There was a rare bit of good news out of Washington this week: the owners of the city’s NFL team are reportedly weighing President Donald Trump’s call to restore the team’s original name, the “Redskins.”
Back in 2020—a year defined by chaos and cultural upheaval—the Redskins were renamed the Washington Football Team, and later, the Commanders. The change came amid claims that “Redskins” was an offensive term. Yet, time and again, polls showed that most Native Americans weren’t actually offended by it.
But the erasure didn’t stop with one football team. In the aftermath of 2020’s cultural reckoning, statues came down across the country. What began with Confederate generals quickly expanded to include figures like Christopher Columbus and Theodore Roosevelt.
Perhaps the most egregious example was the removal of the Emancipation Memorial in Boston—an 1879 statue of Abraham Lincoln freeing a slave, paid for by freedmen themselves. The decision to remove it reflected a stunning level of arrogance, as if modern activists understood emancipation better than those who actually experienced it.
The episode captures exactly why so many of these monuments and names should be restored. The belief that “social justice” is a one-way street—and that whatever was torn down must remain so—is a myth that must be challenged.
What 2020 revealed was that once the cultural wrecking ball gets swinging, it doesn’t stop. After the statues fell, language itself came under siege. Mothers were suddenly “birthing people.” No sacred cow was spared.
Had there been a thoughtful debate about which monuments deserved reconsideration, there might have been room for compromise. But that didn’t happen. Instead, a wave of corporate and government-sanctioned hysteria bulldozed through our historical memory, all in the name of progress.
This is why a reset is so badly needed. To move on from the wounds of 2020—not just the wokeness, but the stifling COVID lockdowns that came with it—we need to restore what was needlessly lost.
Someday soon, on a frigid Sunday afternoon, Washington fans should be able to say, “Remember when they stopped calling them the Redskins? That was a mistake,” and take comfort in knowing it was corrected.
If, on a spring day in New York, people can once again admire the once-removed Theodore Roosevelt statue, it will signal that Americans have reclaimed their role as authors of history—not just passengers on a runaway ideological train.
The desire to erase the past is nothing new. In ancient Egypt, pharaohs practiced damnatio memoriae, erasing the names of rivals. In medieval Europe, iconoclasm divided nations and shattered centuries of tradition.
Time and again, people convinced they were protecting the future destroyed the very treasures that connected them to it.
But the past isn’t beyond repair. We can still choose to recover what we’ve lost—even the General Lee statue in Richmond. Then, perhaps, we can have honest discussions about how to responsibly preserve or reconsider history.
What matters most is the message: when our society makes a mistake, we can fix it. Just as we walked back policies that allowed men to compete in women’s sports, we can return to an era where we respected history instead of trying to obliterate it.
2020 was a year of extraordinary loss—of life, of freedom, and of memory. But from that destruction can come renewal. The owners of what President Trump now calls the Washington “Whatevers” have a real opportunity to lead that renewal.
So here’s to the Redskins—and to Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Columbus. This is our shared history. It’s time we took it back.
