Donald Trump Junior threw a video tantrum on his Rumble channel late Monday morning over a TimeMagazine story documenting the racist foundations of the modern American fitness industry, which exploded in popularity in the mid-Twentieth Century.
Time's interview with author Natalia Mehlman Petrzela that was published in December revealed several startling instances that underscored the point of the éxposé.
For example:
They said we should get rid of corsets, corsets are an assault on women’s form, and that women should be lifting weights and gaining strength. At first, you feel like this is so progressive.
Then you keep reading, and they’re saying white women should start building up their strength because we need more white babies. They’re writing during an incredible amount of immigration, soon after enslaved people have been emancipated. This is totally part of a white supremacy project. So that was a real "holy crap" moment as a historian, where deep archival research really reveals the contradictions of this moment.
But that was not Junior's interpretation. Instead, he falsely accused Time of engaging in a campaign to dissuade people from taking care of themselves:
People have actually lost their minds more than I have thought, which is hard to believe because the amount of lost mind is strong to let's say really, really strong. But here's an article from 'Time Magazine: 'The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness.''
The white supremacist origin of exercise. Exercise is now white supremacy. Okay? Remember, it's either white supremacy or climate change. Literally everything is one of those things. Good, bad, or indifferent. They will blame it on all of those things. But that's Time Magazine. They want to get rid of exercise. They don't want physical fitness. I assume it has to do with probably not wanting people to be self-sufficient or masculine, because there's the attack on that. But this is in 'Time Magazine.' Exercise is now apparently racist. I mean, that's how insane we're getting.
Just stop. You know what seems way more racist to me? Ignoring science and common sense information about, like, physical activity and physical fitness and instead pretending that those things don't matter, which probably is literally killing people. Letting people go about being obese is literally killing people under the guise of protecting them from racism. Pretending that certain people are somehow immune to the health issues associated with obesity seems sociopathic, but that's where we are. So that.
Junior has had his own brushes with science denial. In 2020, he was suspended from Twitter for promoting bogus cures and treatments for COVID-19.
It also warrants noting that Junior's father, former President Donald Trump, was cited in the 2016 book Trump Revealed as believing that exercise was unhealthy:
After college, after Trump mostly gave up his personal athletic interests, he came to view time spent playing sports as time wasted. Trump believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted. So he didn’t work out. When he learned that John O’Donnell, one of his top casino executives, was training for an Ironman triathlon, he admonished him, ‘You are going to die young because of this.’
Watch below.
\u201cJunior\u2019s ranting about an article that supposedly says exercise is racist to black women. I read it. It\u2019s an interview of author who wrote book about history of exercise in US. One part notes at turn of 20th century racists wanted white women in better shape to have more babies.\u201d— Ron Filipkowski \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6 (@Ron Filipkowski \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6) 1672679563
