The New Yorker:

The founder of “House Inhabit” has grown her audience during the second Trump Administration with political gossip and what she calls “quality conspiracy.”

By Clare Malone

In mid-February, on the day that the Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Del Bigtree, an anti-vaccine activist who had served as the communications director of Kennedy’s Presidential campaign, hosted an event at the National Press Club, in Washington, D.C. Bigtree was now the C.E.O. of the advocacy group maha Action, and the National Press Club event, where members of the media gathered in a modest room with a small stage, was a celebration of sorts—the so-called Make America Healthy Again movement had just installed its figurehead as the most powerful public-health official in the country. The Republican senator Ron Johnson, a skeptic of the covid vaccine and an early supporter of Kennedy’s nomination, introduced Bigtree, calling him “a man who has been engaged in radical transparency” and, as a result, had been “vilified and ridiculed.” At the podium, Bigtree derided the assembled press. “You have been the spreaders of misinformation,” he said. “You have gotten it wrong, and America is still waiting for an apology.”

Jessica Reed Kraus, the forty-five-year-old writer behind the popular Instagram and Substack accounts “House Inhabit,” was sitting on the floor a few feet away, live-streaming Bigtree’s speech. Her site, which grew out of a blog about motherhood and home décor, had become perhaps the most popular chronicler of Kennedy’s rise, offering half a million Substack followers an inside look at the Secretary’s new life in the upper echelons of the American right. For the Inauguration, she carpooled from the airport with Kennedy’s daughter Kyra, and her post recapping that weekend’s maha Ball struck a triumphant note. “I retreated to my table, just behind Bobby and Cheryl, who arrived trailed by a sea of flashing lights,” she wrote beneath a photo showing Kennedy in a tux and his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, in formfitting lamé. “Their presence—poised and magnetic—felt uniquely symbolic surrounded by a crowd maligned and mocked for their convictions.”

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