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The Columbus Renaissance Is Here. So Is America’s.
“We’re back. Columbus Day. We’re back, Italians. We love the Italians.”
That was President Donald Trump on Thursday to his Cabinet as he signed a proclamation to honor Christopher Columbus on Columbus Day, to be celebrated on Monday.
“Columbus, obviously, discovered the New World in 1492,” Trump said. “He was a great Italian explorer. He sailed his three ships—the Nina, the Pinta, and Santa Maria—across the Atlantic Ocean, and landed in what’s today the Caribbean. And this is a particularly important holiday for Italian Americans who celebrate the legacy of Christopher Columbus, and the innovation and explorer zeal that he represented.”
I’d have an addition to Trump’s statement: We’re back, America.
In 2017, I wrote a piece for The Daily Signal asking the question whether we might see the end of Columbus Day. As I noted at the time, there had been a concerted effort from the far Left over decades to destroy his reputation and transform Columbus Day into “Indigenous Peoples Day.”
That wasn’t being done for the purpose of simply honoring Native Americans, nor was it just about condemning Columbus the man. Far from it. Instead, the effort to deconstruct Columbus has been part of a concerted effort to delegitimize the entire history of the United States.
America is a “settler-colonialist” state founded on slavery and white supremacy and capitalism and everything horrible, they contended. Once-fringe theories sequestered to the dark corners of academia became mainstream, institutionalized.
The Left sought to rewrite American history with the intent of leading the country to reject its political and cultural heritage. Bereft of that heritage, the country would turn to the Left for answers, the thinking went. I wrote an entire book about it.
The attacks on Columbus escalated. By 2020, there was a full-blown war being waged on American history as statues around the country, whether those of Columbus or the Founding Fathers, or Abraham Lincoln, or pretty much any other historical figure, were being literally town down as elite media and academia effectively cheered them on.
But then something changed. Americans began to see through the insanity. They started to realize that the attacks on our history weren’t about constructive criticism of America’s flaws. They were instead malicious attacks, often outright lies, about what the country was built on.
Now the statues are going up, not coming down. Columbus Day is back on.
The Left can’t just cry “racism” over and over and expect that they will get their way. We don’t have to listen to these fanatics anymore. They are not the majority in this country, and they never were.
What looked like a one-way ticket to America’s cultural oblivion just a few years ago is now a real fight, a fight that we are winning. But that fight isn’t over, despite those victories.
The New York Post reported Tuesday that outgoing New York City Mayor Eric Adams “wants to slap historic designation status on the Italian explorer’s monuments at Columbus Circle and Astoria’s Columbus Square—to keep [leftist Democrat mayoral candidate Zohran] Mamdani from toppling the statues if he takes City Hall.”
Adams was essentially thrown out of the Democrat Party after opposing President Joe Biden’s open borders policies and for cooperating with the Trump administration.
Good for him for trying to protect Columbus and New York City’s history. There was a time when such notions were bipartisan.
But not today.
Mamdani, the man who might replace Adams if he wins the mayor’s race, represents the opposite side of our larger battle over America.
Mamdani is the socialist son of a far-left Columbia professor who spent his career promoting “decolonialism.” He appeared to be flipping the bird toward a Columbus statue in a social media post in 2020 at the height of the George Floyd riots. He said in the post, “take it down.”
Mamdani hasn’t really weighed in on Columbus or statues during the campaign. That wouldn’t go so well given the national “vibe shift.”
Yet, the same forces that led to the attacks on Columbus and our past are still there. They are every bit as committed to erasing our history and derailing the entire course of the American project, and they represent a huge faction of people on the left.
Nevertheless, in the last year, our country got a new lease on life, so to speak.
We almost lost Columbus Day, America, everything good about this country, and what it was meant to be. All those things may still be taken from us. But not this year, not today.
We got another chance to go forward with one foot in the past and another in the future—just like Columbus. Let’s make the most of it.
The post The Columbus Renaissance Is Here. So Is America’s. appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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