Health, fitness and masculinity: Three things Democrats find concerning.
More than a century ago, Republican President Teddy Roosevelt encouraged Americans to lead “the strenuous life,” and TR certainly lived his credo to the max — riding, roping, ranching, boxing and leading his troops up San Juan Hill.
Now Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and other members of President Donald Trump’s administration have taken up Teddy’s challenge.
Last week Kennedy teamed with Kid Rock to demonstrate the sauna-and-cold-plunge approach to health in a video that’s racked up close to 14 million views on X. Their message: “Get active and eat real food.”
Hegseth regularly works out with the troops and shares clips of his weight-room routines.
Even FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has gotten into the act, climbing literally above the clouds to the top of a 2,000-foot antenna tower to replace its light bulbs with LEDs.
Pretty straightforward messaging: RFK wants Americans to eat healthy, whole foods, not ultraprocessed junk, and to exercise more and spend less time on screens.
Hegseth wants our troops to be fit, competent and lethal, and thinks our soldiers should train their bodies and minds for their job — war — rather than sit through interminable DEI seminars whose only potential lethality lies in boring people to death.
Carr climbed the tower to underscore how our 21st-century communications infrastructure depends on old-fashioned blue-collar workers, doing tough outdoor jobs that can’t be performed by geeks in basements or AI-powered robots.
All of them think American society benefits from an infusion of manly energy.
These messages would have seemed unexceptionable back in Teddy’s day.
Exercise, healthy diet and strenuous outdoor work all were seen as vital parts of maintaining our civilization.
Nowadays it’s . . . contested.
Why? Because anything coded as “masculine” is regarded — by the left, anyway — as problematic.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently bemoaned how Republicans are politically “radicalizing” young men by pushing them toward masculinity, “appealing to the basest and worst parts of human nature.”
The horror!
One seldom hears the word “masculinity” used by leftists, or by the mainstream media, without the accompanying modifier “toxic.”
And this goes back years: When freshly elected President Barack Obama tried to create jobs for hard-hit factory and construction workers in his 2009 emergency stimulus program, feminists’ vociferous objections forced him to divert $300 billion to predominantly female social-services jobs instead.
Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden openly expressed their disdain for laid-off coal miners and steelworkers, boasting about putting them “out of business” to boost green-energy goals.
Now, with Trump’s administration working to turn all that around, no surprise they’re accused of running a cult of masculinity.
Well, it’s certainly a sharp contrast to Biden administration figures like “Rachel” Levine, the distinctly unhealthy-looking transwoman who headed the Public Health Service.
Or such clearly non-combat-ready figures as former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, who looked as if the greatest threat they’d pose to our enemies would have been sitting on them.
And who can forget cross-dressing federal official Sam Brinton, the nuclear-fuel administrator famous for stealing women’s clothing from suitcases he purloined from airport baggage carousels?
Say what you will about the previous administration, whatever may have been toxic about its members, it sure wasn’t masculinity.
Democrats know they have a manliness problem: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, absurd as it seems, was chosen to bring a dose of classic midwestern white-male energy to the Kamala Harris ticket.
Trotted out in hunting togs that he’d clearly never worn before and fumbling ineptly with a shotgun at a bird-hunting photo op, he didn’t convince in the role.
Democrats want someone who, they hope, will fool traditionally masculine men into voting for them.
Their task is made more difficult by the fact that they don’t know any of those.
But elsewhere, traditional masculinity seems to be making a comeback.
The success of Hegseth’s War Department in wrecking Iran’s nuclear weapons program, then snatching Nicolás Maduro from the center of Venezuela’s largest military base — both operations pulled off without a single US casualty — has restored the élan of America’s armed forces.
Food companies are racing to pull dyes, seed oils and sweeteners from their products at RFK’s behest.
And the thrilling performance of this year’s US Olympic men’s hockey team, which on Sunday snagged its first gold medal since 1980’s “Miracle on Ice” victory over the Soviet Union, was another big, brash win for American men.
The 1980 triumph marked a turning point in the US-Soviet balance; this weekend’s victory may mark a turnaround in another kind of rivalry.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
