The Trump campaign highlighted past remarks Vice President Kamala Harris made about her desire to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Monday.
In 2019, while running for president, Harris said, “count me in” for the change.
When asked that same year if she would support renaming Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Harris responded, “Sure. Yeah. We have to remember history.”
After President Joe Biden issued a proclamation in 2021 recognizing the first Indigenous Peoples’ Day to coincide with Columbus Day, Harris said “Since 1934, every October the United States has recognized the voyage of the European explorers who first landed on the shores of the Americas. But that is not the whole story. That has never been the whole story.”
“Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for Tribal nations – perpetrating violence, stealing land, and spreading disease,” she asserted.
Columbus Day remains the official federal holiday by law.
Regarding Harris’ views, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said Monday, “Kamala Harris is your stereotypical leftist. Not only does she want to raise taxes and defund the police — she also wants to cancel American traditions like Columbus Day. President Trump will make sure Christopher Columbus’ great legacy is honored and protect this holiday from radical leftists who want to erase our nation’s history like Kamala Harris.”
Harris apparently believes in the view that is probably being propagated on most university campuses across the country nowadays: Europeans are colonizers, and hence America itself is a terrible colonizing nation.
Newsflash: the history of the world is colonization, from the Middle East or Africa depending on who you believe across the entire world.
The first North American “natives” are thought to have likely crossed a Bering Sea Strait land bridge, while those in South America probably came across the Pacific Ocean by boat.
Was the first tribe to arrive on North America’s shores the owners of the entire continent and was everyone else who came later thieves?
Obviously, there were grave injustices borne by the people who had been living here for centuries before the Europeans arrived and even in the history of the U.S., particularly in the 1800s as the nation grew west.
But before the first Europeans ever arrived, the native populations were warring against each other for the lands and resources they wanted.
The Founders established a country, based on the best of the Western Christian tradition, in which all, regardless of their ethnic background, would be treated equally, and it has come closer to achieving that ideal than probably any nation has.
Christopher Columbus and other European explorers to America that followed opened the way so the United States could become the greatest country in the history of the world.
Harris appears too caught up in the leftist view of American history as the ongoing struggle between the “oppressors” versus the “oppressed.”
We’ve seen enough of that mindset under Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Let’s continue to aspire toward the American ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and give no ground to the Marxist worldview.
