The North Carolina military base long called Fort Bragg was stripped of its familiar name in 2023 and changed to Fort Liberty by the Biden administration. With this Democrats joined forces with and essentially endorsed the statue-topping and historical airbrushing that removed statues, street and school names and other memorials to Americans judged insufficiently dedicated to the woke values that hadn’t surfaced until long after their deaths.
Particularly targeted were Confederate generals and other major figures in the Confederacy. Fort Bragg was named after Confederate General Braxton Bragg. Of all the Confederates stripped of honors in 2020 as The Great Stupid spread over the land, Bragg’s might have deserved that fate most. Bragg is generally considered among the worst generals of the Civil War, with most of the battles he engaged in, Shiloh, for example, ending in his army’s defeat. He was also unpopular with both the officers and soldiers under his command. Why he had a fort named after him is something of a mystery. Well, maybe not so mysterious: the North Carolina fort was named during the Wilson administration while that President was undoing civil rights advances for blacks.
Now the new Trump-minted Secretariat of Defense has decreed, as a symbolic rejection of the last administration’s lockstep woke ways, that Fort Liberty will return to its old name but with a twist. The Bragg being honored, the announcement tells us, is not one of the worst generals of the Civil War, but another Bragg. The fort is being renamed after Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, a World War II soldier who earned a Silver Star for driving a stolen German ambulance 20 miles to an Allied hospital during the Battle of the Bulge.
Cute! But is it ethical?
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:
Is this sort-of restoring the fort’s original name ethical?
My reaction: I hate it. It degrades the government to play these kinds of games, essentially trolling ideological adversaries. It is unserious, and the stunt renaming undermines the integrity and values of the military. It is the name game equivalent of “It’s OK to be white,” the deliberately provocative sign that popped up on college campuses for a while to tweak supporters of Black Lives Matter.
This Silver Star recipient has a military facility named after him because his surname is the same as one of the worst generals of the Confederacy. My father was also awarded a Silver Star for his heroism during the Battle of the Bulge. Bestowing additional honors on a soldier because his name permits the Trump Administration to annoy progressives is a juvenile and ludicrous policy.
Ethics Alarms 
My summary comments:
1) The names never should have changed. For the reasons the local states were allowed to name them as part of generations long reconciliation in the spirit of Lincoln’s postwar vision and for the fact that exactly *no one* had a problem with the old names until we had to pretend like 4 years ago that we still had a real racism problem.
2) However if they were going to be changed – they should have stuck with the customary convention: naming the forts after worthy Generals. Not some silly kid’s cartoon sounding “fort liberty”? I mean, can we get a Fort Life and a Fort Pursuit of Happiness (though I heard the soldiers there made the place so licentious that the Island of the Lotus Eaters look like a paragon or morality). There have been *hundreds* of worthy generals in our history to name it after.
3) All that being said- fort “liberty” *should* be re-re-named for a *general* as is the custom.
4) And that being said- in the interest of not engaging in a silly “every administration from here on out is going to grandstand with fort names never ending cycle” it would also be inappropriate to re-re-name the Non-General new names like “Cavazos. While it’s a good custom, I t’s *not that* essential of a custom to use general names even though the precedent in the future should be kept.
5). But even then when Hood was dropped, while Cavazos is great and all, the clear choice for a Texas Hero that’s not a general should have been Fort Audie Murphy.
6) While it may be disagreeable and chaotic, in this particular instance, I don’t oppose fixing the silly name “fort liberty” to anything else.
If you are looking for a non-general Texan, what about the pride of Alvin, Nolan Ryan.
Ah- dang. I gotta correct myself. Cavazos was a General.
So the renaming there isn’t unconventional. Though I wonder if there would be more distinguished generals whose names could be use d
“Fort Liberty” seemed like kind of an Orwellian name to me. Here is a place where everyone has to follow orders, we’re going to call it “Liberty”.
Naming a facility after one of your enemy’s worst, most inept generals is actually kind of savage. People think it’s supposed to honor the man? We should name more things after enemies whose blunders and shortcomings have enabled great victories on our part.
Braxton Bragg is a great case study in leadership. (No not all studies need to be good leaders). He no doubt was not a good general but he was also consistently undermined by his subordinates ala Caine Mutiny. Regardless of if you hate your leader, you’re still expected to follow his decisions. I wonder how much less worse he would have appeared in history if his subordinates weren’t all making insubordination into an art form.
Of course, their hate of him derives directly from his view of leadership. Yet they are still expected to follow orders.
2) The prevailing view at the time was that the civil war was a more akin to disagreement between brothers. Brothers who were both fully American before they argued. Fully American while they argued. And fully American after they argued. They were having a fully American argument that had to be had.
