Health and fitness spaces have always been political. What’s new is the acceleration of old patterns—purity, distrust, and “clean living”—which are now louder and more profitable through social media. If we truly care about health as carework, not content or clout, we must call out the forces shaping wellness culture.
This Didn’t Come Out of Nowhere
Wellness in the US has long overlapped with racial purity politics, social engineering, conspiratorial “nature cure” philosophies, and nationalist body projects. The early 20th-century “physical culture” movement wasn’t just about exercise; it carried eugenic ideals. Bernarr Macfadden, the so-called “father of physical culture,” promoted sterilization talking points and praised fascist body aesthetics. Strength wasn’t framed as personal; it was sold as a way to “improve the race.”
John Harvey Kellogg, famous for cornflakes, funded the “Race Betterment” conferences, spreading eugenics under the veneer of hygiene and wholesome living. This was not a bug of wellness culture; it was a feature of the era’s health reformers.
Across the Atlantic, the German Lebensreform (“life reform”) movement fused vegetarianism, sun worship, gymnastics, naturopathy, and “back to nature” off-grid societies. Parts of that body culture easily slid into völkisch and later Nazi visions of a regenerated national body. “Strength Through Joy” leisure programs and youth physical education made the politics explicit: remake the nation by remaking the body.
This history doesn’t mean wellness equals fascism. It means the soil has long been fertile for narratives about purity, decay, rescue, and body-as-nation fantasies that nationalist movements can use.
Why the Far Right Keeps Finding an Opening
Purity politics disguised as health. “Natural,” “ancestral,” and “toxin-free” aren’t just health claims. They carry cultural overtones about who is clean and who is contaminated. In far-right rhetoric, these terms signal racial purity—an imagined return to a white ancestral past (MAGA and MAHA). At the same time, wellness culture frequently appropriates Indigenous and nonwhite ancestral practices, treating them as raw material to “cleanse” modern life while erasing the people who created them. This is a continuation of colonial exploitation and biopiracy.
These contradictory uses actually reinforce one another. Whether the “ancestor” is an idealized European forebear or an exoticized Indigenous healer, the logic is the same: purity lies in the past, corruption in the present, and health means recovering what was lost. That narrative makes it easy to smuggle racial and exclusionary politics into wellness language that seems harmless on the surface.
Feelings of nostalgia for a supposed simpler time, mixed with resentment toward a modern world that doesn’t live up to its promises, often drive individuals toward these purity narratives. Fear also plays a role, as it feeds into the idea that the current world is tainted by Others and only a return to “pure” origins can offer safety.
Individualism and anti-institutionalism. A fusion of New Age spirituality and conspiracy culture—what scholars call “conspirituality”—frames secret elites as the enemy and personal awakening as salvation. In practice, that means vaccines, food regulations, or collective public health measures get painted as oppression. The wellness mantra of “health freedom” dovetails with far-right libertarian rhetoric about resisting government “tyranny.”
Monetizing doubt. The business model is straightforward: scare, then sell. From supplements to detox programs, entrepreneurs profit from mistrust. Alex Jones sold “immune boosters” alongside conspiracies. Joseph Mercola built a fortune pairing anti-vaccine claims with “natural cure” products. Doubt becomes a sales funnel.
Recruitment through movement spaces. Self-improvement is a hotbed for far-right beliefs. Online lifting forums, MMA gyms, and biohacking circles are popular pipelines to nationalist politics. The obsession with improvement is often accompanied by hatred of weakness. Fascism is ultimately a hatred of weakness.
Why Socially Conscious Clients Miss It
People who care about the world often care about their bodies and assume their trainer or coach shares their values. That trust becomes a blind spot when a trainer’s account shifts from organic recipes to election denial or anti-vax tropes.
