Bret Baier climbed onto Mark Levin’s Life, Liberty & Levin this week to talk about his new book, To Rescue the American Spirit: Teddy Roosevelt and the Birth of a Superpower, and he made an urgent point conservatives already understand — our country needs to remember what made it great. Baier’s project is unapologetically patriotic: a journalist’s narrative meant to pull a distracted public back toward the kind of leadership and gutsy character that built America.
The book lands this month, with major booksellers listing an October 2025 release and heavy promotion across Baier’s tour schedule, so this isn’t a dusty academic exercise — it’s a call to action. Conservatives should be proud that a mainstream media figure like Baier is using his platform to revive the story of a president who believed in national strength and moral clarity.
At the heart of Baier’s thesis is the plain truth that Theodore Roosevelt didn’t stumble into greatness — he forged it through courage, reform, and vision, pushing the United States from a regional power into a global leader. That history matters because the left’s fashionable contempt for American greatness and its attempts to scrub complex figures from our civic memory leave a void that weak leaders and weak ideas rush to fill. Baier’s book reminds readers that rugged virtue and an unapologetic love of country produced the prosperity and liberty we enjoy.
Baier warned — rightly — that many Americans can’t meaningfully define what made Roosevelt extraordinary, and that ignorance isn’t accidental: our schools and media now prefer grievance over greatness. That’s why conservative journalists and authors must step up, tell the honest stories of American accomplishment, and refuse to let the cultural left hollow out the next generation’s sense of national pride. The alternative is a country that forgets how to lead and defend itself.
Don’t let anyone tell you Baier is an ivory-tower historian; he’s a working journalist with a record of high-profile reporting and bestselling presidential biographies, so this book comes from experience, not vanity. Americans weary of elites who apologize for our history will find Baier’s clear-eyed storytelling a welcome corrective that celebrates public virtue and decisive leadership.
The cultural stakes are obvious: when a nation loses its memory of leadership like Roosevelt’s, it loses the courage to act when the world grows dangerous. Conservatives should treat Baier’s book as more than reading — it’s part of a campaign to restore civic literacy and pride, to teach young patriots what real leadership looks like, and to push back against the smug revisionism that weakens our country.
If you care about America’s future, pick up Baier’s book, read it, and hand it to your kids and neighbors; this is how you rebuild a confident electorate that knows why the republic is worth defending. History doesn’t belong to the left or the right — it belongs to the people who love freedom — and right now conservatives must lead the fight to rescue the American spirit.
