Jillian Michaels described evolving her political views as like Neo in “The Matrix.”
“Honestly, it felt a bit like Neo in the Matrix at first because I really did think that, you know, when you’re on the left, like you’re the empathetic one, you’re the good guy, you’re the one that cares about people,” the 52-year-old fitness icon told Dave Rubin on his “The Rubin Report” podcast.
Part of her evolution involved marrying a conservative “who let me know that that wasn’t the case,” she added. “We had very many fights early on in our relationship.”
After that, she said she watched the “world invert. Up was down. Right was left. Literally. And being obese became beautiful and healthy and then COVID happened and that was another crazy moment for me. And then I started learning that all the news I had been ingesting was a lie. COVID did not come from a bat in a wet market and it just — Russia, Russia, Russia wasn’t real.”
Michaels admitted that she worries about political issues “all the time. Mostly selfishly because I have two kids. And I was talking to my son today. He’s only 14 but he’s very political. I think about the kids and the world that we’re leaving them, and I know it sounds cliché, but I was telling my son if this happens with Nithya Raman and Becerra. That’s it.”
Michaels was referring to Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, a Democratic Socialist and former head of U.S. Health and Human Services under former President Biden Javier Becerra. Raman is running for mayor of L.A. and Becerra is running for California governor.
She said she asked where they wanted to go to college, saying she wanted to buy them a house there now.
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“I want to get the kids set up. I worry about them. I worry about them making a living in this environment,” she admitted. “I worry about the political climate. I worry about all of it all the time actually. It’s terrible.”
Michaels and her wife moved their family from California to Wyoming in 2021.
Later in the podcast, she mused on liberals believing the “right is evil.”
“All the news they watch tells them that,” she said. “Everything they read, everything they see is ‘We are fascists, we are racists, we are Nazis. ‘Oh, you want voter ID? Because you’re racist.’”
She said when people hear that enough, it’s hard to get across that “this is totally corrupted. They look at you like you’ve got a tinfoil hat on, and you went all the way down the rabbit hole.”
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She said what she thinks “converts a person on the left, is when it comes for them … It comes for everyone. Let’s just hope it’s not too late.”
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And while she said it’s important to be aware of what’s going on in the world, “everything is a balance. Because if you don’t know what’s going on — I think Jesse Kelly said this to me — if you’re paying attention, you’re destined to be ruled over by idiots and monsters. And that’s unacceptable.”
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But she said simultaneously, “That can’t just be your media diet. And sometimes I will forcibly change my algorithm and watch people do incredible deeds for each other.”
She added that she’s started to add people from different walks of life helping each other to the end of her podcast “Keeping it Real.”
“And it reminds you that the vast majority of us are good people,” she said. “We just have different ideas of how to achieve similar goals. And we’ve got to keep seeing the humanity in each other, and forcing, literally forcing the algorithm to show us those things instead of just ‘Look at this dumba—on the left and look at this racist on the right. That’s engineered. Fight back against that algorithm. It is designed to engage us in a horizontal fight, so we never look up and fight the real enemy.”
She added, jokingly, “which is Gavin Newsom, by the way, in case you were wondering.”