Since wellness is intimate—touch, breath, vulnerability—people hesitate to confront a trainer who drifts into conspiracies mid-session. Clients often chalk it up to eccentricity rather than extremism. Reporting from yoga and wellness communities shows how QAnon slogans and “just asking questions” rhetoric, introduced subtly, can normalize fringe beliefs under a soothing veneer. Mainstream medicine has failed many, especially women, so alternative health feels like a refuge. That genuine frustration makes conspiratorial answers more likely to take hold.
Why It’s Accelerating Now
Platforms and profit. Social media rewards what provokes. Outrage and suspicion travel faster than careful evidence, and wellness creators learn quickly to lean into conspiracy content. In the free market for attention, conspiracy offers a competitive edge.
A pandemic hangover. COVID supercharged alternative-authority ecosystems. Influencers who questioned vaccines and lockdowns built large audiences, then redirected those followers into other conspiracies—climate denial, chemtrail panic, or dietary purity crusades. It wasn’t only fringe influencers who fueled the fallout. Mainstream US media also played a role. While many American doctors and policy experts criticized the US response as too lax, media outlets often turned their sharpest critiques outward, labeling stricter policies in countries like New Zealand, China, South Korea, and Australia as “draconian” or “authoritarian.” This sent mixed signals: if the US was already failing to contain the virus, how could stricter measures abroad be painted as dangerous overreach? Reading between the lines, the media itself seemed to be saying COVID wasn’t that bad, but it just couldn’t report that domestically for unknown reasons. Contradictions like these open the door for conspiratorial answers.
At the same time, media coverage highlighted far-right anti-lockdown protests abroad as stories of ordinary citizens “resisting government tyranny.” That framing legitimized the conspiracy theorists’ favorite narrative: that public health guidance was less about saving lives and more about control. By amplifying those protests and casting health policies as threats to freedom, mainstream media reinforced the exact “health freedom” ideology conspiracy entrepreneurs rely on.
The result is a pandemic hangover where conspiracy claims feel validated. Public health measures are remembered not as imperfect tools to save lives, but as proof of government oppression. Many in wellness culture use this memory to fuel mistrust.
Trust depends on consistency and a lack of double standards. The difference between US and foreign COVID coverage justifies mistrust. Unfortunately, those waiting to fill the gap as alternative news sources were conspirituality entrepreneurs.
Policy legitimization in the MAHA era. Federal health messaging now echoes rhetoric long used by anti-vaccine and “health freedom” activists. The “Make America Healthy Again (MAHA)” initiative, led by HHS, is a campaign to overhaul food and science systems in a way that aligns with far-right conspiracy narratives.
How to Spot the Slide (Before It Harms You)
If you’re a client, athlete, or gym member who wants better health without propaganda, here are practical tells:
From protocols to parables. The pro keeps shifting from evidence and scope of practice to grand stories about “they don’t want you to know.” That’s a pivot from care to ideology.
Purity escalations. Claims creep from reasonable basics (sleep, fiber, strength, sunlight) into absolutist purity rules, “detox” packages, and personalized enemies: seed oils as moral rot, tap water as mind control.
Individuality over collective health. You’re told real health requires rejecting regulators, clinicians, or any collective measure—masking, vaccines—because “only you” can know the truth. That’s the “conspirituality” move.
Commerce plus ideology. Conspiracies and supplements are sold in the same breath.
Nationalist aesthetics. Fitness gets framed as a battle for US cultural survival, not just personal strength. Why are US flags and nationalist slogans everywhere?
Fear and superiority. Is fear the ultimate logic? Is superiority the end goal?
The Bottom Line
If wellness feels more conspiratorial today, it’s because incentives are stronger, not because health was ever apolitical. Purity myths, racial anxieties, and nationalist body politics have been baked in since the start. The difference now is speed, reach, and profit.
In the MAHA era, vigilance matters. Health should be about care, community, and science—not purity myths or nationalist propaganda. When “wellness” gets bundled with conspiracies, we’re not buying health. We’re buying into an ideology we did not consent to.
– Sam
