FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—As the Department of Health and Human Services continues to commemorate Men’s Health Month, the department’s assistant secretary for health told the Daily Signal that President Donald Trump’s administration is focused on revitalizing fatherhood for the benefit of the nation.

“We want to make a positive impact on men’s health during this administration,” Adm. Brian Christine told the Daily Signal. “In this administration, men matter.”

Christine’s remarks come as the United States is witnessing a historic decline in men’s suicide rates, obesity, hypertension, and depression, while also seeing a rise in fertility and testosterone levels.

Christine noted that 80% of suicides in this country are committed by men, and that men “have higher levels of substance abuse, depression, and mental health challenges—and use health care and mental-health resources at a far lower rate—than women do.”

“Every day, 100 men take their life in the United States,” he added. “So, it is appropriate to talk about overall men’s health, but it is also appropriate to talk about men’s mental health.”

During President Joe Biden’s administration, suicides among men in 2023 alone reached a record of 39,045, while substance abuse increased and average testosterone levels for men reached a historic low.

The Trump administration has focused on reversing the crisis through things like loosening restrictions on testosterone replacement therapy and other resources for men’s health. The administration has also focused on promoting strong manhood, cleaner diets, removing drugs from American streets, and the nuclear family.

“We’re committed to making America healthy again here at HHS because that’s all part of getting our country healthy again, and getting America great again,” the admiral continued. “I believe we have to have strong men for strong families to make the country strong again. I think it’s all linked together.”

Christine hopes that by raising awareness about men’s struggles and the positive impact men have in society, a rebound will continue.

“We believe that engaging the public, talking about these things, raising awareness for these things, is important,” he said. “But also, part of our message is not simply to raise awareness.

“It’s that, but also to say, listen, men … if you are having mental health challenges, do reach out to a practitioner. Do seek care. Don’t isolate yourself, because men tend to do that.”

Christine added that the administration also wants to explore why rates of obesity, hypertension, substance abuse, cardiovascular disease, and fertility issues are higher among men.

“We have to talk about it,” he said. “We see higher suicide rates in men … who have been our war fighters. So, it’s a real tragedy.”

Christine concluded by wishing America’s fathers a happy Father’s Day.

“We want to wish a really happy Father’s Day to all the fathers out there. Fathers have such an incredible impact on making the country great and strong again,” he said. “A strong, loving, committed, engaged father can do so much for their children, for their wives.”

The sudden death of the historian Gordon Wood, just weeks before the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, is one more mark of the closure of a golden age of the historiography of the revolutionary era.

It’s an occasion to reflect on the uniqueness, indeed the idiosyncrasy, of the emergence of the primacy of this United States among the nations of the world.

As the historian Walter McDougall has pointed out, a catalog of world civilizations in the year 1600 looks, with one exception, much like the world today. There is a prosperous and populous China at one end of Eurasia and a prosperous and populous Europe at the other. There is a bustling Indian subcontinent and a vast and little-visited Africa, and large Euro-indigenous cultures in Mexico and South America.

The great difference is the emergence, from what was a sparsely populated and isolated realm, of the great world power of the United States of America.

How this nation emerged, and how it was formed and unified in the pivotal final years of the 18th century, has come to be understood anew thanks to a generation of historians who began their work in the postwar decades more than 50 years ago and continued it into their 90s. Among the pioneers were Gordon Wood, who died this week at 92, and his thesis adviser Bernard Bailyn, who died in 2020 at 97.

Before their generation, American historiography often was more about the presumptions of the writers than the makers of history. Early 19th-century historians glorified, even mythologized, the Founding Fathers. The tragic losses of the Civil War prompted Northerners to lament antebellum statesmen’s failure to compromise and Southerners to canonize the champions of the Lost Cause.

Early 20th-century progressives, influenced by Marxist assumptions about economic class warfare, tried to prove that colonists led a revolution against Britain and then wrote a constitution all to protect their wealth against redistribution. Then, in what I have called the “Midcentury Moment” during and after World War II, some historians abjured class warfare and argued that Americans shared a consensus all along.

Bailyn and Wood did something else. They read the patriots’ words more carefully and took their arguments seriously. They studied the numerous pamphlets from the revolutionary 1760s and 1770s, as well as the debates over the new republic in the 1780s and 1790s.

