The Meaning Of The RFK - Hegseth "Physical Fitness Challenge"
"Good Genes" And The Revival Of Nazi Eugenics And White Supremacy
[Update below]
The photo above is from 1937: "Nazi art by Joseph Thorak (1937)" according to the caption.
The Nazi's also emphasized physical fitness:
The Nazis radicalized notions about fitness, health and beauty, linking them to racial categories. Only those considered to be “Aryan” could now reach perfection. Sporting and leisure organizations advocated fitness in service of the nation. German sports imagery of the 1930s reflected the value the Nazi regime placed on physical fitness. Magazines and posters featured idealized figures, both male and female, that promoted a myth of “Aryan” racial superiority.
It could just as well been RFK and Hegseth in their "physical fitness challenge" stunt:
The same fascist message is at the core of all those videos of white southern college sorority girls displaying their blond hair - blue eyed "good genes".
This is not about triggering or owning the libs - it's an open and very clear expression of pure racist eugenicist White Supremacy, with a dose of Nazi nationalism (i.e. the "America Is Back" slogan accompanying the image):
Marko Elez, a former DOGE staff member was linked to an X account that posted, “I just want a eugenic immigration policy, is that too much to ask.” ~~~ Trolling Democracy
This is the ugly cultural underside of MAGA and they are getting much bolder in openly expressing and exposing their racist White Christian Nationalist fascist agenda.
Trump has done exactly the same thing in his initiative to rewrite US history and seize cultural institutions - what I have called his attempt to create a Reich Ministry Of Culture.
The Nazi's clearly understood the power of culture in promoting their fascist project:
[C]ultural concerns were in fact vital to the imperial projects of Hitler and Mussolini. We do not normally associate their violent and aggressive regimes with “soft power.” But the two dictators were would-be intellectuals—Adolf Hitler a failed painter inebriated with the music of Wagner, and Mussolini a onetime schoolteacher and novelist. Unlike American philistines, they thought literature and the arts were important, and wanted to weaponize them as adjuncts to military conquest. Martin’s book adds a significant dimension to our understanding of how the Nazi and Fascist empires were constructed.
The German project can be traced back to World War I propaganda and it lasted well into World War II:
During World War I German patriotic propaganda vaunted the superiority of Germany’s supposedly rooted, organic, spiritual Kultur over the allegedly effete, shallow, cosmopolitan, materialist, Jewish-influenced “civilization” of Western Europe. Martin’s book shows how vigorously the Nazis applied this traditional construct. Hitler invested considerable money and time in the 1930s, and even after World War II began, in an effort to take over Europe’s cultural organizations and turn them into instruments of German power. These projects had some initial success. In the end, however, they collapsed along with the military power they were designed to reinforce. ...
Hitler advocated aggressive governmental intervention into cultural matters. Art was to be the expression of “the hereditary racial bloodstock,” and the artist’s job was to defend the German Volk. When PEN International objected to Hitler expelling “leftists” and Jews from the German chapter, Hitler closed down the chapter altogether.
If Trump MAGA can't close "woke" culture down, they can burn their books.
Psychologically and sexually, the MAGA movement is fueled by testosterone and misogyny and seeks to restore the Christian hierarchical male dominated family and violent and militaristic aggressive tendencies.
So too were the Nazis:
I turn to a review by Paul Robinson in The New York Times for a summation of Theweleit’s argument:
"[Theweleit’s] central contention is that the Freikorps soldiers were afraid of women. Indeed, not just afraid, they were deeply hostile to them, and their ultimate goal was to murder them. Women, in their view, came in only two varieties: Red and White. The White woman was the nurse, the mother, the sister. She was distinguished above all else by her sexlessness. The Red woman, on the other hand, was a whore and a Communist. She was a kind of distillation of sexuality, threatening to engulf the male in a whirlpool of bodily and emotional ecstasy. This, of course, was the woman the Freikorps soldier wished to kill, because she endangered his identity, his sense of self as a fixed and bounded being. In this manner Mr. Theweleit links the Freikorps soldiers’ fantasies of women to their practical life as illegal anti-Communist guerillas: the Republic had to be destroyed because it empowered the lascivious Red woman, while it failed to protect the White woman’s sexual purity."
