Today we remember the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, who in October 1492 landed in the Bahamas and became the first Western European to discover what the Europeans would call the New World.
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Today we remember the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, who in October 1492 landed in the Bahamas and became the first Western European to discover what the Europeans would call the New World.
When Columbus and his crew of approximately 200 sailors left Spain in three crowded ships – the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria – they set their sails toward an unknown horizon. They expected to discover a trade route to India. (Most Europeans at the time knew the earth was round – but they were unaware of the North and South American continents.) Instead of finding a route to Southeast Asia, Columbus and his crew landed on a continent of new opportunities. Columbus’s accidental discovery opened a permanent passage across the Atlantic and redrew the known map of the world.
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The University of Notre Dame administration has now covered the school’s 12 murals depicting the life of Christopher Columbus, which generated protests and petitions from Native American groups on campus.
The 12 tapestries showing Native American symbols and wildlife native to Indiana and are now placed directly over the Columbus murals. The Native American symbols belong to the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, who invited the religious congregation that founded Notre Dame to today’s campus.
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Two Christopher Columbus statues were removed at the direction of Democratic Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Friday morning after protesters and police sparred outside the monuments last week.
Crews dismantled the statues in Grant Park and Arrigo Park under the cover of darkness, and the monuments had been removed from their pedestals by 6 a.m., according to NBC 5.
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It’s been two weeks since a Christopher Columbus statue was toppled outside the Minnesota Capitol, but the Minnesota Department of Public Safety said the investigation remains ongoing.
A spokesperson for the agency told KSTP chief political reporter Tom Hauser that the “investigation continues as the [Bureau of Criminal Apprehension] works to identify other participants in the incident, beyond the leader.”
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Protesters attacked Christopher Columbus statues in Richmond, Virginia and Boston Tuesday night.
The Columbus statue in Richmond’s Byrd Park was toppled, set on fire, and thrown into a nearby lake, ABC affiliate WRIC News reported. The Boston statue, located in Christopher Columbus Park, was discovered decapitated Wednesday morning, according to Boston 25 News.
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Almost 5,000 concerned Minnesotans signed a petition asking the governor to reinstall the statue of Christopher Columbus that was torn down by protesters last June.
The statue was on display at the Capitol building for almost 100 years before being destroyed by members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) last summer.
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Michael Anthony Forcia, the man who organized the destruction of Minnesota’s Christopher Columbus statue, never faced trial and will not go to jail.
Forcia once faced a first-degree criminal property damage charge, which has now been suspended, and his trial was replaced with a virtual Zoom-based hearing. Instead of going to jail, he will have to perform 100 hours of community service and write a letter acknowledging that he destroyed the statue, according to Fox 9.
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Emails obtained by the Star Tribune indicate that Gov. Tim Walz’s administration decided not to reinstall a Christopher Columbus statue the same day it was toppled over by a group of protesters.
The statue, which stood outside the State Capitol building, was torn down in broad daylight by a group of vandals affiliated with the American Indian Movement (AIM). Mike Forcia, chairman of AIM, said he alerted Walz’s office of his plans prior to the June 10 incident.
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Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who welcomed the destruction of a Christopher Columbus statue, chairs the board responsible for Capitol artwork and monuments.
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Republican Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has cosponsored an amendment to replace Columbus Day with Juneteenth as a new federal holiday.
The measure was introduced Wednesday as an amendment to Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-TX) bill to declare Juneteenth a federal holiday. Johnson is co-sponsoring the amendment with Sen. James Lankford (R-OK).
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Two Republican state senators asked the Minnesota Historical Society to repair and restore a Christopher Columbus statue that was torn down outside the Minnesota Capitol three weeks ago.
Although the incident took place in broad daylight and was recorded by countless news stations and reporters, the Minnesota Department of Public Safety said last week the investigation remains ongoing.
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The protesters and activists who tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus outside the Minnesota Capitol Wednesday faced virtually no resistance from state leaders or law enforcement.
In fact, after the statue was toppled over, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan said Minnesota “is long overdue for a hard look at the symbols, statues, and icons that were created without the input of many of our communities.”
