Excerpt: "CULTS OF THE CULTURE WARS: “POLITICS AND THE CONSPIRACY OF VACCINES (PART 2)” (A.Glass 2021)

 

"...As the populism and right wing libertarian aspects gathered momentum into the 1920s, so did the backlash towards what the conservative mindset of American values feared, that government sanctioned socialism is threatening the constitution and the freedom of choice through vaccinations. As faddish diets were pushed and the beginning of the fitness industry developed, Macfadden showed, despite his eccentricity, a more authoritarian perspective to health and fitness, going as far as offering a decree “Weakness is a crime, don’t be a criminal!”  Alluding to his believe that America has become saddled down with laziness, poor diets and an over reliance of the medical profession.   With Fascism gaining traction in Italy,  Macfadden’s might-is-right rhetoric and his confidence trickery was able to captivate not just the likes of celebrates at the time, but even the American President Theodore Roosevelt.  Yet, it was in 1931 that the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini who showed a keen interest in Macfadden’s exercise regimes, conjoined with Mussolin in a vis versa appreciation of Fascist ideology to which Macfadden stated after meeting with the Italian dictator, “There are times when I believe that America needs a Mussolini, as never before.”  Macfadden eccentricity to the alternative health practices stayed with him until the end of his life, seen in his later years as more of a clown like figure, his initial imprint on how to spread misinformation through mass media, which included the skepticism of medical sciences and New Age beliefs in faddish diets and exercise that will solve societies ills resonated well after he died in 1955, after refusing medical treatment for a digestive disorder.

However this flirtation with extreme ideology of the right wing, particularly from Macfadden’s cult like fixture as an alternative health advocate, never the less creating a foundation of quackery that was, by its foundation anti-science and beliefs in a conspiracy based platform.    Took on a bizarre turn when the predecessor, pulp fiction writer to Macfadden’s magazine empire Edward Longstreet Bodin, became the President of Bernarr MacFadden foundation in the late 1950s, maintain the anti science aspects and faddish diets, yet Longstreet Bodin went further exasperating the right wing conspiracy theories under his tenure, from claims that death of Franklin Roosevelt, who was friends with Macfadden, was due to psychic intervention to prevent America’s government from being taken over by Communists.  This oddity of conspiratorial and the mistrust with Government sanctioned medical sciences continued on throughout the 20th Century as it melded onto the more extreme of libertarian beliefs."

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Full articles: "CULTS OF THE CULTURE WARS: “POLITICS AND THE CONSPIRACY OF VACCINES”   (A.Glass 2021)