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If you’ve watched the pundits on the right, you’ve seen Matt Walsh take aim at the latest linguistic contortions of the fat-acceptance movement, and with good reason. Activists aren’t just asking for dignity; they’re slicing bodies into categories—small fat, mid-fat, super fat, and even “infinifat”—and asking the culture to treat those labels as identities rather than health warnings. This isn’t harmless rebranding; it’s a social experiment that demands our attention and should raise alarms across the political spectrum.
Those invented strata come with tidy size numbers and a whole vocabulary designed to normalize ever-greater extremes of body weight, with “super fat” and “infinifat” often applied to people sized well beyond what mainstream retailers serve. Proponents cast this language as empowerment, but what it really does is codify victimhood and shift the argument from health to status, rewarding grievance instead of responsibility. Americans who built this country did so on the backbone of personal accountability, and turning bodily neglect into an identity is a corrosive cultural map to nowhere.
Worse, the rise in extreme obesity is not just a vocabulary issue; it’s a measurable public-health crisis. Recent analyses show a sharp increase in people with BMIs of 60 or greater over the last two decades, a level of obesity that brings severe mobility problems, skyrocketing medical costs, and complex clinical challenges that hospitals and families must confront. This is not abstract activism — it’s a growing class of Americans who need genuine medical solutions, not slogans.
Children are not immune. A national study of youth obesity found a dramatic uptick in extremely severe pediatric obesity between 2008 and 2023, with the highest increases among older adolescents and disadvantaged communities. When kids are being locked into metabolic disease so early in life, the moral failure lies with the adults and institutions that either enabled it or looked the other way. We should be alarmed that the next generation is inheriting chronic illness as normal.
At the same time, market forces and new drug therapies are reshaping the landscape in bewildering ways. Weight-loss medications and celebrity wellness trends have started to pull the fashion and health industries in different directions, creating sudden scarcity in the plus-size market even as the underlying health problems persist. Conservatives should not reflexively demonize medical advances, but neither should we pretend that medicine and marketing erase the real harms of extreme obesity.
This is about incentives. A culture that celebrates every preference and then asks everyone else to pay for its consequences is a culture on life support. Language matters because it changes incentives: when suffering is labeled as identity and consequences are framed as discrimination, we move away from rehabilitation and toward eternal excuse-making. The conservative case is simple and humane—promote dignity through accountability, not through normalizing self-harm.
Policymakers and communities must focus on practical rather than performative solutions: scale up access to effective medical care, fund prevention programs that actually work, and protect children from environments that make obesity the default. The medical literature is clear that the highest BMI categories carry disproportionate health risks and comorbidities, from lymphatic failure to surgical complications and higher rates of serious infections. We cannot applaud a movement that categorizes and romanticizes those outcomes while pretending the costs disappear.
Patriotic Americans know that freedom requires responsibility, and public health depends on common-sense culture. Mocking the absurd labels of the empowerment crowd is not enough; conservatives must offer a vision that restores personal responsibility, protects children, and ensures our healthcare system is not overrun by preventable crises. Call out the fashionable slogans, yes, but also roll up your sleeves and demand real solutions that save lives instead of sanctifying harm.