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A woman who kept her restaurant open against Gov. Tim Walz’s orders was convicted and began her jail term the same week the state dropped charges against the man who toppled and destroyed a statue of Christopher Columbus at the Minnesota Capitol.
Lisa Hanson owns The Interchange Wine and Coffee Bistro in Albert Lea, Minnesota. When Walz issued an executive order last year demanding that all bars and restaurants close their doors in the name of COVID-19 prevention, she did not comply. This resulted in her being convicted of six criminal misdemeanors on Thursday following a trial that took less than a week and a jury deliberation that took only a few hours.
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Right-wing politicians in Spain criticized President Joe Biden’s proclamation of Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Monday and refused to apologize for the atrocities committed when the country colonized the Americas, BBC News reported.
Spain’s colonial expansion into the Americas was described as “the most important event in history after the Roman empire,” by Pablo Casado, leader of the conservative People’s Party, on the eve of the country’s holiday honoring Christopher Columbus, BBC News reported Tuesday.
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Leftists are trying to destroy America, her Constitution, her honor, and the patriots who love her. The corrupt leftists are on the streets of blue cities and are Democrats in positions of leadership in the United States government. The chaos you’ve seen on television every night for nearly two months (or not seen lately if you watch mainstream media) is horrifying, but it is routinely ignored—if not encouraged—by the leadership of the Left. “People will do what they do,” Nancy Pelosi said regarding the mob’s destruction of a Christopher Columbus statue on Independence Day.
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The list of American statues and other monuments that have been toppled, decapitated, defaced, or removed since the May 25 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis grew longer almost daily through June and into July.
A mob cheered as it pulled down a statue of Christopher Columbus in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In Washington, D.C., rioters used ropes to tear down a bronze depiction of Albert Pike, a Confederate general, and then set the 11-foot statue on fire.
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Who would have thought the Gates Foundation would endorse tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus, Ulysses S. Grant, George Washington, and other dead white men?
Sure, you won’t find “mob violence,” “vandalism,” or “destruction of public property” in any grant applications, but the paroxysms of rage racking our country and the desire to rip racism from America by root and branch is the end-product of Big Philanthropy’s governing ideology.
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When Al Sharpton demanded, three years ago, that the funding for the Jefferson Memorial’s upkeep be cut off, people laughed. But they’re not laughing now. Actually, they’re still laughing, but now it’s more of a nervous chuckle in dismal expectation of what’s to come. First it was Robert E. Lee, then it was Christopher Columbus, and now it’s old TJ himself.
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Protests and looting were supplanted last week by an orgy of more symbolic destruction. Statues of various figures from our civilization’s past—Christopher Columbus, a Texas Ranger, numerous confederate Civil War memorials, and even Philadelphia’s Frank Rizzo—have been toppled, defaced, or scheduled for removal by compliant officials.
In the same spirit, a Senate GOP committee recently voted to rename military bases named after confederate generals. Those names—Fort Bragg and Fort Hood, among them—have acquired their own connotations as centers of excellence, but must be renamed because their long-forgotten namesakes fought on the losing side of the Civil War.
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It never stops getting worse, does it? Just when you think the progressive Left has torpedoed our culture and country to rock bottom, a new hitherto-inconceivable outrage explodes.
Until the Trump years, the law-abiding universally loved the FBI. They protected our country and us, we thought. They investigated domestic threats to America, we thought. They were politically nonpartisan, like the military, we thought. Respect for them was so universal that ABC had a show titled The F.B.I., starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr., which depicted FBI heroism week after week.
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Do parents have the right to know what their children are being taught in public school?
Parents say yes; teachers say no.
Of course, it’s not quite that simple. The description of the latter party can be tweaked to “teachers unions” — although you don’t hear many individual teachers bucking the union line — but the dichotomy remains: parents want to know what’s going on in their kids’ classrooms, and teachers, administrators, and their union bosses would rather not tell them.
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Two gubernatorial candidates, Dr. Scott Jensen and Dr. Neil Shah, responded to the announcement that business owner Melissa “Lisa” Hanson was convicted and jailed for violating Governor Tim Walz’s (D) COVID emergency orders. Jensen posted a video to Twitter, where he called the conviction and sentencing saying, “SO WRONG!”
