Let’s play—in more ways than one—a game of pretend.

Suppose a neighborhood arts center has a meeting room called Founders’ Hall.

Someone objects. Founders, he says, were almost always men, men who excluded women. Founders, he says, were bad. Nobody wants to spend a board meeting defending sexism on behalf of a room, so the name becomes Community Hall.

But it turns out—thank you, Wikipedia—that this meeting place was founded by five people, three of them women, and that the group’s charter explicitly endorsed equality between the sexes.

The name, however, has been changed.

No harm, no foul? Maybe.

Because now new members learn that the room used to be called Founders’ Hall. Why was the name changed? Presumably there was something wrong with it. Perhaps women had been excluded. Perhaps the founders were all men. Perhaps there was some unpleasant history nobody quite remembers.

There wasn’t.

But now there is a story.

And, of course, one could tell the same story about conservative name changes. Imagine a gym called Wilson Gym. Someone is sure that the gym is named for Woodrow Wilson, who, among other things, lowered tariffs. That person insists the name must be changed, and no one feels comfortable disagreeing. The gym becomes Freedom Gym. Later somebody checks the archives and discovers that it was named not for Woodrow Wilson but for Wilson, Tom Hanks’s beloved volleyball in Cast Away.

No harm, no foul? Maybe. Many would claim that changing names like this doesn’t really matter. It’s just a place, after all. We should make people happy.

But I’d argue the new sign certifies the objection that produced it. The board changed the name; therefore the old name must have needed changing. People assume the old name was offensive even though the facts tell a very different tale.

A better response might have been: We checked. There is nothing here to correct.

That answer does not dismiss concerns about sexism—or, for that matter, enthusiasm for high tariffs. It simply says those concerns have nothing to do with this particular room or gym.

That distinction is worth preserving. Concepts such as sexist and pro-tariff are useful because they describe real things. If they are applied casually and without factual basis, they often worsen the problem they were created to address. In 2026, it’s a quick jump from the facts don’t matter to anyone who insists on them must be a liar.

It’s worth standing up to such efforts. Being offended by a fact does not make the fact an offense. There is nothing intolerant about refusing to pretend that something happened when it didn’t. Sometimes a name is just a name.