Love him or hate him, HBO’s “Real Time” host Bill Maher made some very poignant observations on his Friday show that he sees as having a major impact on U.S. national security.
Namely, the country’s ‘woke’ cultural acceptance of obesity.
During his closing monologue, Maher noted that our fat nation is “literally a national security issue now.”
“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 continued, citing a 2019 New York Times article noting then that roughly one-third of young people in that age group are too obese for qualify for military service.
The Daily Mail added:
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 regarding what he called 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,” he added. “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 closer this way: “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.
However: “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. This is new — to view letting yourself go as a point of pride,” he said.
“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 explained that the idea of being “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 went on to note that obesity is responsible for several chronic health problems such as heart disease, diabetes, and stokes. And, during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, researchers noted early on that obese patients tended to die more often.
In closing, Maher noted, “Somehow 50 years ago, this country looked entirely different. You don’t think it was a struggle for them? You think cake wasn’t delicious in 1969?”
“And that’s the saddest part, because we can do this, I think, but by lying about it and making excuses, psychologically it’s telling ourselves that letting ourselves go is the best we can do,” he said. “And I got to believe that as Americans we can still do better than that.”
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