The first morning I woke up in my new apartment, something felt off. As soon as I opened my eyes, they began to sting. Moments later, I realized my throat was burning, too, and what was that in my gut? The lining of my stomach felt like someone had taken sandpaper to it. The raw feeling wasn’t horribly intense, but so clear that I thought I was, for the first time, sensing the exact shape of my organ. Sure, I had had allergies before, but never like this—what the hell was going on? I took stock of my condition, deteriorated suddenly overnight, and before I could lift my groggy head from the pillow, a thought boomed in my mind: I have mold.

Of course, when I told people about my suspicions, nobody believed me. I didn’t really believe myself, to be honest. This diagnosis was for right-wing “Make America Healthy Again” grifters like Jordan Peterson or Jenny McCarthy—both of whom have publicly crusaded over their experience with mold—and my friends and family’s personal favorite, hypochondriacs. Not helping my case was my history of hard-to-diagnose neurological symptoms, my old, but largely rehabilitated, habit of following wellness influencers, plus my most damning trait, anxiety. (It’s true, I can get worked up about things.)

Anyway, everyone reminded me, the apartment was cute, even if it was kind of falling apart. It sat on the third story of an old brownstone on 8th Avenue in leafy Park Slope, between 5th and 6th Streets, and only one block from my favorite place in New York City, Prospect Park. The apartment’s two rooms retained some of their original architectural details. There were sanded down, original-looking parquet floors throughout, crown moulding on the walls, and in the bedroom, fat beams in a lattice pattern on the ceiling. I loved every wooden ridge and line, even if, over the years, the landlord had caked them in what looked like 40 coats of white paint. After I signed the lease for the apartment, I took a video of it and sent it to my brother. He complained the footage was “80 percent ceiling.” What can I say? I was charmed. I imagined mornings underneath those beams, completely alone, watching the tree that filled the two large windows in the living room bob back and forth. After years of weird roommates who stole hundreds of dollars from me or listened in on my private conversations, this was the very first 500 square feet in New York City that I would ever call just mine.

 

Before I moved in, my then-girlfriend and I met the superintendent in the apartment to pick up the keys. We walked in right as he was hunched over, fiddling with the radiator. Moments later, it let out a monstrous burst of steam. “Oh geez,” he said, then quickly shut the radiator off. “I’ll fix that before you move in.” The super was a kind man with buzzed white hair, sparse enough to see his scalp. He had grown up in the area, surrounded by cousins, and now lived around the corner in a home his parents had bought in the ’70s. His brother owned the building I would be living in.

“Now that you’re in,” he said, “I’ll tell you about the problems.” He then proceeded to tell me that I cannot adjust the heat for fear, if I remember correctly, that the radiator would leak. In fact, the building leaked all the time. The radiator in the unit upstairs was leaking as we spoke, and at some point during the past year or two, my apartment had flooded in the front room, from the top down. A pipe burst and water poured through the ceiling. “But we fixed everything,” he said. “Put in a whole new ceiling.” He assured me that there were no lingering issues, and I believed him. Everything, the super said, would be cleaned and in good working order by the time my moving truck arrived.

That was not the case. The day I moved in, the stove didn’t work, the refrigerator wouldn’t close, the shower would not drain, and everything was covered in grey dirt. I went to sweep the floors, in a spot collecting dust beneath the radiator, and its wooden pieces broke free like overripe baby teeth falling out of a child’s mouth. With the gentle nudge of a broom, they went rolling into my dustpan. When I woke up the next morning, feeling so strange, and had the thought that maybe, maybe my apartment could be making me feel this way, I sat up in bed and sobbed.

From that day forward, my job became managing doubt. The operative question was not so much “do I have mold?” but “how crazy am I?” A lot of this had to do with how people looked at me when I told them about my mold suspicions—like a crazy person. “You’ll see, in three months, you’re going to love that apartment,” one said. Many others, a drawn out, too highly-pitched, “okkaayyyy.” Because I am anxious, I take people seriously when they express skepticism about my experiences, so like anyone would, I took to the internet on a fact-finding mission.

