A self-described “ungendered activist” told a packed room of socialists that popular weight-loss drugs like Ozempic are “fascistic” because they exist in a world “fixated on genociding fat people.”
The remarks came during a panel at the Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago, a four-day gathering organized by Haymarket Books and attended by more than 3,000 activists, academics, and Democratic Socialists of America members over Labor Day weekend.
Da’Shaun L. Harrison, an Atlanta-based author of the 2022 book Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, was speaking on a panel titled “Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State.”
“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 said.
Harrison argued that drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro exist “to sustain a social order in which fat people are monitored, restricted, guilted, stolen from and punished.”
The activist complained that “body fascism is not some relic from the past, it’s 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.”
WATCH:
🚨 Da’Shaun L. Harrison at Socialism 2026 argues that the political deployment of GLP-1 drugs is “fascistic” because they exist in “a world fixated on genociding fat people.”
“The political deployment of GLP-1s is fascistic, not because individuals take them, but because the… pic.twitter.com/CMxfUTUq0e
— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) September 5, 2026
The activist, who uses they/them pronouns and regularly posts swimsuit photos on Instagram, tied the argument to race, claiming the “policing of Black fat flesh anchors entire systems of governance” and 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, added that society should abandon “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.”
She then declared, “In fact, the more dysgenic, the better, I think,” using a term associated with the supposed decline of a population’s genetic quality, and cited Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin, who became quadriplegic as a teenager, as an example of a “disabled revolutionary.”
Adler-Bolton also argued that “revolution is not a contest between optimized and properly prepared bodies. That idea is fascist in and of itself.”
Video of Harrison’s comments was posted by Manhattan Institute investigative analyst Stu Smith, who told the New York Post that the remarks reflect a far-left impulse to reject anything resembling normalcy.
“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.”
The conference also featured discussions of prison abolition, plans for a large May Day 2028 action, and other panels that treated fitness, public health campaigns, and even the idea of healing as potential forms of “health fascism.”
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