‘An Underhanded Act of Renaming by Hegseth’

 

This tale begins back in 2020, during Trump’s first term in the White House.  Sen Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, in a very typical act of Yankee spite, introduced legislation to remove the names of Confederate heroes from any property owned by the federal government’s Dept of Defense.  The provisions of that legislation migrated to a military funding bill, which Trump vetoed, but the foolish Republicans in the US Senate joined with the Democrats and overrode it.  The removal of those Confederate names began in 2023. 

The woke DoD under Biden told the story this way:

‘Some Army bases, established in the build-up and during World War I, were named for Confederate officers in an effort to court support from local populations in the South. That the men for whom the bases were named had taken up arms against the government they had sworn to defend was seen by some as a sign of reconciliation between the North and South. It was also the height of the Jim Crow Laws in the South, so there was no consideration for the feelings of African Americans who had to serve at bases named after men who fought to defend slavery [on this misleading point, see the work of Kizer and Seabrook on black folks in the Confederate Army—W.G.].

‘All this changed in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. Many people protested systemic racism and pointed to Confederate statues and bases as part of that system. Congress established the commission in the National Defense Authorization Act of fiscal 2021. Then-President Donald J. Trump vetoed the legislation because of the presence of the commission, and huge bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress overrode his veto’ (Jim Garamone, ‘DOD Begins Implementing Naming Commission Recommendations’, defense.gov).

Now Trump is back in the White House, and his SecDef, Pete Hegseth, is doing some renaming of his own:

‘Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth yesterday signed a memorandum directing that Fort Liberty, North Carolina, be renamed to Fort Bragg.

‘The new name honors Army Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, a native of Sabattus, Maine, who enlisted in July 1943 at age 23. He served during World War II with the 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 17th Airborne Division, XVIII Airborne Corps. 

‘Bragg received the Silver Star for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity and a Purple Heart for wounds sustained during the Battle of the Bulge. As part of his actions, Bragg saved a fellow soldier's life by commandeering an enemy German ambulance so that he could transport a wounded service member 20 miles to an allied hospital in Belgium. The ambulance was under enemy fire the entire time. 

‘Following WWII, Bragg returned home to Maine and married. He owned an auto body shop and later a company that moved buildings. In 1984, he also ran a business that operated a portable sawmill. Bragg died in January 1999 and is buried in Nobleboro, Maine’ (C. Todd Lopez, ‘Defense Secretary Renames Fort Liberty as Fort Bragg, Honoring WWII Soldier’, defense.gov). 

Regrettably, Hegseth and Trump are being disingenuous with this move.  Hegseth lays out his and Trump’s reasoning for it:

‘"I was honored to be able to put my signature on that [memorandum,] by the way, with the support of the president of the United States, who set the tone on this and said 'I want Fort Bragg back,'" Hegseth told reporters during a briefing today in Stuttgart, Germany. "We're honored to support a private first class who received a Purple Heart and the Silver Star at the Battle of the Bulge."

‘ . . . Hegseth said the move to rename Fort Liberty to Fort Bragg was about restoring the legacy of the service members who trained and served there. 

‘"It's about that legacy; it's about the connection to the community, to those who've served," he said’ (Ibid.). 

If Hegseth and Trump really wanted ‘Fr Bragg back,’ if they wanted to reestablish the legacy that grew up at the base and to mend broken ties with the local community, they would have immediately gone back to the original dedication to Braxton Bragg, the Confederate general whose name adorned the base for decades before ol’ Liz Warren et al. intervened.  To rededicate it to another soldier named Bragg (who isn’t even a Southerner but a Yankee from Maine) is a dirty act of deceit.  With this move, Hegseth and Trump are in effect saying that the crackers in North Carolina and the rest Dixie are such retarded ignoramuses that they won’t be able to tell the difference between their own native-born General and a private from up North.  What kind of legacy are they establishing at Ft ‘Bragg’ with this new beginning grounded in dishonesty?

Trump’s willingness to challenge the entrenched interests in DC in his second term has astounded longtime political watchers.  But there is one interest group that he has thus far not dared to oppose:  the Dixie-haters.

