The Daily Signal - Why Far-Left Has Worked So Hard to Cancel Christopher Day

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

The far-left’s obsession with canceling Christopher Columbus does not have as much to do with the man, but rather what he represents, according to historian Jarrett Stepman.  Efforts to cancel men like Columbus come from “cultural Marxists who thought that you need to change American culture to truly change our policies at the highest level," says Stepman, a columnist for The Daily Signal and author of "The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past."  Stepman joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the history of Columbus Day and the role the explorer played in the opening of the “transatlantic exchange that led to the creation of the United States.”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Feeling festive. Catch classic holiday favorites like Home Alone, the Santa Claus, and Die Hard, along with holiday episodes from Family Guy, Abbott Elementary, and more with Hulu on Disney Plus. From festive Disney flicks to binge-worthy Hulu originals, Hulu on Disney Plus is your home for the holidays. Celebrate the season with Hulu, available on Disney Plus in Canada. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, October 14th, Columbus Day. I'm Virginia Allen. And today we are looking at the history of Columbus Day, who exactly Christopher Columbus was and why he has become such a boogeyman to the left. Jarrett Stetman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He's also author of the book, The War on History, The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past.

And he joins us in just a moment to answer some of those questions as to why exactly the left seems so bent. on removing the memory of Christopher Columbus from U.S. history. Stay tuned for my conversation with Jared Stetman after this. Your government is out of control. It's doing things it has no business doing. It spends way too much money. It gets involved in way too many wars. It not only tells you what you can and can't say, it actively censors you.

And the things your government should do, it can't, or worse, won't do it all. It can't keep your streets clean of crime and filth. It can't keep your neighborhoods safe enough for kids to play outside. It can't even prevent your country from being invaded by millions of illegal immigrants. Why is that? Because your leaders no longer represent you. They represent themselves and their friends. In my new show, The Signal Sitdown,

we'll expose how the sausage really gets made in Washington, D.C., with guests who have experience on the inside. Fingers will be pointed. Names will be named. You ready? Well, I am so excited and so pleased to now welcome to the Daily Sittle Podcast, my colleague, and a few. somewhat familiar voice for the Daily Signal podcast, Jared Stetman.

Jared, thanks for being here. Oh, thank you for having me, Virginia. I appreciate it. Well, Jared, you are a historian, as I mentioned a moment ago. You're the author of the book, The War on History, The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past. So as we're celebrating Columbus Day, as we're talking about who Christopher Columbus was, I think one of the biggest questions we have to answer first is why exactly in, as you say, the left's effort to rewrite history, why did Christopher Columbus become such a target? Why has the left decided this Christopher Columbus guy, we kind of need to white his name out from the history

books? I do think it's very interesting, the evolution of how Christopher Columbus has been treated in American society, because as I actually pointed out in my book, you know, the only other time where Columbus was really controversial, you could say in a bad way, was really during the 1920s and 1930s when you had groups like the Ku Klux Klan didn't like Columbus because they saw them as a representative of immigrants and Catholics and Italians and they didn't like those groups. And so most of the American people saw Columbus as a hero, as a stand-in for, of course, the man who discovered America, but really opened up, I think, the Transatlantic Exchange that led to the creation of the United States.

He was an extremely popular figure, despite the fact that the Ku Klux Klan, some marginal groups, I think, tried to turn him into a bad guy. Most Americans just were not buying that. They celebrated Columbus, his arrival in the United States. He was a man of both the old world and the new world in a certain sense. And so for a very long time, Columbus was a uniting figure that we could all say, you know, we all embrace the legacy of Columbus. the new left really in the 1960s and 70s started to recreate Columbus as a villainous figure who's a stand-in, A, for the villainous United States, which was a capitalist country as opposed to communism and the Soviet Union at the time, was really a stand-in for the

creation of America, which they saw as highly problematic. This is a settler, colonialist nation that is fundamentally evil. At one time, this used to be only a marginal far-left idea. It was very much written about in the books of Howard Zinn, who's a very prominent left-wing historian whose books have become very popular in American high schools for generations where Zinn really went out to malign Columbus as, again, a stand-in for ushering in what he saw as finance capitalism in the world. I think his narrative is very ridiculous. But that really did take hold on the American left. It used to be a very marginal idea that Columbus was bad. It used to be something, the idea of removing Columbus Day really started in Berkeley, California,

a place that was known for its radicalism in the early 1990s. And has really unfortunately now touched most American institutions. Columbus Day is absolutely under fire. There are many who want to replace it with what they call Indigenous People's Day. but they can't just celebrate both. They can't just celebrate indigenous peoples and Columbus. Columbus has to go. And really what they're saying is the old America that you once knew and loved was fundamentally wicked.

