Perhaps The Right Way To Engage The Left...

     ...is not to engage at all.

     Note the switcheroo exercised in this piece:

     Meher Ahmad: I'm Meher Ahmad, an editor in the New York Times Opinion section. There's been a resurgence in explicit "be thin" messaging and culture. With the Ozempic boom, we see the body-shaming of actresses like Sydney Sweeney and red carpets that were already filled with thin actresses becoming even thinner.
     On the right, there's been a focus on body size that's been bundled up not just with health and wellness but with religion, morals and politics. And so when everything is political and we're more divided than ever, should the size and shape of our bodies be any different? I'm here today with the Opinion writer Jessica Grose to understand why the right is obsessed with thinness and why that message is winning over women.
     Jess, I want to start first by asking you what the messaging on diet and thinness coming from the Christian influencer spaces is -- what do you see there?
     Jessica Grose: So it's really encapsulated by some things that the wellness influencer Alex Clark said at the Young Women's Leadership Summit.

     Audio clip of Alex Clark: Look around this room, let's just be honest. It's never been hotter to be a conservative. You are in this room and you are witnessing a cultural revolution. We've got the girls who lift weights, eat clean, have their hormones balanced, have their lives together. Less Prozac, more protein. Less burnout, more babies. Less feminism, more femininity.
     Grose: And by contrast, liberals are TikTok activists with five shades of autism, panic attacks and a ring light. So it's really defining what is "normal" as a very narrow ideal of womanhood. It's all tied up with not just body size, but also behavior.

     Ahmad: Even in that clip, Alex Clark is sort of describing a foil to what she describes as a liberal body type. How much of this is a reaction to a left version of a body type, and what even is that?
     Grose: So I think it's a reaction to the body positivity movement, which I would say peaked about 10 years ago. It was the idea that weight is not tied directly to health and that you can be healthy and not rail-thin.

     Grose is conflating health with thinness. She attempts to reframe the “body positivity” movement as a reaction to that, when in truth it was an attempt to defend obesity as perfectly consistent with health.

     Outrageous. And of course, since the Times is a left-wing organ, Grose also strives to politicize the pro-health, pro-femininity movement in progress, such that left-leaning readers will be inclined to shy away from it without further consideration. She might as well have shouted “Don’t strive to be healthy and attractive! It will make you a bad person!”

     The Left’s whole appeal to its members is its assertion of moral and intellectual superiority. It’s the most blatant of circular propositions: “If you’re smart and moral, be one of us! Then you can tell others, ‘I’m smarter and more moral than you, because I’m a leftist and you’re not.’”

     Of course, all this is “previous work.” Thomas Sowell has covered it extensively. Nevertheless, these points must be made repeatedly for a simple reason: The Left is relentless. It never ceases to campaign. It’s especially effective upon the young and as-yet-unformed, to whom the Siren song of superiority is singularly seductive. Its subtext is “Politics uber Alles,” a barb on the hook that seeks to exclude any alternative approach to living and relating to others ab initio.

     Something for my Gentle Readers to reflect on when they’re more awake.