Trump renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America last Thursday.
He signed the executive order in the Oval Office and said it was official effective immediately. He also said he had no message for Canada and then immediately added that Canada has been ripping us off for a long time on trade.
Liberals are furious.
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Bill Maher did what Bill Maher does occasionally. He said the thing out loud that made everyone uncomfortable.
Liberals, he noted, say you can’t just go around renaming things to suit your political agenda.
Then he delivered the punchline.
Just ask any Latinx birthing person.
The audience laughed because the joke is airtight. The people most outraged about Trump renaming Lake Ontario are the exact same people who spent the last decade renaming women as birthing persons, renaming Latinos as LatinX, renaming biological sex as gender assigned at birth, renaming Christmas break as winter break, renaming the cafeteria as the nutrition center, and renaming failing schools as opportunity campuses.
The institutions that educated an entire generation had no problem renaming reality whenever it suited their ideological agenda. Now those same institutions and the people who run them are horrified that a president renamed a lake.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney pointed out that the name Lake Ontario comes from an Indigenous word meaning the lake is beautiful and predates both Canada and the United States by hundreds of years.
This is true and it is a reasonable point.
It is also being made by the same political class that spent years renaming schools named after Abraham Lincoln and George Washington because of their historical associations. The same class that removed statues, renamed military bases, and scrubbed names from buildings across the country in a wave of renaming that nobody asked for and nobody voted on.
Trump renamed a lake during a trade dispute.
They renamed the founders of the country during a cultural revolution.
The fury is not really about Lake Ontario. It is about the fact that the renaming power was supposed to flow in one direction only. The institutions got to decide what things were called. The president was supposed to accept those decisions. The moment he started doing it back the outrage became deafening.
This is what happens when the people who control language lose control of the person who controls the executive order pen.
DeSkooled covers the institutions that decide what things are called and what it costs the rest of us when we are no longer allowed to push back.
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