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“We must never,” Bismarck is said to have warned, “look into the origins of laws or sausages.” Sage advice, I’ve always thought (and no pun intended with that “sage”)—but how much at odds it is with the dominant current of modern thought, which is to say Enlightenment thought.
Immanuel Kant, a great hero of the Enlightenment, summed up the alternative to Bismarck’s counsel when, in an essay called “What is Enlightenment?,” he offered Sapere Aude, Dare to know!, as a motto for the movement. Enlightened man, Kant thought, was the first real adult: the first to realize his potential as an autonomous being—a being, as the etymology of the word implies, who “gives the law to himself.” As Kant stressed, this was a moral as well as an intellectual achievement, since it involved courage as much as insight: courage to put aside convention, tradition, and superstition (how the three tended to coalesce for Enlightened thinkers!) in order to rely for guidance on the dictates of reason alone.
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Rutgers University-Camden will remove a statue of the famous poet Walt Whitman from the center of campus as a result of activists’ petitions and a recommendation from a committee of scholars.
The statue of Whitman, featured prominently in the front courtyard of Camden’s Campus Center, will be “relocated to a historically relevant site on campus and contextualized,” interim Chancellor Margaret Marsh recently announced in an email to students and employees.
That new location has yet to be announced by campus officials.
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Riotous rogue Trump supporters who broke into the Capitol on January 6 were properly and widely condemned by conservatives. They were somewhat reminiscent of the mobs of fanatic leftists and union members that a decade ago stormed the Wisconsin state capitol at Madison, or the unpunished hundreds of rioters who created havoc on Washington, D.C. streets during the Trump 2016 inauguration. We expect the Capitol stormers will be punished, and not in the lax fashion of the latter two groups that were not.
Within a few days, the talking points were finalized that all of Donald Trump’s supporters deserved blame for the violence. That riot, the Trump defeat, and the loss of the Senate have greenlighted left-wing talk of “deprogramming,” “de-Baathification,” “re-educating,” and “reprogramming” half the country to ensure they think correctly and act properly from now on—the exact methodology of such brain rinsing apparently to be announced later.
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Holy Cow, the cancel culture has sunk even further. Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, Alexander Graham Bell, Ben Franklin, Woodrow Wilson, and many more names from American history are now personas non grata in Washington DC. A committee formed by the mayor has recommended taking their name off city-owned buildings. They also recommended removing federal assets such as the Jefferson Memorial and Washington Monument.
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser formed the District of Columbia Facilities, and Commemorative Expressions Working Group, also known as the DC FACES Working Group.
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Over the weekend a flurry of articles appeared, enthusing about the awesome machinery being put together across the country to defeat President Donald Trump in this fall’s presidential election. The machinery is being put together not by Democrats but by that most curious of political animals, the Never Trumpers. I have pored over all the reports and noted all the data. Reporters spent a lot of time interviewing the Never Trumpers and noting all their grand designs. It looked to me like it was curtains for Donald, except for two problems facing the valiant Never Trumpers.
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Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan shared a post on social media over the Independence Day weekend calling Mount Rushmore a “symbol of white supremacy.”
“Mount Rushmore is a symbol of white supremacy, of structural racism that’s still alive and well in society today. It’s an injustice to actively steal Indigenous people’s land, then carve the white faces of the colonizers who committed genocide,” said the post, which Flanagan shared on her Instagram.
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Donald Trump did not mention Lincoln’s First Inaugural address in his speech commemorating the spirit of American Independence at Mount Rushmore on Friday night. But the president’s speech—perhaps his most forceful and eloquent to date—vibrated with the same energy and existential commitment that fired Lincoln in March 1861.
Lincoln came to office at a time of crisis. His election had precipitated the secession of seven Southern states. His inaugural address was both a plea for conciliation and unity as well as a warning that violence would be stopped with force. “We are not enemies, but friends,” Lincoln said.
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The New York Times on Thursday published an advertisement calling for Yale to be renamed after someone who was not a brutal, white supremacist slave-trader. A Harvard man named Jeremiah Dummer fits the bill, New Criterion editor and American Greatness contributor Roger Kimball argues.
