A man who died five centuries ago has emerged as a symbol of something he never could have imagined.
Sunday on his social media platform Truth Social, President Donald Trump announced his plan to restore the late-15th-century Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus to his once-lofty perch among the venerated heroes of Western and American history.
The announcement served as a welcome sign that the president has not forgotten his promised National Garden of American Heroes.
On Jan. 18, 2021, only two days before the end of his first presidential term, Trump issued Executive Order 13978. In Section 3, the president identified Columbus among 244 historical figures he intended to honor in that National Garden.
Meanwhile, on Thursday, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced a “special funding opportunity” to support and design the statues.
In other words, Trump might have had the National Garden in mind when he wrote of Columbus on Sunday.
“I’m bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes,” the president wrote. “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!”
Indeed, Trump issued Executive Order 13978 in response to the statue-toppling that accompanied the 2020 Black Lives Matter madness.
Should it be illegal to change federal holiday names without Congressional approval?
Happily, that orgy of destruction has receded into history. But the president has not forgotten.
“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!” he added.
Trump’s announcement qualifies as great news no matter how one looks at it.
Of course — and here I must try not to come across as an academic pedant — conservatives do have an obligation to view Columbus through as realistic a lens as possible then to tell the truth about him.
For instance, whatever else he achieved, Columbus certainly did not sail westward in order to bring freedom to the Americas. Nor did the men of the American Founding Era view him that way. In fact, having spent decades immersed in the writings of those great American Founding Fathers, I can safely report that I never once came across a reference to the Genoese explorer.
Having said that, however, one simply cannot deny Columbus’ bravery, nor his world-changing significance. The decisions he made, and the events his discovery unleashed, transformed the entire planet for good and ill, though in the case of the future United States the friends of freedom across the globe have always and rightly regarded the transformation as not only a net positive but a divinely ordered blessing.
And therein lies the source of our perennial dispute with the woke American Left.
The average woke liberal, for instance, neither knows nor cares what Columbus intended or what he actually did. To their propaganda-filled minds, it matters only that the explorer, his contemporaries, and his successors had lighter skin, and that they carried the scourge of bloodthirsty Christendom to a New World filled with peace-loving Natives.
The point, of course, is not that this characterization had no basis in truth. To their eternal shame, some adventurers did exploit and murder the people they encountered in the New World.
At the same time, however, let us not exaggerate the novelty of that experience. Like human beings everywhere, some tribes in the Western Hemisphere did largely try to live in peace. Meanwhile, others slaughtered their neighbors and cut out their hearts, or they sacrificed children to their false gods.
In short, having a certain color skin, or hailing from a certain continent, makes one neither oppressor nor oppressed.
Wokeness, however, with its roots in Marxism, cannot endure nuance. Nor can the narcissists who embrace wokeness tolerate the veneration of anything real besides themselves. They hate everything having to do with America and its past. So they have made Columbus a proxy for everything they despise. It really involves nothing more complicated than that.
Moreover, in place of real heroes they have erected statues to everything unworthy, including themselves. In building statues to career criminal George Floyd, for instance, who died in police custody in 2020, setting off the aforementioned Black Lives Matter orgy of destruction, woke liberals really meant to honor themselves, for Floyd — as unworthy an honoree as ever lived — reminds liberals of their own exquisite racial sensibilities.
We need statues not to Floyd but to 19th-century abolitionist and civil rights hero Frederick Douglass. Trump promised one in Executive Order 13978. Woke liberals, however, would screech over it, for Douglass, born a slave in Maryland, nonetheless loved both Jesus Christ and the U.S. Constitution. So he must give way in order that the woke left may elevate the Floyds of the world.
In short, thank you, Mr. President, for bringing back Columbus Day. After all, the man who died nearly three hundred years before the United States existed has now become a symbol for good in a much larger fight.
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