In March 2026, Washington County briefly considered renaming a stretch of County Highway K to Charlie J. Kirk Way in honor of the conservative icon who was tragically assassinated by a deranged leftist. The renaming of a highway is hardly cause for concern, but Charlie Kirk’s name alone caused a small firestorm for the county board, which was inundated with calls, emails, and protesters for daring to think of renaming the highway in honor of the fallen conservative hero.
That pressure unfortunately resulted in the resolution failing to move forward. Concerns about taxpayer money funding the signs raised red flags, along with the “substantially higher” than expected $50,000 initial estimate. While I can’t prove it, I’m sure this issue didn’t split directly along ideological lines. I can imagine that many conservatives would view this as wasteful spending. Normally, I would agree with them, but I think this issue is a microcosm of a bigger issue: conservative aversion to building physical culture.
The conservative instinct here is honorable in its own way: government should not waste taxpayer dollars on symbolic gestures. “Frivolous” is the word that I’m sure many people would use. It is the language of restraint and refusing to play the left’s game of performative politics. However, by declining to plant even the smallest flag, we concede the physical landscape to those who have no such hesitation.
In today’s world, we consume so much subscription-based or algorithmically curated content. Unlike our apps that can be gone tomorrow, the physical world does not disappear overnight. It must be physically removed, which can be expensive and publicly visible. That is precisely why such markers matter.
History is not written by the victors alone; it is also rewritten by whoever controls the visible markers of memory. The left understands this reflexively even if they don’t understand the significance of it on a meta level. They do not merely protest our monuments; they remove them and attempt to erect their own.
Conservatives, by contrast, have spent considerable time playing defense. We conserve by preserving what already exists until it’s gone. The real work of conserving a culture in an age of vitriolic iconoclasm is proactive creation. We must build new memorials, new named buildings, new highways, new libraries, and new public squares that testify to the ideas and people we believe are worthy of remembrance.
Not out of pure nostalgia, which isn’t inherently a bad thing, but out of recognition that physical permanence is one of the last backstops against cultural rot. Trust me; I know cool statues and monuments aren’t everything. However, if people don’t have something tangible to connect history to, it’s merely words on a page.
Look at the asymmetry in how the left and right handle these issues. The left has turned entire cityscapes into open-air museums of their victories: renamed streets, plazas, and whole murals that function as ideological propaganda billboards. These are not subtle. They are daily reminders to every pedestrian that a particular narrative now owns this ground. We dismiss them as tacky or divisive, yet we rarely match them.
The death of Iryna Zarutska was one example where the right attempted this. The brutal death of the Ukrainian refugee at the hands of a lifetime career criminal was shocking, and the right highlighted her story, bringing national attention. We saw murals painted in her name, but unfortunately the hostile powers that be don’t want that physical reminder of the failure of liberal policies.
When we do attempt it, as Washington County tried, our gut reaction is to balk at the price tag. Trust me, my initial instinct is to do the same. Now, a highway sign is not the epitome of cultural dominance; I’m well aware that it seems like I’m dying on an obscure hill. However, the left never flinches. They treat real estate as the ultimate cultural non-fungible asset, worth any short-term expenditure because the long-term return is unchecked cultural dominance.
At the national level, we see President Trump building new culture in honor of America’s 250th birthday. If erected, monuments like the Triumphal Arch will undoubtedly outlast us and serve as a physical reminder for this time in history.
We do not need to rename every highway. We do need to stop treating every naming, every monument, and every new civic marker as an automatic waste. The left has turned cultural geography into a battlefield, and they win it by default because we often refuse to fight on it. The conservative task is not to mirror their quest for historical revision but to surpass it with new construction. Plant flags that future generations will have to confront rather than simply scroll past.
History belongs to those who stake a claim on the ground and refuse to let it be rewritten without a fight. The road in Washington County is still just Highway K. Next time, let us make sure the next proposal does not die before getting off the ground. Let us plant the flag—not just because Charlie Kirk, or any single figure, is indispensable, but because the ground itself is.
