GLP-1s Are Fascist, Fitness Is Form of ‘Eugenics,’ Say Socialists

Being fit is for fascists and attempts to get excess weight under control, especially with GLP-1 drugs, are a capitalist attempt at eugenics, say socialists attending a four day-long conference held over the Labor Day weekend.Socialists from around the country gathered at the Socialism 2026 event at Chicago’s Hyatt Regency McCormick Place hotel. Featured speakers included “Democracy Now!” host Amy Goodman, Palestinian activist Noura Erakat, and author Dorothy Gilmore, among others. More than 100 lectures and workshops were offered at the event and covered such issues as “How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World,” “Are All Cops Bastards?,” “Weaponizing Antisemitism: An Interactive History,” and “Madness, Capitalism, and Psychiatric Abolition.”Saturday’s panel on “Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State” covered a discussion on how the inability of governments to provide health care has put the onus on individuals to take care of themselves. According to the panel description, this lack of provision means “fitness, disability, fatness, illness, Blackness, impairment, and bodily capacity are mobilized into measures of moral worth and political belonging.” The panelists discussed how an emphasis on disability, body size, and race are tools of the state to impose “health fascism.” One panelist argued that the political deployment of GLP-1 drugs is “fascistic” because they exist in “a world fixated on genociding fat people.”“The political deployment of GLP-1s is fascistic, not because individuals take them, but because the conditions under which they become necessary are shaped by a world fixated on genociding fat people,” said De’Shaun L. Harrison, a self-described “queer and trans afropessimist and anarcho-communist” who frequently writes on “Black Fat Studies” and the intersection of fat-shaming and racism.The speaker said that conditions produced by capitalism, public health, the state apparatus, and “anti-black desire” focus on a “single bodily ideal” that “leaves little to no room for diversions and punishes” anybody who deviates. Speaking alongside De’Shaun L. Harrison was disability advocate Beatrice Adler-Bolton, whose “Death Panel” podcast hosted the panel. She said it is “cringe” to try to pursue “the fantasy of being fitter than the fascists” because “fitness is a measure of relative disposability under capitalism.” Saying the left should not try to beat fascists “at their own game,” Ms. Adler-Bolton added that “revolution is not a contest between optimized and properly prepared bodies.”“It is not to lay a better claim on their own territory by being fitter, more eugenic. In fact, The more dysgenic, the better, I think,” said Ms. Adler-Bolton. “Our task is not to become disposable, to become more useful to the ruling order. What we need to be doing is rejecting disposability in all of its forms,” she added. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity — defined as a body mass index over 30 — contributes to a host of illnesses, including high blood pressure and cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, kidney disease as well as impaired immune function and depression. The agency reports that black Americans have the highest rates of obesity, with obesity prevalence at or above 35 percent in 38 statesAs many as 12 percent of Americans have taken a GLP-1 drug, which is now covered by Medicaid and Medicare with patients losing an average 21 percent of their body weight. The drug has been cited for a reduction in diabetes and recently was linked to a 30 percent reduction in breast cancer. A Gallup survey conducted last October revealed that the obesity rate in America has declined from its 2022 high of 39.9 percent to 37 percent in 2025, corresponding with a doubling in the reported use of GLP-1s between 2024 and 2025.

GLP-1s Are Fascist, Fitness Is Form of ‘Eugenics,’ Say Socialists

GLP-1s Are Fascist, Fitness Is Form of ‘Eugenics,’ Say Socialists

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