Hello and welcome to Monday, Aug. 31, 2026 — trail mix, South Carolina, and eating outside are all sharing the calendar today.
My calendar says it's Trail Mix Day, Eat Outside Day, South Carolina Day, Matchmaker Day, Diatomaceous Earth Day, and Zoo Awareness Day. Pack a bag of trail mix, eat lunch outdoors while the weather still allows it, tip your hat to South Carolina, and maybe set your dog's flea powder aside for a look at diatomaceous earth instead.
By the way, today is also International Overdose Awareness Day — worth a quiet moment if it's touched your life or someone you know. If you're struggling personally, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available any time, by call or text.
Today in history:
1422: King Henry V of England dies of dysentery at Château de Vincennes near Paris at age 35, leaving the throne to his infant son.
1888: The body of Mary Ann Nichols is discovered in Whitechapel, London, the first of the murders attributed to Jack the Ripper.
1897: Thomas Edison patents the Kinetoscope, an early motion-picture viewing device that helps launch the film industry.
1907: Britain, France, and Russia sign the Anglo-Russian Convention, formally establishing the Triple Entente ahead of World War I.
1935: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the first Neutrality Act, aiming to keep the United States out of the conflicts already brewing in Europe.
1957: Malaya, later Malaysia, gains independence from Britain.
1962: Trinidad and Tobago gains independence from Britain.
1986: Aeroméxico Flight 498 collides with a small private plane over Cerritos, California, killing 82 people, including 15 on the ground.
1994: The Provisional IRA announces a ceasefire in Northern Ireland after 25 years of sectarian violence.
1997: Diana, Princess of Wales, dies in a car crash in Paris at age 36.
Birthdays today include: Richard Gere, actor (An Officer and a Gentleman, Pretty Woman); Van Morrison, singer-songwriter ("Brown Eyed Girl"); Itzhak Perlman, violinist; Debbie Gibson, singer ("Lost in Your Eyes").
If today's your birthday too, happy birthday. Make it a good one.
* * *
With the earth-shaking screaming coming from the Left over the renaming of Lake America (which has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?), maybe it's time to take an inventory of what the Left has tried to rebrand. Actually, I've been compiling this list for some time now. I had almost forgotten it. But the huge response to the column I wrote yesterday got such a huge response that it reminded me of this one, and now perhaps it's time to drag it out of the archives and use it.
There's an axiom I keep coming back to in this column, because it keeps proving itself relevant no matter what subject I point it at: any government, any institution, any culture that wants to survive has one core job: Defend and, where possible, extend the influence of the culture that gave it life. Names matter more than people think in that fight, because names are how a culture remembers what it values. Change enough of them, and eventually you've changed what people believe the culture actually stands for, without ever having to win the underlying argument directly.
I mentioned this in the comment section just recently as regards the Today in History section that I write every single day, and it's an important fit to this discussion: I am of the firm belief that to understand who we are as a culture, a nation, a people, we need to have a firm understanding of who we've been. The harangue from the left on renaming places and items is nothing short of an attempt at re-writing our history.
An example is the removal of statues, as in the featured image for this column, which depicts the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee. This is nothing short of the erasure of history. If you erase our history, what is left to learn from?
As glaring an example as that is, let's start with the language itself because this is where the game gets played every single day, mostly beneath conscious notice. Illegal aliens became "undocumented immigrants." Riots became "mostly peaceful protests." Defund the police became "reimagining public safety" the moment the original slogan started costing Democrats elections. Sex-change surgery on minors became "gender-affirming care." A tax increase became "revenue enhancement" or, more cynically, "asking the wealthy to pay their fair share." It's almost as though nobody currently paying taxes is already doing exactly that.
None of this is accidental phrasing. Every one of these swaps does the same job: it moves the emotional temperature of a debate before the debate even starts. Call something "undocumented" instead of "illegal," and you've quietly shifted the entire legal question into a paperwork problem instead of a law-breaking one. Call a riot "mostly peaceful," and you've pre-loaded the reader's sympathy before a single fact about property damage or injuries gets mentioned. That's not communication. That's engineering. That's not respecting history; that's attempting to rewrite it. This is hardly a complete list, but let's look at a few examples:
Immigration
Illegal alien / illegal immigrant → undocumented immigrant, undocumented worker, "newcomer"
Illegal immigration → migration
Deportation → removal
Sanctuary city → welcoming city (in some local branding)
Crime & Policing
Rioting → mostly peaceful protest
Looting → redistribution (used ironically by critics, but genuinely floated by some activists in 2020)
Defund the police → "reimagining public safety" (after the original slogan tested badly)
Career criminal/repeat offender → "justice-involved individual"
Prisoner / convict → "returning citizen," "justice-impacted person"
Economics
Socialism → "democratic socialism"
Tax increase → "revenue enhancement" or "asking the wealthy to pay their fair share"
Government spending → "investment"
Wealth redistribution → "equity"
Gender & Sex
Sex-change surgery → "gender-affirming care"
Biological sex → "sex assigned at birth"
Mother/father → "birthing parent" / "non-birthing parent" (in some institutional/medical contexts)
Abortion → "reproductive healthcare," "abortion care"
Late-term abortion → "post-viability care"
Race & Identity
Affirmative action → "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI)
Racial preference/quota → "equity" (distinguished from "equality" specifically to justify differential treatment)
Racist (traditional definition: prejudice based on race) → redefined by some academic frameworks as "prejudice plus power," reserving the label so it structurally cannot apply to minority groups
Family & Culture
Nuclear family → sometimes framed as a "colonial" or "oppressive" structure in some academic/activist writing
Biological parent terminology → "chosen family," reflecting a broader push to de-center biological/traditional family structures in some progressive discourse
Foreign Policy / Terrorism
Terrorist attack (in some coverage, depending on the actor) → "militant action," "armed resistance"
Israeli self-defense operations → sometimes framed by critics/activists as "occupation violence" or "genocide," depending on outlet
Political labeling
Democrat Party → insists on "Democratic Party" (a genuine, real linguistic fight running the other direction — worth noting for balance, since conservatives have their own preferred label too)
Progressive → replaced "liberal" as the preferred self-identifier once "liberal" polled poorly for a stretch in the 1990s-2000s
Food & Household Brands Renamed (2020-2021 wave)
Uncle Ben's rice → Ben's Original — Mars dropped the "Uncle" honorific entirely and removed the elderly black man's portrait from the packaging. New branding hit shelves in 2021.
