PragerUChristopher Columbus, the most famous explorer in history, was once a celebrated hero. Now, many consider him a villain, a despoiler of paradise. So which version of Columbus is true? Michael Knowles answers this question and offers some much-needed historical perspective.
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He ventured where no other man of his age dared to go. He saw things no other man of his age had ever seen. He discovered a New World.
For centuries, he was universally admired as a hero. Now heâs widely considered to be a despoiler of paradise, an enslaver, and a genocidal maniac.
Iâm talking, of course, about Christopher Columbus. So which is true? Is he a heroâor a villain?Â
The truth is complicated, as the truth often isâespecially when you have to go back 500 years to find it. But letâs try to get as close as we can.Â
Columbus was born in 1451 in the port city of Genoa, Italy. At a time when birth often determined destiny, his origins were entirely unremarkable. His father was a middle-class wool weaver who expected his son to follow the same path. But Columbus had different plans. The Age of Discovery was dawning. The future belonged to the bold. And the bold went to sea.Â
By the time he turned 30, Columbus had sailed to Iceland, Ireland, and Africa. Somewhere on his many voyages, he became obsessed with the idea that there was a westward sea route from Europe to India. But there were no maps to consult, only wild rumors of sea monsters and endless ocean.
He put together the 15th-century version of a PowerPoint presentation for the king of Portugal, then the worldâs leading sea power. But the king, heeding the advice of his experts, turned him down. It simply couldnât be done, the experts told the king. It was pure speculation, and an expensive one at that.Â
So Columbus took his plans to Spain. But King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella werenât interested eitherâat least, not at first.
Columbus persevered. After eight years, they finally relented. They gave the explorer three small ships. There was a time when every schoolkid knew their namesâthe Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Mariaâand the year in which Columbus set sail: 1492.
Except for a compass and the stars, Columbus had virtually no navigation tools at his disposal. He was, to mix metaphors, flying blind. He was heading west. Thatâs about all he knew.Â
Once the ships left the Canary Islands, they were on their own. His crews stayed loyal for the first week, but by the third week, they had lost their nerve. Columbus, however, never lost his. By sheer force of will, he kept his men in line.Â
Finally, after 10 long weeks at sea, on the night of October 11, Columbus spotted land.Â
He called it San Salvador. Today we know it as the Bahamas.Â
There Columbus and his men encountered the Taino tribe. The first encounter between Europe and the Americas went well. The Taino were curious and helpful. Columbus was emphatic that his crew treat them with kindness and respect.Â
Lest you think that Columbus stumbled on the Garden of Eden, the islands were also inhabited by the Caribs, a tribe of cannibals for whom, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Samuel Eliot Morison, babies were a delicacyâor, in Morisonâs words, âa...toothsome morsel.â Like every place else on Earth, in every time in history, the local peoples were a mixed bag. Some good, some not so good.
Upon his return to Spain, word of the Italian explorerâs successful voyage quickly spread throughout Europe. A New World had been discovered, and the Old World would never be the same.Â
Columbus was a man meant for the sea. On land, he was easily outmaneuvered and betrayed by professional politicians and bureaucrats. It is on their dubious, self-serving accounts that modern attacks on Columbusâs reputation are based. In his own day, these attacks made the explorerâs life a misery.
Celebrating Columbus | 5 Minute VideoPragerU2020-10-05 | Christopher Columbus, the most famous explorer in history, was once a celebrated hero. Now, many consider him a villain, a despoiler of paradise. So which version of Columbus is true? Michael Knowles answers this question and offers some much-needed historical perspective.
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He ventured where no other man of his age dared to go. He saw things no other man of his age had ever seen. He discovered a New World.
For centuries, he was universally admired as a hero. Now heâs widely considered to be a despoiler of paradise, an enslaver, and a genocidal maniac.
Iâm talking, of course, about Christopher Columbus. So which is true? Is he a heroâor a villain?Â
The truth is complicated, as the truth often isâespecially when you have to go back 500 years to find it. But letâs try to get as close as we can.Â
Columbus was born in 1451 in the port city of Genoa, Italy. At a time when birth often determined destiny, his origins were entirely unremarkable. His father was a middle-class wool weaver who expected his son to follow the same path. But Columbus had different plans. The Age of Discovery was dawning. The future belonged to the bold. And the bold went to sea.Â
By the time he turned 30, Columbus had sailed to Iceland, Ireland, and Africa. Somewhere on his many voyages, he became obsessed with the idea that there was a westward sea route from Europe to India. But there were no maps to consult, only wild rumors of sea monsters and endless ocean.
He put together the 15th-century version of a PowerPoint presentation for the king of Portugal, then the worldâs leading sea power. But the king, heeding the advice of his experts, turned him down. It simply couldnât be done, the experts told the king. It was pure speculation, and an expensive one at that.Â
So Columbus took his plans to Spain. But King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella werenât interested eitherâat least, not at first.
Columbus persevered. After eight years, they finally relented. They gave the explorer three small ships. There was a time when every schoolkid knew their namesâthe Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Mariaâand the year in which Columbus set sail: 1492.
Except for a compass and the stars, Columbus had virtually no navigation tools at his disposal. He was, to mix metaphors, flying blind. He was heading west. Thatâs about all he knew.Â
Once the ships left the Canary Islands, they were on their own. His crews stayed loyal for the first week, but by the third week, they had lost their nerve. Columbus, however, never lost his. By sheer force of will, he kept his men in line.Â
Finally, after 10 long weeks at sea, on the night of October 11, Columbus spotted land.Â
He called it San Salvador. Today we know it as the Bahamas.Â
There Columbus and his men encountered the Taino tribe. The first encounter between Europe and the Americas went well. The Taino were curious and helpful. Columbus was emphatic that his crew treat them with kindness and respect.Â
Lest you think that Columbus stumbled on the Garden of Eden, the islands were also inhabited by the Caribs, a tribe of cannibals for whom, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Samuel Eliot Morison, babies were a delicacyâor, in Morisonâs words, âa...toothsome morsel.â Like every place else on Earth, in every time in history, the local peoples were a mixed bag. Some good, some not so good.
