For generations, Columbus Day stood as a proud national holiday, celebrating the Italian explorer’s daring voyage across the Atlantic, which set the stage for the later establishment of the North American colonies that birthed the United States. His legacy includes the District of Columbia, which hosts the nation’s capital, and the state capitals of Columbus, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina—but the man, and his holiday, faced a sustained, relentless assault from woke activists and academics over recent years.
Democrats enthusiastically encouraged and even participated in this assault, with Joe Biden proclaiming the rival Indigenous Peoples’ Day on his first year in office, following Democrat-led states such as California, Maine, and New Mexico. Sometimes, the tearing down of Columbus’s legacy has been literal rather than merely figurative, with at least 33 statues of the explorer pulled down by mobs or removed by craven local officials during the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.
In many ways, the elevation of Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a de facto Anti-Columbus Day was the high point of the leftist culture of national self-loathing, smearing the United States as not just a country with a shameful, ugly history, but as a country that should not even exist. That’s why President Trump’s pledge to bring the holiday “back from the ashes” in April was so significant, and why the presidential proclamation that followed through on that pledge last week was so important.
The proclamation is unambiguous: Columbus is “the original American hero,” who “carried thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason, and culture across the Atlantic into the Americas — paving the way for the ultimate triumph of Western civilization less than three centuries later on July 4, 1776.”
The anti-Columbus movement is denounced in no uncertain terms as a “vicious and merciless campaign to erase our history, slander our heroes, and attack our heritage.”
Politics, as the saying goes, is downstream from culture. The polluted waters of the old culture of self-loathing were producing a polluted politics in America, characterized by trampled borders and a loss of national confidence, national identity, and national cohesion.
The reclamation of Columbus Day is a standing rebuke to that era of decline, and you should make sure you celebrate it today.
President Trump just signed a proclamation bringing back Columbus Day:
“Columbus day—we’re back, Italians!” 🤣 pic.twitter.com/VFL8iCy0Qf
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 9, 2025
Join Pulse+ to comment below, and receive exclusive e-mail analyses.