The solidity craved by the Freikorps soldiers and later by the Nazis can be seen in the hard, straight lines of Nazi art. They didn’t like anything soft or ambiguous, which explains their horrified obsession with liquidity and dirt:
"[Theweleit] argues that aquatic and other liquid metaphors were associated in the minds of these soldiers with the loss of a firm sense of identity. Much of their literature speaks of Communism as a flood, a stream, or a kind of boiling or exploding of the earth – images he shows to be associated traditionally with sexuality.
In similar fashion, he argues that the idea of dirt terrified the Freikorps soldiers precisely because it also was linked in their minds to the loss of self and to bodily pleasure. The connection is perhaps clearest when the metaphors of liquidity and filth are combined, as in such notions as mire, morass, slime and excrement. Again, Mr. Theweleit shows how the anti-Communist rhetoric of the Freikorps soldiers was systematically informed by such metaphors, and he makes a plausible case for linking this political sentiment to their fear of sexuality. The member of the Freikorps, he writes, was hostile to ”all of the hybrid substances that were produced by the body and flowed on, in, over, and out of the body: the floods and stickiness of sucking kisses; the swamps of the vagina, with their slime and mire; the pap and slime of male semen; the film of sweat . . . the warmth that dissolves physical boundaries.”
To Robinson’s account, I add that their hostility stems from repressed desiring. The Freikorps soldiers resented the ice cold mothers they idealized and longed for the vibrant liquid bodies they demonized. Their hatred of the latter was really a hatred of how their emotions were opened up, leaving them feeling vulnerable.
And so it goes.
The failure of the media and progressives to grasp what is going on with MAGA and Trump is deeply disturbing.
The day to day reports of individual Trump political and legal crimes and transgressions are not considered in their totality and the intellectual, cultural, and historical context they demand.
Trump's governing is never analyzed in terms of how it is part of a MAGA fascist movement and an increasingly transparentlyWhite Supremacist - and even eugenist - cultural and political project.
We've seen this fascist game before, yet the word fascist is taboo in mainstream discourse and politics.
The dots are not only never connected, there are no dots - the dots are invisible.
How obvious does it have to get?
The military is already in control of the streets of the US capital city.
Trump is openly threatening to nationalize that military program in major US cities in Blue States - and all of the cities targeted thus far are run by black Mayors. Trump is doing political events with local law enforcement and has threatened to declare a National Emergency, Marshall Law, and invoke the Insurrection Act.
Trump and Republicans are openly rigging the 2026 elections and the US Supreme Court will not enforce the Voting Rights Act to stop them.
Billionaires and Big Tech - who control the algorithm and mass communications - are financing and politically backing Trump. They amplify the firehose of Trump lies and propaganda.
MAGA is angry and heavily armed, while Trump controls and stokes his brownshirt militias with impunity (and let's be perfectly clear: ICE is Trump's Brownshirt Militia).
The Department of Homeland Security is focused on "the Homeland" and scapegoating migrants - openly attacked as "vermin" who are "poisoning the blood of the nation" - as a $100 billion Congressionally funded ICE has masked men kidnap people off the streets and is building domestic concentration camps, including at US military bases.
Protests have been crushed and free speech and advocacy - particularly for Palestinians and critics of Israeli genocide - have been defined as "terrorism" and even criminalized. College student protesters have been deported, arrested, expelled, beaten by police and Zionist thugs, intimidated, and threatened to have their careers destroyed.
No wonder the campuses are silent.
Institutionally, Congress has abdicated or been hollowed out or captured by Trump (as in Weimar); the Courts are capitulating or Trump is simply defying adverse Court orders; the Democrats are disorganized and cowardly; the media, academic, cultural, and legal elites have been cowed or controlled, sometimes by threats of US Department of Justice or IRS investigation and criminal prosecution and federal defunding; and the liberal Church is silent (with the exception of the Pope, who has spoken out, but indirectly).
Where is the mass rejection of all this?
[Update: 8/23/25 - It’s almost like I had a line to NY Times editors. The NY Times today wrote not one, but two stories that I complained about their failure to write, but they left a lot out and the word “fascism” is still taboo (its merely “far-right”:
In Trump’s Second Term, Far-Right Agenda Enters the Mainstream
As Trump Targets the Smithsonian, Museums Across the U.S. Feel a Chill
I found this quote particularly “chilling”:
Trump said he had told his lawyers “to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities.” There, his administration sought changes by threatening funding cuts and in some cases threatening their tax-exempt status.~~~ end update]