Far-left activists declared war on Ozempic and other GLP-1 weight-loss drugs at the recent Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago, calling the medications “fascist” and accusing them of “genociding fat people.”
The claim came from Atlanta activist Da’Shaun L. Harrison, who told the crowd of over 3,000 socialist attendees that the drugs belong to the fascist political spectrum.
“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.”
Harrison — a self-described “ungendered” author and “trans theorist” — argued the drugs exist “to sustain a social order in which fat people are monitored, restricted, guilted, stolen from and punished.”
Prescription drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound were originally developed to treat diabetes. The Trump administration has made them more affordable, and they are credited with lowering the risk of death from heart attack or stroke in high-risk patients.
Harrison sees it differently.
“Body fascism is not some relic from the past, it’s an active feature of modern imperial regimes,” he said. “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.”
Harrison regularly posts shirtless photos of himself on Instagram, which clearly show his body mass index scoring big numbers. In short, he’s overweight.
He also regularly appears on far-left podcasts and was featured in a YouTube video by the American Civil Liberties Union that claimed “anti-fatness is anti-blackness.”
Harrison penned the 2022 book Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness. He spoke at the Socialism 2026 conference on a panel called “Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State.”
Oddly, while being overweight didn’t appear to be a health concern, all conference attendees were required to wear masks “fully covering the nose and mouth,” as if the group were still in the middle of the Covid epidemic.
Another speaker, Beatrice Adler-Bolton — coauthor of the book Health Communism — chimed in with her own take.
“We have to give up the fantasy of being fitter than the fascists,” she said.
“Fitness is a measure of relative disposability under capitalism. Our task is not to become less disposable to become more useful to the ruling order.”
Adler-Bolton continued: “The point is not to beat the fascists at their own game. It is not to lay a better claim on their own territory by being fitter, more eugenic.”
Stu Smith, an investigative analyst at the Manhattan Institute, told the New York Post the remarks are part of the far left’s mission to tear down traditional Western culture.
“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.
“And that’s how you get to things getting so twisted that you are now seeing medical innovations as a fascistic genocidal negative. It’s really its own cult.”
