After Trump restores fort names, its time to end the silly renaming wars

After President Donald Trump restores the names of military bases that once honored Confederates, the left and the right need to call a name-change truce. During Tuesday’s speech at Fort Bragg (formerly Liberty, and before that, Bragg again), Trump announced that his administration would be reviving the names of Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P.Hill and Fort Lee.Those forts were renamed during the left’s crazed push, in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests in 2020, to purge public-property references to any figure it deemed controversial.Much of the frenzy was a ridiculous exercise in woke revisionism: The hysteria got so bad that not even Teddy Roosevelt, a once-hero of progressivism, was safe.

Trump has made his disdain for the whole gambit clear: One of his first acts as president was giving Mount McKinley its name back.But both the left and the right made the argument for nixing the names of traitorous Confederates from public property, especially in cases where the names were picked during the 1950s and ’60s, purely out of hostility toward the Civil Rights movement.

So both sides should be happy to learn that the restored fort names technically won’t honor Confederates.During Trump’s first term, Congress passed the bipartisan National Defense Authorization Act, which required the Pentagon’s newly established Naming Commission to remove Confederate-linked names from Defense Department-owned property.So in order to give the forts their names back, the DOD is nodding to service members with identical surnames.That silly trick doesn’t might go a bit too far: For instance, Fort Bragg is now named after a relatively unknown World War II private, Roland Bragg, instead of Confederate Gen.

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