Best Of 2025: How The Left Hijacked Masculinity - And Why That’s Bad For Society

Editor’s note: This week, we’re reprinting some of our best stories from the past year. In this piece, originally published in June, Gates Garcia offers a reminder that true masculinity is not toxic. * * * The Left’s successful rebranding of masculinity as “toxic” didn’t just rewrite a dictionary entry - it rewired the cultural DNA that once produced great men. In 2018, the American Psychological Association updated its Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men, effectively declaring stoicism, risk-taking, and competitiveness - the building blocks of masculine virtue - “ psychologically harmful .” Within months, Gillette aired its infamous “ We Believe “ commercial, scolding ordinary dads at backyard barbecues while implying every son harbored a bully within. Seemingly overnight, “toxic” became the default adjective attached to manhood. But this cultural ambush was decades in the making. It has its roots in second-wave feminism, which in the 1960s began reframing male strength as patriarchal oppression. By the ’80s and ’90s, freshly-minted gender studies departments were churning out theses that branded healthy male assertiveness “hegemonic.” On television, the upstanding patriarch of “Father Knows Best” gave way to the beer-bellied, weak-willed Al Bundy. When clickbait culture arrived in the 2000s, every societal ill - from climate change to mass shootings - found a convenient culprit in “ traditional masculinity .” C.S. Lewis foresaw the danger. “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise,” he warned in The Abolition of Man - adding the punchline our era can’t escape: “We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” The cultural costs are no laughing matter. Today, 17.6 million American children - nearly one in four - grow up without a father in the home . Their odds of suffering are grim: Barack Obama, citing Census data in 2008, noted that such children are “five times more likely to live in poverty... nine times more likely to drop out of school, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.” If only he did something about it. Christmas Sale - Get 40% off New DailyWire+ Annual Memberships Almost 60 years earlier, Daniel Patrick Moynihan sounded the same alarm , saying, “the deterioration of the fabric of ... society is the deterioration of the ... family.” At the time, he was dismissed as an alarmist. The empty chairs around dinner tables prove him prophetic. Classrooms reveal the next domino. The same ideology that pathologized masculine energy has left boys academically stranded. On the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress , 8th-grade girls outread boys by nine scale points, continuing an unbroken gender gap that dates to 1992. Overall scores for both sexes hit the lowest level on record. College quads tell the same tale. Men have fallen to just 44% of American undergraduates , a gap that’s widened every year since 2011. UNESCO, surveying 140 countries, now calls boys’ lagging literacy a “ growing global crisis .” Christina Hoff Sommers captures the cultural headwind:...

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