Both Trump and Hegseth are dyed-in-the-wool Yankees, so their inconsideration towards the South vis-à-vis the new Ft Bragg is not any great surprise.  However, Southerners have been some of the strongest supporters of Trump and his MAGA project over the years.  If he wants us to continue to stick with him, he and his appointees will need to show more fortitude when it comes to defending the South, her history and culture, and her heroes.  That means giving us back the real Ft Bragg, Ft Hood, Ft Gordon, the Reconciliation Memorial in Arlington Cemetery, and all the rest of it.

***

Originally posted at Identity Dixie, https://identitydixie.com/2025/02/19/an-underhanded-act-of-renaming-by-hegseth/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘We Are All Saint Oncho Now’

 

Since the end of the War, with the Yankees in the ascendancy, the dominant ideas in the union have been mainly change, innovation, progress, and their near-of-kin.  Sultan Donald the Magnificent re-confirmed this in his Inaugural Address in January:

‘And, right now, our nation is more ambitious than any other. There’s no nation like our nation. Americans are explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneers. The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls. Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on Earth. No one comes close. Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness. They crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted millions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the heavens and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand. If we work together, there is nothing we cannot do and no dream we cannot achieve.’

That kind of thinking, in general, a Southerner cannot abide.  Some of those accomplishments are noble, and we do not reject all change, of course, but making The New the center of our life, its guiding ideal, has had, and will continue to have, disastrous consequences.  Man in such a system becomes rootless and falls into despair, and the creation itself, to quote St Justin Popovich, becomes ‘a slaughterhouse.’  The Kentucky agrarian Wendell Berry offers a longer counterpoint:

‘The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to “grow” and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superseded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.’

And once again he declaims, ‘As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association, and affection.’

Dixie understands that without history, traditions, customs, and the like, life is dull and meaningless.  Yet such a normative worldview is attacked relentlessly in the modern United States.  Examples to encourage Southrons not to abandon our heritage would be extraordinarily helpful in the midst of this maelstrom.

And they do exist, thanks be to God.  The first three months of the year feature some of the most beloved saints of the Celtic lands and peoples, to which and to whom the South has deep ties:  St Kentigern Mungo, Patron Saint of Glasgow and a chief apostle of Scotland (13 Jan.), St Ita of Kileedy, ‘Foster-Mother of the Irish Saints’ (15 Jan.), St Teilo, a father to the Welsh (9 Feb.), St Patrick, the Enlightener of Ireland (17 March), and so forth.  Among their number is also St Oncho (sometimes spelled ‘Onchu’) of Clonmore, Ireland (Feast Day celebrated 8 Feb.; he reposed near the end of the 6^th century AD).  A short vita of the saint shows his significance for Southerners today:  ‘Saint Oncho was an Irish pilgrim, poet, guardian of the Celtic traditions, and a collector of holy relics. While pursuing his search for memorials of the Irish saints he died at Clonmore monastery, then governed by Saint Maidoc, and his body was enshrined there together with the relics he had gathered’ (Celtic and Old English Saints).

Like St Oncho, Southerners faithful to our forebears are pilgrims, bards, guardians of Dixie’s traditions, and collectors of precious relics:

Pilgrims, for we are not of the Yankee culture that surrounds us;

Bards, for the words of some in Dixie are still lit with the apocalyptic fire of the prophets of old, revealing truth and error;

Guardians of tradition, for the attacks upon our past have not ceased; and

Collectors of relics, for what of our history has survived has been scattered through neglect and through malice and must be gathered again.

St Oncho set out with a firm resolution and good intention, and so must Southerners also.  In a longer account of St Oncho’s life, we are given the pattern and motivations to imitate:

 . . .

The rest may be read here:

https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/we-are-all-saint-oncho-now

Or here:

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/we-are-all-saint-oncho-now/

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘Another View of LA’s New Social Studies Standards’

 

Rep Chuck Owens was singin’ some high praise of the Louisiana Dept of Education’s guidelines for K-12 social studies classes just the other day.  After taking a look, we would beg to differ somewhat.

