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Hegseth’s latest obsession – testosterone levels among the troops – is a symptom of a deeper dysfunction [1]

['Kelli Anne Busey', 'Chitown Kev', 'Thom Hartmann']

Date: 2026-07-16  

La Feminista is already posting about this, but I thought I’d put my two cents in as well. It’s easy to see this as a bit of crazy all on its own, but there’s a lot more context to it.

ICYMI, this happened yesterday, while Trump’s war quagmire flared up again, like recurring hemorrhoids. From the NY Times:

Hegseth Plans to Screen All Troops, Including Women, for Low Testosterone Pete Hegseth, as defense secretary, has sought to cultivate an image as a manosphere-friendly leader. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Wednesday a new mandatory screening program to test all service members age 30 and older, including women, for testosterone deficiency annually. Hormone treatment for troops with low testosterone will be voluntary. “Our most decisive tactical advantage will always be the individual warfighter,” Mr. Hegseth said in a video from his Pentagon office. “We have a sacred duty to maintain that advantage.” The goal, he said in a social media message accompanying the video, was a “High-T Department of War,” Mr. Hegseth’s preferred name for the Defense Department. Mr. Hegseth’s focus on testosterone levels at a moment when U.S. forces are ramping up attacks in Iran is unorthodox. Defense secretaries typically focus on larger strategic questions, involving alliances, war and weapons production.

So let’s see. “Whiskey Pete Kegsbreath” is presiding over a military that’s been revealed as incapable of dealing effectively with what seemed like a far weaker opponent – Iran. Stockpiles of critical weapons are at dangerously low levels. So what are his priorities?

He purges the upper ranks of blacks, women, and anyone insufficiently loyal to Trump. He’s obsessed with imposing his ‘vision’ on the brass, carrying out an offensive on beardos (with a certain amount of racism) and fatties. Transgender troops and DEI are out. He seems to believe that troops must maximize “lethality”, like a cliché character from an anime earnestly vowing “I have to get stronger!” He did have to back down on anti-vaccine policies – after an outbreak and one death.

And WTF is the “manosphere” anyway? Nothing good:

The “manosphere” is a name for a group of online communities that share strict and often aggressive ideas about what it means to be a man.Footnote 4 These communities often claim that feminism and gender equality have hurt men’s rights. They push the belief that to be a “real man” you need to show emotional control, be wealthy, look good, and have power – especially over women.Footnote 5 Under the guise of offering “community” and “role models,” the manosphere often targets vulnerable young men and boys, preying on their insecurities and gradually exposing them to radical beliefs.Footnote 6

You’d never know this from the NY Times article about Hegseth’s latest policy. Although the Times does its best to gaslight readers by listing some reasons for being concerned about testosterone levels in the military, it falls a bit short in my opinion in explaining why this is suddenly of critical strategic importance. There is a bit of a hint from this though:

Mr. Hegseth’s move is in line with a recent push by Mr. Kennedy to expand access to T.R.T. among American men. Studies in several countries have shown that testosterone levels, which decrease slowly with age, are lower among younger generations of men than historical averages. While many researchers have argued that the trend is being driven by rising obesity and increasingly sedentary lifestyles, Mr. Kennedy has called declining testosterone an “existential” threat to humanity.

The Times article linked in the quote (gift link) is all kinds of alarming, given how the views described in it are all through policies coming from the Trump regime. It needs to be read to appreciate just how batshit insane all of this is. Here’s how it starts:

The Testosterone Moment Is Here. And Men May Never Look the Same. From the Trump administration to online influencers, the hormone is increasingly seen as the key to achieving a new male ideal. In January, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, on her podcast. He was there to celebrate his MAHA victories, but he soon veered into the singular, seemingly indestructible biology of President Donald J. Trump. “He has the constitution of a deity,” Kennedy marveled. And the key to the president’s inexplicable vigor, Kennedy suggested, could be found in his hormones. Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator, had reviewed the president’s medical records, Kennedy said, and found that he had “the highest testosterone levels that he’s ever seen for an individual over 70.” As Miller laughed awkwardly, Kennedy leaned in with the air of a man sharing a locker room secret: “I know the president will be happy that I repeat that.” This overt fixation on masculinity is by now a familiar feature of the Trump administration. On the campaign trail, Trump cast himself as a virile foil to Joe Biden’s frail, “woke” leadership, calling the election a “choice between strength and weakness.” Days before Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered strikes on Iran in February, the Department of Defense posted a video of him bench-pressing while flanked by roaring members of his former infantry unit. But it is Kennedy who has most equated musclebound manliness with wellness, posting videos of his own impossibly ripped septuagenarian physique as he does cold plunges and push-ups, often in nothing but a pair of jeans.

