A far-left conference in Chicago turned into a showcase of ideological extremism when a self-described ungendered activist denounced popular weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic as instruments of fascistic oppression in a world supposedly fixated on genociding fat people."
The remarks were delivered at the Socialism 2026 conference, a four-day gathering over Labor Day weekend that drew more than 3,000 activists, academics, and members of the Democratic Socialists of America. The event, organized by Haymarket Books, featured a range of panels that, according to Gateway Pundit, framed mainstream health practices, fitness, and even the concept of healing as tools of health fascism.
DaShaun L. Harrison, an Atlanta-based activist and author of the 2022 book *Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness*, spoke on a panel titled Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State. Harrison declared, 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.
GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro, widely used to treat diabetes and obesity, were portrayed not as medical advances but as tools of systemic oppression. Harrison argued that these medications exist to sustain a social order in which fat people are monitored, restricted, guilted, stolen from and punished.
The activist went further, insisting that body fascism is not some relic from the past, its an active feature of modern imperial regimes and that every time a government decides whose bodies must be protected and whose bodies must be erased for the sake of national imagery, this is body fascism. The rhetoric reflected a broader left-wing narrative that recasts public health, personal responsibility, and medical innovation as mechanisms of state violence rather than avenues for individual flourishing.
Harrison, who uses they/them pronouns and frequently posts swimsuit photos on Instagram, also racialized the issue, claiming that policing of Black fat flesh anchors entire systems of governance. They asserted that without a population to discipline there would be no BMI, no obesity epidemic, and no medical or scientific institutions organized around managing fatness.
Fellow panelist Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-author of *Health Communism* and co-host of the Death Panel podcast, urged the audience to reject what she called the fantasy of being fitter than the fascists. Fitness is a measure of relative disposability under capitalism, Adler-Bolton said. Our task is not to become less disposable to become more useful to the ruling order.
Adler-Bolton then embraced a deliberately provocative stance, stating, In fact, the more dysgenic, the better, I think, invoking a term associated with the supposed decline of a populations genetic quality. She cited Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin, who became quadriplegic as a teenager, as an example of a disabled revolutionary, and later argued that revolution is not a contest between optimized and properly prepared bodies. That idea is fascist in and of itself.
Video of Harrisons comments was posted online by Manhattan Institute investigative analyst Stu Smith, who viewed the episode as emblematic of a radical left that now treats normal life as suspect. These are people who are just so unhappy with anything that resembles the status quo or normalcy; they have to signal against anything they think is not their revolutionary project, Smith said.
Smith added that this mindset leads to a worldview in which even life-improving medical breakthroughs are cast as evil. And thats how you get to things getting so twisted that you are now seeing medical innovations as a fascistic genocidal negative. Its really its own cult.
Beyond the anti-medicine rhetoric, the Socialism 2026 conference featured sessions on prison abolition, organizing a large May Day 2028 action, and additional panels that labeled fitness, public health campaigns, and even the notion of healing as expressions of health fascism. For many on the right, the spectacle underscored how far segments of the contemporary left have drifted from promoting individual responsibility and human dignity, preferring instead to pathologize self-improvement and demonize the very institutions that help people live longer, healthier lives.
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