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Dr. Carol M. Swain appeared on Fox News Channel’s Fox and Friends Weekend Edition with hosts, Jedediah Bila and Pete Hegseth this past Saturday to discuss the tearing down of national monuments.
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Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York said he supports tearing down statues Tuesday, noting that it is a powerful statement about equality and anti-racism.
“People are making a statement about equality, about community, to be against racism, against slavery. I think those are good statements,” Cuomo said Tuesday on “Today.”
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by Peter Hasson Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush warned protesters not to “mess with the Alamo” on Saturday as vandals have targeted other historical sites around the country. Bush said his office is monitoring “social media posts and rumors from protesters who are threatening to come to The…
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A DFL lawmaker revealed on Twitter this week that she’s “tried a bunch of times” to get a portrait of President Abraham Lincoln removed from the Minnesota House chamber.
State Rep. Mary Kunesh-Podein (DFL-New Brighton) said it’s “hard to look at” House Speaker Melissa Hortman (DFL-Brooklyn Park) when she’s “standing in front of Lincoln.”
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by Jenna Robinson From the very beginning, it’s clear that Wilfred M. McClay’s Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story isn’t a typical textbook. The title alone alerts readers that McClay’s book will not be the kind of history text that has become so popular in…
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by Jeffrey A. Tucker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was trying to explain to me that the world is going to melt, we are all doing to die, and probably we shouldn’t be having any more children, but I was distracted by the dinner she was preparing on camera. She was carefully…
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Thousands of pro-life Americans and advocates from other nations will gather on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Friday to celebrate the 50th March for Life, the first since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
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The jury trial of Richard Barnett, the man famously photographed with his feet on a desk in Nancy Pelosi’s office on January 6, 2021, is underway in Washington, D.C. Nearly two years to the date of his arrest, Barnett finally had a chance to defend himself in court on multiple charges, including obstruction of an official proceeding.
But it was not the fiery, outspoken Barnett who provided the most jaw-dropping testimony in the trial so far. To the contrary, one of the government’s own witnesses confirmed under defense cross-examination that “agents provocateur” were heavily involved in instigating the events of January 6.
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In late November, some Ohio parents received a brochure via snail mail detailing a workshop co-sponsored by their local PTAs and social media app TikTok.
Agendas for the event were included in the mailer but are also posted in media releases on the National PTA and TikTok websites dating back to 2019. “During the family workshops,” readers are told, “parents and teens will: Engage with a student panel about online safety and digital citizenship; Learn about available safety settings and privacy tools within TikTok; [and] Complete a guided activity together that helps illustrate why teens enjoy using TikTok for creative expression.”
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More than 20 members of Congress have signed a letter to both the mayor of Washington, DC, and the Metropolitan Police Chief, demanding “a thorough investigation,” including “autopsies,” into the deaths of five late-term infants allegedly aborted in Cesare Santangelo’s Washington Surgi-Clinic.
Led by Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the lawmakers wrote to Mayor Muriel Bowser and Police Chief Robert J. Contee III Tuesday that, when the police “recovered the remains of five preborn children apparently from the Washington Surgi-Clinic in Washington, D.C.,” the Metropolitan Police “made the assumption that each child died as the result of a legal abortion.”
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WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Minnesota priest, who hosts the No. 1 podcast in the country “The Bible in a Year,” headlined the 49th March for Life rally Friday joined by tens of thousands of abortion opponents gathered at Washington’s National Mall, along with religious leaders, members of Congress and…
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The tony, bucolic town of Dublin, Ohio would be one of the last places in America expected to host a convention of white supremacist militiamen. Nestled along the Scioto River, the Columbus suburb’s biggest claim to fame is hosting the PGA’s annual Memorial Golf tournament every summer.
But in June 2020, days after the nation was roiled by Black Lives Matter looting and rioting, a man from Wisconsin named Stephen Robeson sponsored a “National Militia Conference” at a Dublin hotel. (Yes, that was the real name of the event.)