It has to go away. So what I'm hearing you say is in some ways this effort to remove Columbus Day. It's not actually really just about Columbus. It's almost about a tearing down of an old structure as this kind of radical ideology would say, kind of an old antiquated structure? That's absolutely correct, Virginia. That's a very good way of putting it. I mean, that's sort of the point I made in my entire book, the war on history, that it isn't just about these specific figures. It isn't just about Columbus, a man, the man. It's about larger ideas.

It's really, it's about power in American society. I mean, you know, the old America had, you know, in its DNA, a celebration of Christopher Columbus, a celebration of, a celebration of the founding fathers, a celebration of Abraham Lincoln and the generations that came after. And those were the very concrete ideas. They were really a projection of how we thought as a people. And I think that there were many who saw that is fundamentally problematic. They saw our culture of what we celebrated as an impediment to revolutionary change in this country. I mean, there were many, you could say they're kind of cultural Marxists who thought that you need to change American culture to truly change our politics.

policies at the highest level. And I think the war on Columbus is very much a part of it. And unfortunately, in many cases, it's been successful. I think these days you find fewer and fewer people who are willing to go out and defend Columbus, who are willing to go out and defend any parts of our history. They've kind of accepted the left's attacks that somehow America isn't just, it isn't just not exceptional. It's exceptionally bad. And that starts with Columbus. Wow. Well, and it was fascinating. Something that you've covered as well, you know, in 2020 into 2021, when we saw so many statues being torn down, Columbus statues were especially targeted. They certainly were. In fact, of all the statues, I think they were the ones that were most likely to be torn down, many of which never went back up again. Again, it's quite incredible because a lot of these statues were actually built, again, in the 1920s and 30s, they were actually supposed to be a symbol for America's welcoming nature to

many Irish and Catholic newcomers, immigrants to this country. I mean, that's what's kind of remarkable about this is that Columbus has been transformed from a welcoming figure to one who's somehow stand in for oppression and terrible things. It's really quite terrible. And I think it said a lot of good things about the country that Columbus became a symbol for America. I mean, you know, Columbia is, the goddess Columbia has very much been a symbol of our past as Columbus was praised very much by going back to the founding generation. That's really changed in recent years. And I think it's, I do hope that at some point there's going to be a revival of Columbus Day because it certainly has gone down the reputation of a lot of Americans because I think Columbus does stand for a lot of good things about this country,

of spirit of adventurousness, of being bold about pushing the boundaries. I mean, when you talk about America, I mean, we were the country that put a man on the moon. What more could be in line of Christopher Columbus than that? I mean, that, that's America. And I think at one time, people understood that. That's why we celebrated this man in his accomplishments. And I think it'll be a sad day when this country can no longer celebrate those things. That will mark a fundamental transformation. I want to dive, Jared, just for a few minutes, a little bit into the history, specifically, of who Columbus was, not who anyone claims he was, but what we know from history, from the facts about who this man was. So King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabel, the first of Spain,

they commissioned Christopher Columbus to explore the Americas. Why did they choose him? Why did they choose Columbus specifically to explore the Americas? Well, I think it's because, Columbus chose himself. He was a very, he was a very ambitious man who really, he was absolutely, even before his famous sailing across the Atlantic was a notable navigator. He had grand ambitions to link what he thought would be Europe and Asia at the time. He read the accounts of Marco Polo, heard about these grand nations that existed in the East. At the time, it was very difficult to get to Asia because the Middle East at the time. I mean, this is a time of large-scale Muslim conquests of the Middle East. It was very difficult to find any kind of overland routes

to the east of Europe. So he thought, well, why don't we go the other way? And so when he brought this proposal to Ferdinand and Isabella, his proposal was that he could say, well, look, I want to bring, and this is something that's very true of Christopher Columbus, who was a very religious man, I want to bring Christianity to new nations in the East. The only way we can do this is if you fund my journey and support me. And eventually, especially this happened after the reconquista of Spain, Ferdinandino's Velo, where at some point they weren't too eager initially, but decide, well, maybe this is a good idea to fund this guy.

You know, he's a little bit out there. He's a little bit bold, but they liked his bold nature. And so it really is because of the kind of fore. force of character of Christopher Columbus and pleading over and over saying, you know, send me out in this journey that he was able to pull it off with the funding of the Spanish kingdom. And of course, funded, you know, one of the greatest journeys in human history that was transformative, not necessarily in the original way that they wanted to transform things. They didn't actually, you know, create that hookup between Europe and Asia.

