The Marxist Media Pivots: Now They're Telling Lefties to Go to the Gym

As you know, the left has been celebrating weakness and frailty and poor health (both physical and mental) for its entire history. The strong have no need of a Mommy-Daddy God-State to protect them and provide them with food and phony affirmation.

In the age of Trump, though, they've gone positive bonkers.

Time magazine, 2022: Exercise is just progressive-overload white supremacy.

The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness

Aspects of the wellness world connect with conspiracy theories. If you've spent some time in bodybuilding forums, fitness Instagram, or really anywhere, this is not a surprise. Most recently, The Guardian covered the "wellness-to-fascism pipeline," detailing how some people in the wellness and fitness world are susceptible to conspiracies ranging from quacky antivax theories to full-blown Alex Jones brain. And last year, Time highlighted the "White Supremacist Origins of Exercise," in an interview with Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of the book Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession.

It turns out your far-too-online personal trainer might be sneaking a red pill into your protein shake. The reasons are many, including a lack of trust in modern medicine and the pharmaceutical industry, paired with long periods of isolation thanks to the pandemic. There's also the right wing influencers targeting incels, who might be convinced their deadlift stats are the reason for their lack of romantic success. It doesn't help that the fitness industry often leans on "One Weird Trick" to promote quick spot fixes and instant health benefits, which can then sprout into other types of forbidden "wisdom."

From just three weeks ago: Vanity Fair wonders why protein is so hot right now, and says "Blame MAGA."

Why Are Americans So Obsessed With Protein? Blame MAGA.

From the Liver King to the podcast bros to RFK Jr.'s MAHA constituents, America’s infatuation with protein has reached a fever pitch--and it's undeniably gendered.

How can it be "gendered" when we can't even say what a woman is?

The left just spent $20 million to conduct a "study" at a four-star hotel while loading "mini lobster rolls" into their fat weakling mouths to figure out how to "Speak to American Men."

MSNBC provides the first fruits of this effort, telling fat, weakling Democrats to go to the gym, not for the purposes of health, fitness, longevity, and self-improvement, but for the grubby, gross motive of being better able to politically proselytize to young men.

Do you even vote, bro? Democrats should look for new voters at the gym.

"Speaking with American Men" is a Democratic initiative to win young men, a group Democrats lost ground with in 2024.

After losing big with men under 30 in the 2024 election, Democrats have spent $20 million on a program called "Speaking with American Men" (SAM) to help figure out which "spaces" they need to show up in to fare better with this demographic. A smart place to start would be the gym; the booming men's fitness market is expected to more than double by 2029, growth driven by men under 25, who are joining gyms almost twice as fast as women. And as SAM co-director Ilyse Hogue and I wrote here last year, the right has done an excellent job parlaying young men's healthy interest in exercise into an embrace of reactionary politics.

But it doesn't need to be that way. Across the political spectrum, craving the surefire sense of accomplishment the gym provides is an age-old response to an unstable political and economic environment.

They literally cannot think in any other terms other than Marxist ones. Why do people go to the gym? To give themselves a dopamine hit in order to get them the struggle of capitalist oppression. Squats are the opiate of the masses.

And historically, championing physical fitness with appeals to American manliness has not been a partisan issue. If the SAM initiative is going to net the Democrats more than online snark, its leaders should appreciate that this history suggests the party's path forward might just begin at the gym.

If you weren't so gross, people might like you more, so yeah, maybe.

In the vast digital universe targeting young men, the idea that exercise is imperative to self-actualization is inescapable. It's most obvious in fitness-focused influencers like Ashton Hall, whose six-hour "morning routine" recently racked up nearly a billion views on X. But plenty of public figures with grander concerns insist exercise is integral to achievement. Take Andrew Tate's obsession with "plummeting masculinity" or Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s quest to make America healthy again.

A commitment to early-morning workouts, Tate advises, is Step 1 to asserting alpha dominance. Performing pullups, as the septuagenarian Kennedy does shirtless at Gold's Gym, is proof of political power. Such encouragement spans the political spectrum. While it's become more common to see Republicans like Paul Ryan or Pete Hegseth flaunting their fitness, Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden often promoted exercise as a personal and policy priority, and former Rep. Jamaal Bowman went viral in 2023 for benching 405 pounds while wearing a Working Families Party T-shirt.

You should see him on the Fire Alarm Lat Pull machine.

...

For more than a century, in moments of upheaval that raise questions about what it means to be a man, men have reliably sought a sense of agency in exercise.

This whole article is intended as Marching Orders to the left: Stop writing articles about exercise being toxic masculinity white supremacy or else men are going to continue voting against you. She's now reduced to arguing against the left-wing anti-health, anti-male narratives the left has been spinning out for a decade.

The social and economic roots of the American man's fixation on fitness date to the early 20th century.

When the world feels confusing or out of control, make a man of yourself, beginning with your body is an especially enticing proposition.

I should also point out that their idea of appealing to men is exactly the same as their idea of appealing to women. They appeal to women by talking about anxiety and empowerment, and, because they don't recognize any differences between the sexes, they're going to appeal to men with the exact same Empowerment Overcomes Your Anxiety and Neuroticism pitch, too.

They can only talk about working out in the only language they know, and that language is: Therapy.

...

Although the white-collar careers to which upwardly mobile young men aspired conferred superiority over the sweaty masses, this prestige came at a cost: so-called "desk diseases," as 19th-century doctors styled them, marked by sloped shoulders and sagging paunches. And President Teddy Roosevelt touted "the strenuous life" as a way for young men to resolve the paradox of progress.

...

The unprecedented prosperity of the 1950s, with its many desk jobs, televisions and time-saving appliances, ushered in yet more anxiety about the softening of the American male -- among members of both major political parties. Worried that the sudden glut of leisure risked rendering boys unfit for military duty, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration launched what would become the Presidential Council on Youth Fitness in 1957. "We are not a nation of softies," Vice President Richard Nixon warned at its launch, "but we could become one."

We are not a nation of softies, but we could become one.

We could become a nation of sofites, huh?

Given the many physical and mental benefits of exercise, the latest push for men to self-actualize through fitness is hardly a negative -- or necessarily partisan -- development.

Again, "self-actualization" is a concept pushed in self-help books written for an exclusively female audience.

But I guess that's the target audience for this article. It's trying to persuade wine-and-Xanax addicted left-wing mad women to stop "problematizing" male interest in working out so that they stop chasing off voters. So every argument is basically, "So you angry crazy-women like 'self-actualization,' so just think about the gym being 'self-actualization for bro's.'"

Experts agree that exercise is close to a "magic pill" for its many health benefits.

You don't say.

Weird you took the exact opposite position during the covid pandemic the left created.

So... do you have any GAINZZZ? My only GAINZZZ are starting once again to get GAINZZZ, at the very bottom of the GAINZZZ ladder. I basically skipped out on exercise for a year and now I'm reduced to the n00biest of n00bs.

Gotta get some N00B GAINZZZ, then.

How about you?

posted by Ace at 04:20 PM

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