Did you cheer or roll your eyes when President Donald Trump announced the renaming of Lake Ontario to Lake America?
Renaming the Gulf of America (formerly the Gulf of Mexico) last year was an awesome moment, as it captured the sense that America was back after four long years of Joe Biden's ineptitude. Lake America? That's not quite as inspiring — I mean, come on, it's the smallest of the Great Lakes. And Trump did it just to tweak Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who left the negotiating table over tariffs, which seems somewhat petulant and sophomoric. But it's fine. Move on.
Google and Apple both renamed the lake in their navigation apps per Trump's order. However, CBS News was delighted to report that MapQuest is having a moment for declining to follow suit: "The digital mapping company is now the top free app in the Apple App Store." Take that, President Trump!
[Insert eye-roll].
But every American should take a moment to breathe and think about names.
First of all, this phenomenon hardly started last year. Why is there any discussion at all about "Palestine"? Because in the mid-130s AD, the Romans renamed the Judean territory as a symbolic punishment for the rebellious Jewish inhabitants. Nineteen hundred years later, it's still a problem.
AD is another one. Modern historians now use BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era) instead of BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini, in the year of our Lord). The estimated birth year of Jesus Christ is still the foundation for the dates, but the modern folks who reject Christianity don't mind insulting billions of Christians throughout history with the change.
The ungrateful and anti-American Zohran Mamdani is not the mayor of New Amsterdam. It's New York City. Nancy Pelosi is from San Francisco, not Yerba Buena. Those are just a couple of prominent examples of cities renamed as part of a widespread practice throughout American history.
Now, why is President Trump renaming things after America? Because he loves America.
Contrast that with the reason leftists rename things — and, make no mistake, they do so all the time. Often, it's because they hate America.
President Barack Obama renamed Mount McKinley Mount Denali primarily as a nod to the indigenous people of Alaska rather than to an American president. (Trump changed it back last year.) Left-wingers everywhere renamed Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples' Day because they'd rather celebrate the genocidal pagan tribes that preexisted America than a man whose discoveries led to our nation's birth.
Historian Victor Davis Hanson notes that many things in his native California are "named Montezuma," or "athletic teams called the Aztecs," despite the fact that their culture "sacrificed over 50,000 people on the great pyramid at Tenochtitlan in modern Mexico City."
President Biden — or at least his Autopen — renamed seven U.S. military bases because he and the radical Left wanted to erase the history of reconciliation after the War Between the States. The bases were named after Confederate generals precisely to advance reunification. But President Unity did everything he could to undermine unity.
The Trump administration renamed those bases back to their original surnames, but found other Americans to honor instead of Confederates. That may seem lame, but it likely future-proofs the names.
There's also the left-wing practice of tearing down statues, primarily of Confederates. Again, they would rather destroy the comity that earlier generations strained to achieve than take two seconds to understand why it was important in the first place. When these iconoclasts target statues of our Founders, they are intentionally expressing their loathing for our nation.
Columnist Cal Thomas has an excellent article today about other examples of the renaming fad throughout America for many years. To pick a few, he highlights the names of sports teams and grocery products that the Left targets. The Cleveland Indians are now the Guardians. Aunt Jemima syrup is now Pearl Milling Company.
Perhaps more insidious is the way the Left changes the English language itself.
In 2018, I wrote an article titled "Watch Your Language" about this very thing. Illegal aliens are "undocumented workers." Gay no longer means happy but homosexual. "Gender-affirming care" is hormonal or surgical experimentation to ostensibly change someone's gender. "Choice" is a sick euphemism for ending life in the womb. Standard semiautomatic firearms are now "assault weapons." Leftists turned the word "racism" upside down. And never mind asking them what a woman is.
I could go on, but I've made my point.
The leftist hand-wringers caterwauling about Trump's renaming of a lake and a gulf have spent decades twisting the English language to advance their agenda and tearing down names and monuments of American history. You'll forgive me if I don't take their objections all that seriously.