The trouble actually starts with Dr Cade Brumley’s introductory remarks that preface the document containing the standards.  He makes the ‘quest for freedom’ as the reason-for-being of America:

‘The quest for freedom is a hallmark of the American story. From the signing of the Declaration of Independence, to the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, to the ratification of the 19th Amendment, the journey towards freedom has been one of struggle and sacrifice.

‘We must, and we shall, teach our children the fragility of liberty.

‘ . . . President Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is one of the deepest and noblest aspirations of the human spirit.” I believe these standards create a Freedom Framework for Louisiana educators to cultivate those aspirations every single day.’

Individual freedom as its own end, not in service to another higher goal (freedom to cultivate the virtues in our lives, freedom for the sake of working out our salvation in Christ), begets horrible things.  Freedom, unrestrained by some kind of guiding and uplifting metaphysical framework, devolves necessarily into personal and social destruction, throwing down any traditions, laws, etc., that inhibit the desires of individual men and women from being attained, whatever those desires may be:  from a ‘right’ to using psychedelic drugs to stealing others’ property to redefining marriage to transgender surgery to assisted suicide.

That is the error of the standards writ large.  But there are some smaller problems that need to be addressed as well.

One of them is the wokeness present in the document, which shows in a couple of ways.  First is the use of the words ‘enslaved people’ and ‘freed people’ throughout the standards instead of older, more familiar words like ‘slaves’ and ‘former slaves’.  That’s right out of the handbook of political correctness, of forcing Orwellian standards of wrongthink/wrongspeech onto people (Leftist media operatives openly discuss their preference for the ‘enslaved people’ jargon here).  There is also the inclusion of Juneteenth in the lists of major US and Louisiana holidays like Christmas Day and Thanksgiving Day.  That is laughable; this ‘holiday’ is about as phony as anything one can conjure up, as recounted quite well by one of the essays at the Abbeville Institute (‘Juneteenth:  A Celebration of Nothing’).

Will it be permissible to point this out in Louisiana’s classrooms?

The Civil War gets a lot of attention in the document.  There are problems here as well.  First, the name itself is misleading.  A civil war is a war between two factions for the control of a national government.  That is not what happened in the US from 1861-5.  First, the United States aren’t a nation; our union is a voluntary federation of nations.  Furthermore, the Southern States peacefully withdrew from the union (they weren’t trying to conquer Washington, DC), but Lincoln and his immediate successors used the military to force them back in and keep them there.  Thus, a more appropriate name for this conflict would be the War between the States or the War of Northern Aggression.

Nevertheless, the Social Studies Standards frame the War mainly within the context of the issue of slavery, but economics were just as big a factor, if not bigger, than the moral/metaphysical issue of slavery.  Tariffs that favored Yankee industry and harmed Southern agriculture weighed heavily on Southern minds at that time; they also stirred up plenty of Northern angst and greed for fear of losing their Southern cash cow if the Southern nation-States left the union.  But there is no mention of the antebellum tariff issue in the document.

Likewise, racism seems to be presented as appearing only in Dixie (Jim Crow, etc.), while ignoring the rampant manifestations of it in the Yankee States.

Will it be permissible to point this out in Louisiana’s classrooms?

There is an attempt in the guidelines to valorize the feminists who agitated for the 19^th Amendment (granting women the ability to vote).  Yet the suffragettes pressed for ‘reforms’ and held beliefs that are detrimental to society:  e.g., supported easy divorce, attacked the divine origin and authority of the Bible, advocated for women in the role of pastors and priests, desired the complete secularization of government (all this from only one of the suffragettes mentioned multiple times in the document, Elizabeth Cady Stanton).

Will it be permissible to point this out in Louisiana’s classrooms?

Meanwhile, Christianity gets short shrift, . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2025/02/garlington-another-view-of-las-new-social-studies-standards/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

'Repaganization'

 

Repaganization?

A fairly good conclusion –

Doom decided by a groundhog’s shade;

Every passion plied for a super football scrum;

Cupid adored on Lupercalian lovers’ day.

Dechristianization?

The February that’s become a negation –

Saint Brigid, shepherding Erin’s virgins;

Carthaginian martyrs,

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/repaganization.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!