I am not fit.
At all.
I have admitted this before, every time I write about the Left’s constant efforts to convince people that being fat is healthy and beautiful.
I wish I were fit, but I am a sedentary lazy slug whose greatest pleasures are reading, writing, and petting my cats. Any day now I will get off my butt and get on the treadmill, but even when I do I won’t even try to get buff, but simply healthier. RFK Jr. will always be fitter than I.
With all this said, I recognize the obvious: being fit is, on balance, a much healthier way to be than the alternative, and especially than being the even fatter slobs who seem to fascinate the Left-wing these days. This is so blindingly obvious that everybody from Michele Obama to Paul Ryan could at least agree on this point, and they weren’t famous for being in agreement on many issues.
Being fit these days is now seen as an indication of being a White Supremacist, almost as indicative of fascist tendencies as being Asian or a Black conservative. It probably isn’t quite as dispositive as being opposed to child sex trafficking, though, since that is proof that you are a kook.
The far right’s obsession with fitness is going digital https://t.co/saGOFXMn64
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) July 10, 2023
I have written about the embrace of obesity on the sinister side of the aisle. (Sinister as in the leftward, as well as…sinister).
Earlier this month, researchers reported that a network of online “fascist fitness” chat groups on the encrypted platform Telegram are recruiting and radicalizing young men with neo-Nazi and white supremacist extremist ideologies. Initially lured with health tips and strategies for positive physical changes, new recruits are later invited to closed chat groups where far-right content is shared.
Physical fitness has always been central to the far right. In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler fixated on boxing and jujitsu, believing they could help him create an army of millions whose aggressive spirit and impeccably trained bodies, combined with “fanatical love of the fatherland,” would do more for the German nation than any “mediocre” tactical weapons training.
“Researchers” stand in for “experts,” but it means the same thing in this context. It is the same term of art as “some say” in news stories. You can just assume it is the opinion of either the reporter or just the consensus of the Left, but I repeat myself.
Nazis apparently liked fitness, and that is a serious tell. Of course, Adolph Hitler was also a vegetarian, which proves what we all know: PETA is a bunch of Nazis.
In more modern times, far-right groups have launched mixed martial arts and boxing gyms in Ukraine, Canada and France, among other places, focused on training far-right nationalists in violent hand-to-hand combat and street-fighting techniques. It’s caught the attention of intelligence authorities, especially in Europe, where various reports have noted the role of combat sports and MMA in radicalizing and promoting far-right violence. A series of collaborative efforts between governments, national sports associations, and local gyms in places such as Germany, Poland and the United Kingdom have introduced intervention and prevention programs.
The U.S. is comparatively far behind, which will only become more and more problematic, especially since the phenomenon is growing in the country, building on the established fight-club culture of MMA far-right extremists. The leader of a Maryland skinhead group, for example, once ran a gym to “recruit and train white supremacists in mixed martial arts.” Four members or associates of the racist, violent Rise Above Movement (RAM), the self-described “premier MMA club of the Alt-Right,” pled guilty to conspiracy to riot after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. An online propagandist for that now-defunct group was spotted among protesters on Jan. 6 last year. When members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front marched in Washington, D.C., in December 2021, they were accompanied by a new media outlet created by RAM’s founder, Robert Rundo, who is working to create a network of far-right MMA “Active Clubs” in the U.S. and abroad.
It is hardly surprising that there are Nazis who are into fitness since fitness itself seems to be something that would have universal appeal. Of course, Mark Zuckerberg is also into fitness, including martial arts, while Elon Musk is famously not an especially fit guy. Yet it is Musk who is accused of being the evil Right-winger and Zuckerberg is the government cuck.
And, as we know, some of the fittest athletes in the world are cyclists, and cyclists and Right-wing politics go together like oil and water. No sane person likes cyclists, with vegan cyclists commonly understood to be the most annoying people ever born.
Maybe the correlation isn’t quite as strong as the Left wants you to believe. Just saying.
I can’t quite figure out why the Left has suddenly turned against good nutrition and exercise, but the number of media stories pushing this meme is so great that it clearly isn’t accidental. It is a narrative that the Left is invested in. It fits with the moral panic being pushed about fascists popping up in every corner, armed with AR-15s and lust for insurrection, genocide, and the Constitution.
Maybe it is just that they want people fat, weak, compliant, and hungry for crickets.
It is a bit of a mystery, although it seems to be in line with the assault on any objective standard of human health. Maybe we are supposed to become “transhealthy,” imagining our own standards of what a human body should look like.
Whatever the case, everybody has a new thing to worry about apparently: people who eat right and exercise.
Watch out, they may protect children from sex traffickers, doctors wanting to sterilize and mutilate kids, and drive SUVs.
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