It’s a long article, but a lot of what it has to say makes it easier to understand why young men are drawn to MAGA, why they distrust the medical establishment, why so many men feel like they are under threat, and so on. (The animations that go with the article are entertaining – in a disturbing way.)

If looking to testosterone as an easy cure for everything that seems to be going wrong is trending, it’s part of a larger response to a world that many find less than satisfactory – and there’s something that is energized by those kinds of feelings.

Let’s talk about how this ties in with the other “F” word

It’s relevant to ask why so much coming out of the Trump regime has a tenuous connection with actual facts and reality. It’s a part of how we have slid into Fascism.

There are a lot of arguments about just what constitutes Fascism, but one observation I’ve seen is that it is fundamentally based on gut feelings, emotions, and myths. With that in mind, it becomes easier to understand why the Trump administration is so concerned with appearances over reality. It goes back to Karl Rove – remember him?

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Funny thing about that ‘creating our own reality’ stuff. How’s it working out for you guys, Karl? How sturdy does that empire you’ve built look today?

A 2005 essay by David Neiwert on Pseudo-Fascism was already seeing the Republican Party transforming more and more into Fascism. (pdf) Looking at this from 2026 is to see how prescient the 2005 warning was. An excerpt:

What really sets fascism apart from nearly all other kinds of politics, however, is that, at its core, it is not about thought. It’s all a matter of the gut. Milton Mayer describes this in They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945 (p. 111): . . . Because the mass movement of Nazism was nonintellectual in the beginning, when it was only practice, it had to be anti-intellectual before it could be theoretical. What Mussolini’s official philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, said of Fascism could have been better said of Nazi theory: “We think with our blood.” In his remarkable essay on “Ur-Fascism,” Umberto Eco suggests the extent of this attribute of fascism by its reappearance in most of the traits by which he describes fascism, including “action for action’s sake,” “the rejection of modernism” “fear of difference,” and the notion that “life is permanent warfare.” Swedish political scientist Harald Ofstad likewise has zeroed in on “the contempt for weakness” as the essence of the norm in a fascist society.”

I hate to keep harping on this, but the kind of emotional manipulation High SDO authoritarian leaders thrive on takes advantage of things like this among their authoritarian followers who are looking for easy answers and villains to blame in a world they find hostile and scary. Sara Robinson still has the best quick summary of how authoritarianism works I’ve found, and you can get the full story from Bob Altemeyer.

Speaking of needing High-T war fighters…

Hegseth is trying to create a military that fits his delusions about what constitutes real military power. He’s sees super-warriors with extreme lethality as the answer to an effective military. And Trump is obsessed with giant battleships. Is this the way to go?

Phillips P. O’Brien begs to differ. The need for actual humans on the battlefield and super-expensive weapons systems is changing rapidly, and no amount of magic testosterone is going to wish it away.

…What does “de-humanizing” war mean? At its basic level, it means drastically reducing the number of human beings that will go into direct combat. Rapid changes in both software (the move towards autonomous systems on both the micro and macro level as laid out in this piece) combined with technological changes now happening in the manufacture of all types of platforms (naval vessels, ground vehicles, and yes, drones) are leading this change right now. More and more systems do not need to have a human directly in control of them and this means already that the battlefield is increasingly less reliant upon, and far more dangerous for, human beings… …I could go on and on—but basically the message is all the same. As weapons are becoming increasingly autonomous or capable of being human controlled at a distance, they are becoming more effective, more able to find targets, destroy targets, and more able to operate for longer periods before needing any maintenance. Do the math. As I said before, this de-humanizing of war, which is unstoppable, will lead to transformations in all aspects. I mentioned how wars start, how they are fought, how they are settled and finally their ethics above…

O’Brien has more to say at the link (with more to come in the future) and some of it is really unsettling. But enough of that for the moment.

So here we are. It’s easy to lose the main thread with so many distractions being thrown at us, everything, everywhere, all at once. The mandatory testosterone testing is based more on delusional beliefs than addressing real problems, ‘fixing’ a problem that’s irrelevant to the Big Picture. I have family members and friends in the military who will be subjected to this testing. I can’t repeat their reactions here without running into complications with community standards.

The Big Picture is our country is in the hands of truly dangerous lunatics, crooks, and criminals acting on their toxic delusions and greed. There’s no magic drug than can fix that.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/7/16/800070706/community/you-cant-make-this-stuff-up-hegseths-latest-obsession-testosterone-levels-among-the-troops-mandatory-testing/

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