Search engines turned up standard fare. Healthline confirmed that my symptoms could, conceivably, be caused by mold. So did a page on the Centers for Disease Control website, reassuringly published before Trump had installed his ideologues in our public health apparatus. Another website told me that if the symptoms subsided when I left the apartment and started again when I returned, then if not mold, it was probably something in the environment of my home. And what do you know, my eyes stopped stinging when I left, and started again when I returned home. But the timeline wasn’t perfect. It took a few hours for either effect to kick in. If I really thought about it, did I feel that poorly? I guess my appetite had disappeared, but was that just stress?

My Instagram algorithm, which always seems to keep a careful eye on my internet activity, started lining up reels of people who said they had mold in their homes. An entire apartment building in Manhattan’s affluent West Village neighborhood had become notorious for making people sick with mold. One woman in Florida said the mold gave her husband horrible gastrointestinal issues, emaciating him over the course of a year. The photos of his frail body disappearing under a pile of blankets were shocking. A model said she and her girlfriend had started getting mysteriously and stubbornly sick soon after they moved into a mid-century rental in Los Angeles. They felt better when they left their house and suspected mold. I was rapt.

After a bit of scrolling came the next genre of Instagram reels: first-person accounts of people recovering from living in moldy homes. Video after video showed people either paying thousands for mold remediation services or fleeing their houses. Some people touted “binders,” a type of supplement which, the videos claimed, attaches to mold and helps you excrete it from your body. For maximal detox effect, however, you should heal your gut, too, and the videos offered protocols you could follow. As I watched reel after reel, I noticed the ache in my head subtly become more pronounced. Unthinkingly, I started sniffing the air around my apartment, trying to pick out a musty scent, but it smelled more like an odd old pine. And then a man on a reel pronounced that, in order to recover from mold, I need to avoid EMFs produced by WiFi. What? The man held up a device that supposedly blocked them, available for purchase.

The orange-tinted, blue-light blocking glasses beloved by some MAHA influencers started to appear. Namely on the face of Dave Asprey, an early tech innovator turned biohacking profiteer who has become famous for wearing the neon shades and putting butter in the specially-tested, mycotoxin-free coffee sold by his brand, Bulletproof. Mycotoxins are toxins produced by mold, and while they have been found in some coffee samples, all coffee manufacturers largely eliminate them.

“Mold is the cause of Lyme disease,” Asprey said, talking to wellness podcaster Mari Llewellyn. Both of them have over a million followers on Instagram.

“So that doesn’t have to come from a tick,” Llewellyn asks.

“You can get bitten by a tick,” Asprey says, “[That’s one way to get it], but the people who get chronic Lyme, 90 percent of them have toxic mold that took their immune system offline, and Lyme is a symptom of mold. You fix the mold and the body gets rid of the Lyme.”

Llewellyn responds with a slow, soft, “Wow.”

Even if you know what Lyme disease is, you probably don’t know what Asprey is talking about. The MAHA concept of Lyme disease, which they call “chronic Lyme,” has been divorced from ticks and twisted into a catchall misdiagnosis for the general malaise that so many people battle with today. To be diagnosed with MAHA chronic Lyme, you don’t have to test positive for Lyme disease, nor do you need to have been bitten by a tick. You just have to endorse a roster of nonspecific symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, headaches, joint pain, and muscle pain—all the kinds of issues that mainstream medicine all too frequently writes off as psychosomatic. (Though the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, chronic Lyme is not the same as Post-Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome, a very real phenomenon in which symptoms persist after Lyme disease has been treated.)

The concept of MAHA chronic Lyme sounds bizarre until you remember that, on the whole, people don’t want to be sick. If a doctor dismisses their symptoms, people will keep looking for better answers, and they’ll use their most readily available research tool, the internet, to do it. What they’ll find, almost immediately upon querying a search engine or social media app, are influencers and “alternative” doctors who, unlike those dismissive internists, acknowledge their pain as real and give it a diagnosis: chronic Lyme (or possibly another MAHA-tinged diagnosis like gluten intolerance or parasites). In our insurance-addled society, a diagnosis is the most supreme validation of pain, for it opens access to believability and care. It’s easy to imagine the relief someone might feel, then, in being given a name, any name, for their woe.

