This Week in the New Normal

1. THE EXTREME RIGHT WEAPONISING THE OUTDOORS

Fresh from weaponising memes in 2021, the classics in 2018 and irony in 2016, those pesky alt-righters are back at it – ruining perfectly ordinary things, like going outside.

Yes, according to Vice…

White Nationalists Want to Reclaim Nature as a Safe Space for Racists

Which contains this amazing sentence:

The racist roots of national parks in America has made them an attraction to white supremacists over the years.

It’s not just going outside that’s the problem, it’s buying local produce from farmers’ markets…

Of course, obsessions with purity and clean living aren’t just an American white supremacist thing. Nazi Germany was deeply concerned about the longevity of the Aryan race, and so encouraged a healthy lifestyle and good diet. But eating a natural diet was also a core component of the Nazi slogan “blood and soil”—intended to foster nationalism by eating food grown on the land.

See, it’s not just American fascists that like eating natural food…German fascists did it too. And no one else, apparently.

This is not a new phenomenon. For years it’s been a common refrain across the MSM to accuse the “alt-right” of “weaponising” things they want to undermine, up to and including free speech.

In 2017 Vice ran an article “The Alt-Right’s Favourite Diet”, about meat-heavy “paleo” diet plans.

And perhaps you remember this beauty from last year:

The dark side of wellness: the overlap between spiritual thinking and far-right conspiracies

Which was later followed by this article, where the Guardian claims that the alt-right had co-opted physical fitness, and that “extremists present self-improvement as part of wider political struggle”.

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