It doesn’t do much good calling them “our enemies” even if that’s the closest useful term to use. They were “enemies” of the Union. They weren’t enemies of the country.
I honestly don’t give a flying fuck what they name it, but they need to be completely honest about it. After the time I spent there back in the early 1990’s, it will always be Fort Bragg to me.
The new Secretariat of Defense needs to stop pacifying and tiptoeing around the cancel culture snowflakes with this kind of obvious rationalization, “the action of attempting to explain or justify behavior or an attitude with logical reasons, even if these are not appropriate”. There is no reason to openly pacify the cancel culture imbeciles like this, you need to shut them the fuck down.
For fuck sake, this is the United States of America military, they should have simply reversed the 2023 Fort Liberty name change and restored it to the previous Fort Bragg name and said so openly and honestly, making it an in-your-face complete rejection of the previous cancel culture bull shit. The Secretariat of Defense just lost a bit of respect from me over this pacifying the snowflakes, he should have figuratively said “Fuck You, Cancel Culture” and meant it.
Steve,
I tend to agree with your perspective. I am willing to give Hegseth a bit of slack on this matter because a large swath of the nation would not want the name changed. As a result he is carrying out a directive in a manner that I consider relatively bulletproof. He effectively eliminated another avenue of attack by the left by using a different soldier named Bragg that did not carry with it the “baggage” of the Confederacy.
I consider it a shrewd move. The name goes back to Bragg and the Trump antagonists were neutered. Trump and his team are launching attacks on multiple fronts and do not need to have to address this issue. Hegseth did what he wanted and kept the wolves at bay. Not everything needs to be an in your face rebuttal.
I kind of like having things named after enlisted personnel. It is they who do most of fighting and dying. Roland Bragg should be entitled to something more than a tin star for his heroic service.
Chris,
I really appreciate your balanced view on this.
My problem with this pacification of the snowflakes is that since the name change wasn’t openly reversed it was changed to a “different” Bragg; therefore, it gives the cancel culture a major political win that they can flaunt. The cancel culture snowflakes can literally say their actions were completely justified because, by his actions, the Secretary of Defense agreed with the change away from the original Bragg. I think this cancel culture win will enable the cancel culture crowd when we could have shut them down in a very public way.
Understand my “logic”?
I also spent time at Bragg, and it will forever be known to me as Ft. Bragg. In fact, no one I know ever referred to it as fort Liberty. As pointed out, this is the equivalent of statue toppling and all renamed forts should revert back to their original names. Braxton Bragg’s competence, or lack thereof is irrelevant.
We should not condemn the renaming back to Fort Bragg as petty, as that is missing the bigger picture. The big picture is that the Trump Administration wants to delegitimize every detail of the old narrative that prevailed during the Biden administration, and move the Overton window to a place where “woke”, “cancel culture”, “DEI” and all accusations of racism and bigotry etc. have become matters of ridicule. This is why JD Vance went all out to safe the job of a DOGE programmer who tweeted some bad things in the past. This action went to show that the moral tone in the nation has shifted, and that cancel culture is dead and discredited. Renaming the fort back to Fort Bragg is similar; the administration is acting like a drill sergeant instilling discipline, forcing attention to the minutest of details to instill the message that attempts to rewrite history out of a sense of racial guilt are things of the past. It is intended to poke into eyes of the woke left, the more it hurts the better the lesson is remembered. And if the left cries, they may expect another smackdown on X, such as the one delivered by JD Vance to Ro Khanna. Given the high approval rating of the Trump Administration (53%) and the low approval rating of the Democrats (31%) this approach has been successful, and therefore I think it would be political wise to continue this approach.
Now if they can find another soldier named “Benning”, & etc. (or not, and just them back, anyway).
Then they can get the Navy to redo some of the ships named after “social justice warriors” during the Obama years…pedophile Harvey Milk, activist Cesar Chavez, Gun grabber Gabrielle Giffords, ABSCAM scandal democrat John Murtha…
(posting on android phone… Chrome on Windows computer not playing with WordPress right now.)
Pete Hegseth has a tweet out there that more renaming of forts are in the making.
In Colorado, we renamed Mount Evans to Mount Blue Sky so as to stick our thumb in the eye of former Governor John Evans who was governor during the Sand Creek Massacre. Apparently though, it’s fine to keep the name of a Denver street “Evans” which was named for the same reason after Gov. John Evans.
They probably stumbled over an appropriate “E” name to replace Evans. Gotta keep the alphabetical structure of the street names, right?
This makes me cringe. When my cringe alarm goes off, I default to unethical.
