Trump Vows (Yes, in April) to Bring Columbus Day ‘Back from the Ashes,’ and It’s Important

New in PJ Media:

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.”

There is more. Read the rest here.