Celebrating – and Hating – Columbus: Why the Italian explorer is a lightning rod for Leftist venom.

“I’m bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes,” President Donald Trump declared on Truth Social back in April of 2025. “Christopher is going to make a major comeback,” Trump continued. “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 was established as a federal holiday in 1934, but in October 2021, then-President Joe Biden issued the first-ever presidential proclamation for Indigenous Peoples Day to exist alongside it. You may recall that failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris expressed her support for “efforts on the federal level to change the second Monday in October from Columbus Day to ‘Indigenous Peoples Day.’” She consistently recognized Indigenous Peoples Day (but not Columbus Day) in official statements since 2021. In a speech to the National Congress of American Indians that year, she said of the European explorers to the Americas,

Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for Tribal nations – perpetrating violence, stealing land and spreading disease. We must not shy away from this shameful past, and we must shed light on it and do everything we can to address the impact of the past on Native communities today.

The Left has worked assiduously for half a century or more to perpetuate this hateful, corrosive narrative that the history of European colonialism throughout the New World is nothing but one long, atrocity-punctuated narrative of genocide, exploitation, theft and oppression, launched by Christopher Columbus.

For a rejuvenating antidote to that narrative, I highly recommend Jeff Fynn-Paul’s 2023 book Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World, a must-have for anyone who wants to be prepared to defend the truth about our civilization against the ideologically charged distortions and smears that predominate in our culture. It is a deeply researched book by a scholar who explicitly states that his intention in writing it was not to be a cheerleader for Western civilization or to whitewash atrocities that actually happened in the New World, but to simply present the balanced, objective truth about very contentious historical issues. (For a deeper dive into that book, check out my interview with Professor Fynn-Paul at The Right Take podcast here and my review of his book here.)

The book includes a chapter titled “Intrepid Explorer or Genocidal Maniac? The Complex Case of Christopher Columbus.” In it, Fynn-Paul begins by noting what a boogeyman the Left has made of Columbus. According to their narrative,

Columbus embodies the European penchant for killing and enslaving nonwhite peoples wherever they are found. Throw in the notion that he was also the founder of modern capitalism, the first imperialist, the first colonizer, the bringer of patriarchy to the New World, and the instigator of mass environmental destruction, and Columbus becomes a nearly perfect embodiment of everything hated by the Left today.

He goes on to summarize the truth, both good and bad, of Columbus’ character and accomplishments in the New World, to set the record straight and humanize the monster which the Left have constructed:

Columbus was no saint. He was a self-aggrandizing entrepreneur and a bad administrator who allowed anarchy to break out where some other men might have kept order. This ended up causing thousands of deaths to set the stage for more. At the same time, Columbus was an extremely brave, skilled navigator and a visionary who set the stage for modernity by uniting the two halves of planet earth.

Columbus’s accomplishments as a navigator and explorer are irrefutable and justly catapult him into the first rank of historical figures. For hundreds of years after Columbus, the mapmaking and geography he spurred acted as anchors for countless scientific advancements. It is no exaggeration to say that the European voyages of discovery remain foundational to all modern science and technology. Columbus was the first to bring New World peoples back into contact with the major civilizations of the Old World, and he is rightly remembered as a brash, colorful architect of modern globalism.

But Fynn-Paul notes that, just as multiculturalist Leftists demonize Columbus and other European explorers, they idealize the “indigenous peoples” in that condescending soft bigotry that characterizes the Left’s attitude toward the “people of color” they claim for their own. They believe that

if only indigenous institutions and mentalities had triumphed over European ones, rather than the other way around, the world today would be a veritable utopia, where all races and genders live in harmony with nature and one another. Because that, in their idealized view, is what New World society was like before Columbus arrived.

In this simplistic, utopian worldview, which requires the Left to omit the inconvenient truths and complexities that are always part of the human story, “the wellspring of Western civilization is the oppression of Natives… The resulting worldview is so rabidly anti-white, anti-male, and anti-European that it challenges the idea of human progress itself.”

And that is the real reason Christopher Columbus is a lightning rod for Left-wing hatred: he represents the principal pillars of Western civilization they want to deconstruct and destroy: Christianity, capitalism, masculinity, and “whiteness.”