They understood that Americans, imbued with British ideas of freedom but blessedly distant from British authorities, could write with more frankness than past political theorists under the close supervision of monarch and church, and with no motive to conceal motivation from the then nonexistent Marxian or Freudian theorists. They did the real work of history: understanding a society familiar in some respects but strange in so many others.

“The approach of many historians to the American Revolution, it seemed, had too often been deeply ahistorical; there had been too little sense of the irretrievability and differentness of the eighteenth-century world,” Wood wrote in 1969 in his preface to “The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787.” “When I began to compare the debates surrounding the Revolutionary constitution-making of 1776 with those surrounding the formation of the Constitution of 1787, I realized that a fundamental transformation of political culture had taken place.”

This is a history of unanticipated events changing minds. As Bailyn wrote in 1967 in “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” “The details of this new world were not as yet clearly depicted; but faith ran high that a better world than any that had ever been known could be built where authority was distrusted and held in constant scrutiny; where the status of men flowed from their achievements and from their personal qualities, not from distinctions ascribed to them at birth; and where the use of power over the lives of men was jealously guarded and severely restricted.”

Wood’s central thesis in his 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Radicalism of the American Revolution” was that the revolution declared in 1776 had transformed the character of the American people. They realized that what held them together “could not be the traditional ethnic, religious, and tribal loyalties of the Old World” and instead “found new democratic adhesives in the actual behavior of plain ordinary people—in the everyday desire to make money and pursue happiness in the here and now.”

Writing in National Review last January, Wood celebrated “five significant words that came to define American culture—‘all men are created equal.’” This prompted them to create “numerous learned academies and historical societies,” including “mechanic societies, humane societies, societies for the prevention of pauperism, orphans’ asylums, missionary societies, marine societies, tract societies, Bible societies, temperance associations, Sabbatarian groups, peace societies, societies for the suppression of vice and immorality, societies for the relief of poor widows, societies for the promotion of industry.”

Wood was among the multiple leading historians who criticized The New York Times’s Nikole Hannah-Jones’s argument that 1619, the importation of the first slave in the colonies, was the real founding of America. Instead, he argued it was the revolution that led to the unraveling of slavery.

“Although many modern historians have called the Revolution’s inability to free all the slaves its greatest failure, they have committed the great sin of anachronism by assuming that everyone in the past must have known that slavery was an evil,” he wrote in January. “These historians have not fully appreciated that the Revolution defied a world that for the millennia had taken slavery for granted. It was the Revolution that for the first time in history made slavery a problem, and it led to the first instance of states’ abolishing the practice.”

Wood has been critical as well of the notion, recently mentioned without disapproval by Vice President JD Vance, that those with American ancestors in the Civil War era are somehow more American than those whose ancestors arrived later. Contrary to Europe, “There is no American ethnicity to back up the state,” he said in his November 2025 Irving Kristol lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. “To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something.” Such as “the powerful sense of equality” that “is what makes us one people.”

We are unlikely to hear much more from the last survivors of the two generations of academic and popular historians who made the final third of the 20th century a golden age for the history of the founding. In the universities, most have been replaced by academics with different interests and a more adversarial approach to the nation whose bounty and freedoms make their work possible.

But on the 251st Fourth of July upcoming, and in months and years to come, it should be refreshing to dip into their rich works and gain more knowledge of, and appreciation for, the wondrous deeds of those who came before us and of whom we are the fortunate, if too often the ungrateful, heirs.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

At least 27 people were shot, five of them fatally, Friday into Saturday evening in gun-controlled Chicago, Illinois.

The post Gun-Controlled Chicago: At Least 27 Shot Friday Into Saturday Evening appeared first on Breitbart.

It didn’t matter if it was a scrape or a splinter being extracted, somehow it always ended up with something akin to Windex being applied.  Later in life, the ‘suck it up‘ hardship lessons gained deeper appreciation, Fatherhood training. Today we recognize men, Fathers who have the most consequential role.  The rock, the foundation, the […]

The post Windex Was Never an Antibiotic – Happy Father’s Day appeared first on The Last Refuge.

June 18, 2026, marks 15 years since my father died, and as Father’s Day approaches, I find myself thinking less about the day he left us and more about what he left behind.

My father, Dennis Joseph Gerber Sr., was known by many as Big Dennis. I was Little Dennis. From the time I was old enough to understand what it meant to share a name, I loved it. I loved being his son, and I loved carrying a name that reminded me every day who I hoped to become.

