim, who dropped it low, backed it up, and gave his new friends what may be one of the most electric performances of T-Pain’s “I’m Sprung” ever given at 3 p.m. on a Saturday. But people did also have their phones out to film themselves dancing and lip-synching; one guy in plaid culottes and tiny green sunglasses was filming on a tripod. These events still need to generate online content to be financially viable, Andrew Roth, a co-founder of Offline, told me. Most people find out about these communities through social media, and companies expect that any event they sponsor will generate posts featuring their products. Still, he said, influencers get paid millions of dollars to keep us on our phones—why not reward the hosts getting us (mostly) off them? Roth described a future in which “you already have your monthly book club, and it just so happens this one you’re going to get paid for.”

This proposition is akin to an older phenomenon—the Tupperware parties of the 1950s, Duffy said, when women hosted friends in their living room and exhibited the latest and greatest in food storage. Plenty of people have also paid to socialize at their country club or local Rotary chapter; others have found ways to turn their hobbies into a business, without a venture-backed app to help them do it. At its worst, a world in which a book club is sponsored by Barefoot Wine could make people feel like their every waking moment is a marketing opportunity, even more than they already do. When I played a round of icebreaker cards with two women—who had first met, they told me, at a makeup class at Nordstrom, hosted by another so-called IRL community called Girls That Gather—I had fun, but I felt a bit like I was inhabiting a simulacrum of “community.” Yet all the hosts I spoke with seemed like they were earnestly trying to make sure that their events did not feel that way.

Many of them asked me which communities I was a part of. I’d tell them about Sundays at church and Wednesday Bible study in my living room. A couple of them told me that they were essentially trying to build a secular community from the same template: Churches give people a physical place to repeatedly congregate in a large group setting, and also offer ways for smaller groups to gather throughout the week. Safi Aziz, another full-time community builder, told me he sees events as helping fill the gap left by the decline of public institutions. “If we’re no longer gathering as much over religion” or other organizational ties, he said, “all we really have left to gather over is common interest.” (In his case, that common interest is game nights, which he runs through his company, Joust.)

But unlike these IRL communities, church doesn’t promise a great time. Authentic communities can’t be optimized, because they’re fueled by friction: showing up when it is inconvenient; being kind to one another even when Barbara is being a pain in the neck. They build trust because they ask something of you, besides just money, as the price of admission.

So far, professional community builders mostly seem to be offering people an easy way to party—and thank God for that. Even if someone goes to an event and doesn’t connect with anyone, they’ve still gathered with a group of people that weekend. That is the first step of being part of a community, and something America certainly needs.