This story was originally reported by Jessica Kutz of The 19th. Meet Jessica and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
“Freedom doesn’t ring, it revs!”
That was the tagline of the first-ever IndyCar street race held in Washington, D.C., over the weekend.
From UFC fighters knocking each other out on the White House lawn to ongoing fitness face-offs between Cabinet leaders, the Freedom 250 Grand Prix represents the latest high-profile political theater celebrating a pastime associated with a very specific type of masculinity.
While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have become the agency heads most known for extolling a macho-man image, it’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy — a participant in the “Pete and Bobby [push-up and pull-up] challenge” at an airport — who played a key role in bringing the grand prix to D.C.
Whether turning the National Mall into a race track or announcing plans to defund “DEI bike lanes,” Duffy has leaned into a nostalgia-fueled lens of masculinity via car culture.
In some ways, this is nothing new. Since cars were invented, they’ve been designed with men in mind, according to Nicole Roach, co-founder of Women in Urbanism, Canada. Even the way cars have been tested for safety has centered on men.
Since the 1960s, car companies, particularly those promoting fast cars or big trucks, have tailored their advertising to the male ego, according to Roach. “They’ve really used the messaging of freedom, domination over the environment, strength, power, speed,” to appeal to men, she said.
As a result, car culture has become a symbol of conservative masculinity, where manosphere icons, including Andrew Tate, collect expensive and fast cars and where Elon Musk’s cybertruck — a vehicle that Musk himself has described as being “macho and manly” — became a symbol of the right in the last election. Then there are “truck nuts,” a dangling scrotum that can be attached to the tow hitch of a vehicle, which also became a status symbol among a subset of supporters of President Donald Trump.
This year, some car and truck commercials have also taken on a more overtly patriotic tone that leans into Make America Great Again (MAGA) messaging. UFC President Dana White, a longtime Trump backer, narrates Ram’s latest “In Loud We Trust” ad, sharing a story about the country’s founding while images of monster trucks, rock stars, cowboys and rocket ships flash across the screen.
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Under former President Joe Biden, a lifelong car lover, conservatives argued that this same culture had come under attack through his administration’s promotion of electric cars, alternative modes of transportation and stricter emissions standards. Then-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg even made it a point to ride his bike to work, a choice that Trump ridiculed. “He’s running the biggest air system in the world, and he takes a bicycle to work,” the president quipped during a May 2025 business roundtable in Qatar, the nation that gifted Trump a luxury jet for the Air Force One fleet.
During the Biden administration, Buttigieg focused on addressing the climate crisis and transitioning the country away from fossil fuels. This included expanding federal investments to build out bike and pedestrian infrastructure across the country. He promoted bikes not just as a sustainable mode of transportation but as an equitable one. After all, not everyone can afford a car, and there was a push to ensure bike lanes were being placed in low-income communities of color where such infrastructure is often lacking and bike fatalities are disproportionately higher as a result.
Trump’s win in 2024 was in part a conservative backlash to this transition away from fossil fuels and the culture it represents, according to scholar Cara Daggett, an affiliate faculty member at Virginia Tech, who called the election results a “reactionary defense” of men’s place in society. In 2018, she coined the term “petro-masculinity,” which is the idea that traditional masculinity is tied to fossil fuels as well as a bygone era where men held good jobs in the auto manufacturing or coal industries and their wives stayed at home with the kids. “This particular division of private and public, housewife and breadwinner … was built on a flow of cheap fossil fuels and car culture,” she told The 19th.
During the second Trump administration, conservatives have pushed for a return to a car-centric culture and all that it symbolizes for MAGA, and the DOT has played a leading role in that messaging. Shortly after Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, Duffy issued guidance that transportation programs would give preference to communities “with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average,” which critics saw as a way to direct more transportation dollars to the suburbs, where cars are often necessary to get around. According to the Urban Institute, a left-leaning think tank, this would also concentrate dollars in communities with higher White populations.
By extension, these kinds of directives are a way of messaging that a woman’s place is in the home, according to Leslie Kern, author of “The Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World.”
“It’s like saying a woman’s primary role is to have children,” she said. With big homes that can hold lots of kids, “the suburbs are like the physical manifestation of that.”
Duffy, the former “Real World” cast member turned bureaucrat, is an ideal person to deliver that message. As a devout Catholic, he has nine children, each of whom recently appeared in a YouTube series following his family’s road trip across America to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary. The production was funded by corporate sponsors, including Toyota and Shell.
