When Politics Stumbles Into the Weight Room – Utah’s Gym as a Preview of What the AfD Would Wish For

Someone in Clinton, Utah, just wants to work out, escape the daily noise for a moment, and suddenly there is a guy standing there who looks as if he left his mind at the coat check. A MAGA supporter, holding his phone like a sacred relic, opens an app he proudly calls “Call ICE” – and declares in the tone of a self-appointed deputy sheriff that he will now “report who here is legal and who isn’t.” He is also wearing a sweatshirt with the words “Alligator Alcatraz,” as if he had just wandered out of the merchandise shop of an authoritarianism festival. The Nazi-style setting would only have needed a slick FOX segment in which Kristi Noem indulges her deportation urges.

FOX News on December 9 on TikTok acts as if Kristi Noem personally checks off deportation lists over her morning coffee. In her clips it sounds as if, since Trump’s return, 2.2 million people have voluntarily decided to say “thanks for nothing” and leave the country. By the end of the year another 650,000 are supposed to follow – according to Noem a “success,” according to any thinking person a nightmare in governmental form. The whole thing is marketed like a fitness program for the state: fewer people, better economy. And TikTok is the perfect place for it – fast clips, simple enemies, young audience, maximum manipulation … but on we go.

The man he is yelling at calmly says, “I am a U.S. citizen.” Normally that would be the moment when some shred of common sense appears. But not here. The scene continues as if someone needed to prove how quickly an ordinary room can turn into a testing ground for isolation fantasies. People actually wanted to lift weights – instead someone lifts his own insignificance into the stratosphere. This incident shows how close madness now sits at the doorstep of everyday life. There is no need for political grand events, no demonstrations, no party conventions. A gym is enough, an app is enough, one person with beliefs from the mothball box of history is enough. And suddenly you find yourself in a moment that makes clear why parties like the AfD should only be allowed to touch the reins of government: anyone who celebrates this kind of thinking will eventually import these absurdities into their own neighborhood.

In this gym in Utah, normal life disintegrates within seconds: a dispute over workout equipment turns into a small theater piece about delusion, grandiosity, and the urge to turn fellow human beings into objects. A place where people actually want to take a breath becomes a mirror of a development in which some are just waiting to turn the everyday into a border checkpoint.

This scene is not an exception. It is a preview. It shows how quickly the tone of public spaces can shift when political ideas that should never be in the hands of adults are suddenly carried into everyday life. And it reminds us that collapse does not begin with big events, but in quiet moments, between dumbbells, sweat, and a man who believes his smartphone determines citizenship.