Maybe it was because he was just in Rome for the pope’s funeral, but Donald Trump had Italians and Columbus Day on his mind on Sunday afternoon. The president took to Truth Social and wrote:
I’m bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes. The Democrats did everything possible to destroy Christopher Columbus, his reputation, and all of the Italians that love him so much. They tore down his Statues, and put up nothing but “WOKE,” or even worse, nothing at all! Well, you’ll be happy to know, Christopher is going to make a major comeback. I am hereby reinstating Columbus Day under the same rules, dates, and locations, as it has had for all of the many decades before!
Columbus Day doesn’t come around until October, but if Trump follows through on bringing it back to what it once was, there will need to be some time to set everything up. What was a major holiday in living memory has for more than a decade been under the cloud of the left’s disdain; numerous states and municipalities now ignore Columbus Day altogether and celebrate the day as “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” instead. If they mention Columbus at all, those celebrating Indigenous Leftists’, uh, that is, Indigenous Peoples’ Day portray the Italian explorer as a predatory white supremacist proto-colonialist preying upon the noble, sinless Native Americans.
In a typical article about all this from Oct. 2021, when “journalists” were still claiming that Old Joe Biden was sharp as a tack and the left’s cultural hegemony appeared complete and unassailable, the Los Angeles Times claimed that Columbus was the “progenitor of a continental genocide.” Alan Mikhail, the chair of the Department of History at Yale University, declared that Columbus was something even worse than a genocidal maniac: he was an “Islamophobe”: “A primary force behind Columbus’ Atlantic crossings was a fear and hatred of Islam.”
Columbus – or so Mikhail and the Los Angeles Times would have had you believe – was motivated to sail the ocean blue in 1492 by the worst impulse possible, as far as the contemporary left is concerned: “At heart, Columbus was a Crusader. Throughout his life, in his encounters with and then battles against Muslims, he felt the burden of holy war deep in his soul.” For shame, infidel! All these years you have lived in America without realizing that its very foundations are built on “Islamophobia.”
Nor did the villainy stop with the discovery of the new continent: “An anti-Islamic worldview was the mold that cast the European understanding of race and ethnicity in the Americas, as well as the concept of warfare in the Western Hemisphere.”
While portraying the discovery of America as an exercise in gratuitous racial hatred, Mikhail didn’t bother to mention what really led up to Columbus making his voyage. As “The History of Jihad” shows, Columbus set said because the land route to Asia had been closed to Europeans since the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman jihadis in 1453. The fall of the city was the occasion for an unforgettable demonstration of jihadi bloodlust, and the new Muslim rulers of the land made it perilous in the extreme for Christian tradesmen to travel the Spice Road through their domains; they were liable to be forced to convert to Islam, enslaved, or even killed.
Related: Here’s the Most Remarkable Thing About the Trump/Zelensky Sit-Down at the Pope’s Funeral
The LA Times article was yet another in the apparently endless series of articles marking the West’s cultural suicide. All of them were and are based on the assumption that the West has been uniquely violent, even genocidal, and hateful, while the (largely Islamic) East has been more sinned against than sinning and encapsulates a wisdom and nobility that we have lost. Making Americans ashamed of their history and culture is a big business nowadays. And no good can come of it.
Donald Trump appears to be aware of this, as few other Western leaders are. He isn’t afraid to speak out about it and to take action against it, either. Instilling some pride in Americans for Christopher Columbus and the civilizing effects of European settlement in North America would be a worthy endeavor indeed, and much needed as part of Trump’s America-First program. After all, why would anyone want to put America first if all he or she has learned at school has been about how evil America has been? If Trump succeeds in ending the phenomenon of Americans being ashamed of their own culture and heritage, it would be one of his most important achievements of all.
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