A devastatingly sad new poll came out saying that one-quarter of young men ages 18-34 report feeling lonely, compared to only 18% of women having the same feeling. I’m not at all surprised. Young men live in a world in which they’re demeaned as toxic and their natural instincts—competitiveness and pushing themselves to the edge—are buried under a nanny state sensibility. Men have retreated to darkened rooms where they stare at computer screens to play in mock military competitions that they know are ultimately meaningless.
What men need is to be challenged, and they need lives filled with purpose. It’s true that over the centuries, many jobs have been unchallenging, but life’s challenges were still there: To feed oneself and to grow up, get married, and support a family. Nowadays, though, young men don’t even have that. Without their innate emotional needs being filled, it’s no wonder that young men are depressed.
However, there is one last bastion of unashamed manliness in America—or there was up until Obama and then Biden got a’hold of it. Of course, I mean the military.
The military is truly where young men can test their mettle. And it’s true that some will be horribly damaged by that test and, every parent’s nightmare, some may never come home. Nevertheless, pushing themselves is young men’s natural heritage.
The military also offers something increasingly rare in modern society, when young men live lonely lives in darkened basements, bedrooms, and cubicles: Camaraderie. For my dad, who served in the RAF, WWII was the best of times and the worst of times. It was the worst of times because he saw battle in places such as Crete and El Alamein. It was the best of times, because he was joined with other men doing something that mattered. He was never more alive, and his life never more profoundly realized, than during that horrible war.
But the leftists in the Pentagon, the ones planted by Obama and fertilized by Biden (you can take that statement however you wish), decided that the military wasn’t about young men pushing themselves so that they could be the world’s most lethal fighting force, ready to defend the homeland at a moment’s notice. Instead, as Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, so memorably said, the point of his role as one of America’s most important military leaders was to “understand white rage.” Under his aegis, the troops would no longer bleed red, white, and blue, regardless of skin color; instead, they would be encouraged to focus obsessively on race and victimhood.
The military was also going to be about pushing women into combat roles, a singularly bad idea. It’s true that women have always gone into combat, but from Boudica to the women of the French Resistance to Druze and Israeli women, they have only done so when the war has come to their doorsteps. Sending women off to battle—people who are weaker than men and vulnerable to rape, and who should be naturally nurturing and kept alive to rebirth a nation when most of the men are gone—is an appalling idea.
Lastly, the military was going to be a place that allowed so-called “transgender” people to realize their identity potential by serving the nation—and, not so coincidentally, getting access to a lifetime of free medical care, estimated at around $1 million for the most mentally ill of them, those who opted for mutilating surgery and toxic chemicals.
This was going to be the new military. Its purpose, as Biden outlined when he last spoke at West Point, would be to fight other countries’ wars. The only real enemy for the new military was the always omnipresent, but invariably nebulous, “climate change.”
Both Donald Trump and his Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, have said that the military is being returned to its original purpose—national defense—a purpose that aligns nicely with men’s instincts to be aggressive, protective, and competitive, and to push themselves to their limits in a meaningful life alongside their comrades.
And that is exactly the point of a new ad the Pentagon released during NASCAR. It doesn’t promote a specific branch of the military, nor does it even end by reminding men to enlist. It simply tells men that the new military is a place where masculinity isn’t toxic. It’s a foot-stomping, cheering, chills-down-the-spine video, with both Trump and Hegseth being heard reminding people what our military is (a fighting machine) and what it is not (a social justice mission):
???? JUST IN: This Pete Hegseth and President Trump-featured U.S. Military ad has just aired during the Coca-Cola 600 race today.
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 26, 2025
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"No more distraction. No more electric tanks, no more gender confusion, no more climate change worship. We are laser focused on our mission of… pic.twitter.com/vQ3QwLSolk
Image: X screen grab.