Musk, Rogan Mock MSNBC Writer’s ‘Far Right’ Exercise Claim

Tech billionaire Elon Musk and podcaster Joe Rogan skewered an MSNBC opinion columnist’s claim from March 2022 that exercise is used by the “far right” as a recruiting tool.

Retweeted by MSNBC on Monday, the article by professor Cynthia Miller-Idriss of American University in Washington, D.C., claimed that the “far right has taken advantage of pandemic at-home fitness trends to expand its decade-plus radicalization of physical mixed martial arts (MMA) and combat sports spaces.”

According to Miller-Idriss, new recruits to the far-right movement are “lured with health tips and strategies for positive physical changes.” She claims that “researchers” say that the recruits are then invited to private chat groups.

She also referenced Adolf Hitler and said that his book “Mein Kampf” revealed a fixation on “boxing and jujitsu, believing they could help him create an army of millions whose aggressive spirit and impeccably trained bodies, combined with ‘fanatical love of the fatherland,’ would do more for the German nation than any ‘mediocre’ tactical weapons training.”

MSNBC’s tweet quickly went viral, amassing more than 34 million views, and unleashed a blitzkrieg of mockery on Twitter, with Musk and Rogan joining in.

“Being healthy is ‘far right.’ Holy f***,” Rogan, who is a UFC commentator and fitness buff, tweeted.

Twitter owner Musk replied to Rogan’s tweet, writing, “Parody & reality are becoming indistinguishable.”

“MSNBC thinks you’re a nazi if you work out lmaooo,” Musk stated in another tweet.

Other Twitter users seemed equally mystified by the supposed link between physical fitness and the far right, including one who said “MSNBC fears fitness, home schooling, parental rights, and religious liberty,” and another who said it “seems like an insane conspiracy theory to me, but I’m probably just ‘far-right’ too.”

This isn’t the professor’s first controversial column.

In a February article, Miller-Idriss claimed that some homeschooling could be “a strategy that has long been key to white supremacist groups: indoctrinating their children through curriculum designed to teach white supremacy, while keeping them out of what they see as the brainwashing multiculturalism of public schools.”

“Homeschooling as a strategy to indoctrinate children into white supremacy is nothing new,” she wrote.

“There’s a reason why Germany, some 80 years after the Holocaust, does not allow homeschooling: because they see the state as having an obligation to teach democratic citizenship and socialize children in ways that lead to the rejection of antisemitic and extremist ideologies,” she added.