Along with that cultural messaging is a backlash against anything that threatens the car culture that accompanies it: enter Duffy’s “DEI bike lanes.” One of the transportation chief’s first priorities following his Senate confirmation in January 2025 was to target bike lanes and so-called green infrastructure.
He instructed DOT officials to review grants “whose primary purpose is bicycle infrastructure” and cancelled grants for street safety, pedestrian and bike infrastructure, arguing that the “projects aren’t designed for cars.” The department halted multiple ongoing projects for “being hostile to vehicles” and ended a grant that would have made a street intersection in Boston safer for pedestrians but could “impede vehicle capacity and speed.”
This July, Duffy ratcheted up the rhetoric, proclaiming in a post on X that the Biden administration “used YOUR MONEY for DEI bike lanes and climate change. THAT’S OVER.” Shortly after, he announced $1.7 billion in additional funding would go toward roads and bridges, though it is unclear how much of that came from grants he had already canceled for bike infrastructure. In July, NPR reported that the department had taken down important safety data about crashes involving cars and bicycles and pedestrians, which are used by city planners to figure out where to focus road improvements.
For Roach, this decision to attack bike lanes is directly correlated to the identity politics around cars. “Any efforts to prioritize other modes or to restrict access to vehicles is really seen as an affront or a restriction of rights or an infringement on their personal freedoms. So it makes people really angry, especially people in big trucks,” she said.
Caring about the environment, something that riding a bike or buying an electric car implies, is another aspect of this culture war. Marketing researchers have found that men see environmentally friendly consumer choices as inherently more feminine and as a result, men are more likely to avoid making purchases that could be seen as less than manly.
Tara Goddard, a car culture researcher and assistant professor at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), said this decision to remove bike infrastructure and efforts to address climate change “at its heart is punishing care,” she said. “It’s like pathologizing the idea of caring for each other, and of course it’s weak to care for the environment.”
A Department of Transportation spokesperson told the 19th in a statement that the decision to redirect money from bike lanes is due to the failure to investigate the problems they cause, like traffic congestion, impacts on small businesses and accessibility issues.
Goddard said that evidence points to bike lanes not adding to congestion but reducing it, that more pedestrian infrastructure is better for small businesses and that in places where bike lanes are put in, safety improves for both cyclists and drivers. “The money in our budget that we spend on bike and pedestrian infrastructure is like fractions of pennies on the dollar of what we spend towards other projects. So it’s not like it’s taking money away,” Goddard said. “They’re not truly in competition for road space.”
Despite the political posturing around bikes and bike lanes, the average American supports more bike infrastructure. According to a YouGov survey released in June 2025, 75 percent of U.S. adults support bike lanes in their communities and 33 percent want even more.
“When safe cycling infrastructure goes in, then you see a lot more women, a lot more marginalized communities, also children, elderly people, people with disabilities,” Roach said. “So that’s of course why they’re connecting it to DEI because it is a good thing for marginalized people.”
On the other hand, trucks and SUVs pose real dangers, according to experts. Since 2009, the number of pedestrians and cyclists killed each year has risen 75 percent, with that rise at least partially attributed to the growing size of cars, which make it harder to see children and can make crashes more deadly, according to an investigation by The New York Times. Cycling deaths have increased 87 percent since 2010.
It’s a connection that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made as a state assembly member in 2023. At an event about super-sized SUVs and mega trucks, Mamdani told the crowd that the car industry “is pushing larger and larger vehicles, tying it to notions of masculinity.” Cars, he pointed out, “have a direct link to the higher likelihood of killing children and people on the streets.” He later introduced legislation in the state assembly that would charge drivers more in registration fees for owning these bigger cars.
Since becoming mayor in January, Mamdani has widened bike lanes, announced plans for new bike boulevards and prioritized improving pedestrian walkways. Like Buttigieg, he has made biking a part of his public image, even riding with a group of school kids in Brooklyn earlier this year.
Last week, after viewers of his official Instagram and TikTok accounts noticed that he’d been riding without a helmet, he posted an apologetic response: “You’re right. I’ve got to do better.”
After waving the starting flag at the Freedom 250 Grand Prix over the weekend, Duffy also took to social media. He posted a video of himself revving the engine of a brand new Ram pickup truck.
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