But what they did was actually far grander, which is truly transforming this world. and making it a global world. I mean, that's sort of the victory of Columbus. I mean, the world had been kind of broken up into multiple parts. Columbus made this a truly global world in which all parts of it were connected, that the new world will be connected to the old, will be connected to Asia. And really the transformation of our world into modernity is because of people like

Columbus who stretched those boundaries. How long was that initial expedition when he set out saying, I'm going to explore, sail across the ocean. How long was he at sea? He was at sea for about two months, just 61 days to be exact. And what's incredible is, I mean, if you've seen mock-ups of the ships, the Niena P. Tenna Saniam Marina, these are tiny ships. I mean, to even call them ships, I mean, I think the Santa Maria, which was the largest of these three, was about 117 feet long.

Now, I've been in a 21-foot-long boat. 117 feet is not very big to be crossing the Atlantic Ocean, and not just crossing the Atlantic Ocean, but crossing into the complete and utter unknown. I mean, who knows what he was going to find crossing that ocean? I mean, there was nobody there to bail him out. There was nobody there to call for a rescue. I mean, they were really on their own. There were many times during this two-month journey in which they didn't think they were going to find anything. They thought that they were going to be stranded. And the days before he actually landed in San Salvador. He was dealing with a potential mutiny from his crews because they're saying,

well, we've been out here for so long. We're not finding anything. We need to go back. This is a crazy doomed venture. But Columbus was able to convince them to keep going. And I guess very fortunately did because not long thereafter, they discovered land. They discovered land. They saw the journey through, which is quite remarkable. I think the story itself of Columbus is one of the most, remarkable in human history. He really was a bold adventure who, again, showed that the power of a person who has a plan, an idea is willing to take it through and is willing to take great risks to do so, risks that certainly could have cost him his life and very much more. So that's, I think, what's so remarkable about Columbus. And even though the United States would certainly not exist for a very long time, I do think that that spirit is very much a part of this country.

And I think that's because we celebrate people like Columbus. You know, we're the people of the frontier pushing boundaries, going out into space. And I think that's a great thing. You know, even though we're separated very much in time from people like Columbus, who was very much a man of the late Middle Ages, there is something of that spirit of the new world in what he did. And so even the journey itself, even the story, I think, is an important one to tell and retell. It's why I think Columbus Day is a great American holiday.

Certainly. What do we know from Columbus's writings? What documentation do we have to know what those impressions were, maybe the emotions that Columbus had when he finally did reach land, discover San Salvador? Yeah, he did actually write. a number of accounts. He had an account of his, he really made four journeys to the America. So it wasn't, he continued to go back.

He praised God for what had happened. I mean, there's some famous paintings of Columbus praying as he reaches the landfall. You know, obviously, you know, people in those days, they wrote a little bit differently, I think, than modern people. But he was very thankful for what had he had accomplished. Now, he didn't really know that he had discovered the new world.

He never, in fact, it took him a very long time to even acknowledge that he had discovered anything new. For most of his life, he thought that he had just, that this was Asia, that the people that he had found were Indians, as he called them, because he thought he had landed in Asia, possibly in India. So he never really, I think, accepted the depth of what his discovery was, even until late in life. he just couldn't quite accept it because he thought that there's no way, you know, this is a whole new world that I've discovered here, but he did. And so, you know, I think that's kind of remarkable. He never really fully understood the scope of what he had done, but he certainly did. And those who came after certainly understood. Wow.

That's so fascinating to have made such a powerful discovery and in your lifetime to never fully have understood how vast that discovery was and how it would change the world. to come forever and always. That's just absolutely incredible. Well, Jared, before we let you go, tell us, for one, how can we follow your work and again share with us your book and how we can get a copy? Yeah, absolutely. So again, the book is the war in history, the conspiracy to rewrite America's Pass. I have an entire chapter on Christopher Columbus and his discovery and why the left wants to go after him, why he's become aligned, and why we should still celebrate him. You can find it pretty much at any major retailer that sells books, including Amazon.com, or Regnery Publishing, which is my publisher for the book. Sometimes I post about this on Twitter or X. My handle is at Jared Stetman, so just my name at Jared Stetman.

Excellent. Well, Jared, thank you. Greatly appreciate your time. Enjoy your Columbus Day. Thank you very much. You too, Virginia. And for all of our listeners, don't forget to hit that subscribe button. so you never miss out on brand new shows from The Daily Signal. And if you would, take a minute to leave us a five-star rating and review. We love hearing your feedback. Because it is Columbus Day, our team is off for some of today, so we do not have a Top News edition this afternoon,

but we will be back with you for Top News tomorrow on Tuesday. Have a wonderful Columbus Day. Thanks again for joining us. The Daily Signal podcast is made possible because of listeners like you. Executive producers are Rob Lewy and Katrina Trinko. Hosts are Virginia Allen, Brian Gottstein, Tyler O'Neill, and Elizabeth Mitchell. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, John Pop, and Joseph von Spakovsky. To learn more or support our work, please visit DailySignal.com.