Next, the very influencers and alternative doctors who provided that diagnostic relief start selling solutions: expensive supplements, detox protocols, and cleansing courses, none of which are evidence-based, because the evidence does not support the existence of chronic Lyme. It’s their grift, and it’s made many an influencer very rich. Now, as Asprey’s comments reveal, there is a push to brand mold as a version of chronic Lyme disease, another monetizable, haphazardly-applied answer to a body that doesn’t make sense to itself and that conventional medicine doesn’t have a clean answer for.

Mold, I would come to realize, is ripe for the MAHA grifter picking. Whereas Lyme disease, the kind you get from a tick, has clearer symptoms, testing, and diagnosis, mold is vague. The standard symptoms of mold exposure are similar to seasonal allergies, but as I learned in my research frenzy, even conventional doctors and government institutions will tell you that mold can stir up anything from fatigue, to chest tightness, to headaches, to blurred vision, to rashes, to mood changes. Making matters vaguer: these symptoms strike different people in different ways depending on the type and concentration of the mold, and on if someone has a pre-existing condition, like asthma, allergies, or an autoimmune deficiency. There’s no great medical diagnostic test for mold exposure, nor is it the first diagnosis most clinicians think of, so it can take a while to discover that mold is involved in someone’s illness. This only amps up the potential to see conspiracy in its misdiagnosis. Moreover, there is mold everywhere. It is in the air even under the most normal of conditions, albeit in low, generally safe amounts. If you open up a petri dish of agar and let it sit in your house, it will grow dark, variegated ovals of mold under the right conditions. Some people will take this as evidence of a growing infestation. It’s not.

In keeping with the laws of modern political discourse, an action on the right must inspire an opposite, if not equal, reaction on the left. And right on cue, Google turned up a piece in New York magazine’s left-leaning women’s vertical The Cut inaugurating mold into the culture war. “Mold, Mold Everywhere” by Jessica Lucas swung hard against Asprey and his ilk, gawking at people who have gotten wrapped up in this MAHA vision of mold. Rather than approaching it like an environmental toxin that can cause symptoms for the duration of exposure, MAHA’s “moldies” have been told that they have lingering “toxic mold” lodged in their systems, and to get rid of it, they must detox. The pursuit of interior purity pushes some to extremes. The author writes of people who have spent thousands of dollars on testing, remediation, diets, and extensive cleansing regimens, sometimes involving prescription drugs. Some have moved multiple times, trashed their clothes, dumped their furniture, and even refused to enter their parents’ home because they suspect it has mold. One guy lives in his car for fear of mold in any kind of constructed building.

These people are obviously terrified for their health, but the tone of the article is condescending, almost teasing. A reader can’t help but feel that the author wants them to believe “moldies” are red-pilled hysterics—not uncomfortable people who have been lied to by right-wing media, but dimwits. For example, though the author’s summary of the science is technically correct, she phrases it so as to cast even more doubt on her subjects:

The medical community, however, has long maintained that toxic-mold poisoning isn’t real and that for the vast majority of people, mold is not even an allergen[...] For those with asthma, it might aggravate respiratory issues, and in extremely rare cases in severely immunocompromised patients, breathing it in can lead to invasive mold infections in which mold grows inside moist areas of the body like the lungs. Moldies, though, believe they’re under siege.

True, the existence of MAHA mold toxicity is dubious, but to imply mold is not a common allergen is out of step. Mold is an allergen for up to 10 percent of people, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation, and though the science on its effect on humans is still evolving, mold is widely regarded as a risk to our health. The author spins the science only to advance her thesis: If you, a science-loving left-winger, hear someone say they are feeling ill from mold, don’t believe them—they're quacks. If mold is a health issue, it's a fake one, and if mold is a political issue, it is only one of science vs. anti-science. Left vs. right.

None of this online back and forth, however, changed the reality of my situation. I was feeling worse and worse in a way that was irrefutable; I did kind of feel like I was under siege. My whole body felt inflamed. Never in my life had I had significant dermatitis, and now I had it on my neck. Out of nowhere, the pain in the joints of my big toes was getting worse and my migraines were starting to flare. I’ll admit it: I felt like I had brain fog.

