The other day, I was reminded that few working-stiff conservatives have the luxury, as I do, of working for an organization that encourages conservativism. Instead, most of them, chained by mortgages and their family’s needs, work in angry silence at corporations that offend their values. The only people who really have the luxury of free speech are the very rich, but even they are cowed by the fear of being socially ostracized and abused in the media. For a long time, J.K. Rowley has been the only really rich person pushing back against gender madness. Now, though, Mike Grondahl, who co-founded Planet Fitness, is speaking out, too.
Grondahl and his brother, Marc, started a franchise in 1992 which, in 2002, they renamed “Planet Fitness.” The company’s goal was to create non-intimidating fitness clubs for people who wanted to start exercising or who exercised only intermittently. It was a very user-friendly place, and the business model worked. By 2023, Planet Fitness had almost 2,400 locations worldwide and was bringing in more than $900 million annually in revenue.
In 2012, a Marin County-based private equity company, TSG Consumer Partners, invested in Planet Fitness. According to Grondahl, at the same time TSG invested in Planet Fitness, he learned that Richard Moore, Planet Fitness’s General Counsel and Chief Administrative Officer, was a self-admitted homosexual pedophile. When Grondahl told TSG about this, TSG fired…Grondahl. Indeed, says Grondahl, after he left the company, it became a haven for sexual predators.
Within two years of Grondahl’s departure, the new management opened up its women’s locker rooms to mentally ill or opportunistic men claiming to be women. The company was so proud of its new policy that it built an advertising campaign around it:
Although the locker room policy is 9 years old, as long as so-called transgenderism was a relative backwater of the Democrat party, nobody paid too much attention. However, with transgenderism having exploded in America, especially in America’s schools and medical centers, people have taken notice.
That's why, when a woman protested a man in the women’s locker room, and Planet Fitness responded by canceling her membership, the pushback was instantaneous. Suddenly, Planet Fitness got the Bud Light treatment and, in a week, lost $400 million in market value. LGBTQ Nation contends, however, that we’re seeing a seasonal decline in Planet Fitness profits and that it will soon return to its normal profitability. Time will tell.
What’s clear from the LGBTQ Nation article, though, is that Planet Fitness is an incredibly LGBTQ+-friendly place, going so far as to acknowledge that the outlet does indeed work closely with an organization that gets pro-LGBTQ+ books in school. It differs from Libs of TikTok only in claiming that bringing sex books to children isn’t “grooming.”
It turns out that Mike Grondahl isn’t happy with the direction the judgment-free company he founded has taken. After all, when he came up with the “judgment-free” concept, he was talking about not being bullied for being unfamiliar with gyms or for wanting workouts to be affordable and casual without a focus on bulging muscles. He never intended to create a place that celebrates sexually abnormal behavior as part of its “judgment-free” appeal.
And how do we know this? Well, because he’s speaking out and because he changed the “about” description on his Twitter home page:
You find the interview fascinating, so please take a few minutes to listen.
Grondahl’s stance reminds us that we need more courageous millionaires and billionaires to speak out. Working people do not have the financial luxury of free speech. Sure, it’s their constitutional right, but when you have a family that’s dependent on you and a job that requires you to keep your mouth shut, it’s the rare person who can make the choice to speak freely about the madness sweeping America, especially corporate America.
Image: X screen grab.