Upon his return to Spain, word of the Italian explorerâs successful voyage quickly spread throughout Europe. A New World had been discovered, and the Old World would never be the same.Â
Columbus was a man meant for the sea. On land, he was easily outmaneuvered and betrayed by professional politicians and bureaucrats. It is on their dubious, self-serving accounts that modern attacks on Columbusâs reputation are based. In his own day, these attacks made the explorerâs life a misery.
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Script:
As Columbus Day dies a slow, woke death, it might be a good idea to consider how this national holiday came about in the first place.
The answer might surprise you.
Ready for it?
The purpose of Columbus Day was to encourage Americans to be more accepting of immigrantsâspecifically Italian immigrants.
The Italian explorer, once universally regarded as a great hero, was the symbol of the holiday, not the focus of it.
Hereâs the historical context.
Following a mass migration from southern Italy beginning in the 1880s, the status of Italian Americans was at an all-time low. How low was clearly illustrated by one of the single worst episodes of racial violence in American history: the mass murder and lynching of 11 Italian Americans in New Orleans in 1891.
Hatred against the Italian newcomers had been brewing for years and was openly encouraged by the leading newspapers of the day. For example, in 1882 the New York Times ran an editorial under the headline âOur Future Citizensâ in which the Timesâ stated, âThere has never been since New York was founded so low and ignorant a class among the immigrantsâŠas the Southern Italians...â
In 1887, the same New York Times wrote approvingly about the lynching in Mississippi of a man they referred to as âDago Joe,â âdagoâ being an ethnic slur for Italians.
Anti-immigrant sentiment was especially intense in New Orleans where Italians were settling in large numbers. Local papers accused them of working for below-market wages, engaging in all manner of crimes, and being more loyal to the Pope than the President.
These seething resentments broke to the surface when the cityâs police chief, David Hennessey, was assassinated in the fall of 1890.
As the chief lay dying in the street, a witness claimed to have heard him say that âdagoesâ had shot him. In response, authorities rounded up hundreds of Italians, eventually charging nine of them with complicity in Hennessyâs murder.
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It was April 1865. The Civil War was finally over. An exhausted, bloodied nation breathed a deep sigh of reliefâŠ
Then, suddenly, shockingly, President Abraham Lincoln was dead, felled by an assassinâs bullet while watching a play.
To take the reins of power at this tumultuous moment required a great man, a man of compassion, discernment, and discipline. Andrew Johnson, Lincolnâs vice president, was not that man.
This is not to say he didnât have virtues. He did. He just didnât have the stuff it took to meet the moment.
Born into abject poverty on December 29, 1808, Johnson was apprenticed â âsoldâ would be more accurate â to a tailor at the age of 10. Legally bound to serve until he was 21, he ran away after five years. He eventually settled in Greeneville, Tennessee, where he set up his own tailorâs shop and prospered.
In 1834, he was elected mayor of Greeneville. From there, he climbed steadily up the political ladder; the state legislature in 1835, the US Congress in 1843, Governor in 1853, and the Senate in 1857. He was still serving as U.S. Senator for Tennessee in 1861 when the Civil War broke out.
Although Johnson was a Democrat and a slaveowner himself, when Tennessee left the Union to join the break-away Confederacy and defend legalized slavery, Johnson denounced his stateâs secession on the floor of the Senate.
âI will not give up this Government,â he thundered in December 1860. âNo; I intend to stand by it, and I entreat every man throughout the nation who is a patriotâŠto come forward, that the Constitution shall be saved, and the Union preserved.â
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Script:
Asked to define the word âwomanâ during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2022, Judge Ketanji Jackson famously demurred, saying âIâm not a biologist.â
Well, I am a biologist, and Iâm here to help.
To that end, let me rephrase the question to Judge Jackson: are sex categories in humansâmale and femaleâreal, immutable, and binary, or are they merely âsocial constructsâ?
Answer: real (thatâs just the way it is and we all know it), immutable (it canât be changed), and binary (there are only two sexes, not three or four or fifty-seven).
This is true throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. An organismâs sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) it can or would produce. Males have the function of producing sperm, or small gametes; and females, ova, or large ones. There is no third gamete type. There are only two.
Therefore, sex is binary. This shouldnât be controversial. Itâs just basic biology.
Every one of us is the result of a male and female (our biological mom and dad) successfully reproducing. Sorry to make you think about that. Without the existence of males and females, I wouldnât be here right now, and neither would you. Our species would have gone extinct long ago.
Many âgenderâ activists, however, falsely assert that sex cannot be binary and must be viewed as a âspectrumâ because a very small number of people have genitalia that appear ambiguous or mixed, phenomena known as intersex conditions. These idealogues claim the existence of such conditions renders the categories âmaleâ and âfemaleâ meaningless.
But intersex conditions donât undermine the sex binary at all because sex ambiguity is not a third sex. The existence of very rare borderline cases no more raises questions about everyone elseâs sex than the existence of dawn and dusk casts doubt on the existence of day and night.
Our society isnât experiencing a sudden dramatic surge in people born with ambiguous genitalia. We are experiencing a dramatic surge in people who are unambiguously one sex claiming to âidentifyâ as the opposite sex or as something other than male or female altogether.
Gender ideology seeks to portray sex as so incomprehensibly complex and multivariable that our traditional practice of classifying people as either male or female is grossly outdated and should be abandoned for a revolutionary concept of âgender identity.â
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