Neither did the discourse matter to people across the country living with mold in their homes. As I kept searching the news for information about mold, I found plenty of articles of people falling ill in substandard living conditions, with mold part of a larger picture of environmental disaster, climate change, and landlord neglect. In North Carolina, Grist reported on how mold surged after Hurricane Helene unleashed massive amounts of water on the state, and how we can only expect to see more mold as the planet heats up and extreme storms become more and more common. In Auburn Hills, Michigan, a mother’s dying wish was for her family to leave the mold-infested mobile home they’d been renting, the structure so degraded that the floor literally fell out from underneath their feet. The story that stuck with me the most, though, was one at Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility, Michigan’s only women’s prison, where inmates alleged the state had let dangerous mold grow wildly in the building and filed a class action lawsuit in 2019. “It affects me daily,” one of the plaintiffs, Krystal Clark, who is highly allergic to mold, told Michigan Public. “My heart, my breathing. I have to sleep standing up most of the time. [I'm] begging for breathing treatments cause the mold is affecting my breathing. That's how it's affecting me, it's killing me.”

All these years later, the case is still making its way through the court system as the state tries to argue it has qualified immunity and inmates argue their medical needs are not being met. The delay is a tragedy, considering that three inmates have died at Huron Valley this year, with medical neglect suspected to have played a role in at least one of their deaths. One of the women who died, Khaira Howard, had reached out to a state representative with concerns about mold not long before she passed away.

The common thread in these cases is not supplements and MAHA influencers, but by and large, polluting private industry and landlords—be it the state, a corporation, or otherwise—who refuse to spend the money necessary to provide a safe, healthy living environment. Perhaps no one benefits more from doubting the existence of mold-related illness than landlords.

And herein lies the cost of letting mold become culture war fodder: Mold, if taken seriously by the political left, represents a unique opportunity for solidarity. People across the country and in vastly different living conditions have all had their lives rocked by mold, and the left can obviously connect their struggles. The same system is screwing all of them, each somehow mistreated by an entity who cares more about profit than their health. Instead of selling them supplements, the left can send “moldies” into tenants’ unions, and their landlords to court. Redefined, mold is no longer a matter of left vs. right, nor even just man vs. mold, but people vs. for-profit businesses. Once people recognize that their pain is not uncommon, but a shared condition imposed by someone else’s greed, they can finally begin to pursue genuine political accountability. In fact, mold is one of the most frequently cited reasons that people join and form tenants’ unions. One can only imagine mold is mentioned frequently at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Rental Ripoff hearings, too, in which tenants are invited to publicly testify on just how bad their landlord is.

Or we can proceed as we have been. Readers of that Cut article can try talking down to people who think they have mold, but I can assure you it won’t persuade “moldies” into remission, much less raise their political consciousness. Quite the contrary, real pain resists condemnation absolutely, and arrogance only forms pain into opposition. We think that shame in its various forms can stop wayward thinking, can put an ill-conceived idea out to pasture. In fact, all of those verboten feelings and thoughts, banished to the same open field, start talking to each other and come up with their own explanations for the world. Folks in similar situations are lured in, then the grifters arrive, and the online conservative con game begins. This route gets us more of the same: MAHA influencers and charlatans continue to seize the narrative around mold and neuter its political potential. Mold remains misconstrued as a problem of the individual, as people are told to use their body, plus a course of targeted supplements, to eliminate what is really a societal malfunction. Mold is commoditized, corporatized, and divisive in all the wrong ways.

After a few weeks of talking about my maybe-mold symptoms, two people grew concerned and told me to get mold testing. I contacted an environmental testing and inspection company with the most professional certifications I could find, and on Halloween, they sent a no-nonsense Austrian woman to my apartment. As she collected air samples and scratched samples of wood from the floor, she lamented how terrible it is that men often don’t believe women’s health problems. I concurred. The results would take a week to prepare, but she told me she would send her initial impression within a few days. On November 3, 2025, she sent me the following email:

The mold in [an] air sample taken from the living room is extremely high[…] There must be a significant source of hidden mold growth in the apartment[…] You mentioned not feeling well when staying in the apartment. The level of mold found on the day of our inspection would certainly explain your health symptoms. Consider staying somewhere else if that is an option.

According to the testing, the mold levels in my home were 400 times what they should have been. I moved out that day.