Like many boys, I watched my father closely. I paid attention to how he treated people, how he carried himself, how he approached challenges, and how he showed up for those around him. Even today, my signature is little more than a poor imitation of his. I remember watching him intently as he signed documents, studying his signature and wondering how I could make mine look like his when I got older. Looking back, that seems fitting because much of who I am was learned the same way.

I was adopted as an infant, but I never spent a single moment wondering whether I belonged. My father never made me feel adopted, he made me feel chosen. He would often say, “God made you for us.” As an adopted son, those words carried special weight, but he was also expressing something deeper about how he viewed his life. He believed that God had entrusted him with responsibilities as a husband, father, neighbor, and citizen, and he embraced those responsibilities wholeheartedly. He never approached fatherhood as a burden. He approached it as a calling.

Perhaps that is one reason why St. Joseph has always occupied such an important place in my life. My father and I shared the middle name Joseph, but more importantly, we shared a devotion to the saint who taught both of us something essential about fatherhood.

When I think about St. Joseph today, I am struck by the quiet trust that defined his life. Scripture records none of his words, yet his actions reveal a man who accepts God’s will with humility and courage. He did not choose the circumstances placed before him, but he faithfully embraced the responsibilities entrusted to him. God the Father entrusted His Son to Joseph’s care. Joseph did not seek that responsibility, but when it was given to him, he embraced it completely. He protected Jesus, taught Him, worked for Him, and loved Him, all while knowing that the child entrusted to him ultimately belonged to God.

As an adopted son, that reality has always resonated with me. Joseph reminds us that fatherhood is not primarily a biological relationship. It is a vocation of love, sacrifice, and responsibility.

Looking back now, I realize that both St. Joseph and my father understood the same truth: Children ultimately belong to our Heavenly Father. Earthly fathers are entrusted with them for a time. Their task is to love them, guide them, protect them, and through their example help them come to know the love of the Father from whom all fatherhood takes its name.

My father understood that instinctively.

He was not a perfect man, but he was a remarkably loving one. We hugged often. We were never afraid to show our affection for each other. Sometimes, as we would walk together, he would simply place his hand on my head or the back of my neck. Those small gestures communicated something every child longs to hear: “I am here. I love you. You belong.”

Part of the reason we were so close was that he was always there. Whether it was a football game, a track meet, a school event, or some other activity that seemed enormously important to me at the time, I could count on seeing him there. He was present. He was interested. He was proud.

As a boy, there is something powerful about knowing your father is in the stands.

As a man, there is something even more powerful about realizing how many sacrifices it took for him to be there.

When I was home from college and working locally, we would go to lunch together almost every day. Those lunches remain some of my favorite memories. We talked about work, family, our community, and whatever else happened to be on our minds. When I was away at school or traveling for work, I called him every day, sometimes several times a day. It never felt like an obligation. He was simply the person I most wanted to talk to.

My father was also the kind of man who believed that if you wanted your community to be better, you had to help make it better. He coached our teams, served on the local school board, and served on the library board. What he lacked in technical expertise as a coach, he more than made up for in encouragement and leadership. He had a gift for making people believe in themselves.

More importantly, he taught me that when someone asks for help, the first response should not be whether helping is convenient. The response should be, “How can I help?”

He did not merely teach that lesson. He lived it.

Years after I became an adult, I began hearing something from friends that surprised me. More than one person told me, “Your dad was like a father to me.”

At first, I was caught off guard by those comments. Then I realized they made perfect sense.

My father had a gift for making people feel seen. He encouraged people. He listened. He showed up. Without ever trying to become a father figure, he became one for many people simply because he cared.

The week before my father died, my wife and I shared some joyful news with him. We had just learned that we were expecting our first child.

I still remember his response; he told me that I was going to be a great dad.

At the time, it felt wonderful to hear. Looking back, it means even more because those words came from the man who had been my model of fatherhood for my entire life.

Less than a week later, he was gone.

I was traveling for work in Egypt when he died unexpectedly. The loss devastated me. Even now, fifteen years later, it is difficult to put into words.

Yet one memory has remained with me through all the years since.

Before he left this world, my father gave me one final gift. He gave me confidence that I could do what he had done.

He told me I could be a father.

