Why Team Trump Talking About ‘Lethalitymaxxing’ Should Alarm You: Trendy internet slang meets eugenics, the manosphere, and neo-Nazis. (Ilyse Hogue, Feb 20, 2026, The Bulwark)
The fitness-to-radicalization pipeline works like this: A young man who feels defeated by external factors finds power and community in spaces within his control. One of those places is the gym, where self-discipline is celebrated.1 This is not inherently sinister. The desire to be strong, healthy, and competent is deeply human. But if you go deeper into some parts of fitness culture, the message shifts almost imperceptibly from your value is determined by your body to some bodies—and therefore some people—are simply worth more than others.
RFK Jr.’s ‘concern’ about vaccines was never purely about what was in the syringe. He was always alluding to a logic familiar to those within eugenics movements: that strong, healthy, naturally resilient bodies don’t need pharmaceutical intervention, and that those who do are, in some fundamental sense, weaker. It’s no coincidence that Kennedy is now secretary of health and human services, and that Make America Healthy Again is the mainstream-laundered expression of that same ideology, only operating from inside the federal government.
Now, the Department of Defense is getting in on the game. The term “maxxing” comes from the looksmaxxing subculture—a bleak corner of the internet rooted in incel forums and built around the obsessive desire to optimize physical appearance. Where red-pill fitness and MAHA offered self-improvement as aspiration, looksmaxxing suggests natural remedy is not sufficient. Here, the ideology is even more explicit: Human worth is a function not just of genetics but how you can build on it. Your jawline, your clavicle width, your bone structure—these aren’t just aesthetic qualities. They are destiny. To improve them is to improve your social rank, your sexual prospects, and ultimately your value as a human being.
The “looksmaxxing” world grades men on a scale that ranges from “subhuman” to “Chad.” They trade techniques ranging from aggressive fitness regimens to hormone injections to “bonesmashing,” i.e., hitting your own face with a hammer to reshape your cheekbones. The movement’s newest star, a 20-year-old known as Clavicular, has injected his teenage girlfriend with fat-dissolving acid on livestream to reshape her jaw. He says he typically earns between $80,000 and $100,000 a month from streaming.
The looksmaxxing world is, as the Atlantic recently described it, “narcissistic, cruel, racist, shot through with social Darwinism, and proudly anti-compassion.”