Strength as Truth: Self-Improvement and Ideological Formation in Far-Right Physical Culture

Far-right digital ecosystems increasingly embed ideology within narratives of self-improvement, transforming physical culture into a key site for producing and legitimising their politics of truth. This paper examines how transnational communities centred on combat sports, strength training, and masculinist lifestyle practices mobilise self-improvement in physical, intellectual, and spiritual realms, as an ideological conduit within European far-right networks. Drawing on a netnographic analysis far-right digital communities centred around fitness subcultures, I show how these groups cultivate an aspirational masculine archetype that blends bodily discipline with curated reading, philosophical reflection, and pseudo-scientific authority. In these spaces, self-improvement is framed as a moral, civilisational, and political obligation. Through this framework, ideological content is repackaged as health, discipline, or self-optimisation advice. Digital affordances facilitate the convergence of far-right intellectuals, alternative media outlets, lifestyle influencers, and fitness-oriented subcultures, creating synergies that embed racism, exclusion, or conspiracy thinking within regimes of training and self-care. Combat sports, bodybuilding and physical culture become mechanisms for constructing epistemic authority, the disciplined body is positioned as proof of ideological truth, while the pursuit of strength is reframed as a pathway to clarity, authenticity, and political awakening. This paper argues that far-right physical culture networks function as important nodes in Europe’s digital metapolitical landscape. By transforming self-improvement into a mode of ideological transmission, these communities blend aesthetics, discipline, and pseudo-knowledge to produce a durable and transnational far-right politics of truth.