According to BuzzFeed’s exceptional July 2021 investigative report on the FBI-led plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, Robeson “helped organize the national meeting, and he was enthusiastically pushing people he knew to attend.” The purpose of the conference was to recruit people who ultimately would stoke “political violence” against governors who refused to reopen their states after lockdowns supposedly necessitated by COVID.
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Angelo Codevilla was many admirable things in his long, productive, and amazing life: an immigrant, a student-athlete, a naval officer, a scholar, a husband, a father, a foreign service officer, a Capitol Hill staffer, an adviser to senators and presidents, a distinguished author of great insight and foresight, and—above all things—a patriot. Although he had already accomplished a great deal in his 78 years and faced some recent health challenges, he was determined to overcome these and never abandoned the fight.
Angelo, who died Monday night, was a man of great energy and spirit, raring for the battle, and determined in every way he could to contribute to it.
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Just four weeks ago, I wrote about the rising resistance to the woke craze and critical race theory, and much has transpired since then.
Here in California, even Disneyland has not been spared the wrath of the crazies. On May 7, the incomparable Christopher Rufo reported that “The Wokest Place on Earth” now includes employee trainings on systemic racism, white privilege, white fragility, and white saviors, and also launched racially segregated “affinity groups” at the company’s headquarters.
But just five days later, Rufo disclosed that Disney “has removed its entire antiracism program from the company’s internal portal, effectively scrubbing it out of existence.” Rufo added, “This is a major victory in the war against ‘woke capital,’” and noted that a “significant backlash from the public” was responsible for the shift. While some skeptics suggested that the policy was being “tweaked or rebranded, not scrubbed,” Rufo responded, “Possibly, but small victories start to add up. We’ve set the precedent—and forced a $329 billion company to back down.”
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The middle class is the traditional bedrock of American society. They are the rule followers, the volunteers, the middle managers, and small business owners. Being rule-oriented, they support the police and stability, as they have a stake in maintaining the status quo. Their values are defined by their economic and social position: self-sufficient, conscientious, and, lately, anxious.
The middle class is under pressure from numerous directions. Wages have been flat for 50 years, while prices have gone up, particularly for the traditional perquisites of middle-class existence: homes, healthcare, and education. Globalization and mass immigration increase the labor pool against which Americans must compete. Inflation and debt eat away at the ability of families to accrue wealth. And diversity and crime have made it so many families need to spend a small fortune (and a lot of time commuting) to recreate the lifestyle they enjoyed growing up.
Lately, riots and racial tension create additional anxieties for the middle class. The nihilism of these displays is alien to the middle class’s quest for security.
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The fevered frenzy against public monuments has caused varied reactions. Among scholars, the main symptom is seemingly contagious dispassion. When a New York Times columnist spoke with art historian Erin Thompson, for example, their interview closed with Thompson recommending the use of chains for those interested in inverting large objects. She appears to have an affinity for neither art nor history. Thompson may have caught the bug from archaeologist Sarah Parcak, who recently — and apparently satirically — briefed mobs struggling to dislodge obelisks. “It is sometimes complained,” drawls historian William Cavert, “that such acts erase history.” According to him, that is a popular grievance against the destruction of statues that historians and scholars almost universally dismiss.
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The statue of a Roman Catholic saint, Junipero Serra, will be removed from public display over accusations that statues of the missionary reflect oppression of indigenous peoples, according to city officials.
The mayor of Ventura, California, representatives from the Barbareno/Venureno Band of Mission Indians, and a pastor of the Mission San Buenaventura issued a joint statement agreeing to take down a bronzed, 9-foot statue of Serra and have it “moved to a more appropriate non-public location” on Thursday, according to the Los Angeles Times.
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Republicans are facing their biggest test in generations.
The mentality of a psychotic mob of radicals has taken control of the country and its institutions. With remarkable speed, America’s mayors, governors, media, lawmakers, health experts, artists, sports leagues, generals and troops, powerful corporations, and the wealthiest men on the planet, have all loudly endorsed this mob, its hatred of America, and its demands for radical transformation.
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by Edward Ring In his final speech from the White House in January 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the nation that the military had joined with the arms industry and had acquired unwarranted influence over American politics. His term for this alliance was the “military industrial complex.” Since that time,…
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