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.

Fynn-Paul adds,

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.”

The President concluded,

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.

Hear, hear. And Happy Columbus Day.

Mark Tapson, Front Page Magazine