Hegseth Goes Up Against the Cultural Revolutionaries

The facts of the matter are straightforward. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is striking back against the Obama/Biden cultural revolution by, among other actions, renaming the USNS Harvey Milk, a Navy oil tanker, after Medal of Honor recipient Oscar V. Peterson. The reactions from leftists, however, are as predictable as they are revealing.

This shouldn’t be difficult. The ship wasn’t named after Harvey Milk, who served four undistinguished years in the Navy, because of anything he did while in uniform, but solely because of his sexuality and his role in the transformation of American society and culture: he was the first openly homosexual elected official in California. Peterson, by contrast, gave his life for his country during World War II.

In previous eras, there would have been no question. No ship would ever have been named for Harvey Milk in the first place, and no one would have batted an eye at the prospect of a ship being named for Oscar V. Peterson. Our own age, however, is different. As part of his efforts to transform the U.S. military from a fighting force designed to defend the country from its enemies into an instrument of social engineering, Barack Obama named the tanker after Milk in 2016. To have the honor of having one’s name bestowed upon a naval vessel, it was no longer necessary to have provided exemplary service to the country; it was only necessary to have been a visible exponent of the left’s war against traditional values.

Hegseth is trying to reverse all that and bring the military back to its actual purpose. Accordingly, as he announced the renaming on Friday, he added: “We are taking the politics out of ship naming.”

Leftists were, of course, furious, as ever since Obama’s disastrous presidency, politics has been what ship naming is all about. Some pointed to the restoration of the names of Confederate generals on forts as evidence of the Trump administration’s inconsistency on this issue, but contrary to contemporary claims, the forts were not named after the Confederates in the first place as an expression of racism; they were so named as a non-political effort to bind up the nation’s wounds and strengthen national unity by recognizing heroism and valor among those who had fought for Southern independence.

The naming of the USNS Harvey Milk was done just for the opposite reason: not to foster national unity, but to exacerbate national division and to rebuke those who thought that the behavior that made Harvey Milk a hero was immoral. If Milk had served heroically in the Navy and been denied some honor because he was a homosexual, a case might plausibly be made that he deserved the honor and that to give it to him was roughly analogous to naming the forts after Confederates, but that was not the case.

Nevertheless, Milk remains a hero for the cultural revolutionaries, and so Hegseth has committed an unpardonable sin. Leftists being what they are, their analysis of Hegseth’s action fell into the usual ruts. One X user wrote: “This administration is setting the country back at least 50 years. Before we know it, we will have segregation again with signs saying ‘Whites Only.’” Milk was white and Peterson was white, and so it’s hard to see what this fellow is getting at, except that leftists are in the habit of referring to everything they dislike as “racist.” Also, Milk was supposedly a civil rights activist, and so Hegseth’s action is a blow against civil rights, which means that all civil rights advances will soon be rolled back. Get it? That’s what passes for deep thought in leftist circles.

The perpetually enraged Keith Olbermann injected a personal note while contradicting Hegseth’s contention that he was taking politics out of the naming of ships: “lol. You’re putting in more politics. And whiskey.” This was a cheap shot aimed at reviving the left’s false claims when Hegseth was nominated that he had been drunk on the job at Fox News. Olbermann’s claim that Hegseth was playing the politics he was claiming to reject didn’t hold up, either. If Oscar V. Peterson had been a Republican activist or a campaigner for Judeo-Christian values, Olbermann might have had a case. But he didn’t.

The left’s rage over the renaming of the USNS Harvey Milk reflects their shock and horror at the fact that their victory is not inevitable. The “progressives” confidently tell one another, and the world at large, that “history” is on their side and is moving inexorably in the direction of causes they favor. In such a scenario, setbacks have no place. The left is supposed to be moving society confidently ahead into pure socialism, and we are constantly told that we can “never go back.” Well, thanks to Pete Hegseth, we just did. We went back to honoring valor, courage, and self-sacrifice. We went back to removing the military from the realm of pushing social agendas. Let’s do it some more.