Bill Maher says woke ‘fat acceptance’ is now a national security issue because obesity is driving down Pentagon recruitment and slams social justice warriors’ ‘Orwellian’ obsession with body positivity
- Talk show host Bill Maher railed against the fat acceptance movement in his closing monologue Friday night
- He pointed to a 2019 New York Times article showing that about one-third of potential recruits to the US military are too overweight
- Maher called obesity a ‘national security issue’ as he described what he referred to as an ‘Orwellian’ fat acceptance movement
- Maher noted that obesity leads to increased health issues and said enabling and encouraging overeating is dangerous
Talk show host Bill Maher has railed against the fat acceptance movement — which he said has become a national security issue as obesity rates drive down military recruitment.
‘It’s literally a national security issue now,’ Maher said in the closing monologue of his show Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night. ‘Military recruitment is down by the most since the end of the draft, because mainly 17 to 24 year olds are too fat to fight.’
He cited a 2019 New York Times article showing that about one-third of potential recruits are too overweight to enlist in the US military.
The article also noted that obesity rates in the Army, Air Force and Marine Corps have doubled in less than a decade, while in the Navy, obesity rates have risen six-fold since 2011.
Those rates could negatively impact ‘physical performance and military readiness,’ the authors of the Defense Department’s Medical Surveillance Monthly Report wrote at the time.
‘At some point, acceptance becomes enabling,’ Maher said of what he describes as the ‘Orwellian’ fat acceptance movement.
‘And if you’re in any way participating in this joyful celebration of gluttony that goes on now, you have blood on your hands, full stop.’
‘You can make believe you’re fighting some great social justice battle for a besieged minority, but what you’re really doing is enabling addicts — which I thought we decided was bad.’
Maher began his closing monologue on Friday by saying: ‘Everybody should be allowed to let themselves go a couple of times a year — like now, the dog days of summer. School’s out, rules out.
‘And the holidays, that’s the other “OK I’ll let myself go” time of year, and who can blame us — it’s the end of the year, structured around feast days.’
But, he said: ‘There’s a disturbing trend going on in America these days: rewriting science to fit ideology or just to fit what you want reality to be.
‘We’ve gone from fat acceptance to fat acceptance to fat celebration,’ Maher continued. ‘This is new — to view letting yourself go as a point of pride.
‘Now the term body positivity is used to mean “I’m perfect the way I am because I’m me,”‘ he said, adding: ‘It’s Orwellian how often positivity is used to describe what’s not healthy.’
Maher then went on to explain that the notion of ‘healthy at any weight is an unchallenged lie that people tell themselves [so] they can go on eating whatever they want.
‘Obesity is horrible for the immune system,’ he said, noting that it could lead to increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and stroke.
And during the coronavirus pandemic, many studies found that those with the greatest risk of dying from the novel virus were those who were obese.