As for the truth of Indigenous Peoples Day, my colleague Daniel Greenfield has written,

[R]emember that the notion of ‘indigenous’ is a Marxist myth used to browbeat civilized peoples into feeling like they have no right to exist because tribes of settlers and colonists who sacrificed children on pyramids and cut the noses off women are considered to be ‘indigenous’ because they did their settling and colonizing a thousand years earlier.

In his Columbus Day proclamation issued on October 7, Trump called the explorer “a legend whose vision, fortitude, and perseverance unleashed a dynamic of history that led to the creation of the greatest, freest, and most just Nation in history.” Trump added, with an unambiguous warning shot at the America-hating Left, “We are forever indebted to his courageous voyage, and we will never allow his legacy to be erased by radical extremists.”

Today, as we celebrate the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World, we honor his unrivaled greatness. We embrace our duty to prove worthy of the inheritance he left us, to match his courage with our own, and to never abandon, forsake, or forget the beauty of our faith, the glories of our culture, and the stories of our heroes.

>>>Why the Italian explorer is a lightning rod<<<

In 2024 a research team used DNA to establish that Christopher Columbus had Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Is that behind some attempts to discredit him?

https://aish.com/christopher-columbus-secret-jew/

That article predates the DNA research by many years (circa 2012) but I think they updated it slightly.

A couple of data point connections that aren't found in the usual sources:

1) The name "Columbus", Columbia and so on, means dove, and

The Talmud compares the spirit of God hovering over the waters to a dove that hovers over her young.[13][14][15]
In post-biblical Judaism, souls are envisioned as bird-like (Bahir 119), a concept that may be derived from the Biblical notion that dead spirits "chirp" (Isa. 29:4). The Guf, or Treasury of Souls, is sometimes described as a columbarium, a dove cote. This connects it to a related legend: the "Palace of the Bird's Nest", the dwelling place of the Messiah's soul until his advent (Zohar II: 8a–9a).
The Vilna Gaon explicitly declares that a dove is a symbol of the human soul (Commentary to Jonah, 1). The dove is also a symbol of the people Israel (Song of Songs Rabbah 2:14), an image frequently repeated in Midrash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doves_as_symbols#Judaism

2) "1492" is synonymous with Columbus and the Discovery of America, and the first words in the Torah that add up to 1492 are in Genesis 1:1 --

בראשית 1:1
בראשית *ברא אלהים את השמים ואת* הארץ
Genesis 1
1 In the beginning *God created the heaven and* the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

As such, the "bookend" words with the 1492 inside read "in the beginning [is] the land."

(It's never just one thing.)

I included all of Day One because:

"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good" = 1776
"And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness." = 1776

***

In other news, because every word in Hebrew has a numeric value as an intrinsic property (a veritable "Numerology!" invective used in certain circles to warn the folks, but whatever)...

"Lightning rod" [כליא ברק] = 363 = "the Messiah" [המשיח]

Particularly relevant because the hovering dove "Spirit of God" in verse 2 is also likened to the soul of the Messiah:

“And the spirit of God was hovering” – this is the spirit of the messianic king, as it says: “The spirit of the Lord will rest upon him” (Isaiah 11:2). By what merit will it [the Messianic kingdom] come? “Hovering over the surface of the water” – by the merit of repentance, that is likened to water, as it is stated: “Pour out your heart like water [before the face of the Lord]” (Lamentations 2:19).
https://www.sefaria.org/Bereshit_Rabbah.2.4?lang=bi

Noun

lightning rod (plural lightning rods)

1. A metallic conductor that is attached to a high point of a building and leads to the ground to protect the building from damage by lightning.
2. (figuratively) A person or thing that is a target for negative reactions and distracts criticism from another target.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lightning_rod

And over in the Land of the Rising Sun, Japan named for being the land (relative to China) of the origin/source of the Sun:

1492, the year of Columbus' first voyage to America, can be read as "i-yo-ku-ni" and appended with "ga mieta" to form the phrase "Alright! I can see land!" (いいよ！国が見えた！). Additionally, "i-yo-ku-ni" itself could simply be interpreted as "It's a good country" (いいよ、国). The alternative reading "i-shi-ku-ni" is also used to memorize the year, though it is not typically associated with a particular meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_wordplay#Examples

Also the view from China:

The United States is known as 美國, lit. "beautiful country."

Weird how the audio pronunciations on that page sound like "make war".

Well not really strange at all. It's pretty much the simple meaning. Columbus... America... fightin' words, especially today. It comes with the territory. 🙂

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