Today, my son Blaise is 3 years old. Like most little boys, he wants to do whatever his dad is doing. If he sees me exercising, he drops to the floor and tries to do pushups beside me. If I am getting dressed for Mass, he wants to dress like Dad. He wants to sit next to me, hold my hand, and be wherever I am.

Truthfully, he is my best friend.

Whenever I watch him imitate me, I find myself thinking about how much of my own life was spent trying to imitate my father. Children learn far less from what we tell them than from who we are.

There is something beautiful about watching a little boy carry a name that has been carried before him. Not because the name itself is important, but because of the men who carried it. My father taught me what it means to bear the name Gerber. Every day, I am trying to teach Blaise the same thing.

Fifteen years after my father’s death, I have come to understand what fathers leave behind.

Not merely a name, though I am proud to carry his. Not possessions, accomplishments, or even memories. Fathers leave behind examples. They leave behind habits, convictions, and a way of loving. They leave behind a vision of the kind of man their sons might become.

I see that inheritance every time I take Blaise’s hand. I see it every time he imitates something I am doing. I see it every time I find myself responding to the needs of another person with the same instinct my father had so many years ago: “How can I help?”

Fifteen years after his death, my father is still teaching a little boy how to be a man.

The difference is that little boy is no longer me.

It is Blaise.

And for that gift, I thank God the Father, St. Joseph, and Big Dennis.

Pride Month is difficult to avoid.

Whether you are logging onto your Hulu account, listening to the radio, or shopping online, it seems that many organizations support June’s dedication to same-sex marriage and transgenderism.

Navigating the cultural support of this issue as a Christian can be complex and practically challenging. It is important to understand why Christians cannot support Pride Month, and to be able to explain the reasons charitably and logically. To do this, we must use language precisely to speak about true love.

The Christian understanding of marriage is rooted in Biblical clarity. God created everything. God created human beings in his image and likeness. We are made for communion, and we are given the capacities for reason, freedom, and love. In these ways, we can see that we are made like God.

God created human beings as male and female. Human sexuality is reciprocal—the male body only makes sense within the context of the female body and vice versa. Man can give his entire body to woman, and woman can receive him completely. Man receives by giving, and woman gives by receiving. 

When husband and wife join together in this way, new life can emerge. The love between a husband and wife is so great that it can result in other human beings—completely new persons made in the image and likeness of God.

While most people understand these realities intuitively, few have ever reflected on them deeply and lack language to explain them. The Catholic Church uses the language of the “unitive” and “procreative” aspects of marriage. Marriage must be between a man and a woman because only two members of the opposite sex can truly unite with one another physically for the sexual act. Marriage is built on the unitive nature of the human body, which is divided into male and female.

Marriage is also founded upon a couple’s distinctive embrace, which has the unique capacity for procreation. A simple understanding of the human reproductive organs reveals that it is only possible for a man and a woman to have a sexual embrace. Two men or two women cannot. For this reason, two men or two women cannot have children together. Procreation is impossible between two people of the same sex.

This evidence is based on biology, not bigotry.

Such a distinction is critical in today’s world, where any opposition to a person’s feelings is met with great disdain.

The human person is male and female. Male and female come together to form new life, and marriage is the God-authored way new life is meant to be created and cared for. Speaking these truths helps people better understand their identities and what fulfills them.

One of the most famous articulations of the Christian view of sexuality is that of Pope St. John Paul II in his groundbreaking “Theology of the Body.”

In it he says, we “can deduce that man became the image of God not only through his own humanity, but also through the communion of persons, which man and woman form from the very beginning. The function of the image is that of mirroring the one who is the model, of reproducing its own prototype. Man becomes an image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion.”

This “constitutes, perhaps, the deepest theological aspect of everything one can say about man. … On all this, right from the beginning, the blessing of fruitfulness descended.”

Nothing about the Christian view of sexuality is intended to offend those who experience same-sex attraction or know and love someone who is civilly “married” to someone of the same sex.

A Christian response to Pride Month must be concerned with speaking the truth in love. Truth is the mind’s conformity to reality. Love is willing the good of the other. Living in accordance with the reality of our bodies can cultivate a healthier nation full of healthier marriages.

The healthiest and truest context for the family is reliance on God, who is truth and love. When we ask God for the strength to love those closest to us, He will empower us to impact their lives and spread His love—no matter what month it is.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.