The sinking of Cesar Chavez
The U.S. Navy’s program to name ships after civil rights leaders is not aging well.
J.R. Dunn | March 20, 2026
The U.S. Navy’s program to name ships after civil rights leaders is not aging well. For the second time, the Navy will be forced to change the name of a ship named for a sexual predator. Both of them, interestingly enough, have been widely honored as “civil rights pioneers.”
The program to name ships for civil rights crusaders began during the Obama administration when Navy Secretary Ray Mabus announced that upcoming U.S. navy oilers would be named for John L. Lewis, Lucy Stone, Sojourner Truth, Earl Warren, Robert F. Kennedy, and Harvey Milk.
At that time, a Lewis and Clark class cargo vessel had already been named for Cesar Chavez.
This was a strange list. Sojourner Truth is fine and even John L. Lewis, but the inclusion of Bobby Kennedy, whose great contribution toward civil rights was advising JFK not to meet with Martin Luther King, Jr., and Earl Warren, who helped put the entire population of Japanese Americans behind barbed wire during WW II, made it clear that the actual purpose was to provide a smokescreen for liberal pols.
Yet another problem lay in the fact that Harvey Milk, lauded for his role in promoting gay rights, was a statutory rapist and sexual predator, a fact known at the time (though generally buried by the media).
Milk had once been in a sexual relationship with sixteen-year-old Jack McKinley, a troubled teenager who committed suicide after their breakup. (This was detailed by gay journalist Randy Schilts in his book The Mayor of Castro Street.) Numerous reports of similar liaisons exist. He was honored by the U.S. Navy under the Biden administration just the same – even though he’d been given a dishonorable discharge in 1955. It’s impossible to imagine a straight pol being acclaimed in the same way given the circumstances.
The Harvey Milk was ordered renamed by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth in July 2025. It became the Oscar V. Peterson, after an actual war hero who died of his wounds following the 1942 battle of Coral Sea, wounds that he suffered while keeping his ship operational under Japanese attack. While no mention of Milk’s pedophilia was made at the time, there’s little question that it played a role in the decision.
So now we have Cesar Chavez, a man revered for his work in aid of migrant workers during the 60s and 70s, a period when, as it turns out, he was also raping twelve-year-old girls.
An attempt was made to rename the ship in 2025 but was abandoned after widespread protests. Will the protestors now apologize? I doubt it.
There’s little question that it will be renamed now, along with streets, buildings, and schools across the country. So it always seems to go with DEI efforts. Will the Left ever learn? I doubt that too.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/03/the_sinking_of_cesar_chavez.html
