When Fitness Becomes Fascism: Please Step Away From the Treadmill, Comrade
I have apparently been exercising under politically suspicious circumstances. For years, I thought I was walking into a gym. Now I learn I may have been entering a fluorescent training ground for authoritarianism, armed with a water bottle, a pair of increasingly questionable knees, and the dangerous belief that climbing stairs without bargaining with God might be useful. This revelation comes courtesy of a controversy surrounding a panel at the Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago. As reported by Jeremiah Johnson in The Argument , panelists connected physical fitness, weight-loss drugs, capitalism, eugenics, and fascism in ways that promptly escaped the conference room, landed online, and were greeted with the kind of public tenderness normally reserved for a raccoon trapped in a vending machine. One speaker argued that people should abandon the dream of becoming fitter than fascists. Another described the political use of GLP-1 drugs as fascistic and diet culture as a weapon in a war...