I approve of doing things the Left hates, however, just because they are so smug and certain of their moral superiority that anything that makes them the least bit unhappy is, at some level, praiseworthy. That level may be down in the mud, but there we go.
But schadenfruede aside, it’s still cringe-worthy.
“This makes me cringe. When my cringe alarm goes off, I default to unethical.”
This is a very interesting comment that raises some deeper philosophical questions about ethics. Do we as humans reach ethical conclusions based on instinct, with our feelings as guideline? And do we then after the fact we rationalize the conclusions we arrived at instinctively, and call that reason? Comments like this illustrate that ethics does not have rational basis; it only appears that way. In other words, the rationality of ethics appears to be an illusion.
These musings are enough for me at an early morning, and would require a separate post (main article) to work out. I will have to reread “The Faith Instinct” from Nicholas Wade, and there is another book on my way from “Amazon”, named “The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics” with Ruse and Richards as editors. This must take me a couple of weeks.
CEES VAN BARNEVELDT wrote:
This is a very interesting comment that raises some deeper philosophical questions about ethics. Do we as humans reach ethical conclusions based on instinct, with our feelings as guideline?
I think that often, instincts guide us in our ethical decision-making, but sound ethical decision-making requires analysis and the application of principles. So while my default position is as described, if I analyze the situation as above, I may discover error.
So to answer your question — yes, I’m sure we do reach ethical conclusions based on instinct and feelings, but those conclusions must be considered suspect pending analysis.
And do we then after the fact we rationalize the conclusions we arrived at instinctively, and call that reason?
I imagine some people do just that, but not those who understand the fundamentals of ethical decision-making.
Comments like this illustrate that ethics does not have rational basis; it only appears that way. In other words, the rationality of ethics appears to be an illusion.
Not really. In my case, it simply indicates laziness rather than irrationality. I didn’t feel like analyzing this subject, so I adopted a default position based on my “gut.”
Just switch it back to Fort Bragg. It was Fort Bragg for what, a hundred and eighty years? These names take on a meaning all their own. Leave well enough alone. Who cares about who Bragg actually was. It’s simply a place name. Should we rename Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta. Give it a rest. The entire concept of cleaning up names needs to be scrapped.
Forts aren’t the on;y things the US military has named for what they considered worthy opponents. A number of aircraft, particularly helicopters, are named after Indigenous tribes or individuals who fought against the US Army. A few ships have been as well, including USS Chickasaw. The Chickasaw allied with the Confederacy in the civil war.
I seem to remember that there was also a Union General who (ironically considering this discussion and his later campaigns) was named “Tecumseh”.
That would be William Tecumseh Sherman. Tecumseh is actually his real middle name, and Wikipedia has some interesting details on how he got that name. Tecumseh was also the name of a chief of the Shawnee tribe.
Then there was baseball pitcher Calvin Coolidge Julius Caesar Tuskahoma McLish, or “Cal McLish” for short. I saw him pitch once…
Ummm, yeah, that was kind of (part of) the point 😉 , along with his severe post civil war actions in the “Indian wars”. My sarcasm doesn’t always carry through as intended…oh well…
Some sources claim Tecumseh was originally his first name.
This is just another form of airbrushing. What’s the difference between getting rid of Braxton Bragg by renaming the place Fort Liberty versus claiming that you are now honoring a different Bragg?
Bingo. I was thinking of “Lee”s and “Washington”s the woke could use on streets and schools. Spike Lee? Booker T. Washington? The crooked lawyer on “Amos and Andy” was a Calhoun….Hey: we could coin a new word: making this mind of deceitful change can be called ‘Bragging rights”!
Pete Hegseth already posted a message on X “more to come”. So I expect that he will give all the forts renamed during the Biden administration back their original name, such as Fort Hood and Fort Benning.
My impression is that Pete Hegseth is playing a longer game here. First there is the immediate pleasure of seeing the mainstream media (CNN, MSNBC) go totally ape shit crazy over this. Second, the name change back to Bragg goes over well with the majority of the soldiers, and with the electorate. Third, the Trump administration has a vested interest in change the tone and narrative of the conversation about the history of the USA. If these seemingly petty and stupid name changes help the Trump administration achieve his wider political and cultural goals and a positive legacy, I would call these name changes “ethical”. In politics we need to big about ethics, and not myopically focus on a small event as this outside the main political and cultural context.
Yes, the change to Fort Bragg is stupid.
Though, I admit, when they pushed to re-name Lake Calhoun to Bde Maka Ska (say that five time fast–or even once slowly, if you can), I did joke that they should just re-name it in honor of Rory Calhoun.
Of course, it was a joke.
-Jut