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| Victor Davis Hanson: Obama Changed Names. Trump Does It, and Suddenly It's Tyranny. |
| 2026-09-05 |
| [SIGNAL] We’re in another psychodrama, melodrama controversy, and that is that [President] Donald Trump has just renamed Lake Ontario, one of the five Great Lakes, 55% of which is in Canada, 45% in the United States. He said as far as America is concerned, it’s now Lake America. People got very angry about that and said it was to pay back Canada because it walked out on a trade agreement, and this is unprecedented. It’s unheard of that he would do that. It’s not unheard of. Going back to the Roman age, every time an unpopular emperor died or was executed or was exiled, the Roman puppet Senate issued a damnatio memoriae. That means we’re gonna damn him to memory. And what that meant was all of his images and his name placards all over the empire, 70 million people, a million square miles, were erased. They were very economical and practical, the Romans. They didn’t destroy the statue because most people’s bodies were portrayed in sculpture the same. They just wiped out the face and redid it or cut the head off and put a new emperor’s head. But the point was the same. And it happens all over the world today. We call it the Persian Gulf. If you talk to the Arabs on the other side of the gulf, they call it the Arab Gulf. We call it the Rio Grande. I think the Mexicans often call it the RÃo Bravo. So, each country has a different name. But getting back to the issue, did Donald Trump start this? No. He’s only reacting to a long tradition, and a tradition, I might add, that’s been very popular the last 15 years. It was Barack Obama who changed Mount McKinley, that had been pretty much there for, oh, over 100 years, and he called it Mount Denali, the Indigenous name. And the state of Alaska had too. Trump changed that back. I work at Stanford University. One day I came to the Hoover Tower and I looked around and I thought something was strange about the street sign. I couldn’t quite figure it out. It said Stanford Mall, Stanford Plaza, named after [university co-founder) Jane Stanford. And I thought, it was Serra Mall the last time, named after JunÃpero Serra. It was, but Stanford had voted to take off the word Serra because supposedly this 18th-century Catholic priest who helped build California in some senses as we know it, and as far as when it was under Spanish control, he was integral in offering agriculture, introducing new crops, creating the El Camino Real, basically. And all of a sudden he was considered anti-Indigenous and mean to Indigenous people. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |