Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently renamed a Navy ship that had honored gay activist and pederast Harvey Milk.
But rather than merely renaming the ship, Hegseth executed the move in such a way that the reputation of its former namesake would be tarnished forever, and rightly so.
The ship currently known as the USNS Harvey Milk was christened under now-former President Barack Obama in 2016.
Milk, an officer in the Navy, received a “less than honorable” discharge in 1955 before becoming an LGBT activist and winning election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977.
Milk was also known for grooming and raping 16-year-old Jack Galen McKinley when Milk himself was a grown man.
As noted in a thread by the X account PoliMath, the entire move to rename the ship was designed to spring a narrative trap on leftists.
First, the Navy purportedly leaked the news that they would rename the ship, all to leverage “the volume and scale of the media to spread wide this info.”
The initial stage of the trap worked. Democrats like House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore whined about the renaming, sparking “the Dem’s outrage machine” and putting renaming in the news.
The renaming of the USNS Harvey Milk is such a perfect example of a smarter right-wing that has learned how to set a narrative trap
The Navy “leaks” that they are going to rename the ship, leveraging the volume and scale of the media to spread wide this info /1
— PoIiMath (@politicalmath) June 4, 2025
Was this a political trap?
That would clearly prove to be a mistake.
“The Dem’s outrage machine has given the story legs and visibility. The right can leverage that visibility to sabotage Milk’s legacy,” PoliMath noted. “They can talk about how a 33-year-old Milk was sleeping with teenage boys.”
Milk was also involved in defending cult leader Jim Jones and helping “keep a father from saving his 6-year-old son from the cult leader who would ultimately kill him,” yet another blemish on an already deeply tainted legacy.
The context of the ship renaming was the only way these facts could effectively infiltrate the public consciousness.
“If the right tried to bring all these skeletons about Milk up in isolation, they would seem obsessed and creepy,” PoliMath continued.
“But by using this ship re-name as bait, they got Dems to make praising Harvey Milk a part of their national platform.”
Usually the Republicans are the ones who fall for these sorts of stunts.
But PoliMath asserted that the renaming of the ship is a “perfect example of a smarter right-wing.”
Let us hope PoliMath is correct.
Erasing the legacies and favored ideologies of subversive leftists will be a lot more complicated than merely renaming ships, but the right is getting smart, and it is a welcome sign.
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