Aunt Jemima → Pearl Milling Company — Quaker Oats retired the 130-year-old brand outright, renaming it after the original 19th-century mill that produced the pancake mix. The company stated directly: "We recognize Aunt Jemima's origins are based on a racial stereotype," forgetting, of course, the real person behind that image.
Mrs. Butterworth's → kept the name but changed the bottle shape and packaging, since the syrup bottle's silhouette had drawn comparisons to the "mammy" stereotype.
Cream of Wheat → removed the image of "Rastus," the black chef pictured on the box since the early 1900s.
Eskimo Pie → Edy's Pie — the ice cream bar's maker dropped "Eskimo" as a term now considered a colonial-era slur imposed on Inuit and other Arctic Indigenous peoples, who generally prefer their own specific tribal names.
Land O'Lakes → removed the Native American woman ("Mia") from its butter packaging entirely, replacing her with a lake landscape.
Sports:
Washington Redskins → Washington Commanders
Hey, Cleveland, whatever happened to Chief Wahoo?
Lord only knows how many high school and college teams.
Military Bases:
And then there's the part of this story that actually flips the script, because it shows the exact same rebranding playbook running in reverse — which tells you something important about how these fights actually work.
In 2023, Congress's Naming Commission stripped Confederate names off nine Army bases. Fort Bragg became Fort Liberty. Fort Benning became Fort Moore. Fort Hood became Fort Cavazos. That's reasonable enough, on its face — nobody's obligated to keep honoring men who took up arms against their own country to preserve slavery.
But in 2025, the Pentagon reversed course, and the method it used to do it is the single most instructive detail in this entire column. Rather than simply restoring the original Confederate namesakes outright — which federal law still prohibits — the Defense Department went hunting for non-Confederate service members who happened to share the exact same surnames. Fort Bragg is Fort Bragg again, but it now honors World War II paratrooper Pfc. Roland Bragg, not Confederate General Braxton Bragg. Fort Benning is Fort Benning again, honoring WWI Corporal Fred G. Benning instead of the Confederate brigadier general who once wore that name. Naming Commission member Lawrence Romo said the quiet part out loud: "They found some people with similar names so they could work around it."
Same gate. Same sign. Same regional identity and institutional memory for the surrounding community. Entirely different, legally distinct man being honored underneath. That's not restoring history. That's the identical rebranding technique used on your cereal boxes, just aimed at putting a name back on the wall instead of taking one down.
Fort Bragg (North Carolina) → Fort Liberty
Fort Benning (Georgia) → Fort Moore
Fort Hood (Texas) → Fort Cavazos
Fort Lee (Virginia) → Fort Gregg-Adams
Fort Pickett (Virginia) → Fort Barfoot
Fort Polk (Louisiana) → Fort Johnson
Fort Rucker (Alabama) → Fort Novosel
Fort A.P. Hill (Virginia) → Fort Walker
Fort Gordon (Georgia) → Fort Eisenhower
For all the screaming about the renaming of a lake that I spoke of yesterday, you might believe the list I've just laid out of things leftists have renamed didn't exist.
In all honesty, my axiom that I listed at the top of this column holds up here better than I expected when I started writing this: Whoever controls the language, and what things get called, controls, in a very real sense, what a culture is allowed to remember about itself. Thereby, where we're going as a people. Or, as I put it before: to know who we are as a culture... a nation... a people, we need to have a firm understanding of who we've been.
I submit that redefining language, as we've seen above, is by the very nature of the thing an attempt by a very small subset of the culture to totally control that culture.
Now, say what you will about the specific event of renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America. But the objections we're now seeing from the left in this particular case are labeled as something other than tradition, which is how it's being couched today. The objection comes down to who controls the language. In evidence of this, I offer the long list of examples of the left's attempt to control us.
Do we really want the leftists driving this nonsense — you know, people who have sworn themselves to the cause of wiping Western culture off the map — to have control over our language and thereby what we remember about ourselves?
I certainly don't.
Thought for the Day: Henry V died at 35 with an infant heir on the throne, and everything he'd built started unraveling almost immediately — proof that no legacy survives on momentum alone once the person holding it together is gone. Nasty way to go, by the way.
VIP members: Your turn. Speak up in the comments. You make a difference.
Take care, gang. I'll see you here tomorrow.
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